Crowstep
3mo ago
The end of the speech is particularly beautiful:
I'm not trying to have grandkids so they can fund Medicare. I want my kids to have kids so they can learn the Christmas morning is actually better as a parent than as a kid. I want my daughters to have sons and my sons to have daughters, and to care intensely what happens to them, and watch as that transforms their whole perspective on the opposite sex. I want them to see all the little imperfections and embarrassing things that they were insecure about as kids in this other person who's just the best and realise that all that was completely okay and not a big deal it didn't make them unloveable. You're supposed to observe your life again in third person.
Crowstep
5mo ago
My metric for judging demographic swaps is how much it breaks the universe the adaptation is set in. For example:
Retelling a Shakespeare play, but setting it in the context of 13th century Chinese court politics. Sounds fun.
House of the Dragon: One of the Valyrian clans is inexplicably African, but otherwise genetics works as it would be expected to. Tolerable, but it would have made more sense to have that clan be merchant lords from the Summer Isles.
Rings of Power: Every race (in the sense Tolkein used it) is inexplicably multiracial. Children don't inherit phenotype from their parents. Commoners use racial slurs about elves having pointy ears but pointedly ignore their complexion. Parts of middle earth where the people are canonically swarthy have the same clunky racial mix as everywhere else. Bad.
Netflix's Cleopatra: Cleopatra, a real historical person who was Greek and looked like this, becomes YAS SLAY AFRICAN QUEEN! Terrible
Unfortunately, the modernist ugliness you are right to complain about is Western, or at least it came from the West originally, and has now been embraced by decision makers globally.
Traditional architecture, sculpture and painting are beautiful everywhere, regardless of the geographic background. The modernist equivalents are ugly regardless of background.
Compare two recent statues in London. The first is a pile of whipped cream, with a drone, fly and cherry sitting on top. It is designed by a British woman and is an example of contemporary western art.
The second is a recreation of the ancient Winged Bull statue from Iraq, which was destroyed by ISIS. It was designed by an Iraqi Jew and is a literal recreation of ancient middle eastern art.
The Winged Bull statue is self-evidently far superior, it is also not western. It is superior because it is traditionalist and not modernist.
Crowstep
4mo ago
I'm wondering how to square this with the data that suggests that modern parents do way more parenting. Apparently modern fathers spend almost as much time on childcare as 1960s housewives.
Children seem to have had more freedom 50 years ago and were less neurotic. It seems more intuitive to me that overparenting would contribute to poor mental health than the wrong kind of parenting.
Crowstep
1mo ago
'Weak affirmative action' as you describe it, doesn't exist. It can't exist, because, outside of academic studies with fake resumes, there is no such thing as two equally qualified candidates. Equally qualified candidates would have to be literally identical, and real candidates obviously differ in terms of their work experience, academic background and interview quality.
In practice, 'tie-goes-to-the-runner' acts as a fig leaf for more aggressive discrimination. I've seen this first hand. I had to shortlist candidates for an academic programme, giving each one a score. This list then went to the higher-ups, who simply removed the five lowest scoring male candidates, even if they had higher scores than the female candidates. The remainder were given offers. Although the official guidance said preference should be given to the 'minority gender' when deciding between two equally qualified candidates, in practice they just penalised the male candidates.
This is just a straight up gish-gallop. None of these arguments address the central HBD thesis (individuals and groups differ in personality and intelligence, and these differences are at least partly genetic). Most of them are non-sequitors, some are just straight up lies.
To address just one randomly selected point, 'Africans have greater genetic diversity than the rest of the world'. This is entirely meaningless because genetic diversity does not guarantee phenotypic diversity on any one trait within an ethnic or racial group. For example, all SSAfrican ethnic groups have darker skin than every ethnic group in Europe. Their genetic diversity doesn't provide a range of skin tones matching the breadth that we see in humanity as a whole, so why should we assume that same genetic diversity would provide a range of IQs matching humanity as a whole.
The Ashkenazi Jews obviously have less genetic diversity than the whole of Subsaharan Africa, but that doesn't stop them having the highest IQs in the world.
