But this lines up with the Arabs perfectly, and I mean the utterly untamed ones that were never really conquered at the village and clan level, not by Saddam, not by the Brits, not by the Turks. This isn’t a post-colonial thing, with the exception of the welfare and substance abuse. Yes, destroying the chiefs’ rule and real power caused more dysfunction, but the sexual behavior was always there.

It also lines up with the data and experience we get here on Meso America to the south. The truth is, until Christianity took Rome, women, children, boys were usually taken at will and always meat, yes, even in Rome. One of the reasons they killed Paul was his bizarre idea that all people had intrinsic value and dignity, instead of the strong having their way with the weak. In truth Islam taught the same message.

Rampant sexual abuse is also common in Asia to this day, and that’s not post-colonial.

I’m saying it’s always been that way. It’s only “sexual abuse{ in our eyes, because we chose to say it’s abuse. It is, and it’s evil, but they never saw it that way until we began to insist — there’s a real colonial legacy — on what we now call Human Rights. It once was called Christianity.

Now the breakdown of Fatherhood is another common theme in dysfunctions such as above, including the old Irish, and including the slums now. The modern destruction of the family by destroying the father legally and economically is core to the modern state, especially America. The ultimate privilege is having a “normal” family and growing up with one father.

I would guess that if you went and looked at the aftereffects from the Enclosures and the Clearances in Scotland and Ireland, it’d look about the same, absent the gasoline.

Same-same with the Gauls, after Caeser. Pretty much anywhere that there was an interface between a simpler, less-sophisticated civilization and anything superior to it…

About the only people that really managed to avoid this syndrome were the Japanese, and the Thais. And, a few others… Cherokee, until they ran up against Andrew Jackson, the First Democrat Thief-in-Chief.

An aboriginal reserve in Canada and one in Australia are virtually identical. Equal amounts of misery, alcohol and substance abuse, sexual abuse of children, domestic violence, and suicide. Interestingly, even the substances abused are the same (gasoline sniffing).

Thing you have to consider is that there were actual reasons why the old-timers thought they were doing right by destroying the “ancient cultures” with all that residential schooling.

The syndromes you mention were things that existed back in the day, as well–It was never the “happy hunting ground” that the idiotarian activists postulate.

I knew a woman who was originally from one of the border tribes, and spent time in both the US and Canada as a “genuine Indian/First Nation’s” member. Her take on “traditional culture” was essentially unprintable, and she said the smartest thing anyone from those cultures could do would be to get the hell away from them as far and as fast as they could.

I can’t remember which tribe she was from, but it was one of the smaller off-shoots from one of the Ojibwe-speaking groups. Her father had been some kind of activist/revolutionary with the American Indian Movement in the 1960s, and had dragged her and the rest of the family into Canada as a draft-dodging refugee. Her take on the whole experience left her with a deep and lasting repugnance for the entire culture on both sides of the border. She was pretty up front about the fact that her dad had apparently traded her and her sisters off for drugs and sex, while her mom was so far gone into alcoholism that she wasn’t even aware that she’d been passed off to some band leader as a passport into the band.

In retrospect, she might not have been the most unbiased informant.

Regardless, that is a data point–Some of those “cultures” were never that good to begin with, and it might be a mercy to slip the grace knife in. Especially for the women and kids involved…

Of course, the residential schools weren’t exactly hotbeds of enlightenment, either–And, there are equally horrid tales of sexual exploitation from those, as well.

On the other hand, I do know that up here in Canada, aboriginal communities (which include the Inuit), have an extremely high rate of suicide, violence, sexual violence, and sexual violence towards children. How much of this is as a result of past racism like the residential schools program etc. I can’t say, but food for thought when evaluating the “superiority” of how these communities raise their children….

My favorite was a woman who’d spent much of her time as a single woman telling me how she’d raise her kids so much better than her own mother and father did. And, to tell the truth, I don’t think it could have been possible to have done a worse job of it than they did, all things considered. Once my idealistic acquaintance was actually married, having kids, and being “mom”, wellllllll…

I just remember the day when the three of her kids were running rampant in the back yard, and one of them did something to one of the others, and the one that was “done unto” came into the house screaming bloody murder, whereupon “mom” told her that it was bloody well her own fault, and she should go right back out and bite her brother…

This was followed by silence, a determined look on the little girl’s face, and departure. Shortly after, male screams emanated from the back yard.

I got this heavy sigh from my friend, and she looked over at me and said something to the effect of “Y’know… I now understand why gerbils eat their young…”.

This is very true but the flip side is that when you do spend time with one of them, it’s for something you are both interested in, and feels significant. Especially for the little ones.

Are you familiar with the bit of “hacker jargon” that the phrase “scratch monkey” is part of?

“Scratch monkey is a term used in hacker jargon, as in “Before testing or reconfiguring, always mount a scratch monkey”, a proverb used to advise caution when dealing with irreplaceable data or devices.”

Lore has it that this refers back to an infamous incident in 1979 or 1980, where five monkeys at the University of Toronto in the medicine department were hooked up to brainwave sensors using custom hardware. Part of the interface was a diskdrive located in a different part of the building whose read-only button was activated and taped down with a warning not to remove the adhesive tape. Drive read operations operate at a much lower current than write operations. A maintenance technician from outside the university servicing a fault removed the tape, enabled write mode and performed a drive diagnostic test. The resulting electrical current sent through the sensors stunned two monkeys and killed the other three.(Source: Wikipedia)

This is a useful concept in childrearing, because the firstborn and other older children in a family often become what amount to “scratch monkeys” for child-rearing practices by the responsible parental figures.

Unfortunately, the problem is that you only ever get one circuit of the track, and once you figure out what you did wrong raising your kids, the opportunity is over and you’re on to screwing up the grandkids…

In hindsight, it sure doesn’t look that way to me.