August 15, 2016

Abandoned cities more likely if population was diverse, including Ellis Island diversity from the Gilded Age

Milwaukee blacks are providing yet another demonstration of why nobody wants to live in Milwaukee anymore.

Still, the degree of white flight is staggering -- in 2010, non-Hispanic whites were only 37% of the population, with blacks at 40% and Hispanics at 17% (Asians 4%). Most people probably don't even think of Milwaukee as a city with black problems, or if they were a little more in the know, might think of a sizable black minority next to a white plurality or even majority. In reality, blacks are the dominant group, and whites have mostly fled to the suburbs.

It's an utter shame to see producers and maintainers abandon an entire city to parasites and decomposers. Why didn't they stay around and push back? Not even violently, just banding together however a community can to repel invasions by corrosive outsiders.

You might first blame the wimpy whites who live in Wiscucksin, but you see it in many other cities around the Great Lakes where whites are under 50% -- Chicago (32% white), Detroit (8%), Cleveland (33%), Buffalo (46%) -- not to mention the East Coast, where Nordic Lutheran cuckolds are not that common.

Where don't you see it? Compared to the Great Lakes cities just mentioned, other large cities nearby are a lot whiter, despite all of the region being affected by the Great Migration of blacks out of the Deep South after WWI. Columbus OH, Grand Rapids MI, and Indianapolis IN are 59% white, Rockford IL is 58%, and Syracuse NY is 53%.

These big cities were not Gilded Age boomtowns, not lying directly on a large body of water that would have made them centers for trading and transportation. They had enough going for them to eventually turn into popular places to raise families during the Mid-Century, but not so much going for them that the millions of Ellis Island immigrants would have flocked there in search of easy employment.

In fact, these cities may actually have decent sized populations of Ellis Island ancestry -- just not rooted there from the very first ancestor who arrived in America, and therefore not forming ethnic enclaves that have lasted for generations.

We know from Robert Putnam's study on ethnic diversity and trust levels that the more ethnically diverse a place is, the less people trust each other. Quite simply, if individuals don't come from similar backgrounds -- with similar norms, similar expectations, and similar languages, foods, and customs -- how can any of them plan on coordinating their lives with the others?

Even worse, in a diverse area, members of the same ethnic group trust each other less than if they were in a homogeneous area. While they may share the customs, norms, etc. with those of their own group, they sense a certain futility in trying to convert that into collective action, when they're just one small group within a greater Tower of Babel.

Putnam was studying high-level group differences like blacks and whites. But something similar must have taken place during the Gilded Age, when "diverse" meant a wide variety of white European immigrant groups, who spoke different languages, ate different foods, followed different religions or sects, and lived by different norms and customs. Wherever the white population continued to be descended from these Ellis Islanders, the initial lack of trust and lowered ability for collective action by the citizenry would have persisted -- perhaps to this very day.

I think that's just what we see in all these Gilded Age boomtowns, where the influx of blacks after WWI gradually sent more and more white people out into the suburbs rather than stay and defend their city in one way or another. If trust and collective action potential were low to begin with, they could not have worked together to keep their city white-ish. And not trusting the other groups, or even their "fellow" members of their own group, they would have felt little sense of stewardship over their city's fate.

Let the city crumble, at least I will be safe once I move out into the suburbs.

The cities that saw their greatest growth after the Gilded Age -- especially after immigration was shut off in the 1920s -- would have had settlers who all identified as Americans, not as Poles, Italians, Irish, Germans, etc. Their ethnic distinctions were relegated to quirky things your neighbors did in the privacy of their own home that were of no larger importance, and you poked fun at them the way you do among friends who have strange tastes, instead of looking down upon them as fundamentally Other.

With minimal cultural diversity coming into these later-settled cities, ethnic enclaves were not as common, and trust and collective action for the common good were at higher levels.

Therefore, why abandon the city just because blacks are moving in? We can act in the common good to give them their place, while we keep ours. And they won't try to mess with us as much if they sense the high levels of trust and potential for collective action -- the last thing blacks want to do is start a fight with a tight-knit group of white folks. That's how a white community turns into a white mob -- something not possible when whites are all divided amongst themselves.

