Friday, December 14, 2012

Year's end


Just horsing around? Or is there also a political message?

It’s year’s end, and to date I’ve written nothing on the three themes I promised to blog about back in January. One reason was the need to comment on certain unforeseen events, like Phil Rushton’s death and the confirmation that Europeans became white-skinned long after their ancestors had arrived in Europe. Another reason was the difficulty in finding relevant data, particularly with respect to the Burakumin of Japan.

So, before the clock runs out, I’ll post my thoughts on all three themes:

Archaic admixture

There is growing evidence that a Neanderthal-like archaic population once inhabited parts of Africa. Lachance et al. (2012) studied the genomes of three hunter-gatherer peoples from sub-Saharan Africa: Pygmy, Hadza, and Sandawe. All three of them showed introgression from an unknown archaic group whose ancestors had separated from ancestral modern humans at about the same time as ancestral Neanderthals had.

Africa is probably the continent where modern humans have the most archaic admixture, since it is where they were in contact with archaic hominins for the longest time. In addition, it’s also where modern humans were in contact with “almost-moderns” who offered weaker barriers to intermixture because they were so similar behaviorally and physically.

But what does all this mean? If a human population has a lot of archaic admixture, is it therefore more primitive anatomically and mentally? Not really. The “modern” gene variants are still present in the gene pool, and if they’re any better they will progressively displace their archaic counterparts through natural selection. Over time, archaic admixture will thus be confined to junk DNA of little or no selective value. Mallards, for instance, have outbred so much that only a minority of them cluster together on an mtDNA tree, the rest being scattered among black ducks (Avise et al., 1990). Yet each and every one of them looks, quacks, and waddles like a mallard.

Indeed, if we follow Greg Cochran’s reasoning, an admixed population provides natural selection with a wider range of interesting variants, some of which might even be better than the ones in the original genetic toolkit.

The Korean tinderbox

In late capitalism, the elites are no longer restrained by ties of national identity and are thus freer to enrich themselves at the expense of their host society. This clash of interests lies at the heart of the globalist project: on the one hand, jobs are outsourced to low-wage countries; on the other, low-wage labor is insourced for jobs that cannot be relocated, such as in the construction and service industries.

This two-way movement redistributes wealth from owners of labor to owners of capital. Business people benefit from access to lower-paid workers and weaker labor and environmental standards. Working people are meanwhile thrown into competition with these other workers. As a result, the top 10% of society is pulling farther and farther ahead of everyone else, and this trend is taking place throughout the developed world. The rich are getting richer … not by making a better product but by making the same product with cheaper and less troublesome inputs of labor.

In the United States, globalism is being pushed by a contrived bipartisan consensus. As Jeff Faux (2012) notes:

But the national discourse is silent on the tacit agreement both parties have already made on the future that lies ahead for the majority of working Americans: a dramatic drop in their living standards. […] Even before the financial crash, real wages for the typical American worker had been stagnant for 30 years as a result of: 1) trade and investment deregulation that shoved American workers into a brutally competitive global labor market for which they were unprepared; 2) the relentless war on unions that began with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980; and 3) more recently, the erosion of the social safety net for low wage workers and the unemployed.

In East Asia, South Korea has gone the furthest in embracing the globalist project, as one observer recently summarized in comparing that country with Ireland and the U.S.:

[…] lesser skilled jobs are moving from advanced markets to developing nations. Companies recovering from the financial shocks of 2008 have discovered more cost-effective processes than older, more labor-intensive means through technology and outsourcing. Consequently, the recent economic rebounds have not been matched with expected re-employment.

Independent “knowledge professionals” represent more and more of the labor force. Decreasing numbers of “permanent” employees mean more reliance on multi-skilled, independent specialists on a plug-in and plug-out basis for short- and medium-term projects. This major development is becoming an increasingly common aspect of this new paradigm.

[…] I have seen an erosion of the middle classes, and a strengthening of the upper-middle classes and upper classes, while the lower classes are growing in size. At the same time, I have seen the middle class getting by on less, and becoming much less aggressive consumers. (Coyner, 2012)

South Korea has also gone global by opening its borders to immigration. Officially, there are about 1.4 million foreigners (2011), but this figure excludes illegal immigrants (estimated to be 30-50% of the legal total) and foreigners who have acquired South Korean citizenship. Also excluded are their Korean-born children (Anon, 2011).

