ResoluteRaven
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User ID: 867
ResoluteRaven
1yr ago
I could find similar quotes online by white nationalists planning their own long march through the institutions. That doesn't mean I should assume any policy proposal such people might agree with is being directed by them and must be fought tooth and nail to keep us off a slippery slope towards racial separatism. Playing culture war whack-a-mole makes you look crazy to outsiders and weakens one's position, whether you are a wokescold arguing about Halloween costumes or a conservative grandstanding on behalf of steak and bacon.
ResoluteRaven
1yr ago
Well, for the most part I would say that making small talk with strangers is practice for conversations that you go into with a goal e.g. evaluating someone as a potential friend or romantic partner. Knowing how to share just enough personal information to build a rapport without weirding someone out or shifting the frame to keep people engaged are skills that need to be developed like any other. Most people do this subconsciously, but for others it requires focused attention. The people you are now good friends with and can have deep conversations with were once strangers after all, and you need a way to get from one to the other.
As far as specifics go, I'm not sure what you are trying to get out of your time at house parties or bars, but that is a question you should be asking yourself. You seem to be thinking a lot about your relative social status in a way that is somewhat foreign to me, but if you are trying to achieve high status and then leverage it to obtain something else, then you might be better served by seeking that other thing directly. Also, you don't need to study things that don't interest you just to have conversation starters, but they key is to keep up with something, whether it's the news or how to tie fishing lures, and then be able to identify connections between that thing and your interlocutor's personal experience.
ResoluteRaven
1yr ago
They'd be idiots to do so, as being the world's primary human capital magnet accrues compounding advantages over time that are simply irresistible and possibly even insurmountable, as we see now with China's stagnation.
Whether you consider these advantages at all depends on your metric of success. If you value something else more than material economic gain or technological development, then all the GDP growth in the world is not going to sway you. I wouldn't swap out my family members for people who were smarter and more productive if I were given the choice; for many people the same goes for their countrymen.
ResoluteRaven
2yr ago
That's all true, but "I am unwilling to have a child if doing so means compromising on a middle class lifestyle for them or me" is not the same thing as "I cannot afford to have a child." Having known people whose parents gave them away to another family as children to keep them from going hungry, this is not a trivial distinction. We'd also be better off if those same prospective middle class parents were willing to make more economic compromises for the sake of raising children, as those children will turn out more or less the same regardless of which school district or extracurricular activities they're in.
ResoluteRaven
2yr ago
Those cores weren't designed by or built for Mestizos...
No, but they were built by Mestizos for a white overclass, which is the same thing we would get in the US even for the most extreme possible levels of immigration, except that some of that overclass will be Asian as well.
Is San Salvador now as nice as Copenhagen?
To me, yes. Copenhagen is flat and boring and the people are (by my American standards) standoffish, rude, and lazy. San Salvador also has much better food and it isn't dark half the year (I should note that while I have visited Denmark, Sweden, and many South American countries, I have not been to El Salvador specifically). That's not to say that much of the architecture in Copenhagen or Stockholm isn't jaw-droppingly beautiful, and they are definitely places I might choose to live...if they weren't inhabited by Scandinavians.
ResoluteRaven
2yr ago
Mestizos and Asians are not as crime-prone as blacks, but they don't create cities that are optimal for the enjoyment of white people.
The cores of most Latin American cities don't seem all that different from their antecedents in Spain and Portugal; there is more crime and sprawling slums around many of them of course, but recent events in El Salvador show that that can be fixed. Plenty of westerners seem to love the urban planning in places like Japan or Singapore as well. Given American population densities, we will not see any Tokyo-style megacities for the foreseeable future, but I fail to see how getting a Sapporo or two (a city that was built in consultation with American engineers in the late 19th century and looks the part) would be sub-optimal.
ResoluteRaven
2yr ago
In order to be passed any potential immigration policy has to be justifiable in non-HBD (either group-based or individual) terms. Individually IQ-testing potential immigrants will never be considered acceptable, but screening them on the basis of "culture" is more palatable.
ResoluteRaven
2yr ago
Only for certain subpopulations. Others, for example New England whites, are comparable to Europeans in this regard.
I think The EROEI crowd are peak oilers who couldn't accept that they lost and cooked up some new doomer nonsense.
I mean I don't see any issues with the ROI concept itself. It's a bit of a tautology, but at least it gives us something quantitative that could be updated with new or better data.
