ResoluteRaven
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User ID: 867
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
Some older relatives of mine say soda-pop, which I always found endearing. I could never tell if that was because they grew up near the boundary line or if it was used nationwide as a compromise term back when soda and pop-sayers were more equal in number (as part of some anti-coke alliance, I suppose).
The gradual Californiazation (Californication?) of young Americans' accents is sad to observe. The only college-educated zoomers I hear with distinct regional pronunciations are from New York City, the deep deep South, and a few pockets of the upper midwest.
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
Have you considered joining a fraternal or service organization e.g. Freemasons, Odd Fellows, Kiwanis, Rotary Club? They don't have the influence or membership they used to, but many are still around and eager for recruits. Some may require a basic profession of belief in a higher power to join, but it's a lot more vague and open to interpretation than becoming part of an established religion. Now it's possible that reaching out to one of these groups could result in a few elderly stragglers dumping the responsibility for maintaining a centuries-old fraternity on your shoulders, but that would still leave you with more to build on than trying to create a community completely from scratch.
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
I know a few. Most have African or Caribbean immigrant parents who did their best to insulate them from stereotypical Black culture, up to and including homeschooling. They are granted certain opportunities denied to their White and Asian peers as far as scholarships, affirmative action, and such are concerned, but apart from that have similar educational and career outcomes.
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
For whatever reason, I never struggled with these questions as much as others seemed to, but I eventually settled into a Daoist sort of framework of "the world just is the way it is and what can we know about it?" Whether things are pre-determined by physical laws or whether I have a soul with free will or whether there are infinite copies of me out there someplace has no bearing on how I live my life or get on in my little corner of the universe. Or, as the Bard put it: "All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances." Maybe some find it sad that there's no great cosmic destiny in store for them (but hey, I'm sure someone out there will be be the lucky one), but I never harbored any such delusions of grandeur.
That being said, if you truly want to feel a connection with the Way or God or whatever you want to call it, there are options such as meditation (the hardcore monastic kind where you fast and don't speak to anyone for days) or doing psychedelic drugs, but I can't tell you what sorts of answers you'll get or if they'll do you any good.
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
I don't think Gavin Newsom ever really had a shot at becoming president. It would take a political genius of the highest order to thread the needle of a road to Damascus style conversion on the issues of urban dysfunction and public order in California to neutralize that angle of attack, while preventing defections from his existing base of support, so unless he can somehow turn San Francisco into Singapore in the next 3 years all his opponents need to do is show live footage of open-air drug markets and homeless encampments in the streets to end his campaign before it begins.
As far as LA is concerned, the fires are only nibbling away at the edges of the city and not reducing downtown to ash, so not much rebuilding is even necessary. I think a large earthquake would provide more opportunities for that type of renewal, as it would damage or destroy buildings over a much larger area. Not that I hope such a thing happens, but it seems inevitable that one of the major west coast cities will be hit by one within the next decade or two.
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
What's your take on the Hapa ethnogenesis?
I'll give my two cents, as I am a product of it. Those of us above a certain age are disproportionately likely to be from broken families (relative to non-mixed families of the same social class) and to have parents who are deeply weird in some way e.g. dad is autistic, a sexpat, or an abusive soldier, mom is a former sex worker or couldn't find a husband in her home country and snagged a white guy to have kids with at age 40, etc. This is not a good recipe for creating successful and well-adjusted individuals, but doesn't necessarily reflect what the results would be if you randomly paired off the populations of say Germany and South Korea.
The younger couples I see around me seem more normal, as most met at school or through some tech job in California, and the gender ratios are less skewed i.e. more pairings of Asian men and White women. It's too soon to tell for sure, but I imagine a nation of their descendants would look like a cross between Finland and Japan: a clean, orderly place capable of making substantial contributions to science, technology, and literature, but with a smaller fraction of truly brilliant, one-of-a-kind individuals. There's a certain type of genius I've seen in a few individuals of European, Jewish, or Indian descent that I have never seen in East Asians.