This influx of foreign labor is framed as a positive development that will make South Korea a more open society:

In order to sustain its development, the country has increasingly turned to foreign labor and selective immigration as countermeasures for its economic and demographic problems. The state manages the influx of foreigners under a framework of “multiculturalism” that professes openness towards becoming a “multicultural society” despite resistance rooted in ethno-nationalism and a history of homogeneity. (Kim & Kwon, 2012).

The veneer of official discourse conceals the stresses and strains that are building among ordinary South Koreans. With conditions of life deteriorating for the majority, animosity is growing toward the top 10% whose lives are steadily improving. The latter are satirized in the hit video “Gangnam style” by Korean rapper Psy:

Gangnam is a wealthy neighborhood in the South Korean city of Seoul where young people go to party. In the song, Psy describes the kind of guy he is and the kind of girl he wants, painting caricatures of the ostentatious culture of people who hang out in Gangnam. 

As The Atlantic pointed out in an in-depth article last month, behind the flashy costumes and killer dance moves in Psy's video, there's a subtle commentary on class in South Korea. 

WHAT DOES THE CHORUS, 'OPPAN GANGNAM STYLE,' MEAN?

It roughly means something like 'Your man has Gangnam Style.' 'Oppa,' which literally means 'older brother,' is an affectionate term girls use to address older guy friends or a boyfriend. It can also be used as a first-person pronoun, as PSY does here — in this case, he's telling a woman that he has Gangnam style.

WHAT'S THE DEAL WITH HIS SIGNATURE DANCE?

"It's a horse-riding dance," PSY explained in an interview with NY1 anchor Michelle Park. "So there is an invisible horse, and you're on it. (Goyette, 2012)

No, that’s not the whole story. The dance is also a parody of an American cowboy. (Twirling a lasso is not a usual feature of horseback riding). There is in fact a streak of anti-Americanism in all of this, as recent revelations about Psy’s past have shown. Something is going on beneath the apparent calm of South Korean society, and it won’t be pretty when it finally comes to a head …

Places like South Korea and Greece, which lie on the periphery of the current world-system, will be the first to push back against globalism. In such countries, national identity is still strong and the elites use little imagination in adapting their approach to local circumstances, preferring to “copy and paste” from elsewhere. There too, the failure of globalism will be the most obvious.

The Burakumin

In pre-modern Japanese society, the Burakumin specialized in jobs that required contact with dead flesh, e.g., butchery, leather making, and preparation of corpses for burial. They were and still are socially stigmatized, and marriage with them was forbidden. Because of their endogamy and their reserved occupations, they may have thus escaped the process of demographic replacement that Gregory Clark (2007) described for English society, i.e., they were not gradually replaced by downwardly moving members of the middle class. As such, they might provide a glimpse into the genetic predispositions that characterized the Japanese several centuries ago—at a time when the State was largely absent and when social relations were quite different.

In this earlier social environment, adult males were expected to use force on a regular basis to defend themselves and their families. Law courts did exist, but their rulings were enforced by the aggrieved party, not by the State. Young men preferred to socialize with other young men in small loosely hierarchical groups that sought to control local territory while engaging in raids to plunder neighboring territories. Literacy was rare, with less importance being given to creation, processing, and storage of abstract information. Finally, time orientation was focused much more on the present. This reflected the uncertainty over one’s own future, including life expectancy, and also the difficulty in converting oral agreements into long-term enforceable contracts.

These behavior patterns seem to describe the Burakumin. Modern Japanese society is alienating to them, not because of discrimination but because of its high level of domesticity, social discipline, and nerdish devotion to intellectual pursuits. Male Burakumin, in particular, prefer alternate forms of social affiliation and expression, such as the Yakuza (Japanese mafia), the largest Yakuza syndicate being over 70% Burakumin.  At school, their achievement scores have remained nearly one standard deviation below those of other Japanese regardless of the time and place of the research (BLHRRI, 1997). The persistent gap may reflect a lack of either ability or interest, or a lack of both.