I guess a question I would put to a HBD-skeptic would be:
Why do IQ scores correlate with brain size, academic achievement, income and criminality? What is the cause of these correlations if not intelligence?
Crowstep
1yr ago
I guess what I find strange about this whole thing is the idea that effective altruism needs to be a 'community'. I always considered it more of a civilisational meme, like rule of law or double-entry bookkeeping. It's an improvement on the vague altruism that preceded it, but it's not a religion or a social movement.
Like, I would consider myself an effective altruist, inasfar as I donate some of my money to charities recommended by effective altruist organisations. But apparently I've been doing it wrong. What I really need to do is move to San Francisco and join a polycule or something.
Crowstep
3mo ago
Such a dilemma never existed. There's a reason that 'spinster' is a word used in English to describe a single woman. It's how they very often supported themselves. If we take England in 1377 as an example, a full third of adult women were single, and 10-20% never married at all. The idea that the only options were marriage or prostitution is a fantasy, formed (as far as I can tell) by people extrapolating the experience of the midcentury American housewife far off into the past and across the planet.
Crowstep
5mo ago
Refugee is just a modern euphemism for illegal immigrant. Hence why thousands of Albanian men who wash up on the southern shore of England are called 'refugees' by the open border crowd.
I think you're being too generous. As Tanista said, there is already a separate example of a staged stock photo. They didn't say the photo of the family walking looked fake, they said it didn't represent 'real Londoners'. The mayor's office has since claimed that this caption was added mistakenly, but that just begs the questions of which caption they intended to put there and why the photo was on that list in the first place?
The photo itself doesn't look staged or fake to me. It looks like a photo of a real (albeit photogenic) London family walking around the city.
Moreover, page 35 specifies that photography must be diverse. Page 33 specifies that all photos must 'reflect a recognisable, real and diverse London'. Given that there are (as far as I can tell) no photos in the guide which only include indigenous (BIPOC?) Britons, I think it's reasonable to conclude that the problem with the photo was the ethnicity of the family.
And as someone who works in or with this industry, I don't know if you're just not aware of the implicit rules that the rest of us notice because you're too steeped in them, but this is a textbook example of shoehorned multiracialism. Do you ever notice how every advert on TV these days has either multiple ethnic groups or interracial relationships? Or how every costume drama somehow includes at least one West African character regardless of the setting or era? This is the same thing.
Crowstep
1yr ago
I think your explanation for low rates of white intermarriage is wrong. We should expect the majority racial group to intermarry less, absent any racial preference.
As a toy example, let's say a population is 99% French and 1% Chinese, and everyone has a strong preference for intermarriage. We should expect 100% of Chinese to intermarry, and only 1% of French to intermarry. A higher number for French intermarriage isn't mathematically possible, there aren't enough Chinese spouses to go around.
Crowstep
3mo ago
Your premise rests on the assumption that AI and robotics are a magic money cheat that will allow a nation of retirees to be kept in the manner to which they have become accustomed. You might be right, and I certainly hope you are. Infinite wealth for humanity sounds great. But on the (perhaps more than) slim chance that technology doesn't go foom and solve all our economic problems, it's probably worth worrying about birth rates.
If only so that politicians don't have an excuse to import millions of low-IQ workers to maintain the dependency ratio.
Crowstep
7mo ago
I think this explanation excludes the reality that often women simply change their minds.
I've been in the exact situation you describe, I asked her out, she ignored my message. I then asked her out again a week later. She said yes, we ended up dating for several years.
Of course, that just makes it even harder for our would be suitor. Her saying she's busy means she's not interested, unless she's genuinely busy but still expects you to take the initiative to ask her out again. Or she's not sure if she's interested and can't be bothered to make a decision the first time you ask. Or she is interested but slightly more interested in another guy, and asking her out after he ignores her texts could go well for you.
God I don't miss the dating game at all.
Crowstep
1yr ago
Putin famously hardly uses the internet. He doesn't own a smartphone and thinks the web is controlled by the CIA.