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
I don't keep count, but I probably read a few dozen books a year. My childhood reading habit fell off some time in high school and I have not yet fully recovered. I find that while once I was able to read hundreds of pages in a single sitting, I now find myself reading a chapter or two each of five different books in a day (this takes me somewhere between 45 minutes and 2 hours depending on the day and the books). Presumably I have the internet and my cell phone to thank for ruining my attention span, but at least this way I'm still making my way through a very long backlog of ebooks, impulse purchases at thrift stores, and recommendations from friends, bloggers, and friendly mottizens.
I think around these parts you will find an interesting mix of people with reading habits like yours or mine, defenders of Richard Hanania's thesis that books are a waste of time (some of which is deeply felt and some of which is just reflexive contrarianism), and those whose revealed preference is the latter but feel bad about it.
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
The NovaRussia campaign was Putin's attempt to instigate a popular uprising that he thought would sweep the country
As far as I know, the war in Donbass began as the result of actions by individual Russians like Strelkov who crossed the border into Ukraine without their government's knowledge or sanction (though these individuals did believe they were instigating a popular uprising that would sweep the country), and only once their filibuster campaign was on the verge of collapse did Putin finally intervene to save them.
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
But in today's age of high information availability, more subtlety is required. Even if you can convince the average person with a braindead argument like "Putin = Hitler", there will always be a subset of more intelligent people who demand a real argument. Since the more intelligent people tend to have out-sized influence, if you fail to offer them anything, they will not truly support you, or may even undermine you.
This doesn't seem true to me. Political speeches have been decreasing in sophistication for nearly a century at this point, at least in Democracies where you can have the votes of every thinking person but, in the words of Adlai Stevenson, "still need a majority." If the voters demand something contradictory like "we want to give billions of dollars in military aid to Ukraine but not pay more in taxes or suffer any material consequences" then all the smartest politicians will spend their days coming up with ways to trick the populace into thinking they can have their cake and eat it too, praying that they won't be the one left standing when the game of musical chairs ends.
As far as convincing the averge person in the west to support Ukraine, "Putin is like Hitler" will work a lot better than "the system of international norms that have prevented large-scale interstate conflict in Europe since 1945 are dependent on all nations renouncing territorial annexation as a means of resolving their disputes, and any violator of these norms must be swiftly and severely punished to prevent a return to the bloodshed that characterized the first half of the twentieth century", but the latter is there if you want it.
But he has to let go of the idea that he will get all of the land back.
There is no way he or anyone close to him genuinely believes this, but it would be stupid to undermine his bargaining position before ever setting foot in the negotiating room. Such concessions need to be made privately to avoid public humiliation (or potential defenestration).
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
I have no problems spotting what in old travel guides would be called national characteristics and feel very keenly the points at which my parents' cultures grind against each other to produce sparks (in a way that they themselves never seem to fully grasp). I don't however hold that these characteristics are inherently bound to any given ethnos and that this should be the primary criterion by which political boundaries are drawn.
Regarding cultural change over time, the question, as Bryan Caplan puts it, is what makes cultural change through immigration worse than cultural change through time, if the end result is equally unrecognizable? The honest answer is usually "I want my descendants to look like me" or to put it autistically "I have a biological imperative to maximize the propagation of my genes." To be fair, my descendants looking like me was never really an option to begin with, so perhaps the value of this is lost on me; from where I stand having descendants at all seems sufficient.
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
I'm pretty sure the individuals in this particular office do in fact speak English. There's a difference between the commands "learn English" and "speak only English in public for the rest of your life." The former is a perfectly reasonable demand, but the latter seems a bit extreme. If I meet an American living in Mexico I'm not going to speak to him in Spanish even if we are both fluent in it.
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
There is a path forward for an American nation of some sort, but its relationship to the one that many here want to restore will be akin to that between 10th century Constantinople and 1st century Rome: if you squint there is continuity but it is obscured by changes in faith, language, ethnicity, and forms of government. The question of whether the future Spanish-speaking Catholic integralist American Empire (just to throw out one possibility) is truly American is one I will leave to the historians.