This topic unfortunately suffers from insufficient good data. The American literature often asserts that IQ scores have risen dramatically among Burakumin immigrants to the U.S., but Jason Malloy has shown that this claim is an academic legend:

I often see media assertions like Steve Olson in The Atlantic: “Yet when the Buraku emigrate to the United States, the IQ gap between them and other Japanese vanishes.” This claim is somewhat apocryphal. There is no data for Burakumin in the US. False claims about US IQ data have mutated second-hand from John Ogbu who claimed a study showed that the Buraku immigrants here “do slightly better in school than the other Japanese immigrants”. The book chapter Ogbu references for this claim (Ito 1966) however, is by a pseudonymous author who relied strictly on gossip from non-outcast Japanese communities in California to surmise how the outcasts here might be performing. The author’s informants believed the US outcasts were more attractive, more fair-skinned, and made more money. Though– as a testament to Ogbu’s immaculate scholarship– the author reported no gossip about how these Burakumin performed in school. (Cochran, 2011)

The Japanese literature doesn’t seem much better. It generally admits the existence of negative stereotypes about the Burakumin but provides little information on the content of these stereotypes. 

References

Anon. (2011). Foreigners make up 3% of Korea’s population, December 19, Gusts of Popular Feeling
http://populargusts.blogspot.ca/2011/12/foreigners-make-up-3-of-koreas.html

Avise, J.C., C.D. Ankney, W.S. Nelson. (1990). Mitochondrial gene trees and the evolutionary relationship of mallard and black ducks, Evolution, 44, 1109-1119.

BLHRRI (1997). Practice of Dowa Education Today, Buraku Liberation and Human Rights Institute.
http://blhrri.org/blhrri_e/dowaeducation/de_0006.htm

Clark, G. (2007). A Farewell to Alms. A Brief Economic History of the World, Princeton University Press, Princeton and Oxford.

Cochran, G. (2011). Risch’s conjecture, December 28, West Hunter
http://westhunt.wordpress.com/2011/12/28/rischs-conjecture/

Coyner, T. (2012). Learning to move with the tide, Korea Joongang Daily, September 12
http://koreajoongangdaily.joinsmsn.com/news/article/article.aspx?aid=2959517 

Faux, J. (2012). The elites are unanimous: Lower everyone’s wages and standard of living, Jeff Faux
http://jefffaux.com/?p=345

Goyette, B. (2012). Psy’s ‘Gangam Style,’ explained! NY Daily News, September 7,
http://articles.nydailynews.com/2012-09-07/news/33682557_1_gangnam-psy-dance

Ito, H. (1966). Japan’s outcastes in the United States. In G.A. deVos and H. Wagatsuma (eds.), Japan’s Invisible Race. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Kim, J. & Y-S. Kwon. (2012). Economic development, the evolution of foreign labor and immigration policy, and the shift to multiculturalism in South Korea, Philippine Political Science Journal, 33, 178-201.

Lachance, J., B. Vernot, C.C. Elbers, B. Ferwerda, A. Froment, J-M Bodo, G. Lema, W. Fu, T.B. Nyambo, T.R. Rebbeck, K. Zhang, J.M. Akey, S.A. Tishkoff. (2012). Evolutionary history and adaptation from high-coverage whole-genome sequences of diverse African hunter-gatherers, Cell, 150, 457-469.
http://211.144.68.84:9998/91keshi/Public/File/42/150-3/pdf/1-s2.0-S0092867412008318-main.pdf

Wikipedia. (2012). PSY (entertainer).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSY_(entertainer)

30 comments:

Difference Maker said...

Archaic admixture
"Might be"... "progressively"


These are not the words I want to hear purporting the benefits of admixture.

We may (or may not) pat ourselves on the back as being largely immune against the hybridization. But I look with no optimism on a future mixed world, not least because the introgressed variants will inevitably begin to infiltrate up the classes. Even accounting for assortative mating, these new hybrids have no reason to be as great as such children might have been.

After all, evolution, as we should know, does not have to select for the smartest, the bravest, the fastest, the handsomest, the noblest.

Evil indeed must the one in favor of admixture think this world, and "his" people

Difference Maker said...

Of course, looking over the failings of WASP society, one may wish that people could be immunized against its vulnerabilities, in short, that people could be different.

And, if we imagine a sort of hypothetical supermen pairings, these are easily hybridization events, ones that may lead to something better.

Anonymous said...

In late capitalism, the elites are no longer restrained by ties of national identity and are thus freer to enrich themselves at the expense of their host society.

You seem to hold a Marxist materialist view of historical and economic development. This is kind of odd in light of your general focus on genes and biology.

Anonymous said...

"You seem to hold a Marxist materialist view of historical and economic development. This is kind of odd in light of your general focus on genes and biology."

Silly Anon, genes and biology are also material aspects of this world. You can't use genes and biology alone to explain things just as you cannot use economics alone to do the same. Peter knows this.

