tribal war

failure of imagination and threat misdiagnosis

failure to acknowledge tribalism as a primary societal driver is a pure luxury belief that can be reasonably held only in extremely high-trust societies arranged around "golden rule" ethoses.

in most cultures, especially low trust cultures, tribe and family structure are always paramount.

the purpose of government is not to protect rights or individuals; it's to codify which tribe gets to plunder and dominate the other tribes.

this will be done with ostentatious and unapologetic violence because dominant tribes want to be seen doing it and see it as nothing to apologize for. in such a worldview, it’s how you impose order.

these groups do not want to be like you and adopt your ways. they see them as weak and cowardly and as an invitation to take what they want.

meet is qalinle ibrahim dirie, a 42 year old somali immigrant who has been in the US for 18 years.

in july of 2024, he was charged with raping a 12 year old minneapolis girl who he abducted from her backyard.

this is obviously an outlandish tragedy and outrage, quite literally one of the worst things that can happen.

qalinle and his family do not seem to care.

and the very systems that underpin one-time high trust places like minnesota serve to encourage more and more intense low trust behavior.

when you respond to death threats against victims with "rights for perpetrators" they assume you are scared and thus that they have the upper hand. how would a cobra look at a mongoose who said "well, we cannot fight back until he actually eats one of the babies?" yeah...

this man kidnapped and violently raped a 12 year old girl. he grabbed her out of her own yard.

he has no remorse. his family and a nearby islamic center and mosque back him utterly and act like this was some out of character mistake.

“[Dirie] is a deeply good man whose presence enriches the lives of those around him,” said one of the letters. “I respectfully ask that you consider his character, his contributions, and his ongoing potential when making your decision.”

they speak of “challenges starting again in a new culture” as though 18 years were somehow not enough time to learn that “rape is wrong.”

The Islamic center wrote that the convicted felon has faced “the challenge of starting over in a new culture,” and Dirie was known as an outgoing, family-oriented person before “this situation.” The Islamic center said the community has “witnessed his love for his family and kids” and noted that Dirie sends money back to Somalia to support family members.

this is pure fabrication and fiction. try breaking the law in an islamic culture and see how they take “oh, sorry, i’m new here” as a defense.

i know for a fact that there are some lovely folks in the somali community in minneapolis (and i have met some), but given the widespread outpouring of support for dirie from individuals and institutions alike, there's clearly something very substantial that is very wrong here.

many would argue that one of two possibilities pertain:

1. either absolutely none of this is genuine and his community is simply picking "us over them no matter what" and rallying around their own in groupmate regardless of his having committed one of the most appaling acts of which a human is capable

or

2. it's quite genuine and much of this community legitimately fails to understand or believe that abducting and raping 12 year old girls in a van is anything more than a minor peccadillo that could happen to any good, enriching-presence kind of guy.

i think this misses the game and as such results in significant misdiagnosis of the issue and even worse response calibration.

i would argue that there is a third option and that people miss it because they have never traveled in or experienced the part of the world from which these cultures come and thus simply cannot model the underlying processes:

raping a 12 year old girl of another tribe is a concrete expression of tribal dominance. such an outrage, precisely because it is such an outrage, winds up being "a good thing" because it shows strength. it's quite literally "we are strong so we can do this. respect and fear us."

that fact that it’s objectively horrible is a feature, not a bug.

if you doubt me, go spend some time in some of these societies.

or, here is a quick primer on the topic.

there is a large literature here.

and this is not only widespread, but also institutionalized. the line between violence, sexual assault, politics, religion, and especially theocracy does not really exist in many of these societies.

this world is very different from your world.

it’s a world where the woman raped is killed for adultery or fornication and the man who did it gets slapped on the wrist. these are not social mores with which one can integrate or compromise.

rape is a not a crime of sex, it’s a crime of power.

and politics is the pursuit of power.

thus, rape is just another tool of political state ot tribecraft.

the fact that this idea is nearly impossible for the western mind to imagine or countenance does not mean that others lack this ability. they understand quite well, they just lack moral constraint or compunction around it and they have zero interest in learning such things. it’s ferenghi weakness.

consider: such child rape by an outsider is not an act this tribe would tolerate if you did it to them. they would go wild in violent response. and that tells you a great deal about the real underpinnings: it's not that they do not understand what rape means, it's that they understand EXACTLY what it means, probably better than you do, but see it as a tool and an expression of alpha-culture dominance.

the fact that you do not go wild in instant violent response means you are weak and afraid. no one who was not these things would fail to respond with instant attack. to once so acculturated, the slow, stately, manipulable process of the courts seems like no response at all.

this level of pure "might makes right" morality is utterly foreign to the western mind whose high-trust, non-defection civilization elevates the rights of others above the short term desires of the self and which sees a just state as that which protects such negative rights to self-determination, safety, and property.

this is not the mindset of most of the world. power is. low-trust systems are essentially forms of multi-sided gang warfare and the only way to survive in such a system is to find influence and protection in gangs. no individual can stand against 100 or 1000 predators. only tribes may. so you join and you participate and you seek power, prominence, and prestige. this is safety and prosperity.

away from your tribe or family, you are weak and exposed. you’ll be the one robbed and raped rather than the one robbing and raping, but the idea that “no one should do these things” simply does not exist. so you are held into these structures and may not resist them and these systems favor zero move look ahead takings. it’s essentially a form of feudal obligation and obedience because that’s a structure that makes sense when you live in a subsistence level war of all against all. someone has to be brutally dominating the others. so it might as well be you.