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
There are a lot of variables that determine how people will respond to mass migration, including the number of migrants, the speed with which they arrive, the cultural distance between them and the native population, and how innately tolerant that native population is. You probably couldn't move 10 people across a mountain valley in New Guinea without triggering some sort of tribal war, while as we all know Anglos and their Germanic cousins are capable of passively accepting millions of alien newcomers every year without murdering them. This difference is partially genetic, but also in large part due to the development of social technologies that allow for cooperation across groups larger than Dunbar's number, of which organized religion, nationalism, and confucianism (if you consider it distinct from the other two) have been the most successful.
Now overall I'm pretty happy with the fact that most of us nowadays don't kill strangers on sight and think a continued expansion of our circle of care would be a good thing, but advancements in communication and transportation are threatening to overwhelm the capacities of our existing social technologies, and until they either adapt to the times or new ones are born from the ashes of our society, we are in a dangerous and volatile transition period (see all the comparisons between our present moment and European history between Martin Luther and Westphalia). This sense of an impending storm contributes to the growing wave of isolationist and nativist sentiment around the world but, conditional on continued economic growth and us all not getting turned into paperclips, it is in the longer view merely a tactical retreat, as competition between groups ultimately favors those able to marshall a larger population and greater resources.
Bringing things back down to Earth, I've been thinking a lot about my own sense of identity and belonging as a result of the recent immigration kerfuffle. Growing up as a mixed-race State Department kid, I never really had a hometown, a nation (in the blood and soil sense), a church, or many of the other things that root people in time and space (though it turns out a few formative years in sub-Saharan Africa is a pretty good inoculation against many stupid ideologies). To the extent that I have a people to call my own, it is the coastal American PMC class with its mixture of whites and "elite" immigrants. I don't know whether the Indians (and others) I went to school with and whose weddings I attended represent the top 1%, 0.5%, 0.1%, or whatever of their cousins in the mother country, or what visas their parents came here on, but they are good people and at the end of the day no man should betray his friends.
I have looked for the old American nation that this class replaced and found only ghosts and the dusty pages of Tocqueville and Fischer. Once upon a time my grandfather was a school principal and a Mason who read Latin and coached wrestling in a small town with a general store and a train station and town hall meetings out of a Rockwell painting. There was one black family in town, courtesy of the Great Migration, but apart from that there was hardly even an Ellis Islander in sight (I'm told the previous generation had not been fond of Catholics or Jews). Now, half the buildings are empty and the meetings are about how to beg the federal government for grant money to fix the rusty pipes, or when they will have to finally close down the school because the only children born in the county are Amish. Whomever you blame for this state of affairs, the culture that built that place is dead and no amount of nationalistic necromancy will conjure up anything functional out of its corpse.
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
There were certainly a few black slaves and freedmen in imperial Rome. Most were probably Nubian, as travel along the Nile is easier than across the Sahara. I would not take lack of genetic traces in modern populations as clear evidence of absence, as modern Italians bear essentially no imprint of the cosmopolitan population of the classical Mediterranean. Parts of Europe under Muslim rule such as Sicily and Iberia would have continued to host some number of sub-Saharan African slaves into the medieval period and I'm sure some made their way to Constantinople as well. I have also come across the claim that Lisbon was 10% black just a few decades after the Reconquista.
If we are limiting our scope to say northern European states under Catholic rule between 550 and 1400, then I think the presence of even a single black individual there would be highly unusual and noteworthy, but the argument that some part of Europe has been inhabited by a non-zero number of individuals we would call black at most points within the last two thousand years forms a motte from which the bailey of "here are some black vikings or knights in medieval England" can be defended. I won't pretend to know the motivation of everyone making these claims, but I imagine the most informed and introspective among them believe that they are presenting scenarios from within the realm of possibility that, while not the most likely, are the ones with the greatest expected social utility in the present day.
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
The eventual result will almost certainly be a ceasefire along the line of control with no official peace treaty or concessions by either side besides perhaps the Kursk salient by Ukraine. The best analogue would be the Korean War, where the last two years were spent in a stalemate with high casualties but no meaningful progress by either side, and the core issues remain unresolved to this day despite the cessation of major hostilities. I see no way to force Putin to accept such an outcome while he still thinks he has the upper hand and can slowly push the front forward in the Donbass, but presumably there will come a time in the next two years when he has to either declare a full mobilization, risking domestic unrest, or agree to a ceasefire.
