cultural barbarism

The Social Decay of Black Neighborhoods (And Yours!)

Just Four Guys

I pointed out yesterday’s great post by Obsidian at “Just Four Guys.” The social pathologies destroying the old black neighborhoods are coming to everyone’s neighborhoods eventually unless something changes. The interesting comments provoked me to write a short summary of what I think about the problem, and what should be done to start changing it before it spreads further:

I just read Jeb Kinnison’s answer.

Not my answer — I actually wrote my post reporting on a study showing very young black men in an inner-city environment start out hoping for an intimate, trusting long-term relationship before social pressures and negative experience turn them cynical and hard. Then I saw Obsidian’s post.

I’m blindingly white but we can all see what has happened and feel bad about it.

I get what he’s saying: you can’t just bring the old rules back lock, stock, and barrel. However, one shouldn’t be so quick to discount the old norms, as they got the job done.

If, by “repressive norms,” one means holding women accountable for their misbehavior and socially punishing them the way we do with misbehaving men, that is the price to pay. Enabling people to blow up their families at will and treat their partners like criminals just because they’re not sexy enough does nothing to solve this. You can’t eat your cake and have it, with only men working hard and honoring their vows while women get away with the most selfish and hateful behavior.

The old rules wasted potential and did harm to people who were different from the norm. Bringing back some accountability and social pressure is the likely route to a more civilized future.

It isn’t like one group of people suddenly decided to be irresponsible in a vacuum; incentives changed. I’ve seen most of the causes cited already in the comments: social welfare “helping” people into dependency and supporting single mothers over families; the movement of pillars of the old black districts to suburbs; and the abandonment of “bourgeois” norms in those areas as the tide of disorder rose.

Disorder begets more decay and more disorder. The black markets created by the Drug War financed the gangs that sprang up, and feral children began shooting each other over turf. Frightened people authorized longer and longer sentences, more prisons were built and filled with young black men, supporting them in limbo and teaching them to live a life of crime.

End the Drug War and stop financing the lives of criminals (and the army of prison guards, lawyers, politicians, and social workers they support.) Gradually transition to a real economy of voluntary work as the source of all support for people, and the natural laws of getting along with other people — customers, bosses, employees, and partners — will return. The lack of accountability for irresponsible women and men will evaporate when there’s no supporting yourself without being cooperative and civilized.

And then there’ll be a community to disapprove of selfish and short-sighted choices.

Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations

[From Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations, available now in Kindle and trade paperback.]

The first review is in: by Elmer T. Jones, author of The Employment Game. Here’s the condensed version; view the entire review here.

Corporate HR Scrambles to Halt Publication of “Death by HR”

Nobody gets a job through HR. The purpose of HR is to protect their parent organization against lawsuits for running afoul of the government’s diversity extortion bureaus. HR kills companies by blanketing industry with onerous gender and race labor compliance rules and forcing companies to hire useless HR staff to process the associated paperwork… a tour de force… carefully explains to CEOs how HR poisons their companies and what steps they may take to marginalize this threat… It is time to turn the tide against this madness, and Death by HR is an important research tool… All CEOs should read this book. If you are a mere worker drone but care about your company, you should forward an anonymous copy to him.

Young Men Want Trust and Intimacy

HoExample – Glossynews.com

Science Daily reports on a study from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health:

Teenage boys desire intimacy and sex in the context of a meaningful relationship and value trust in their partnerships, according to researchers at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. The research provides a snapshot of the development of masculine values in adolescence, an area that has been understudied.

The researchers studied 33 males who ranged from 14 to 16 years of age to learn more about how their romantic and sexual relationships developed, progressed, and ended. The participants were recruited during routine medical visits at a community adolescent clinic that serves low-income, predominately African-American adolescents. The group’s sexual history began earlier than the national average, putting them at increased risk for sexually transmitted diseases.

Participants were asked open-ended questions about relationships and sex, such as desirable partner characteristics, intimacy, closeness, and trust.

“Prevailing values in our culture suggest adolescent males want sex, not relationships. However, values and behaviors related to sex and relationships are likely more complex than typically portrayed,” said first author David Bell, MD, MPH, assistant professor of Population and Family Health at the Mailman School of Public Health and assistant professor of Pediatrics at Columbia University Medical Center. “In fact, very few of the participants described sex as the main goal of opposite-sex interactions and relationships.”

The study advances an understanding of adolescent males’ early relationships in two significant ways. First, close relationships were important to the participants. Second, they desired intimate and caring relationships, expressed vulnerability and dependence, and placed great importance on trust in relationships.

Few participants described trying to trick or talk a partner into having sex, and few evidenced pride and boastfulness about numbers of sexual conquests. An area of vulnerability expressed by the males was the lack of knowledge about sex and concerns about their own capacity to sexually perform.

These findings starkly contrast with descriptions of older, sexually experienced adolescent males, according to Dr. Bell, in which older adolescents consistently endorse the belief that relationships should be focused around sex, an avoidance of intimacy, and the treatment of females as sex objects.

This study supports a view that young men, like young women, start out looking for a romantic partner first and only come around to a utilitarian, abusive “I just want sex” view after exposure to negative experiences and cultural pressures to conform to their culture’s notion of masculine behavior.

This unfeeling view of the opposite sex is not normal for young men (or young women), but comes as supporting cultural norms are eroded and parental guidance is either absent or overcome by peer group pressure and media exposure to sexuality as a primary good.

The question of how to support a more empathetic view that values the feelings and long-term commitment of romantic partner prospects is a difficult one. Certainly knee-jerk social conservative ideas of locking down society to conform to a previous century’s repressive norms are not going to work.

Reference: D. L. Bell, J. G. Rosenberger, M. A. Ott. Masculinity in Adolescent Males’ Early Romantic and Sexual Heterosexual Relationships. American Journal of Men’s Health, 2014; DOI: 10.1177/1557988314535623

Also note the great post by Obsidian at “Just Four Guys” on the atomization of black families.

Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations

[From Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations, available now in Kindle and trade paperback.]

The first review is in: by Elmer T. Jones, author of The Employment Game. Here’s the condensed version; view the entire review here.

Corporate HR Scrambles to Halt Publication of “Death by HR”

Nobody gets a job through HR. The purpose of HR is to protect their parent organization against lawsuits for running afoul of the government’s diversity extortion bureaus. HR kills companies by blanketing industry with onerous gender and race labor compliance rules and forcing companies to hire useless HR staff to process the associated paperwork… a tour de force… carefully explains to CEOs how HR poisons their companies and what steps they may take to marginalize this threat… It is time to turn the tide against this madness, and Death by HR is an important research tool… All CEOs should read this book. If you are a mere worker drone but care about your company, you should forward an anonymous copy to him.

Jeb Kinnison

Writing About Life and Love

cultural barbarism

Young Men Want Trust and Intimacy

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