ResoluteRaven
No bio...
User ID: 867
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
It seems to me that for an ethnicity to exist in practice, you need a critical mass of people to identify with it to the exclusion of other identities, and that is what "Americans"/Amerikaners/white Americans of colonial British heritage/[insert your preferred neologism here] lack. Ukrainians are fighting a war not to get lumped in with the Russian ethnicity and Palestinians have fiercely resisted decades of attempts to group them with Jordanians or Egyptians, but I doubt even a lizardman's constant of your founding stock American ethnicity conceive of it in the same terms you do or would lift a finger to assist any political mobilization on their behalf (unless it were disguised as garden variety civic nationalism, which is what liberals have been paranoid about for decades despite it almost never happening).
ResoluteRaven
10mo ago
While I agree that smart people often overestimate the intellectual capabilities of people with average or below-average IQ's, the claim that violence is associated with a particular IQ range seems extremely tenuous. Intelligence is important but it isn't the sole determinant of personality, and while there is a correlation between lower IQ and violence in the US owing to the particular populations present here, the opposite trend can be observed in Mexico, where murder rates are lower in plurality indigenous regions than in plurality white ones (Conquistadors were a mean bunch).
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
1mo 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
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
9mo 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
9mo 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
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
9mo 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
10mo 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
10mo 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
11mo 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
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.
ResoluteRaven
1yr ago
ResoluteRaven
6hr ago
It appears that humans have between 350 and 400 olfactory receptors, so I suppose once we fully describe them we'll have as good a model for smell as we can get. Taste seems to be a lot simpler, and yet people are still finding new receptors there as well (though having tasted salt licorice I would say that's one better left unstimulated).
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
Dover's dual-language books are a good way to start reading short passages from classic works and if you like Game of Thrones you could check out Les Rois maudits, the (completed!) historical novel series that inspired it.
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
9mo ago
The failure mode of tough construction site man is "I had/have it hard so y'all should too".
Whether this is a failure mode or not depends on the specific details of "having it hard." Making your children exercise every day is being harder on them than letting them lounge around on the couch watching cartoons, but the outcome is better; making your children exercise until they throw up or pass out from heatstroke is being too hard on them. There can't be any universal rules at this level of abstraction because people's definitions of hardness are conditional and based on their own experiences; some tiger parents need to be told to take it easy and some parents who are spoiling their kids should be encouraged to be more strict.
As an aside, for an example of a culture whose members took shunning pleasures to the extreme but was nevertheless quite successful, look no further than Puritan New England, which banned everything from music to sports but also produced an outsized number of great scientific and literary figures. I've even heard it speculated that New Englanders had a longer life expectancy than all their colonial neighbors because their food was so bland that people inadvertently practiced the sort of calorie restriction that leads to longevity in laboratory mice.
ResoluteRaven
9mo ago
This framing describes pretty well how many American liberals see things, but my understanding of the conservative point of view is that the division is between those who wish to be "colorblind" and resent being categorized in racial terms at all, and those who embrace racial identity politics as a way to gain power. To them, what the woke left would call "white" characteristics are simply aspects of American culture that do not belong to any particular race. This is of course different from the typical dissident right/white nationalist framing, which is to just take the woke liberal framing, invert it, and make it even more restrictive.
ResoluteRaven
10mo ago
I mean, I don't think it's possible to create a test of political ideology that accurately predicts real-world behavior because those things are nearly orthogonal. In the same way knowing that a 12th century Templar knight and Mother Teresa were both Christians does not provide any practical guide to their actions, what a given liberal, conservative, or libertarian does in any situation is at best very loosely informed by their liberal/conservative/libertarian-ness. To the extent that those labels have meaning it is by providing the lens through which each individual interprets their own unique personal preferences. The number of people who have actually shopped around for an ideology whose principles they align with most strongly is so vanishingly small as to be meaningless, even though we are overrepresented by orders of magnitude in a forum like this one.
In other words, what you're looking for is a personality test and not a revised political compass test. For the record, my answer to your question is that it's entirely context-dependent but if you insist then I would have to go with option 1. I outlined my ideology here.
ResoluteRaven
10mo ago
Yes, woke leftists say that, and they are wrong. Copying them doesn’t make that argument any better.
When they do something worse to you than marginally reducing your chances of getting a job.
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