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
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
13d 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
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
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
1mo ago
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.
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
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
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?
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
1mo ago
Other than quantum mechanical shenanigans this seems like a settled fact of existence?
RedRegard
23d 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
2mo ago
The disadvantaged groups that get on the 'stack' all have something in common: their qualities act as tribalistic signifiers, which in turn provides a basis for political coordination. This might just be an outgrowth of human evolutionary history, where apes gathered themselves into tribes and warred against rival tribes, mirroring our present political circumstances not by accident but because of the encoding of behavior into genes. We are witnessing the modern potential of ape-evolution.
Mental and psychological disabilities are not close enough to the tribal dynamic to serve as signifiers in this way, so they are not adequate, in the same way, as a basis for political organization. To the extent that policy is made to take these things into account I would say that it's probably driven by higher mental processes and philosophies than by instinctual ape-tribalism.
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.
RedRegard
1mo ago
A panopticon society might fix the problem everywhere, but if you're talking about just a single implementation of the legibility fix then you're only resolving the surface aspect of the problem. If you simply wish for parking spaces to not get stolen, sure, it would work. If you're viewing the problem as 'bad actors use intimidation and bullying to create unfair, anti-utilitarian outcomes', then implementing the fix in one place will simply squeeze the problem out elsewhere.
RedRegard
1mo ago
I'd say the eugenics would be more about promoting pro-sociality. I don't think East Asia has as much trouble as the West, let alone other parts of the world, with these kinds of perennial bad actors. The OP specified two approaches that only East Asian countries have so far achieved, Japan's acceptance of insularity and its attendant low immigration and economic stagnation, and China's social credit authoritarian system. Both are quintessentially East Asian systems. You need an East Asian-style populace to even get to the point where such approaches are plausible, as otherwise you are dealing with whacky Westerners and their preferences.
RedRegard
1yr ago
There are two practical reasons to avoid war crimes:
-
They encourage a defect-defect race toward the bottom, as the enemy is encouraged to reciprocate by killing your own soldiers.
-
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
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.
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
Sometimes they really are on the street (usually obese, weird looking, skeletal, etc.), but I think people tune them out because they don't enjoy contemplating unfeminine women. They are actively unwholesome in ways that slovenly men are not. It is the dual edge of the women are wonderful trope.
RedRegard
1yr ago
We've already seen the mass obsolescence of humans. The result was to push people towards the service economy while also increasing social dysfunction among the former blue-collar working class. Political outcomes actually led to the reduction of social programs under the auspices of neoliberalism and Reaganism, as the blue-collar class had lost the organizational potential that their former labor involvement had granted them. Probably we will see more people employed in the service economy as well as a 'shadow economy' while the real economy falls under the sway of capitalists and their robotic labor forces.
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.
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.
More options
Context Copy link