That won't stop every weenie from fleeing the city to the suburbs, but it will keep the city noticeably whiter than other big cities facing the same Great Migration of blacks. We're talking at least 20 percentage points more white.

There is one major exception to this general pattern -- Pittsburgh, a former Gilded Age boomtown whose white population has been almost entirely Ellis Islanders from way back, and yet which has resisted the temptation toward white flight. In 2010 it was 65% white, the whitest of any big, old city.

Why didn't the blacks in Pittsburgh drive out the Ellis Islander whites as in Milwaukee, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and Buffalo? My best guess is that it's the Appalachian cultural influence, which is not found in the Great Lakes and East Coast cities of lower elevation and proximity to lakes and oceans. The Poles, Irish, etc., who settled in Pittsburgh didn't adapt to any old set of founding stock American norms, but specifically Scotch-Irish Appalachian hillbilly norms, which still surround them in the suburban and rural areas outside the big city.

Appalachia, outside of the Deep South where blacks have been rooted since they got here, has remained the whitest region in the nation. The northern routes of the Great Migration forked around Appalachia -- one toward the Midwest, the other toward the East Coast -- because they weren't foolish enough to try to colonize hillbilly country, even if there were big cities like Knoxville TN up that way.

That would be trying to live next to the tight-knit clan kind of white people, so the hell with that, let's just go to some alienated city where the white folks will be too atomized to organize against us. Those would be the cities over-run by Ellis Islanders living in ethnic enclaves.

This suggests, sadly, that some of these Gilded Age boomtowns would not recover even if the non-white populations were magically moved somewhere else. Their roots would still reflect the low-trust divisiveness of the ethnic enclave era, and they would remain vulnerable to invasion, prone to corruption, cynicism about politics, and so on.

Those big cities that began to be heavily populated after the Gilded Age -- and of course before the current wave of immigration -- will probably make better sites for city living and urban culture. We do need to de-urbanize like crazy, but if big cities are going to stay around, it's better for people to live in more cohesive and all-American cities than in those that have proven to be ruined by immigration-induced diversity, whether from the first Gilded Age or the second.

We can also forecast that the Sun Belt cities whose populations have begun to soar due to recent immigration -- such as Phoenix -- will meet a similar fate as the Milwaukees, the Chicagos, and the Detroits further north. And it's not only the foreigners who are raising the cultural diversity of cities like Phoenix, Miami, and Houston, but transplants from highly different regional cultures within America. Throwing a bunch of New Englanders, Southerners, Midwesterners, and Mid-Atlantic people into the same city might as well be like the Ellis Islanders pouring into Chicago over 100 years ago.

The upshot of all this is that proper stewardship over our cities requires low levels of diversity, meaning deport the illegals, lower immigration in the future, and discourage transplanting within the country. We see what the result is when we pursue the opposite of these policies.

25 comments:

  1. Random Dude on the Internet8/15/16, 12:46 PM

    Living in the cuck belt, there's a lot of defeatism when it comes to "diversity enrichment." You can see cucked whites grimace at a horde of Somalians walking around a shopping mall but they ignore it. Then when those same Somalians are responsible for a sudden crime wave, they shrug their shoulders and say "oh well whaddya gonna do about it?" Then when it gets to be really bad, they just move to a suburb and repeat the process.

    I have family in Minneapolis and Des Moines and this is basically their attitude. I have friends in Wichita that are reporting similar developments. White people just aren't #woke enough to pay attention to how badly "diversity" is destroying the country.

    For a much more micro scale, consider packing plant towns, many of now are 1/3 to 1/2 hispanic. You drive by towns of 2500 people and see gang signs spray painted on strip malls. No point of pride for the business owners to clean it up, they just accept their fate of inevitable diversity enrichment, whether that means more robberies, their daughters getting sexually assaulted, their sons getting beaten for their iPhone, etc. The local media does little or no reporting on this but will devote time to Donald Trump eating fried chicken with a knife and fork.

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  2. I don't see lack of experience with diversity as the main force -- Appalachia sure doesn't have any diversity, north of Birmingham, and absolutely none of them want to bring in refugees, let alone settle them in their own states, preen moralistically about how advanced they are for wanting to do so, etc.