consider this story written by a former US peace corps volunteer.

there are no rights or “doing unto others as one would have done in return” there are the prerogatives of power and to quote the same author as he speaks of transgressions:

“If they got away with it, it was all good. But if an elder catches you, you’re in for a world of hurt. Literally, because all punishment is corporal. They don’t mess around with stern lectures. It’s stright to beatings, from a young age on.”

again, this level of imminence is consistent with high time-preference cultures where “now” matters much and “the future” is a sort of amorphous and unpredictable thing if anyone bothers to think about it at all. the size of the punishment winds up mattering a great deal less than the immediacy of it.

it’s also a very simple power dynamic: you get away with whatever you can and the only crime is getting caught or being too powerless to avoid punishment. the dream is to be the father whom none may gainsay for taking such bread as he sees.

this is used not only to dominate but to learn. one explores the power structures by seeing who may be offended or outraged without consequence, a sort of reconnaissance in force to determine the pecking (and plundering) order.

this inverts american melting pot notions of assimilation. the more comfortable and safe the tribe feels, the less it will integrate and the more it will seek to take, to prey upon those around it, to flex muscles and power to gain and to show dominance. that is their way.

“hey let’s just be nice to them and they will learn to be nice to us” will not work to bring those of this mindset into the fold. it presents as weakness and fear, the acts of contrition a weak people would make to the strong.

it is seen as submission and will invite more and more intense acts of dominance.

we all see the world in our own frames and assuming that others will adopt yours is a severe category error.

when you are lenient in a way that they would never be to a lesser tribe, they assume this places them above you in hierarchy. it’s simple animal dominance. a wolf that gives food to another wolf is beta. the one who takes is alpha. and the idea of “let’s build a society conducive to human flourishing by getting past this” is entirely absent, not only unknown but possibly unknowable by those so subsumed by the demands of trible alliegence in service of tribal dominance and of immediate time preferences rooted in “now” vs “what comes later.” this is pissing on trees and showing one’s belly in submission. ideas beyond that ethos sound like whining, cowardice, and stupidity.

and the beatings will continue until discernment improves.

if one believes in american exceptionalism (and i do) and in the value of high-trust, golden rule civilization and social contract as the only thing that has ever durably lifted large numbers of humans out of crushing poverty and the immiseration of “nasty, brutish, and short” (and i most emphatically do) then it is time to wake up and smell what is being shoveled.

this is a special weakness of a high trust society. it’s strong vs. “the without,” but once the threat is inside the walls, the immune system goes awry. and a tribe that will not defend itself from other tribes shall not long remain.

america was founded and thrived as a nation of immigrants, but that was because the immigrants were a special sort, a best and brightest team from around the world undergoing hard ships to get here and hardships once they arrived given little to no help and facing local animosity.

this was a powerful sorting hat.

but when you pay to bring immigrants here and then shower them with goodies and privilege, you’re doing the opposite and your center will not hold.

immigrants are probably 18% of the US population right now, a number higher than even the high points before the civil war. the last 20 years have been a river and the 4 under biden an absolute flood. it’s palpable and the demography is astonishing.

(this almost certainly reads too low)

it’s easier to see as a ratio:

15% of american population increase is americans.

that’s not immigration, it’s erasure.

do the math on what this means for the relative power of tribes and their civilizational visions in the decades to come if this trend is left unchecked.

when you add low trust people to high trust societies, it does not “lift all boats” it sinks you into second world degenerate states where you suffer much of the worst of all worlds.

sowell famously said that “civilizations decline by forgetting the obvious things” and “you cannot retain freedom and human flourishing without the golden rule structures that allow it” seems like a pretty obvious thing to foget.

the opposite of “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” and the social contract of “i will forgo harming you and taking your things so long as you forgo harming me and taking my things” is “might makes right and the mighty tribes shall take from the lesser” law of the jungle.

these are antithetical in meaning, purpose, and practice.

and they cannot coexist.

this makes such breaches of social contract into existential threat for a high-trust civilization and way of life.

i have long been a proponent of immigration, but this current instantiation of it has become so adversely selected, odious, and dangerous that i find myself instead standing in opposition.

end it.

“america first” means that we must first save american culture.

that is our superpower.

this is not a radical idea. the center left from the times clintonian agreed with border control, immigration limits, and strict limits to access to benefits.

we need to clearly revoke birthright citizenship.

this becomes a matter of civilizational survival.

if 100 rattlesnakes come pouring into your tent, should you refrain from action because 10 (or even 90) of them are nice or some are babies?

no.

first you get them all out of the tent, then you figure out what to do next.

the very purpose of this recent flood was to create a situation in which there are no good answers.

in needing and compelling mass deportation and removal to prevent cultural destruction, we are choosing between evils, but the lesser evil and thus better course would seem to be the one that preserves the american civilization rather than the one that sacrifices it to tribal war and predation because “the alternative would be being mean to people and getting called racist by the ‘empathy for other’ addled progressives.”

the classic frame here is to blame the hard men made so by the hard times created by the soft, but this is the classic “put your opponeent upon the horns of a dilemma and then make the story about their reaction” rules for agitators projection.

when you are thrown in a pit with an anrgy hyaena, the story is not “man kicks out innocent doggy who never did nuffink to no one and whose family swears he was a good doggins,” it’s “lunatic throws man into life threatening situation narrowly escaped by deporting slavering beast.”

he who was thrown into the pit is the victim, not the villain.

at some point, you have to choose.

i told you this was the most important graph in current politics…