The European powers may be more determined to push Russia back, but do they have much practical ability without the US?
If a Polish/Baltic expeditionary force were deployed to Ukraine with no restrictions, they could probably force Russia to withdraw from most of the territory they have occupied except for Crimea, but such action seems likely to anger the Russian public enough to accept full mobilization and escalation to a general European war against NATO. There are ways to do this with some plausible deniability e.g. "We had nothing to do with this ambassador, our soldiers just went AWOL and joined the Ukrainian foreign legion," but the more political cover they have the more likely they are to simply be fed into the Ukrainian meat grinder without the tools they need to make a real difference in the war ("They also stole our tanks and fighter jets and launched missiles at you from our territory" is a bit of a stretch). In either case, the US and other NATO nations would not be obligated to bail them out of a fight they started.
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
No one is arguing that the differences between capitalist and communist countries are biological in origin. That the gaps in wealth between North and South Korea or East and West Germany are explained by economic policies alone is self-evident. That does not mean that biological and cultural differences don't exist or matter.
Looking at communist countries alone we can see the difference between those with high human capital (East Germany, the Soviet Union, North Korea), which are able to maintain an orderly society with advanced weapons manufacturing and scientific research and pose a credible military threat to their neighbors, and those with lower human capital (Angola, Benin, Cambodia, Ethiopia), which are a threat to no one but their own miserable inhabitants.
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
A repeat of the Spanish Flu seems unlikely to me given the particular circumstances that led to that strain disproportionately affecting young and healthy individuals i.e. an adaptation period among soldiers on the western front who were immunocompromised from extreme stress and injuries, in addition to close promixity and lack of hygiene. A more prototypical bad influenza pandemic is the 1957 Asian Flu outbreak, which is hardly a blip in the history books.
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
people kept getting sanskritized and it was no longer Aryan in anything but name
Were the Aryans not the ones who brought Sanskrit to India in the first place? Or are you talking about attempts to diminish the influence of the Persian high culture of the Mughals?
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
Not Indian, but I grew up around enough of them to observe and ask about such matters.
1. It's possible for someone to be light-skinned enough that they are almost certainly North Indian or dark-skinned enough that they are almost certainly South Indian, but in between it's difficult to tell.
2. If they are from one of the communities that tend to migrate to the US I can do this pretty well e.g. Seetharaman is Tamil, Ravi is Telugu, Bose is Bengali, Jagtap is Marathi, Portuguese names are from Goa, English Christian names indicate someone is from Kerala, the aforementioned Singh and Patel, etc.
3. Among recent migrants, language and religion are probably the two main barriers between communities. For the second generation, religious differences may persist and there is some inertia around food (which correlates very strongly with North vs South), but ancestral language is no longer relevant and most folks just identify as Brown.
4. Absent any other information, not well at all.
5. If they have a surname I am familiar with in the Indian-American community I would guess that they are Brahmin and be right the majority of the time. Otherwise I would have no idea.
6. Discrimination, at least for things like who you are supposed to marry, is not really by geography, but by Jati, which is basically your particular endogamous community. The part of the caste system that Westerners are usually familiar with is Varna e.g. Brahmin, Kshatriya, and so on, and this defines the role that your Jati is supposed to play in society (priest, warrior, merchant, etc.). As an example, Iyers and Iyengars are both Tamil Brahmins, but they are separate Jati. Discrimination along other axes includes "people darker-skinned than me are inferior," "people from [other state] talk funny and eat weird food," and "[other religion]'s men are coming to steal and forcibly convert our women." Basically none of these differences matter to second generation immigrants except for the rare few who let their parents arrange a marriage or are devoutly religious (usually Muslim).
7. I can tell if their native language is North or South Indian, but usually not more than that. I can probably distinguish North Indian languages like Gujarati, Hindi, and Bengali by hearing better than I could those same accents in English.
8. If it's a group of international students playing cricket on the college quad, they probably all came from the same state and are of similar caste backgrounds. Among the second generation this may still happen if it's a group of friends who all grew up together because their parents were in the former sort of group and moved to the same part of the US (I know a lot of Telugus from Northern Virginia, for instance), but they won't go out of their way to exclude others on those lines.
