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
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
4mo 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
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.
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.
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.
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
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
10mo 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
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.
Crowstep
3mo ago
I think you could look at the existence (or absence) of lobbying groups arguing for either side.
If women were being screwed over by divorce courts, we would expect feminist groups to campaign for their reform, whereas as far as I can tell, most feminist lobbying is to stop reform of the divorce courts. Men's groups campaign for the right to see their children, women's groups campaign against laws that would allow them to do this. Divorced men campaign against permanent alimony, divorced women campaign to keep it.
The very fact that the miniscule and powerless men's rights movement focuses mostly on unfair divorce laws suggests that perhaps they might have some legitimate complaints. After all, even if the law is written in a gender neutral manner doesn't mean it needs to be applied evenly. Hell, two-thirds of divorcing women acknowledge that men are treated unfairly when it comes to child custody. I struggle to think of any woman who is known for losing out from an unfair divorce ruling, and yet multiple men come to mind immediately.
Crowstep
4mo ago
I noticed it in a previous relationship I was in. Women my age (late-20s) were unhappy to see me dating a girl six years younger. I think they were unhappy to see a guy from their cohort with a younger women, since that norm (if tolerated) would allow the men they were interested in to date younger. That would fit your assumption about mate competition.
This study suggests that people disapprove of both older man and older woman relationships, but that the power imbalance assumption only holds for the older man relationships. That suggests to me that there's an 'ew gross' effect for both types of relationship, but the women are wonderful/female hypoagency effect makes the participants assume that a younger woman is being exploited, whereas there is no such concern for a young man in the same situation.
We'd really need to see which people (or realistically, women) are trying to enforce this taboo. My gut would say that it is most strongly enforced by women from 25-35, who have noticed that the beauty they took for granted in their early 20s is starting to decline and who are looking for husbands. Younger women are probably too confident in their looks to care, and older women are having to look at increasingly older men themselves to have a realistic shot in the marriage/dating market.
Crowstep
8mo ago
I don't think westerners need teaching that racial prejudice is wrong. The obsesssion with race and with racial grievance is driven mostly by people of European descent. The people who wrote this guide were almost certainly majority Britons.
Besides, the idea that only non-westerners ever faced racial or ethnic prejudice and that Europeans need teaching how this feels is absurd. You know that the Russian military is trying to wipe out a European ethnic group/nation like, right now?
Crowstep
9mo ago
Would you rather be an average Brazilian or an average American?
Because that seems to most likely outcome for the United States to me. Not hell on earth, just a very unequal and somewhat corrupt country where anyone with money barricades themselves behind fences and guards. Perhaps add in a touch of third world ethnic spoils politics.
Looking at modern large and diverse countries like Brazil, India or South Africa seems more relevant than comparing America to premodern empires.
Crowstep
20d ago
When most people say 'work' they mean something like 'provide good living standards for the median person'. Marxists tend not to brag about how communist countries have the biggest armies, although having a huge army is certainly possible when the state (nominally) controls the entire economy and the leadership doesn't have to pay too much attention to the needs and wants of the populace.
Like sure, the USSR worked in the sense that Russia colonised all its neighbours, spent huge amounts on its military, suppressed opposition and built walls to keep its citizens in. It failed at providing good living standards, innovating technologically, creating economic equality (arguably its cardinal goal) or creating a society that wasn't rife with corruption.
Crowstep
4mo ago
I'm pretty sure that the number one reason to have a hot girlfriend is to have a hot girlfriend. It's an end in and of itself. Rich men have attractive mistresses in spite of the fact that they absolutely can't show them off to their peers.
The social disapproval I got wasn't from men, it was from women. Honestly, I didn't really get any reaction from men, positive or negative.
Crowstep
6mo ago
That Indian (politicians) in the UK have gone anti-immigration doesn't shock me. As a group, they are wealthy, well-educated, law-abiding and immune to accusations of hating brown people. They're natural Tories. Of course, that doesn't mean they actually reduce legal or illegal immigration, they just talk stridently about it.
What I'm curious about is why so many of the native Tories (Boris Johnson, George Osborne, David Cameron) were so open-bordery. Aristocratic disdain for the native proles? Desire for cheaper servants? Regular cosmopolitan posturing?
The end of the speech is particularly beautiful:
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