    "Defeatism" is looking more and more like lack of stewardship -- abandoning / shirking responsibility to the group -- and then trying to rationalize it in a socially acceptable way. "Gee, whaddaya gonna do? They're just too powerful for us to stop anyway."

    That's called a self-fulfilling prophecy, and is the self-centered person's way of making excuses for why they aren't defending their city.

    We're supposed to take pity on them, the way you comfort a down-in-the-dumps friend. But if they're just making excuses for not doing their part to maintain the collective welfare, then they need to be shamed as shirkers -- not coddled as Eeyores.

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  3. BioCultBeamDelta8/15/16, 6:32 PM

    You've said not to be black pilled, and that Trump's popularity comes in waves, but I think Trump is going to lose at this point. Even the Breitbart conducted poll says that he will only win 37% of the vote, and Clinton will win 42%. Identical to 1992. Plus, he seems to be putting barely any energy into things right now. I'm very skeptical that the debates will help him. I'm worried this is going to be Mitt Romney all over again, when Trump explicitly promised that it wouldn't be. Everyone kept saying, "Mitt's going to crush the debates," or that "Mitt's going to have a marketing blitz at the very end." I fell for it that time, I refuse to fall for it this time. There are too many invaders, and too many white Americans are brainwashed. I want to be hopeful, but I don't want to delude myself, either. Trump needs something incredible to turn it around, but it seems like he's given up at this point.

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  4. A.B. Prosper8/15/16, 7:15 PM

    The upshot of all this is that proper stewardship over our cities requires low levels of diversity, meaning deport the illegals, lower immigration in the future, and discourage transplanting within the country. We see what the result is when we pursue the opposite of these policies.

    First I didn't know the great lakes were so screwed up. Very interesting though sad.

    To the above how heck do you get there? If there is no real majority, there is also no real ideology either.

    This is really the crux of the Right's problem, what can we do about it, or how can we get anyone to do something about it.

    Its not a logistical issue mind you, simple legal changes and a ruthless attitude would suffice, probably but getting cooperation enough to implement anything except collapse and or ethnic warfare seems a forlorn hope.

    If people can be ignited enough it can happen but Whites seem hopelessly depressed and passivized. I just wish I knew how to boost morale broadly

    And yes Trump but he may not win and may not accomplish enough.


    Hell that is the real problem with diversity innit? More diverse less in group cooperation

    Also I wanted to add something, you might be one of the handful of bloggers who gets that this is an old problem, not exclusive to non Whites

    Hell I'd say it started with the forced compromise of slavery , African slavery baked national elimination in a few centuries right in the cake.

    All that said,I'm from the atomized West and Gen X so am prone to irrational levels of cynicism and people are often passive till they aren't and I have no way to predict.

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  5. A.B. Prosper8/15/16, 7:28 PM

    BioCultBeamDelta, wait until the debates before you make any judgements.

    There is a lot going on, 3 debates yet to occur and some months of ad blitzes .

    Trump certainly follows Napoleon's old doctrine of Never interrupting your enemy when she is making a mistake in any case and Hillary is making a lot of mistakes

    That said if Trump doesn't act after the debates and push harder we may have a problem. It does not right now despite the quiet seem that way to me though

    Also remember, Trump isn't the solution, he is one of the last attempts at making it work without bloodshed. Gun sales, prep sales, ammo sales, training all that is a good sign people are expecting Boom!

    If Trump wins he buys time and shows that maybe peace can work but unless he is a better man than even I think he is and I admired him have since the 80's , its only a delaying action.

    In the end its either war or Brazil and its best to be prepared for war because while Whites don't want it everyone else does.

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  6. "Even the Breitbart conducted poll says that he will only win 37% of the vote, and Clinton will win 42%."

    Those Breitbart surveys are using registered voters, not likely voters. Over-counts cucks and other wimps who will sit out, under-counts those who are warming up to him.

    He's already narrowing the gap in the USC poll, and he's tied on the West Coast according to Reuters (meaning he's up by a little bit). Two polls show them tied in Oregon. Despite her dumping millions of attack ads on the West Coast.

    On what planet is the Republican being tied in Oregon a cause for despair?

    2016 is not 2012 because Trump is not Romney.

