Be a Chad
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Jesus, I didn't realize Sowell was still alive. It's surprising to see old people still cognitively functional, he even gave opinion on recent american politics (I hope he's not involved in social media, that shit's a brain drain).
I guess I'd never really bothered looking him up, as I only ever see him mentioned in passing. A lot of his ideas expressed on wikipedia sound legit. Actually kind of irritating the more I think about it - we could be hearing people talk about him instead of some youtuber geared towards tweens.
The book sounds interesting, thanks. Claiming the origin of cracker culture to be from an identifiable group of foreigners is enough to make me interested. Hopefully he actually puts a definition or description to it, as I have had very poor results from questioning those I encounter using the term cracker to describe people.
He nails it down to a specific kind of culture that existed in pre-aglicanized Ulster among the Scotts living in Ulster. Their culture and language crossed the ocean with them during some of the initial settlements of the colonial south, and they took a some of their bad behaviors with them.
It's so significant that the act of burning a cross on your enemy's land comes from the Scotts (though they didn't traditionally burn crosses, they burned other symbols for the same dramatic and intimidation effect). It's why they the KKK called themselves a clan.
To be specific, I can tell you that he doesn't go into the specific entymology of each term, but historical lineage of the terms are fairly well understood.
Cracker, referred originally to these same people, but chiefly people who happened to braggarts. Similar to the usage of the phrase "Not all it's cracked up to be". A cracker is someone who cracks up himself.
Rednecks were not inclined from a necessarily derogatory term, but was also more clearly pointed at this same group of people. Particularly because the Ulster-Scotts were Presbyterian, and Presbyterians of the era were known for having worn red neckware to symbolize a blood oath taken in defiance against the King of England who had attempted to seize control of their official church.
I had some time and listened to an audiobook version on youtube. It was overall worthwhile.
I prefer your summary here to the long-hand version of that essay, but there were a couple of extra bits, such as cracker also coming from "wisecracker", which is pretty satisfying from an etymology angle. It'll be interesting to see how frequently I see "cracker" used in a way that directly conflicts with all of this information. I expect it to be very frequently, based off of all the prior reports I got about what it meant.
My major gripe was with him fellating middlemen so much. Surely he understands that not all middlemen are perfect super workers..? I think he sabotaged his argument by not discussing the possibility that anyone at any point might have been right to despise middlemen. I certainly refuse to accept managerialism just because hard workers existed in the past. Oh well. At least I learned that there were other groups that got conflated with jews for that kind of stuff, which reaffirms some assumptions.
Maybe I'll look for an audio version of Culture of Critique next. Reading a review of that years ago was what led me to take the culture pill. (My real reading time is still stuck on Nietzsche, he's definitely not an author you can speedread)
Overall, I only really reaffirmed some of my labelling positions. I gave it some consideration due to new information, but I'm gonna have to stick with the goal of having my words understood easier rather than being more correct in proper labelling. I have more terms I can use in restrictive normie areas, at least.
Obviously, but middle men have a point in a society. They can introduce a positive exchange where there would otherwise be none. Middle men positions are also an excellent method of creating social mobility when you have relatively low direct skill, so there are a lot of major advantages to them. In some cases "eliminating the middle men" will be done by efficiency. The problem is when those people themselves are being directly targeted. One of the reasons they come about is because there are some stoppages within the economic system that are not allowing transactions to take place.
I mean, when he's talking about middle-men minorities, it's not exactly the same as just the economic concept, because hatred of middle-men minorities comes from resentment of a single group's success, typically observed by a domestic population that doesn't understand why that group succeeded.
There isn't really a good reason to hate middle-man minorities because that hatred is from resentment, bred from not having actually done the same level of work to succeed.
Opposing middle-men from an economic perspective is a slightly different analysis about economic efficiency.
If it's culture that might be interesting to you, and you're still looking at Sowell, I found Immigrations & Cultures and Conquests & Cultures to be excellent.
I'll start a backlog for audio books. I'm not much of a reader, so do you have any further culture-related recommendations? I'm done being frustrated at a lack of culture acknowledgement in public discourse; I'll only be able to advance my theories by going to books, it seems. You'd think it would get brought up in at least 1/5 of discussions about "multiculturalism" or "culture war", but nope.
I mostly agree there. But it's slightly complicated by some other factors. Say you're some prole that actually understands how they succeeded and you want to join in too - can you? What if they've already garnered support from governing or regulatory power structures to inhibit competition? A "fuck these guys" attitude is appropriate at that point. But I know little about the history of free markets and whether they ever existed.
I'd wager that in most of those cases where the middlemen minorities got banished/killed, there were a bunch of businessmen waiting to take up those middlemen roles they failed to innovate themselves. That's where a lot of the problem is, in my view. They understood it, but chose to engage jealousy instead of just being angry. If the businesses engaged with the middlemen would just get together and talk, they could probably come to an arrangement that saves them money and creates new infrastructure that makes those middlemen positions obsolete (for some middlemen roles, at least).
The same type of skillset used to discover and innovate business opportunities like middlemen is also used to subvert law. A nation would be nuts to embrace such people unless it's prepared to make their legal system more robust (not that it's 100% bad stuff that can come of it; they might work towards eliminating various forms of corruption). Some poor immigrants aren't gonna be able to influence politics easily, so that's probably a solid reason to ignore their abilities. But they stop being poor without a lot of trouble due to their ability to innovate (I'd even say that they may have been forced to innovate) and gain the ability to move superpowers within a few generations. Maybe it's just proof that money should be disconnected from power influence. You could also argue that negative feedback should be directed towards legislators who failed to adapt, but that gets into an argument about whether a weak man deserves to be conquered by a strong man (and whether the weak have a duty to be conquered).
Further negatives come from what I recognize as jewish culture, but I'll just state one of those: responding hysterically to criticism. There's an eagerness to take the least generous interpretation of criticism ("greedy? that's anti-semitic!"). It shouldn't be hard to understand what a terrible feedback loop this creates, we all saw it in grade school when nerds got bullied. It feeds into other issues like the refusal to adapt to your host culture and a desire to be treated as a victim (I wonder how common self-deprecative humor was 200 years ago). Sowell's point about jews being generic is terrific because it means I might be able to find more sample data sometime (whereever the fuck white armenians went) to see if any of this jewish culture stuff applies to them, which it might if enough circumstances match up to trigger the same evolutionary psychology principles.
So okay, yeah, middlemen have a valid marketable skillset and they provide tremendous innovation opportunities where they pop up. But that's just the positives. I could make a similar argument for sociopaths, a group that I'm actually jealous of because it seems extremely liberating to be a monster incapable of caring for others.
I don't even need to blame middlemen for the existence of managerialism, as I think it's an organic product of other systems (much like a tumor). It doesn't demand a similar skillset, though it can still reward it.