In the case of agricultural production, the counterargument to your figures would be that recent increases in crop yields and the green revolution are dependent on artificial fertilizer produced by the Haber-Bosch process, which in turn is dependent on fossil fuel energy that has a decreasing ROI over time. This belief could be falsified by evidence that new sources of oil and natural gas (e.g. shale, tar sands, etc.) do not in fact have a lower ROI than older ones, that nuclear or renewable energy technologies are scalable to the same extent with similar or better returns, or that there are cheaper alternative sources of fertilizer.
ResoluteRaven
2yr ago
It might be a bad idea to try to adjust every individual to be of equal ability, but I am not sure that it would be a bad idea to raise up every population to be of equal average ability if it could be accomplished through the sum of voluntary decisions made by each set of parents. Of course you would need to fix the definition of "population" (say, US census categories as of 2020) to prevent later complications.
ResoluteRaven
2yr ago
I use the term "Amerikaner" to refer to the white American ethnos-that-isn't-quite-an-ethnos, though this would in theory exclude people who still retain a strong European immigrant culture and include any Jews who are thoroughly assimilated.
ResoluteRaven
2yr ago
to my ear it sounds very similar to the Spanish flap r (not having learned Spanish but knowing people who speak it)
It is that sound exactly. If you simply assume that whatever sound a language writes with the letter r is an alveolar tap then you will be correct the vast majority of the time. The affricate ch in Japanese is also different from its English counterpart, but since the English sound is not present in Japanese there isn't a pressing need to distinguish it to be understood.
ResoluteRaven
2yr ago
Do you have a specific vernacular form of Arabic that you are studying or planning to study in addition to the Standard? The two common choices are Egyptian and Lebanese and I've been trying to decide between them for whenever I stop playing around with the script and get to the hard part. Egyptian has more total speakers and a big media presence but the Arab diaspora seems to be disproportionately from Lebanon and places with similar dialects like Syria and Palestine. Or is it possible to muddle along with a passive understanding of a few varieties in addition to speaking and reading MSA?
ResoluteRaven
2yr ago
Why do you assume that wealth or social status was directly correlated with fertility in every pre-industrial society? That may have been the case in many places, but certainly not in the classical Mediterranean nor in the many cases of market-dominant minorities such as the Chinese in Southeast Asia, Parsis in India, Jews in Europe, or Sogdians in Tang Dynasty China.
Indian religions in particular seem to promote an ascetic path as the most holy way to live, and the individuals who chose such a path with its attendant celibacy seem disproportionately likely to have been from the priestly castes. The practical economic benefits of having additional children are also specific to an agricultural lifestyle in which they can perform manual labor and act as surrogate parents for their younger siblings. If your children are religiously forbidden from engaging in those activities then they are an economic drain rather than an asset, and are diverting the time and resources your servants could be spending expanding your property or sponsoring temples. If you are, furthermore, entrusted with the transmission of sacred texts that must be memorized and recited perfectly, you are likely better off instructing a smaller number of children to make sure they each get it right.
ResoluteRaven
2yr ago
ResoluteRaven
1mo ago
The Romans and the Ottomans certainly were. Hell, Egypt was run by Circassians for centuries and the elite of Tsarist Russia was disproportionately Volga German. An empire by definition consists of multiple peoples without a common ethnic heritage, so all this nationalist talk of "foreign brains" would be alien to them.
ResoluteRaven
2mo ago
I don't see any way to do Venus faster than Mars. Even if you cooled it down very quickly with orbital mirrors it would take a long time for the atmosphere to condense out. You can get Mars to a partially terraformed state i.e. stable bodies of water on the surface much faster, although if you wanted to bring in enough nitrogen for an earthlike atmosphere and surface pressure it would take you a lot longer.
ResoluteRaven
3mo ago
You're right, that was a poor way to phrase what I meant, which was "you can't learn a language properly as an adult if you never acquired one as a child."
ResoluteRaven
3mo ago
How would you describe this "modern worldview"? Empiricism, materialism, skepticism, rationality, something along those lines?
"We, as individuals, are capable of discovering the physical and moral laws of the universe and in so doing creating a more perfect society."
The short version is that as Science began delivering massive, obvious benefits, people noticed that they could lie and claim to be Scientists doing Science, and as long as they engaged in a certain minimal amount of social posturing, the empiricism, materialism, skepticism and rationality could simply be bypassed, and they could reap all the social, fiscal and political benefits of Contributing to Science without actually having to contribute anything meaningful at all. The more people explicitly or implicitly locked into this paradigm, the lower the incentive to resist the bypass became. The result was a parasite class of "intellectuals" growing fat and happy, while at best actively burning value to accomplish nothing, and more often burning value to produce dangerous forms of self-replicating deceit to plague mankind generally.