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  7. Random Dude on the Internet8/15/16, 7:47 PM

    I'm still keeping hope alive. Mitt Romney is a drastically different candidate than Donald Trump and really can't be compared. I still even hold out that he will win in a 400+ electoral vote blowout because I still think that this election is a repeat of the 1980 election; heck even Jimmy Carter was still leading in the polls almost right up to election day.

    I consider Gary Johnson to be the John Anderson of 2016. Evan McMullin, if he even bothers to keep running after this month, may be lucky to get 100,000 votes. A Bernie Sanders write in campaign will probably be more successful.

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  8. Of the non 2 party candidates, I dunno about any of 'em. Johnson usually looks like he's trying to remember where he parked. Trump isn't the most articulate guy, but he radiates sincerity and confidence. True to libertarian form, Johnson has a cold fish vibe. The last thing we need right now is libertarian crap. Our institutions need to get stronger and we need to stop pushing decadent cultural liberal crap (Johnson runs/or ran a medical mary jane company). Great, we can all be stoned trannies as our authorities do nothing to protect the lives, the families, and the jobs of regular Americans.

    The libertarians usually do terribly in elections because no matter how fucked up we are, there's still something that just never sits right with most people about the philosophy. It's too sociopathic and libertine.

    If I was 5 years younger there's a good chance I'd vote for Jill Stein. A lot of silly leftist crap but at least a decent shot of exacting revenge on the robber barons.

    Oh, and Johnson grew up in the North Dakota wasteland. He's definitely a Western flake, and he's not even from the more rooted Pac. coast. His Wiki says that he's of Slav descent too, meaning he either lacks much founding stock ancestry or he and his people are too clueless to research or report his other heritage. If I'm a candidate, I'd say on my Wiki that I have English and Scottish ancestry on my Mom's side alone (her Mom was old stock Southern, her dad's surname was Webster). Earth to Gary, there aren't many non Polish Slavs in America.

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  9. "Living in the cuck belt, there's a lot of defeatism when it comes to "diversity enrichment." You can see cucked whites grimace at a horde of Somalians walking around a shopping mall but they ignore it. Then when those same Somalians are responsible for a sudden crime wave, they shrug their shoulders and say "oh well whaddya gonna do about it?" Then when it gets to be really bad, they just move to a suburb and repeat the process.

    I have family in Minneapolis and Des Moines and this is basically their attitude. I have friends in Wichita that are reporting similar developments. White people just aren't #woke enough to pay attention to how badly "diversity" is destroying the country."

    Yup, here in the upper Midwest there seems to be a bummer vibe right now. The Nordic belt feels affronted by Trump's brashness (but of course the majority of whites are disgusted by Hillary too). The plains and much of the West feels forlorn right now (the survivalists, the evangies, the anti-statist cultists) since many of the major players right now are firmly East Coast and are doing relatively little pandering to Western hobby issues. The Wall isn't a Western issue per se since it's intended to protect the country as a whole and is symbolic of us getting our shit together, working as a team, not the usual pandering tough cowboy individualist posturing of the last 40 years.

    Now it's not like every Easterner is on board either, piggybacking on the point of this post. A lot of people back East need to get their heads out of their asses too, especially "America is a nation of immigrants" schlock pushers who fawn over diversity while overlooking the diseases, the crime, the welfare, etc.

    The white nationalist goofs who always put down non whites but then say, "Hey, let's make America a magnet for all kinds of whites" are delusional and essentially are still buying into a form of leftism (that every group is equally capable). We need to slash the movement of all peoples, though I would be willing to accept non-American whites who are genuinely distressed refugees.

    We need stability and continuity. We aren't really a nation if we don't calibrate ethnicity and encourage assimilation. This was understood once upon a time, but over the last 20-30 years the racial consciousness of of what it means to be an American has really taken a beating. Knock off the old country stuff, and let's discard the idea that a nation can function as a series of places that are treated as just names on a map, with ever changing degrees of dull browns, sullen blacks, busy Asians, interloper rootless whites, Scorsesean "ethnic" whites, and Anglo/Teutonic/Nordic whites who don't stick up for themselves. The blacks can have the lowland South, the mestizos born to Americans get Utah/New Mexico/Colorado/West Texas, the Asians get a decent chunk of California. And whites should dominate everywhere else. Muslims and non-slave descended Africans can get lost.

