I've read that medieval workers averaged 1600 hours annually, while modern people work 1900 hours, and industrial revolution-era workers put in 3000+ (https://tudorscribe.medium.com/do-you-work-longer-hours-than-a-medieval-peasant-17a9efe92a20). The horror stories about the wretched condition of peoples teeth and health in premodern times I've come across also seem to mostly come from the industrial age. I suspect that Malthusianism is partly to blame for declining standards, but also the power that capitalists and landowners gained over the commonfolk. Medieval economic systems were chaotic and inefficient, but they served to protect the peasantry against the ruling class through their illegibility. As the economy became more streamlined and efficient, it also gave the powerful greater leverage over the common people. The maximization of profitability for those at the top led to the sacrifice of complex arrangements that satisfied a broader array of needs for those at the bottom.
On a similar note, I've come to believe that medieval peasants weren't necessarily super different from tribalists in their economic engagement, and also that the distinction between hunter-gatherers, agriculturalists, etc. is somewhat misleading, since most societies derived their nourishment from a motley of sources. Medieval people fished, foraged, hunted, etc., too, and many hunter-gatherers I've read about seem to have engaged in some amount of cultivation, so the categories aren't entirely discrete. In Seeing Like A State, it seems to be indicated that primitive peoples, including medieval peasants, had a complex arrangement of nutrient sources, which depended on access to farms, forests, and streams, but as society became streamlined and living spaces monopolized, they were forced into factories and workshops and fed mono-diets of grain. From there, various vitamin deficiencies and rapid tooth decay ensued.
RedRegard
1yr ago
Evolution doesn't have a 'job', it's a mindless process that doesn't care about human values. Eugenics is merely about guiding the process to achieve results in accordance with human values. Currently, evolution is selecting for low intelligence, social malignancy, and poor immune systems, among a very long list of other undesirable things. So it would accord with my values to have a eugenics program correct for this. The future I would desire would initially look like Israel — a nation with a mere ten million relatively intelligent souls and yet also with a space program. But the sky's the limit. Who knows what wondrous societies would be possible if intelligence were pushed higher than even the Jews'?
RedRegard
13d ago
The DEI stuff is built around internet fads, upper-middle-class pretensions/narcissism, and establishment imperatives. The terms left and right are malleable and relative, so it's both left-wing and not-left-wing. In any case, it's very convenient for the knowledge worker class and the giant institutions they serve, as it not only leaves their deeper structures and economic advantages uncontested (while merely arguing for superficial alterations), it also argues for increased power to be given to these people and institutions, as their credentials, HR departments, teams of lawyers and such are put forward as the necessary cures for 'systemic' bigotry or whatever.
What 'true' leftists, which exist only as fully as true rightists, lament is that there aren't strong working-class involvements in this new left, and indeed it lacks much revolutionary spark at all. It's not about solving or changing modern society so much as it's about keeping things in place and expanding the purvue of some of its most powerful factions. I think it deserves to be treated as a process of its own, best understood as a unique development that began around the 1960's, rather than something that matches patterns as broad as 'leftism'. Although, I can see the propagandistic appeal of accusing them of being false leftists, given that the term left enjoys positive valence with many of the people who would benefit from more working class, economically focused initiatives, such that it's a way of signaling to them that they are missing out. It's a matter of brand manipulation rather than objective understanding.
RedRegard
1mo ago
There's a problem with your Darwinian reasoning - and it has economic resonance, such that I recall David Friedman once writing about it - which is that a single man's contribution towards victory in a line battle is so minuscule as to make no difference in the battle's result, and so would neither make for a powerful behavioral incentive, nor for a powerful influence on his ability to reproduce. Instead, it would be his compatriots' group effort that would make the difference, thus suggesting the possibility of group selection being a thing, although I think there are broader arguments (with a mathematical basis?) for why group selection isn't likely to be a thing, either.
I think there is some Darwinian selection going on here, but it works more like this: the cost of being a coward isn't that your tribe gets slaughtered in battle, it's that your social reputation gets ruined and your fellow tribesmen shun you.
So men are selected on the basis of whether they integrate into their tribes properly, courage being a particularly valued trait, but also conformity - whatever gets you there. Courage is perhaps more of a manifestation of behavioral traits than a trait that is selected for by itself, or perhaps it is both. In any case, I think it's more likely to be intra-tribal social selection that drives gene selection in this case than inter-tribal warfare.
RedRegard
1yr ago
There are two practical reasons to avoid war crimes:
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They encourage a defect-defect race toward the bottom, as the enemy is encouraged to reciprocate by killing your own soldiers.
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They create bad optics. Given that Ukraine is highly dependent on foreign aid, its public image is important. Tarnishing that image in order to kill small numbers of enemy prisoners and thus jeopardize large amounts of foreign aid seems like a poorly calculated strategy.
