ResoluteRaven
No bio...
User ID: 867
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
23hr ago
Lab-grown meat has made it surprisingly far given how many people hate it for different reasons: Cattle farmers and the meat industry want to kneecap their economic competition, conservatives dread a future where steak is banned and scientists in white coats force feed them pink slime, hardcore vegans think that true commitment to their cause should require sacrifices and this sort of moral shortcut would undermine the whole puritan thing they have going on, economists hate it because it's currently expensive as hell, non-Westerners laugh at the whole enterprise, and environmentalists who can do math insist on switching to insect, soy, or mushroom protein instead.
Really the only groups rooting for its success at the moment are biotech investors hoping to get in on the ground floor of the next big thing, biologists who are overconfident in their ability to pull it off, and the aforementioned liberals and environmentalists who haven't crunched the numbers.
ResoluteRaven
8d ago
This line of argument goes at least as far back as Gibbon's claim that Christianity fatally weakened the Roman Empire and the modern online form includes a heavy dose of Nietzschean master-slave morality in the way they contrast supposedly Pagan and Christian ethics. In a sense they are correct, in that if one is committed to permanent racial separatism and inequality then any universalist and egalitarian ideology, be it Christianity, Communism, etc. represents a beachhead from which future moral attacks may be launched on your position. What they don't have is any sort of workable replacement, retreating instead into memes and BAP-type shitposting rather than doing the hard work of building a philosophy to replace the one they continue to hack away at even as it holds up the ground beneath their feet.
ResoluteRaven
9mo ago
As Carl Sagan used to say, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. A single clear picture of an alien spacecraft, a single radio signal listing off prime numbers, a single microbe in a meteorite that shares no common origin with life on Earth, any of these would be evidence of extraterrestrial life, but none have been presented. All we get is a lot of hemming and hawing, winks and hints, and the tiniest crumbs of blurry images or eyewitness reports. Show me the data and we can have the conversation. Otherwise I don't see the point.
ResoluteRaven
11mo 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
10mo ago
Only for certain subpopulations. Others, for example New England whites, are comparable to Europeans in this regard.
ResoluteRaven
9mo ago
If by misgendered you mean referred to by a different pronoun with all else remaining equal then I think people could get over it, but if you mean actually treated as the opposite gender all the time then you end up with horror stories like David Reimer's. Most people who think of themselves as not having a strong gender identity are like white people in the US who don't think of themselves as having a strong racial identity. Take them out of their present circumstances by either treating them as the opposite gender or sending them to live in Africa, respectively, and they will discover very quickly that their gender or race are real and important to them.
ResoluteRaven
2mo ago
It's not clear to me that Taiwan and Ukraine require the same kinds of weapons. The former needs naval and air assets while the latter needs artillery shells and tanks. Any war between China and US allies in the Pacific (outside of Korea) would be a quick and deadly exchange of missiles and planes that ends with one navy still afloat and one at the bottom of the sea, Battle of Midway style, rather than the kind of unending slugfest that a war between two nations that share a land border can devolve into. By the time you find yourself fighting a ground battle on the island itself, a war for Taiwan would have already been lost.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
Chechens are a Muslim hill tribe with a culture and language alien to that of Orthodox Russians, not fellow East Slavs and members of the triune All-Russian nation. There is no room in that conception for a Ukrainian nation whose destiny is different from that of Russia and there never has been. If Putin got his wish they could keep their folk songs (except the ones about fighting Russians, perhaps) and quaint clothing and go on speaking their peasant dialect regional language at home if they so desired, but that would be the extent of their autonomy.
ResoluteRaven
9mo ago
The change happened last year as a nationalist PR move by Erdogan, partially motivated by annoyance at having the same name as a dumb-looking bird and partially by a sense of pride in being able to force foreigners to use their endonym. More broadly, there does seem to have been a slightly higher rate of country name changes in the past few years (Turkey to Türkiye, Czech Republic to Czechia, Swaziland to eSwatini, and Macedonia to North Macedonia).
ResoluteRaven
10mo ago
I'm of the opinion that once you start debating what is or isn't a "real" member of a given category, it's time to switch to E-prime or else risk No true Scotsman-ing your way from Orkney to Newcastle. In this case the relevant question can be phrased with the verb form i.e. not "Is [person] a mother?" but rather "Does [person] mother [child]?"
As a relevant example, I didn't know that my grandmother was not my father's biological mother until after she died; neither he nor any of his siblings had ever brought it up. I don't think I have ever even heard him say the word "stepmom" before, as he refers to them as "my mom" and "my biological mother." It's unclear to me how unusual this is, though I assume it is more likely the younger the child and the more absent the biological parent is when the stepparent takes over (in this case 4 years old and dead, respectively).
ResoluteRaven
11mo ago
Not everyone's local norms are the same, otherwise we could just call them universal norms. Traditional southeast Asian culture was relatively accepting of gay and "spiritually trans" individuals, usually in a religious context (the stuff the woke left says about "two-spirit" priests in indigenous societies is not in fact completely made up, though they take it way too far in assuming they were exactly like modern trans people). The country in that region least affected culturally by either western colonialism or the expansion of Islam is Thailand, and they also began modernizing early enough to profit first from curious westerners through prostitution and sex tourism.
In the case of Taiwan though it is in fact mostly due to recent western cultural influence. Young people there, who overwhelmingly support independence from China, are influenced by leftist anti-colonialist narratives coming out of the US, which have brought with them a lot of baggage ranging from environmentalist opposition to nuclear power, being anti-military (this position is both more complicated than it seems for contingent historical reasons, but also exactly as dumb as it seems for a group whose very existence threatens war with a superpower), promotion of aboriginal culture and languages, support for LGBT rights, and most recently its own me too movement.