    It's kinda tough to sell this stuff to people accustomed to the entirely sentimental/abstract justifications for diversity and mobility. Do these people not recognize, for example, that even in the wholesome mid-century we still had quite a bit of corruption, crime, and gruff attitudes among the Ellis Island descendants originating from big Northeastern and Midwestern cities. Not to mention the even greater decadence among the rootless people out West (serial killers were much more common per capita out West in the 60's-80's, when many serial killers were white. Now that most killers are black there's a bias towards the South and urban Midwest).

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  10. We need to focus on re-assimilating the Ellis Island people. They were Americans during the Great Compression, but over the past several decades, they've started emphasizing their homeland ethnic identity more and more.

    Only founding stock people go by "American" anymore -- now it's "I'm Italian," "Are you Polish?" etc. The Nordic people use a regional circumlocution -- "That's not very Minnesotan of you" -- but we and they understand that they're talking about their Nordic homeland's customs, not America's.

    The GSS shows that Slavs are more likely than founding stock to favor increased immigration, and less likely to favor restricting it. Only small exceptions were Czechoslovaks and Hungarians.

    Of course in their homelands, they're the most nationalist of Europe. It's just that when they come here, they continue holding onto their Slavic identity -- making them more sympathetic to immigrants than to natives.

    Germans, Irish, and Italians were actually in the range of founding stock -- they're the best success story of assimilation. Thankfully also a lot more numerous than Slavs.

    But just because they're as anti-immigration as founding stock, doesn't mean they aren't drifting off away from an American or even regional American identity, and back into the Gilded Age mindset of which ethnic enclave you belong to.

    At least they're still speaking English, though. That puts them in a category apart from the immigrants of today. Could be a simple way to wedge them off from supporting immigrants -- their ancestors adapted to the language here, so why aren't today's immigrants bothering to learn English?

    Basically, paint the picture that their immigrant ancestors were not better because they were white (true, but won't go anywhere persuasively), but because they made an effort to assimilate -- unlike today's immigrants who just came here to steal jobs and fracture our American culture with their strange languages, clothing, customs, etc., which they are arrogantly and selfishly refusing to give up in favor of American ways.

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    1. Only founding stock people go by "American" anymore

      Is that just in the GSS? In person, for as long as I can remember, every Southern-British/Scots Irish person I've talked with (and I'm a Southerner who's roughly 1/2 old stock American) also tries to emphasize the "exotic", non-British roots: Dutch, Irish (don't laugh), German (don't laugh again), Swedish... and above all, by a mile, INDIAN!*
      In person, I have never heard one of these types, old-stock Americans who have been here since at least the 1700s, ever just say "American". This has been since the 80s for me personally.

      Not disagreeing with your overall points, especially that we are emphasizing our differences more nowadays.

      Slavs. I was under impression that Czechs arrived here earlier than Ellis Island, mostly starting around 1848 because of the nationalist revolutions that started rocking Bohemia. My own ancestors from there came in two waves: 1840s and 1870s. They also settled the prairie of the upper Midwest, forgoing the cities. I know very little about these Slavic migrations to the US other than that Czechs (and Poles) also settled in Texas... and I want to think these were earlier than Ellis Island, too, but I don't know.

      *That Indian thing... man! Genetics in just the past few years have blown a hole into that, hasn't it? I want to think I read somewhere that the fashion for claiming Indian ancestry goes back to around the 1900s? I don't remember if I have that right, or the veracity of it, anyway, but it's been around for a long time!

      Genetics does seem to reveal that Southerners do have more Indian than others, because they at least have some, but almost always less than 1%, lol!

      If you haven't, go on the internet sometime and you'll discover all these people shocked by their dna tests revealing they have zero Indian ancestry, in contradiction to oral histories. I've had long talks myself with a couple of family members about their "surprising" 23andme results in this regard (they had less than 1% Indian).

      BTW, I am literally the only person I know who believed herself to be 100% white and found out differently: 99.4% Euro, .4% Amerindian, .1% Japanese (???)

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  11. Good point. There has been white flight in Southern cities since desegregation, but not in the same manner as the rapid and complete abandonment of the Rust Belt metropoles

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  12. It's interesting that the east-west dichotomy we saw during the primaries seems to have reversed itself during the general with many states West of the Mississippi that voted for Cruz warming up to Trump while many Eastern states where Trump dominated the primaries giving Hillary big leads in recent polls.