So the Halla-aho guy's reasoning seems poor. (Also, killing enemy soldiers is just one of many factors that could advance one's war aims.)
RedRegard
4mo ago
No, but it does challenge the moral authority somewhat. I'm an immigrant to the US, so if I am unhappy at immigration (generally) then I am at least somewhat hypocritical. If I had the courage of my convictions I would go back to the UK.
This is a common argument, but I think it's only hypocritical if you're assuming a standpoint of moral universalism. If someone cares about themselves and not other people then a 'immigration for me but not for ye' argument has no hypocrisy. They simply want to get the best that they can for themselves and regard further immigration to be a detriment.
RedRegard
2d ago
By the time Christians conquered Japan in 1945 they didn't really care to convert defeated populations anymore.
Early attempts by the Jesuits to convert Nippon led to a freakout over national security and the expulsion of the Spanish, though not the Portuguese, and there was also the extreme suppression of any lingering Christian belief. The inciting incident was supposedly a Spanish captain boasting that Christian missionaries were but a prelude to Iberian conquest. Japan successfully maintained its near-isolation for the next few centuries.
But the Abrahamic religions are downright viral.
RedRegard
6mo ago
A lot of them live on reservations and are impoverished, which is a great context for maximizing birth rates. They have nothing better or more appealing to do than breed. No career prospects to sacrifice fertility for, no Molochian god of GDP maximization to care about, just civilizationally robust cigarettes and booze.
RedRegard
1yr ago
Not only do we not see female losers as losers, but I think that often we fail to perceive them at all. A third of homeless people are female, for instance, but the prototypical homeless person in the public consciousness is almost invariably male. I think there's also a recent upswing in young male dysfunction owing to the collapse of masculine-coded blue-collar work. Service sector jobs code as more feminine and better pair with female agreeability, while males chaff under the subservience required of them.
RedRegard
12d ago
The Liberals have dramatically increased the immigration rate, which certainly has inflated property values. There are good arguments to defend this, among them that the higher property values are a net gain for Canada since the vast majority of property is owned by Canadians and most Canadians are homeowners. It really only hurts renters whose parents aren't homeonwers and therefore won't inherit that wealth. Most young Canadians, even if they rent, have parents who are benefiting from this and therefore shouldn't really complain (although they do).
It's bleak compensation for me if after twenty years of a degenerative enforced lifestyle I receive some wealth from my parents after they die. Yours seems to be an extremely materialistic view: you are placing immense value on greatly delayed net worth maximization while discounting life choices that people are funneled into today. I'd go so far as to say that net worth is of minor value compared to qualitive aspects of lifestyle which do not depend on it so much as on personal and public choice making. A society that chooses to be more healthy and virtuous is better than one which is simply richer, particularly if the riches are withheld until given members reach middle-advanced age. Net worth calculation should take a definite back seat to other matters such as intellectual, physical, and creative enhancement.
RedRegard
1mo ago
Other than quantum mechanical shenanigans this seems like a settled fact of existence?
RedRegard
1mo ago
Don't Asians have some gene that makes them less likely to get fat (but more likely to get diabetes and heart disease) as well?
I disagree with your second point, I think that openly self-interested arguments are a lot less common than ones presenting themselves as high-minded or altruistic, which utterly saturate modern-day societies. Even the most brutal dictatorships, like North Korea, present their edicts in idealistic terms.
Any debate that followed from an argument of self-interest (i.e. an honest argument) would be of a technical nature on how best to achieve it. This is opposed to debate that follows from false idealism, which is a contest of deception and narcissistic self-delusion. There, the art is in the effective spin and the bald-faced lie.
RedRegard
4mo ago
Even if racial divergence may have ended, on net, around the Neanderthal age, the trend towards total racial homogenization was very slow up until recently. You probably could have had visually distinct races indefinitely if travel technology stopped with pre-Columbean tech. The future mongrelization of humanity is merely another aspect of the bug-man future we're all looking forward to. It's maximum entropy, maximum simplification, degradation to increasingly robust physical states.
Actually, the natives of Canada are extremely demographically relevant. Their overall TFR was 2.5~ in 2011 and was higher for those on reserves, where it was over 3, and substantially lower for those assimilated urban populations you mentioned. Their share of Canada's overall population has actually substantially increased over time despite Canada's sky-high immigration rates.
In 2011, when Canada’s TFR was 1.61 children per woman, the TFR for Status Indian women was 2.63 children per woman, 3.25 if living on reserve. The TFR for women identifying as First Nation but without Status was 1.47 children per woman, and the TFR for self-identified Métis women was 1.81 children per woman. The TFR for Inuit generally was 2.75 children per woman, with records collected by Nunavut and the North-West Territories indicating a TFR of 3.02 children per Inuit woman living there.
https://ecampusontario.pressbooks.pub/indigenouseconomics244/chapter/104/
RedRegard
1yr ago
People aren't bothered as much by infectious diseases as in the past so the selection for disease resistance is probably lessened, and we can expect immune systems to weaken or become dysfunctional due to random drift. We have basically removed all selection pressures other than fecundity for modern-day humans, so everything that evolution used to optimize for besides fecundity will be expected to decline.