In fact, a good definition of "economics" should include genes and biology. In fact, "economics should be a sub-category of biology, since economics is the study of a particular kind of animal.

Anonymous said...

Silly Anon, genes and biology are also material aspects of this world. You can't use genes and biology alone to explain things just as you cannot use economics alone to do the same. Peter knows this.

"Marxist materialism" has a specific meaning. It doesn't mean what you think it means.

Anonymous said...

The “modern” gene variants are still present in the gene pool, and if they’re any better they will progressively displace their archaic counterparts through natural selection.

It very much depends on the selective environment.

If the archaic strategy is better, than an archaic variant will introgress to a hybrid population.

If the modern strategy is better, than a modern variant will introgress to a hybrid population.

What kind of selective environment was Eurasia, what kind was Africa, what kind was Australasia?

Anon 2 said...

"Marxist materialism" has a specific meaning. It doesn't mean what you think it means.

I think I know what you meant, Anon. If you meant the notion that history operates according to iron laws, and capitalism will destroy itself and be replaced by a socialist utopia, then I don't think Peter thinks that. Do you? Peter was just saying something that happens to coincide with some notions voiced by Marx. Capitalism probably won't produce equilibrium. I just don't understand the problem you have with Peter's suggesting that have a market economy affects people's behavior in certain ways. That's all Anon.

And my comment was more about economics and biology in general. Even if we acknowledge that Marx said some things that sometimes coincide with actual trends, we can still understand that biology and genes play a role.

Anonymous said...

I think I know what you meant, Anon. If you meant the notion that history operates according to iron laws, and capitalism will destroy itself and be replaced by a socialist utopia, then I don't think Peter thinks that. Do you?

Like I said, I don't think you understand what was meant by "Marxist materialism". It doesn't mean that Peter actually subscribes to Marxism and its specific predictions.

Jimmy said...

Dr. Frost,

It's off topic. I would appreciate if you could tell me where to find wide information and literature on variations of mating system of Millennials compared to the Boomers and Generation X, differences on dating and courtship patterns, the influence by the time period, social conditions and constructs, genetic factors, cultural norms, and institutional structures that surround mating market,etc. I need bibliography on this theme. Thanks.

Anonymous said...

I wonder, how did Africans look before archaic admixtures.







Anonymous said...

Quote: "Europeans became white-skinned long after their ancestors had arrived in Europe."


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UI2cNs6m4cQ




sykes.1 said...

North Koreans regard South Koreans as irredeemably corrupt and are appalled at non-Korean immigrants, whom they regard as subhuman.

Reunification might prove to be problematic for modern South Korean culture. More so because China has made it clear that reunification under South Korean leadership will not be permitted. China will annex North Korea first. So, any reunification will have to be under North Korean leadership, hopefully some what moderated.

Now that North Korea has an ICBM that can reach literally any target on the earth, Northern conquest of the South is at least conceivable. The US will not give up LA or Chicago or NYC for Seoul.

Beyond Anon said...

It is clear that there are several sets of stable behavioral complexes that depend on the circumstances (eg, the presence of strong state actors etc.)

It is also clear that the elites want a WorldGov because they imagine that it is in their interests.

We shall see what comes to pass.

Sean said...

There is a source of within-species adaptation to novel selection pressure though the rare individual in whom (though environmental stress) some piece of junk DNA has come through to expression.


S. Korea is certainly where the globalisation yoke is going to weigh most heavily. ‘Replacement Migration’, or why everyone’s going to have to live in Korea.
The pay off for the elites has become greater. Nowak on networks of cooperation here. He says the point at which the system grows so wealth is maximized, is also where defection can most easily bring the whole system down.

The stakes are so high now that Superpower America will not, could not, permit any state to roll back globalisation. Not even a marginal one. The instant a country starts to show signs of wanting to defect from the global system, the West will 'go nuclear' in a rhetorical sense, and identify the state as 'radical nationalist' and then fascist (ie mark it for destruction).

The US led global project is to remove substantive issues from political manifestos (or even discussion). Local allegiance, even the family, will be dismantled through 'rights'. Liberal legalism refuses to accept that any legitimate rights of native workers in democratic countries can conflict with the rights of 'migrants' to those countries.

Native workers in advanced countries can't affect the political system because business, media and academic types with their hands on the levers of power won't listen to people who are clannish, prone to violence, lack intellectuality and are not particularly bright.

Lets face it, working people are 'Burakumin' in the eyes of those who run the show.

Anonymous said...