    For example Iowa and Wisconsin were released by the same polling company on the same day. Both were Cruz states in the general. Yet in Iowa Trump is winning (or statistically tied while Wisconsin, just across the Mississippi, shows Trump in a massive lead. Although I have no doubt Minnesota, also West of the MS, looks a lot more like WI than Iowa.

    Another example is Texas and Oklahoma. Cruz primary states (it is Cruz country afterall). Yet they are fine with Trump. Go east to Virginia and North Carolina and Clinton is winning. Those are the most disheartening polls to me (and I truly don't want to feel disheartened). Yes both states have a lot of liberal Northeastern transplants. With all the elitists in NOVA I suppose it's possible Virginia will stay blue forever. Also, the very large black populations in both states play a role. Yet Texas which also has lots of transplants (many from liberal California) stays red despite predictions from Democrats that it will flip (which would guarantee one party rule if it ever did happen).

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    1. I just read this over. Of course I meant to say Hillary has a massive lead in Wisconsin. Sadly I don't think all the riots in Milwaukee will change this much. People could have their houses burned down and they will vote exactly the same as those that did the burning or approved of it. There comes a point where niceness becomes so extreme it can become a mental disorder.

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  13. I spent my first 10 years in suburban Milwaukee and I find it fascinating how it molded me into being a wimpy nice guy for life. Not politically. I have long broken away from the liberal mindset. I am a independent conservative, totally a Trump guy.

    Yet my demeanor (and even physical appearance) is totally wimpy nice guy. I have lived the past 40 years in a few different Western states and am regularly told how nice I am. Amazing that my childhood in suburban Milwaukee such a long time ago was able to have this much influence on my personality.

    While I totally believe the culture of niceness, which is like a religion in the Upper Midwest, is heavily influenced by the Lutheran church...it dominated the whole culture. My family was Jewish yet were all super nice and blended in with everyone in WI. I have no doubt Jews in Wisconsin (yes there is a Jewish community in Milwaukee) have more in common personality wise with WI Lutherans than New York Jews. The same could be said for Catholics. There was a movie I saw about 10 years ago (I forgot the name unfortunately) where a Minnesota Jewish couple met a NY Jewish couple and they couldn't relate to each other at all. The Minnesota couple were a lot more reserved and had a strong distaste for how the NY couple talked and behaved. It was really funny and it showed the truth that Midwesterners and Northeasterners are so very different from each other that even sharing the same religion means nothing.

    When I lived in Milwaukee the TV show Laverne and Shirley was popular. I remember many people being offended that it was supposed to take place in Milwaukee with all those pushy NY people and their accents (I am not sure if Laverne was supposed to be a transplant or not).

    My Uncle from WI visited and I had Michael Savage on the car radio. He had an extremely negative reaction. It had nothing to do with the content or politics. It was his brashness that was horrifying to him. "Please, Please turn that off, I can't handle listening to a pushy New Yorker". Yes, WI (and MN) people really hate New Yorkers. They offend every fiber of their super nice beings. Donald Trump is a prime example of the kind of person who offends them (even if it is obvious to me he is a decent guy). They hate him for his NY demeanor more than any issue he stands for.

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  14. "It's interesting that the east-west dichotomy we saw during the primaries seems to have reversed itself during the general"

    That's to be expected from primary turnout on either side -- although Trump won MD massively, GOP turnout was a fraction of what it was for Dem turnout. MD will be guaranteed for Crooked Hillary.

    Likewise for Texas or Utah -- GOP turnout was YUGE compared to Dem turnout in primaries, and both will go for Trump.

    States where turnout was close on both sides, and where Trump won decisively, will be crucial -- like Michigan and Pennsylvania.

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  15. "I remember many people being offended that it was supposed to take place in Milwaukee with all those pushy NY people and their accents (I am not sure if Laverne was supposed to be a transplant or not)."

    Minnesotans must have thought the same thing about the Mary Tyler Moore Show -- no excessive niceness or naivete there either.

    What did Wisconsinites think about Happy Days?

