ResoluteRaven
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User ID: 867
ResoluteRaven
1yr ago
If your aim is to improve the long-term prospects of Haiti and you had that kind of money you might be better off starting some sort of underground fertility clinic experimenting with embryo selection to increase human capital slowly over many years. Distribute some unapproved nootropics and anti-aging drugs while you're at it and who knows, maybe some of them turn out to actually work and they'll be speaking Haitian Creole on Mars in a thousand years.
ResoluteRaven
9mo ago
I think being a relatively isolated island continent helps a lot with maintaining that policy. It's a lot harder to refuse someone when you have a land border and you can see the poor masses longing to get in, which is why most western nations have out of cowardice tried to outsource the job to Central American or Middle Eastern countries that have fewer qualms about kicking people out by force. It also seems to me that Australia has relatively few immigrants from populations that restrictionists like to complain about e.g. Hispanics, Arabs, Africans (black Africans to be precise, I know there's a lot of Afrikaners in Perth), so that may have something to do with its success as well.
ResoluteRaven
9mo ago
It is a crime against humanity to shaft their futures and potential livelihoods for social engineering.
Are their livelihoods actually negatively affected by being denied admission to Ivy League schools? My impression is that by future income and most other material measures of success there isn't any effect. In the same way, when Jews were kept out of Harvard all their Nobel Prize-winning scientists went to CUNY instead, and didn't seem any worse off for it.
ResoluteRaven
10mo ago
barbarian recruitment preceded what was essentially the barbarian expulsion of non-European people on the continent vis-a-vis the destruction of the multi-racial Roman empire
I wasn't aware of any expulsion of non-Europeans on the part of the post-Roman Germanic kings. My impression was that the multiethnic urban Romans simply died out on their own due to below-replacement fertility rates, repeated sackings of major cities during Justinian's wars of reconquest, and the subsequent plague. Their replacement by peasants from the countryside with a more traditional conservative culture was the most likely source of any moral "cleansing" of the former empire, rather than the influence of the small and soon assimilated Germanic minority that ruled them for a time.
ResoluteRaven
11mo ago
Does this mean you think black people are more genetically predisposed to violence?
I think American blacks are culturally (strongly) and genetically (not as strongly) predisposed to violence, and that those genetic predispositions are to some extent shared with southern whites i.e. not from slave ancestry, but from slaveowner ancestry. Black people elsewhere would have to be analyzed independently, as they don't share all of these characteristics. In some multiethnic countries like Mali, the black agricultural population is less violent than the lighter-skinned desert pastoralist population.
Can I ask what your politics are? I think you're consistently one of the best commentators here.
Thanks, I appreciate it. I have a mixture of Asian-style social conservatism and more classically American liberal beliefs i.e. on a personal level I follow the typical "immigrant parent" line, on an intermediate scale I think of Tocquevillian-style local democracy as an ideal, and on a larger scale I align more or less with Hobbes or Xunzi. When I'm feeling witty I call this Confucianism with American Characteristics.
ResoluteRaven
11mo ago
I mean, communist societies were theoretically universal in the same way that Iran is theoretically tolerant of gay people because it gives them the option of getting a sex-change surgery instead of being executed for sodomy. Social class may seem like a category less intrinsic to the individual than race, but as far as adults are concerned I would argue that isn't so, and even to the extent that it was that in some cases liquidation of class enemies was even worse than genocide of particular ethnic groups because there was no clear stopping point and it was easier to keep throwing people into the meat grinder for increasingly arbitrary reasons e.g. wearing glasses in Pol Pot's Cambodia.
ResoluteRaven
1yr ago
I found this an interesting exercise, so here's who I was able to come up with:
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Norbert Rillieux, inventor of the multiple effect-evaporator used in industrial sugar production.
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Percy Julian, pioneer of chemical synthesis of steroids and hormonal drugs.
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John Hodge, who determined the mechanism of the Maillard reaction in cooking.
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John Dabiri, developer of advanced wind turbines and some weird jellyfish-inspired soft robots
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George Carruthers, inventor of the ultraviolet camera deployed on the Moon by Apollo 16
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Arlie Petters, developer of the mathematical theory of gravitational lensing
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Alexander Anim-Mensah, whose contributions to membrane engineering are quite opaque to me, but seem to be quite significant in the areas of water filtration and improvement of washing machines
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Mark Dean, who holds an impressive number of patents in computer hardware and processor design
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Charles Drew, who achievements in blood plasma storage enabled the development of the first large-scale blood banks during WWII
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Kristala Prather, one of the major figures in the infant field of synthetic biology
I tried to limit this list as much as I could to the harder sciences and to leave out anyone whose contributions or lack thereof are at the center of a major controversy, which narrowed it down considerably. You are free to point out that this list includes mostly highly selected African immigrants or people with so little black ancestry that no one but an American would label them as such.
ResoluteRaven
9d ago
The point is that those are the same people. They say the same things in person that they do online because below a certain age there isn't a difference in their minds and you have to treat it as such.