North Koreans regard South Koreans as irredeemably corrupt and are appalled at non-Korean immigrants, whom they regard as subhuman.

I don't think it's really accurate to say that the North Koreans regard non-Koreans as "subhuman". The North Koreans seem to have a "nationalities" view that was common in the Communist bloc. This sort of view was also common in the pre-WW2 West. If anything, the Communist "nationalities" view is less "racist" and relatively more egalitarian than the kinds of more rigid views that prevailed in the pre-WW2 West since while different nationalities are affirmed, the differences among them are attributed to being on different stages of "socialist development" or some such.

But today, any nationalism is regarded by the dominant worldview in the West as being automatically hostile, "racist", etc.

Anonymous said...

Native workers in advanced countries can't affect the political system because business, media and academic types with their hands on the levers of power won't listen to people who are clannish, prone to violence, lack intellectuality and are not particularly bright.

Judging by their behavior and track record, it would seem that the "business, media and academic types with their hands on the levers of power" are the ones that are "clannish, prone to violence, lack intellectuality and are not particularly bright."

Anonymous said...

The stakes are so high now that Superpower America will not, could not, permit any state to roll back globalisation. Not even a marginal one. The instant a country starts to show signs of wanting to defect from the global system, the West will 'go nuclear' in a rhetorical sense, and identify the state as 'radical nationalist' and then fascist (ie mark it for destruction).

The US led global project is to remove substantive issues from political manifestos (or even discussion). Local allegiance, even the family, will be dismantled through 'rights'. Liberal legalism refuses to accept that any legitimate rights of native workers in democratic countries can conflict with the rights of 'migrants' to those countries.


Yes this is what is so dangerous. Civilization has controlled men in order to maintain its monopoly on violence (Peter has written about "genetic pacification"). This has generally been counter-balanced (up until recently in the West) with institutionalized patriarchy and "sexism" against women. The only way to not counter-balance this with sexism against women is to take control of reproduction ala Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. This appears to mean that it's a race against time for the West to go totally eusocial, with total, amoral, warfare against the developing world and against defectors in the developed world before their sexism conquers by sheer force of demography.

Sean said...

Levels of 25-hydroxyvitamin D in familial longevity: the Leiden Longevity Study."These results cast doubt on the causal nature of previously reported associations between low levels of vitamin D and age-related diseases and mortality."

The life-history trade-off between fertility and child survival.

Caribou Casall said...

Mr Frost -- thank you v. much for some v. interesting posts. Yr series on Greece was excellent and I'll be re-reading this post too. Merry Xmas and, if Mayan prophecies don't intervene, I hope you carry on the good stuff, and gene-stuff (and g-stuff), in 2013.

Sean said...

Soon after taking power in 1961 Park Chung-hee initiated a nationwide program to reduce the birthrate. There was still a little bit of a youth bulge to be got over. In 1979 repression sparked an uprising in the city of Kwangju. The US re-enforced its forces in S.Korea and held the ring while Park Chung-hee sent in his army 'special forces' to restore order by shooting, bayoneting, clubbing and beating protesters to death. here. Park Chung-hee is remembered fondly by many older South Koreans (who increasingly outnumber the young ones of course). Park Chung-hee's daughter ascends to presidency. There won't be meaningful unrest (beyond grumbling) there aren't enough young people in South Korea for anything else. It's already game over there, and in the West too.

Anonymous said...

n 1979 repression sparked an uprising in the city of Kwangju. The US re-enforced its forces in S.Korea and held the ring while Park Chung-hee sent in his army 'special forces' to restore order by shooting, bayoneting, clubbing and beating protesters to death.

That uprising was in 1980. Park Chung-hee was assassinated in 1979 by the head of the Korean CIA. Some say that he was assassinated with the tacit approval of the US because they feared he would "go rogue" and seek nukes and greater independence.

Jprezy87 said...

"In late capitalism, the elites are no longer restrained by ties of national identity and are thus freer to enrich themselves at the expense of their host society. This clash of interests lies at the heart of the globalist project:"

Um-am I reading the communist manifesto here??

Sean said...

Zǒu gǒu, the Pusan and Masan demonstrations were in 1979. The protesters were a cross section of young people, not just students.

Okamoto Minoru sent paratroopers in, and they killed many; he demanded that protests be suppressed "even if it cost 30,000 lives." Kim Jae-gyu acted like a true Korean.

Anonymous said...

Um-am I reading the communist manifesto here??