    Family Ties feels more like it would fit in suburban Philly, not urban Columbus.

    For New York media Jews, it seems like their idea of flyover country were the suburbs of the Acela corridor -- somewhere outside the Center of the Universe, and familiar enough for them to cast certain types.

    Shows that are set in Acela areas they do get pretty well -- All in the Family, Who's the Boss, Charles in Charge, Seinfeld, etc.

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  16. Happy Days was very popular in Milwaukee (as it was nationally). I heard no negative feedback like I did with Laverne & Shirley. It seemed people felt the Cunningham's were a pretty good representation of a 50s Milwaukee family. Richie and his pals were all nice guys. The Fonz was a rebel but he had a heart and was non-threatening. Plus they thought his motorcycle was cool as Milwaukee is the Harley Davidson HQ. The show had more of a middle American feel and didn't have those "obnoxious New Yorkers" like Laverne and the guys that worked in the brewery

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  17. "It's interesting that the east-west dichotomy we saw during the primaries seems to have reversed itself during the general with many states West of the Mississippi that voted for Cruz warming up to Trump while many Eastern states where Trump dominated the primaries giving Hillary big leads in recent polls.

    For example Iowa and Wisconsin were released by the same polling company on the same day. Both were Cruz states in the general. Yet in Iowa Trump is winning "

    Well, the non-Nordic plains states are heavily Republican. They hate big gubmint Dems. So do the Mountain states that aren't Colorado (a yuppie and flake haven) or New Mexico (not enough founding stock Americans). Ted Kaczyinski could be the Rep. candidate and Oklahoma, Wyoming, Kansas, Utah, etc. would still not vote Democrat. In a sense, this is good news when we've got a Trump type running against the Dems. The down side is that the reasons the GOP dominates these areas (most of which don't have many electoral votes) are the reasons a lot of people back East tune out of politics. Too much evangelical/individualist/anti-gubmint paranoia and pandering. Not enough focus on reasonable and prudent measures to insure results that give us communal optimism, security, and prosperity.

    I don't think the plains/mountains have really warmed up to Trump all that much. They're just reflexively supporting whoever is running against Hillary.

    I've read numerous articles about how stupid most of the polls are. Rueters has openly admitted to over sampling Democrats, while another poll (maybe the NBC one) would force uncommitted or disinterested voters to pick either Trump or Hillary. Well, naturally these wimps didn't pick Trump. It's worth repeating that regardless of the claimed validity of poll methodology, these polls are likely underestimating turnout of Reagan Dems/long suffering populist Republicans while overestimating turnout of youth (voting likelihood soars with age) and browns/blacks (no black or "hip" under 50 candidate this time).

    Good article about voting fraud in Penn. (obviously an important and seemingly close election). http://www.nationalreview.com/article/438981/donald-trump-voter-fraud-warning-hes-right-media-philadelphia-pennsylvania

    This dude claims that his app shows Trump with 2/3rds of support:

    www.usatoday.com%2fstory%2ftech%2f2016%2f08%2f13%2fapp-maker---trump-win-election%2f88640044%2f/RK=0/RS=dVbzQh3aFlDlxOoUyAWXDQ_Y0ck-

    The LA times "daily" (for the most part) poll consistently shows a tight race, with the most recent poll having Trump behind by 5 or so. Not great news, but certainly far more credible than many mainstream national polls often showing an 8-15 (!) point gap that are calibrated by hacks in cahoots with the globalists.

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  18. "I remember many people being offended that it was supposed to take place in Milwaukee with all those pushy NY people and their accents (I am not sure if Laverne was supposed to be a transplant or not)."

    Minnesotans must have thought the same thing about the Mary Tyler Moore Show -- no excessive niceness or naivete there either."

    Niceness? There's a lot of repression and passive-aggressiveness. And a lot of the non Boomer whites in Minnesota can come off as being pretty surly and self-absorbed. The generation that came of age in the low striving/high outgoingness era of the 60's/70's/early 80's can be pretty approachable and convivial. But forget about the other generations.

    The vibe of the Mary T. M. show seemed to be more of a generic urban Midwestern thing with professional class Silents playing fast and loose with their careers and relationships. Per wiki, MTM moves to Minneapolis at the outset of the show and remains single throughout the run. Not at all like Happy Days, which is an idealized and nostalgic mid century setting show that was popular with Silents (we were so cool back then) and Boomers.