RedRegard
2d ago
Squat sitting and cross-legged sitting are the ideal ways to sit and read IMO. The first takes pressure off your lower spine while together they keep your muscles limbered and ensure good flexibility. Backup method: random chair. I've always enjoyed reading in rocking-style chairs for some reason, even though their resting position typically leaves you in a presumably unhealthy posture, with your head and upper body curving forward to maintain equilibrium. I guess they make sitting somewhat 'active', and I am by nature a bit of an ADD rat.
RedRegard
16d ago
Why did the US only suddenly start to do this in the late 1970s, though
That's when the US started getting close with Israel, so all the ADL, holocaust propaganda, and other shit was to help cement the budding alliance through public relations manipulation, perhaps. We've seen how claims of antisemitism were used most recently to try and stifle dissent towards America's support for the ongoing 'police action' in Gaza, and various projects like the opening of new holocaust remembrance museums and movies directed by Spielberg depicting the suffering of Jews keep getting announced ever since 10/6. This strongly suggests that all of the anti-antisemitism buzz is just for propaganda purposes, not for actually contesting antisemitism (which would be bizarre if it was).
RedRegard
22d ago
You can simply adopt eugenicism and the desire to improve black intelligence through DNA as your primary worldview, as opposed to nihilism (which I think is also an adequate choice...).
RedRegard
1mo ago
The purpose of immigrants is to strengthen Canada for the future in absolute rather than relative terms. The power elite figure that they will be able to command greater respect internationally if they grow their population faster than peer countries. I suspect that this is not true, as further technological advance will render low-quality human capital increasingly obsolete in both military and economic terms. We are already seeing economic growth potential increasingly reliant on tech sector success. The commodities-driven market of Canada is expected to fare poorly and there's no apparent alternative. All these masses of humanity have been brought here, and it is for no reason.
RedRegard
1mo ago
As an aside, it's interesting how the apartheid government never even tried to adjust population. Not through white immigration, not through population control programs for blacks, not through attempts to boost the native white fertility rate. Obviously it's a hard problem, but it's interesting that they didn't even try.
It seems like governments mostly focus on solving acute problems rather than long-term progressive ones. The payoff for fixing birthrates wouldn't come for at least twenty years after the fact, only once the added batches of children begin reaching maturity, while the costs would begin immediately. Governments are typically run by people who only expect to be in power for short durations, so for them it's better to deal with staving off coups and electoral defeats. That means focusing on who gets the $$$ and making the right noises.
There's also a weird tendency for normies to deny all matters pertaining to biology in pretty much any context. Possibly, this due to narcisism. Or maybe it's about optimizing for personal social advancement over coordinating against civilization threats. It is as though they sit at the very precipice of oblivion maintaining attitudes of perfect nonchalance. As long as they do not fall in, they are content; and those who do fall in do not have the luxury of further action. That's essentially what happened to the white South Africans, and probably all other fallen societies.
RedRegard
1mo ago
It's in peoples' rational self-interest to stand up for victims because being a victim could happen to anyone and the costs for the victim are often greater than the benefits for the abuser. Same reason why torture is usually outlawed the moment democracy is implemented: the benefits of torture are small, the costs great, so people outlaw it as they themselves don't think the costs of foregoing torture outweigh the benefits of never having to be a potential recipient of it.
That this reasoning sometimes errs is because the analysis of who constitutes a victim/abuser is, like all other democratic analyses, based on outward optics and scant information. It's the satellite view of a conflict and so misses all of the nitty-gritty. So only a rough approximation of the matter is made. The roles, only vaguely educed.
And there are also perverse incentives that the average human holds. There's the Harrison Bergeron impulse on the part of the mediocre multitude to hold down and discredit the talented few. Retarded, violent populations are not as maligned as they perhaps should be following utilitarian calculations, as the average citizen to some extent identifies with them or else narcissistically considers themselves to be a savior. So populations like the Palestinians earn protected status, while their haughty superiors are brought low, but it all follows from the base self-interest of the demos, those muddled idiots who wish to protect themselves...
RedRegard
1mo ago
Also the welfare state they complain about disproportionately favors them in many regards. A hugely outsized portion of healthcare costs go towards treating the elderly, and they also (probably) get all sorts of old age benefits and subsidies for caretaking, retirement homes, public transportation, and such.
Sounds like you need a long-term eugenic environment to cost-efficiently correct this. The social matrix that enables this behavior is itself founded on genetics. To fix a country you must fix its people.
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