No. Marx never cared about the national identities of host societies. If anything, he approved of international capitalism's erosion of national identities as a stepping stone to world communism.

Peter Fros_ said...

Difference Maker,

WASPs have an obsessive desire to be "moral." This was a highly adaptive setup when morality was defined by tradition. Unfortunately, that's no longer the case. When circumstances change, an adaptive trait can become maladaptive.

Anon (and others),

I don't believe genes are everything. Human behavior is multidimensional, with inputs not only from genetic predispositions but also from present and past cultural environments and from the economic system.

I've never been a full-fledged Marxist. I used to consider myself a "Marxisant", i.e., someone who drew inspiration from Marxism while recognizing its deficiencies. I then became increasingly disillusioned. When the Cold War ended, I felt that Marxism deserved to be tossed onto the trash heap of history.

Today, I feel differently. Marxism helped to keep capitalism honest, and the Cold War deterred both superpowers from engaging in military adventurism. The current unipolar world is bringing out the worst features of capitalsm -- and of those political regimes that fall under its influence.

Jimmy,

Try:

L. Cohen (2012). The 20th Century Decline in the Private Cost to Women of Non-Marital Sex: Causes and Consequences

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2170522

Anon,

They probably looked like Khoisans (Bushmen, Hottentots), but a lot bigger.

Sykes,

The current world-system is decomposing at its periphery. China and Russia (which were never fully integrated into it) are increasingly able to go their own way. The situation is different for places like South Korea and Greece, which cannot easily leave this system and yet are finding the status quo more and more intolerable. It looks like we are moving toward a new bipolar world, with a Eurasian power bloc coalescing around Russia and China.

That in itself will be manageable. The problem lies in the willingness of the Western power bloc to abandon its global aims. It also lies in desperate 2nd-tier countries (like North Korea) that will try to instrumentalize this unstable situation.

Sean,

You're ruining my Christmas holidays with all of these interesting leads!

Caribou Casell,

Thanks! There'll be more to come in 2013. As for the Mayan calendar, the Mayans never did predict the end of the world on this date. It's simply the end of an era.

Anonymous said...

They probably looked like Khoisans (Bushmen, Hottentots), but a lot bigger.

Great Andamanese might be useful, as they at least show up with no Denisova admixture

http://www.andaman.org/BOOK/chapter13/Ongecouple.jpg

http://www.andaman.org/BOOK/chapter13/pla13-1.jpg

http://www.teluguone.com/tmdbuserfiles/jarawa-extinction(1).jpg

Anonymous said...

"You seem to hold a Marxist materialist view of historical and economic development. This is kind of odd in light of your general focus on genes and biology."

Race starts at extended family and works outwards. That may be less obvious to the average white person than it is to the disproportionately sociopathic elites.

.
"Um-am I reading the communist manifesto here?"

When capital was tied to land it was less portable. When capital was tied to minimum levels of training, education and infrastructure it was less portable. The greater the portability of wealth the greater the temptation to steal it.

Similar to why historically pastoralist peoples are likely to be more violent.

.
"The stakes are so high now that Superpower America will not, could not, permit any state to roll back globalisation. Not even a marginal one. The instant a country starts to show signs of wanting to defect from the global system, the West will 'go nuclear' in a rhetorical sense, and identify the state as 'radical nationalist' and then fascist (ie mark it for destruction)."

Except it's not really the west. Its America with Britain tagging along and ultimately it's not America and Britain it's the bankers of New York and London who own the politicians and ironically it's the globalized banking system which is destroying America's superpower status which in turn is allowing countries to break away from the globalized system enforced by that superpower status.

Anonymous said...

It's a shame about the burakunim. They do sound like a perfect test case for all sorts of ideas.

Sean said...

Anon, "Race starts at extended family and works outwards." But I know young women who are very close to their families and yet are with men of a different race.

In countries like S.Korea, the US bases are indirectly preventing the independent self defence, and the type of nationalist politics that goes with it. If the US was to begin losing ground they'd just change the rules like Nixon did when he deregulated capital in 1970.

Britain had the first workers movements it's the most advanced (decrepit) state in the world, the native society is dissolving away. If there is some kind of meaningful backlash it will be in France, which is where all kinds of political tendencies and movements have appeared first. (It doesn't have any US bases.)

PaganAtheist said...

Peter what do you think of the part about the paekchong outcastes of Korea in 'Chinese Outcasts: Discrimination and Emancipation in Late Imperial China' by Anders Hansson?