ResoluteRaven
2mo ago
New Hampshire has always seemed like the odd man out in New England to me due to its strong Scotch-Irish/Libertarian heritage, but I digress.
Having considered it more, I suppose I can agree with a version of your thesis that goes like this (writing this out more for my own understanding than yours):
What those in the early-20th century called Progressivism produced a generation of technocrats (including Wilson, Hoover, FDR, etc.) who for several decades controlled both political parties while fighting a (to them very real and serious but to outsiders insignificant) battle amongst themselves. The technocrats recently lost control of the Republican party and what many HBD-believing folks on the new/dissident/alt/whatever-right are trying to do is re-establish the yang to the Democrats' yin while ignoring the bubbling cauldron of resentment into which both the current elites and their would-be shadow elites are soon to fall.
ResoluteRaven
9mo ago
This doesn't seem like an overly restrictive definition to me; I would consider someone with one immigrant parent to be of foreign origin. In practice, people's intuition on this matter is mostly based on appearance e.g. someone who is half Belgian and half Algerian will be seen as more foreign than if they were half Polish, even though each has one non-Belgian parent.
ResoluteRaven
11mo ago
My impression is that Mesoamericans are like the Japanese or Germans: capable of committing horrendous acts when sanctioned by the state or their religion, but less likely than most to commit spontaneous acts of interpersonal violence. People who have lived in Guatemala, for instance, have told me that the stereotypes there are that Mayans are shy and docile whereas Ladinos (the local name for Mestizos) are loud and aggressive.
ResoluteRaven
11mo ago
There's a big difference between opposing mass immigration and supporting mass deportation. The closest thing to what you propose that I can think of was the expulsion of the Germans from Eastern Europe in 1945 and that was at the conclusion of a genocidal war and carried out by a communist government crueler than any a modern western European population could ever produce.
ResoluteRaven
1yr ago
Well, part of what keeps a high-trust society the way it is is distrust of outsiders, so you may be starting off on the wrong foot here. I would suggest first taking a look at your own roots or those of your significant other if you have one. Are you from an immigrant family or do you have relatives in or recent ancestors from a small town or rural area? Those are places where you already have a connection, where the locals are less likely to immediately reject you because your being there makes some sense in their eyes, and where you yourself may be less likely to bail out early. There are plenty of places still left in America where you can tune out the culture war just by turning off your computer or phone, and if you choose to get involved in things like town meetings and local government you can do your own part to build the kind of community you want to live in.
If that isn't an option or if you insist that you still want the lifestyle of a first world urbanite without the downsides of violent crime or social dysfunction, then the places I would suggest are Taiwan (more accepting of foreigners than Japan with a similar standard of living, but may only be a short-term solution for geopolitical reasons) or New Zealand (politics there might offend you if you are hardcore anti-woke, but it's probably the safest place to be during the apocalypse), in addition to Singapore which you mentioned.
ResoluteRaven
1yr ago
It’s been the realm of cranks forever because as much as the public loves space operas, the only way to transverse the distances involved in a single human generation is to suspend physics.
I agree with your larger point, but there is another way to make such trips within one generation and that is to increase the length of a human generation. If through life-extension people lived for many centuries, for instance, a trip of several years to Alpha Centauri would be the equivalent of a long sea voyage in the 18th century.
ResoluteRaven
1yr ago
The neighborhood around Walt Whitman High School in Maryland (which has been in the news lately for other culture war related reasons) is around 8 miles from the White House and looks to be about a 15 minute bike ride from the nearest grocery store, maybe longer if you lived to the north or west.
I'd say from looking at the intersections that need to be traversed and knowing the poor quality of the local drivers that the helicopter parents in such a wealthy neighborhood would never let their kids make that particular journey, but that of course has no direct bearing on your question.
ResoluteRaven
1yr ago
The place I described is in the DC metro area and could plausibly be called a "far exurb." I make no claims as to whether this is a typical suburban experience because I have no idea, only that the type of place that YIMBY's complain so vociferously about does in fact exist somewhere.
ResoluteRaven
1yr ago
I'm not sure that the Indian caste system is the best argument for eugenics or even a central example of it. Sure, the maintenance of genetically distinct Jati over thousands of years of close contact is impressive in its own way, but the end result seems to me more dystopian than anything else, with a tiny population of highly successful Brahmins lording it over a majority living in worse squalor than most of Africa. Meanwhile China, where there was to my knowledge no intentional eugenics of the sort you attribute to other ancient societies, has today a much more uniformly successful population than India by nearly any metric you care to use. Even if the average Brahmin is smarter than the average Chinese person, which I could believe (are there any IQ statistics on Indian subgroups?), I can't say I think it was worth it.
ResoluteRaven
2mo 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
9mo 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
10mo 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
11mo 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
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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.
I don’t see a huge death rate, I see voluntary reports of deaths that occured close to the time of vaccination clustering...close to the time of vaccination.
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