9. The communities I'm familiar with basically have no lower-caste people in them at all, at least if we're talking about Dalits and such, so it's hard to tell.
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
While I think Bryan Caplan, Noah Smith, and co are correct that with reasonable economic policies India could climb above the deepest rungs of poverty i.e. no more shitting in the street, basic literacy, and an end to chronic child malnutrition, and that this is something the rest of the world ought to encourage and celebrate, they are far too bullish on its long-term convergence with industrialized nations.
Caplan's last point in particular strikes me as either willfully ignorant or completely insane:
Even if you have cultural fears about immigrants in general, what exactly is culturally objectionable about Indians? I live in one of top centers of Indian migration in the United States, and no one here even claims that they’re clinging to their native culture of crazy driving and rampant littering. They’re definitely not unleashing stray cattle on us. Yes, I know Indian Americans are self-selected from high castes and top schools. But after ten days in India, I confidently declare that the children of randomly-selected Indians would do well here. Like the Indians who are already here, they’d adopt almost everything good about modern U.S. culture, while retaining the strong family values that Americans have been foolishly forgetting.
First off, this man has apparently never told an Indian Uber driver that he's in a hurry to get to the airport. And as a supporter of elite Indian immigration (we can certainly quibble on what "elite" means, since that's really the crux of the issue here), I must strenously oppose the claim that we can just import randomly-selected(?!) people from any country and expect a good outcome, economic, cultural, or otherwise. We in fact have a pretty good idea of what importing random Indians looks like, in the form of Guyana and Trinidad, and it isn't pretty.
As for North Korea, I think the fact that in their current state they are still able to build and test nuclear missiles and field an impressive IMO team, among other achievements, is a testament to the inherent biocapital of the Korean people, and something we don't see in other nations with similar regimes like Eritrea or Turkmenistan. With nations as with individuals, you may sabotage someone with the potential to be intelligent and successful by starving them as a child or hitting them in the head with a hammer, but I have yet to the see the opposite.
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
I found it notable that a Mexican corrido has already been written about him.
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
I think there is a distinction to be made between the Asian work model as institutionalized through a network of cram schools, tiger parents, and autistic focus on maximizing a small set of quanitifiable parameters, and the more generalized immigrant striver mindset that can be observed in everyone from Mexicans to Nigerians and is probably closer to what Vivek was trying to articulate. The former is almost always unhealthy, while the latter combination of grit, frugality, and focus on education and getting a good job seems to me like a much more reasonable thing to promote. Of course, the descendants of immigrants will eventually regress to the mean, and despite the fact that their parents and grandparents would describe this as "becoming lazy Americans," it is really at this point that it becomes more relevant what their origins are.
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
I think your peer group in childhood and adolescence plays a greater role in who you are attracted to than your own or your parent's race, though perhaps with some weighting according to the hierarchy observed anecdotally and in the OkCupid dataset i.e. East Asian women and White men being considered slightly more attractive by everyone. Looking at the edge cases, none of the Asian adoptees I knew who grew up in White supermajority communities or the single digit number of Black students who attended my elite high school seemed romantically interested in their co-ethnics.
There is a confounding factor here in many cases though, which is that the kind of person likely to move to an ethnically diverse community or one where they will be a tiny minority is likely higher in openess to experience to begin with, which would correlate with a willingness to date or marry outside their race. To the extent that this trait is heritable they will pass it on to their children who grow up in such an environment.
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
I think it's worthwhile to be introspective about what you like and why, but trying to shame other people into being attracted to someone they're not, as some black and trans progressives do, is worse than useless.
The existence of edge cases doesn't immediately invalidate the usefulness of having separate categories, otherwise we would throw our hands in the air whenever we had to define languages (is this rural Galician dialect Spanish or Portuguese?), colors (where is the boundary between blue and green?), or sections of the electromagnetic spectrum (is this extreme UV or weak X-rays?). If there are ever enough half-Asians to matter, we will get our own box on the census the same way Hispanics do. Either way there are still tens of millions of unambiguously White Americans, and that is who the category is for.
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