While this parasitic class clearly exists today, the benefits of scientific advancement were not obvious enough in 1789 for this to be a primary motivator of anyone involved in the French Revolution. Three years later China could still imperiously dismiss the Macartney Embassy, and the idea that Britain would go from producing nothing that they needed to kicking down their doors and taking whatever they wanted by force within a single lifetime was as far from European minds as it was from Asian ones.
You should be able to recognize the hostile takeover in the architects, actions and character of the French revolution. You should definitely be able to recognize it in how subsequent generations spoke about the French Revolution; Mark Twain is one of my favorite examples of a purportedly intelligent person spouting insane, mindkilled horseshit. By the time we get to Marx and Freud, it seems to me that failure to recognize the pattern must in some sense be willful; and then there is the 20th century, where we must laugh lest we weep.
This is why I ask people to identify whether the American or French revolution was a more central example of the Enlightenment. My impression is that the consensus answer is the French revolution is the more Enlightened; yet the industrial revolution came out of Britain and then America, both of which stubbornly resisted the succession of ideologies spawned by the French Revolution far longer than their European peers, to their enormous benefit.
I don't hold that more Enlightened = better, only that some minimum threshold of Enlightenment needed to be passed for the Industrial Revolution to occur. Beyond that point, that ideological train was almost certain to crash and burn in spectacular fashion. Therefore, I will raise Mark Twain one better: modern technology and Communism were separate but inevitable consequences of the Enlightenment, and the hundred million dead at the hands of the latter were a fair trade for the former.
Likewise, the universal literacy that was an obvious precursor to the scientific and industrial revolutions was a product of Protestant Christianity
Bit of a tangent, but we do have examples of highly literate societies that did not produce a scientific revolution, namely Japan under the Tokugawa Shogunate and pre-colonial Burma.
The empiricism, materialism, skepticism and rationality were never rigorous in any population-level sense. Superstition and ignorance changed their masks, and nothing more. Now that bedazzling scientific advancements are slowing down and we have had a moment to collect ourselves, a modest amount of actual skepticism and curiosity and a memory broader than the last fifteen minutes is sufficient to tear the whole rotten edifice wide open.
No argument from me here. I think our priority should be salvaging what is valuable from Western civilization before it implodes and incorporating it into a more sustainable philosophical tradition.
ResoluteRaven
3mo ago
When I was taking piano lessons, my teacher showed me a video of a Japanese 4 year old playing that Clementi Sonatina and dared me to do better. At the time I was infuriated to be shown up by a toddler, but it's probably the reason I still remember and enjoy the piece.
ResoluteRaven
3mo ago
The aversion to cold water is based on traditional Chinese medicine i.e. the belief that cold drinks will sap your Qi and shorten your life, although I'm guessing that the true reason is that in the past serving hot drinks was a way to prove that you had boiled water for your guests and weren't trying to get them sick.
ResoluteRaven
3mo ago
Why must every border in the world be drawn according to 19th century European nationalist principles? Multiethnic empires, religious caliphates, city-states, mercantile republics, and tribal confederations all existed long before the national revivals of Mitteleuropa and I do not see why they should be considered inherently less legitimate forms of political organization.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
In addition to their historical lack of access to their own fisheries, the fact that Ireland remains relatively underpopulated to this day as a result of the Great Famine meant that there wasn't the kind of Malthusian pressure to exploit every available food source that existed in places like Japan. However, certain kinds of seaweed (dulse and Irish moss) are considered part of the traditional Irish diet and are seeing a resurgence in popularity nowadays alongside other more quotidian sorts of fish and shellfish.
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
Serbia (>80% Serb and ranked 104 out of 180 by the CPI), Belarus (85% Belarusian and ranked 98 out of 180 by the CPI), Albania (>90% Albanian and tied with Belarus by the CPI), Kosovo (also >90% Albanian and ranked 83 out of 180 by the CPI), Cambodia (>95% Khmer and ranked 158 out of 180 by the CPI), and if we feel like stretching the definition of Southeast Asia we can throw in Bangladesh (99% Bengali and ranked 149 out of 180 by the CPI) too.
Presumably in the process of self-segregation where the pod people and the McMansion people move into separate communities and redevelop them somebody is going to have to get pushed out of their home. Once this uncomfortable business is behind us we can all go on with our lives in peace.
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