Apparently he gets most of his news from spy agency briefings. These have the problem so common in dictatorships that nobody wants to give the boss bad news.
As a disinterested atheist, it seems pretty clear to me that the Vatican is just trying to slow-walk gay marriage. I'm sure they'll do it bit by bit, with just enough continuation between each change to avoid getting called out too heavily, but the end result will be rainbow flags in St Peter's Basilica.
I wonder at what point all those young, high-TFR, head-covering, Latin Mass-enjoying traditionalist Catholics I hear so much about just straight up break away from the church? Would they just be another protestant denomination at that point? Can they appoint their own Pope? Or get one of their own elected to the Papacy?
This Reddit thread is hilarious. A handful of posters acknowledging what this is, another handful criticising the Vatican for ambiguity (as if this wasn't part of the plan) and another group saying that it doesn't technically involve blessing gay unions so there's nothing to see here.
Crowstep
7mo ago
What point were you trying to make with this post? It seems to be a historical curio with no real relevance to modern culture war.
They also managed to have a well-rounded gay character (the 'pansexual imp' Dean) without getting all preachy.
I think the show's strength was that it simply assumed it's audience was on board with the modern liberal package, and so didn't have to convert them. Dan Harmon assumed his audience would be fine with the Dean being gay or whatever, so he was able to focus on funny plotlines that derive from that fact, rather than making his sexuality the point.
To bring it back to the original post about Britta, the finale actually had her imagine the Dean coming out as trans rather than continuing with the vague 'whatever this is' that he was doing before. It can be read as a criticism of the restrictiveness of the trans lobby's ideology if one were so inclined.
Crowstep
3mo ago
60% infidelity seems insanely high. Figures from the UK* show adultery given as the reason for divorce by 7.5% of men and 8.7% of women. Crime victimhood figures show 5% of adults being victims of domestic violence. Either Americans are far worse than I thought or those figures are wrong. My money is on the latter.
*It's worth noting that until 2022, the divorcing partner was forced by law to given a reason for divorce. Hence most divorces were either codifying separations that had already happened (one of the reasons allowed) or recorded as 'unreasonable behaviour', which was the essentially the dump stat for amicable divorces.
Crowstep
9mo ago
According to the chart in that article, Asian-Americans actually support racial quotas at college more than Euro-Americans (although both groups are still net disapproving).
You would think that as the people most disadvantaged by the quotas, they would be most opposed. I wonder if many of them are making the incorrect assumption that the race-based admissions policies are just benefiting minorities in general, rather than being targeted at specific racial groups.
Crowstep
6mo ago
My theory is that Thunberg files the same psychological niche as the Holy Maid of Kent and other similar mediaeval characters. A strident young woman with visions of the future, scolding us to repent our sins. Thankfully the worst that could happen to Greta is if she gets cancelled on Twitter rather than being beheaded for treason.
Crowstep
9mo ago
I don't know what the mods' position is, but I'm in favour of posters like you and Kulak linking to your blogs here (or indeed, anyone writing the kind of stuff popular here, even if they're not an established poster). I'd like to see more top-level posts outside of the CWR generally.
Crowstep
1yr ago
It is, they pulled the photo from the Nerdfighters subreddit.
We pressured Ukraine into committing suicide.
That's not how it happened. The west originally assumed that Ukraine would be conquered in three days. It was only after the Ukrainians themselves demonstrated their will to fight against Russia (and their success doing so) that NATO et al started arming Ukraine.
America is not the only country in the world with agency.
Crowstep
1mo ago
Median white household income in 2021 was $74,932, median black was $48,297
Which, notably, is around $1,000 higher than the 2021 median household income in the UK, as well as higher than 2/3 of European countries.
I guess it really demonstrates how much these are really zero-sum status concerns. Black Americans are, globally speaking, rich.
A follow up to the Roald Dahl censorship story from last week for those who haven't been following UK news. Apparently the publisher as (partially) backed down and agreed to keep the original books in print, along with the modernised versions. Apparently criticism from the Prime Minister, the queen, global authordom and the French was enough to swing it.
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