    Even in the 70's (to say nothing of later decades), we were beginning to see the roots of the yuppie, and the growing discontinuity in many cities and neighborhoods. Getting a "good" job, a big-ass car, getting laid a lot (for guys) or endlessly searching for mr. right (the women). Obviously, stuff like Mary T.M. (or the All in the Family liberalthon) was not necessarily reflective of what many Americans felt or experienced in the 70's. But the 70's was still the decade that was the beginning of the current striving era.

    The 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers captured this. The people and streets of late 70's San Francisco are moody and troubled. The bonds between everyone seem to be weakening while goofy fads are embraced and charlatan pop psychologists try to explain the world created by the Me Generation. The invading aliens are allowed to quietly take nearly everyone over since too many people are too self-absorbed to notice the weird stuff going on.

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  19. Random Dude on the Internet8/16/16, 10:28 PM

    The media outright admits to adjusting the polls but 99% of people who care about polls ironically don't care much about the methodology. They just see "Trump loses by 13 points, may even lose Texas!"

    My mother who was on Trump train and is now considering getting off is citing the polls as a reason. Again, it's that cuck belt defeatism. So it likely is having a small effect. I'm not saying that my mother is indicative of the rest of the country for sure. It's just that the media know that there are some people who will just sit out if it appears hopeless enough.

    People need to do what they can to get Trump supporters to register to vote and go to the polls. I think this will be a challenge for working class whites who may not have voted in a long time if ever. They can say they are for Trump and may be willing to stand 2-3 hours in line for a rally but if they don't vote, it's entirely meaningless.

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  20. The reason white people left cities like Cleveland etc, wasn't simply black riots or physical control of neighborhoods: it had to do with forced bussing and integration of the schools. Ethnic neighborhoods could be policed by local guys. As a child I lived in an neighborhood where the Italian Mafia had had their guys patrolling during black riots to enforce the neighborhood boundaries.

    This same sort of community policing could not be done at a school. To use my old neighborhood as an example, there used to be a neighborhood school mostly attended by people from the Italian neighborhood (but with a small number blacks) until this school was destroyed by the liberal and replaced with larger more integrated institutions.

    So, for the city resident, your neighborhood itself might be ok but your kid would be in a school where he would be attacked by blacks for racial reasons. The school and police at this time would exercise a tolerance for this: after all its society making them behave this way. This is intolerable for any parent.

    At the same time society in general was experiencing a decline in public order. To illustrate: take a look at 1970's and 1980's movies and one thing you see (and don't see in modern movies) is teenagers and young adults rampaging in public places and no one stopping them. This is an exaggeration of the disorder in places like center city downtowns, but captures of feeling of what it was like to be in one of those places.

    So the suburbs offered a safe place for children, safer feeling and actually safer public spaces (and ethnic feeling had been superseded by a post WWII American culture which made ethnicity secondary).

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  21. On Pittsburgh: haven't lived in that city but I have a theory. Unlike other Northern industrial cities, Pittsburgh is built around a bunch of mountains which make it hard to get anywhere. So my guess is that forced bussing and integration were more difficult because of areas being isolated from each other because of the topography.

    In contrast Cleveland is simply hilly, Chicago is totally flat, and the area of Milwaukee where blacks are the majority is flat and separated from non-black areas of the city by significant rivers and valleys.

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  22. Ah, a Murray Hill/Little Italy guy! As someone whose parents were driven out of east Cleveland in the 60's and fled all the way to Solon, I second what you wrote. The busing was a social engineering disaster - even the judge who issued the order later recanted (decades later, when the damage had been done).

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  23. Again, I have come to the same conclusion: the topography hemmed in development and made the creation of suburbs problematic. Ergo, Pittsburgh's higher white population. Incidentally, I have lived in Columbus (which is nice and flat, with a commensurate ring of suburbs) for the last 20 years, and white flight basically has been continuing unabated (at a slow burn) this entire time - the usual growing black cancer has now tainted the entire north side irrevocably, for example. Furthermore, their ranks have been swelled with the needless addition of Somali immigrants, who immediately clog up the welfare and social security offices.

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