This claim has always sounded like an excuse to me, because I have only ever heard it from people who are middle or upper-middle class, while families much poorer than theirs both in this country and abroad are somehow able to raise multiple kids.
ResoluteRaven
9mo ago
I mean, the trans people I know don't get upset when they are misgendered in contexts like someone who knew them pre-transition slipping up for a second, or a native speaker of a language without gendered pronouns like Mandarin or Persian getting confused.
The internet caricature of a trans activist who flies off the handle at the slightest infraction of pronoun etiquette is not something I've ever come across in the real world, even in extremely liberal areas and college campuses, and neither is the sort of person who would misgender them in an antagonistic manner to trigger such a reaction.
At most the people who have disagreements with modern gender politics, including me, just avoid pronouns altogether in situations where it makes us uncomfortable.
ResoluteRaven
9mo ago
While India alone is not likely enough to provide an alternative to China for the reasons you and other posters have described, I think that collectively the ASEAN nations, India, and Bangladesh can. With a combined population of over 2.2 billion, this block of more or less pro-American nations (China may invest heavily in some of them, but it's not my impression that they have enough leverage to force Cambodia or Bangladesh to issue a wholesale trade embargo against the US and its allies, since ultimately those countries mostly just care about getting rich) would be sufficient even if we assumed their citizens had on average only half the human capital of China's. That assumption seems a bit harsh even for India, and is certainly not true for places like Vietnam and Malaysia.
It's true that coordinating trade relations with a dozen countries is a lot more complicated than managing a single relationship, but it also spreads out the risk, and the supranational organizations (i.e. ASEAN) that can facilitate this already exist. Looking at the tags on clothing and cheap manufactured goods in recent years, it seems to me that this shift is well underway for economic reasons irrespective of US foreign policy decisions, but there are a few moves that could perhaps help secure its future, such as negotiating a formal alliance with Vietnam.
ResoluteRaven
10mo ago
I at least wouldn't have any problem with that in theory. I don’t see the point of trying to freeze the ethnic map of the world at any particular point in time, as these things are always in flux. In practice, however, the things I do care about (cultural practices, crime rates, behavior) are so highly correlated with national origin that the simplest approach is to screen by background rather than thoroughly vet every individual immigrant to get only those that will assimilate well.
When I have visited Scandinavia in the past, the thing that annoyed me about immigrants there wasn't that they were nonwhite, it was that many did not seem to speak the local language, and I came close to berating several shopkeepers in my broken Swedish for their lack of respect towards their new home.
Cultural homogenization or breakdown of law and order are much worse outcomes in my eyes than racial replacement, and to the extent that they can be disambiguated (and perhaps they can't, this a point of disagreement), I don’t particularly care about the latter.
ResoluteRaven
11mo ago
Better than them causing a civil war in a first world country.
Your proposal itself would be enough to start a civil war in a first world country. The "we" in your case is not some silent majority of Europeans but a tiny minority that would first have to carve a bloody swathe through your own kin to seize the kind of power needed to conduct mass deportations.
It is the Laestadians, traditionalist Catholics, and other rapidly growing Christian sects who have the right approach, as they have the potential to weather the coming storm and outbreed the other survivors.
ResoluteRaven
8d ago
Myanmar
The Burmese Civil War rumbles on, with rebel forces pulling back from Myawaddy on the Thai border, because apparently the Karen National Army and the Karen National Liberation Army don't get along. All the same, the map still isn't looking good for the central government, with attacks on all fronts, fighting on the outskirts of Mandalay, and the Arakan Army closing in on the regional capital of Sittwe. At this point the partition of the country into 5 or more states seems inevitable, which seems like it will be mostly a victory for traffickers of drugs, arms, and people, who can thrive in the chaos of a half dozen failed states. But hey, maybe one of these ethnic groups will thrive without the Bamar boot on their neck and end up building a successful and prosperous society. Here's hoping.
ResoluteRaven
9mo ago
Seeing as the proposed admissions system has a portion that explicitly "would test a candidate’s ability to bullshit convincingly, the most important elite skill there is" I assume that's what they were going for.
ResoluteRaven
10mo ago
You can't bribe people into having more children with government subsidies when it was becoming wealthy that caused this situation in the first place, and the population of any developed country will see right through any natalist propaganda for the pitiful attempt at cultural engineering that it is. This issue will never and can never be addressed by the tools of the state, outside of implausible scenarios like spending your entire nation's R&D budget on artificial womb technology and robot nannies, going full 50 Handmaid's Tales (Saudi Arabia is not nearly theocratic enough to prevent dropping birth rates), or the simplest route of nuking oneself and returning to a pre-industrial agricultural state.
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
6mo ago
We certainly hear a lot more about the USS Liberty than we do about that time the British bombed the French fleet after their surrender to Germany, killing over a thousand sailors, or the many times commercial airliners have been shot down, among other such incidents. What sort of conversation do you think we should be having? Should we break our alliance with Israel because they killed 34 of our sailors? We're allies with Germany and Japan after all, and they've killed about 10,000 times more Americans than that.
ResoluteRaven
9mo ago
I think there's a fundamental difference in temperment between the kinds of people who support immigration and the kinds of people who oppose it. The former encompasses those who are excited by the idea of meeting new people from far off lands, trying new kinds of food, and uniting all of humanity in a shared civilizational project. The latter encompasses those who just want to be left alone, to live and die in the land of their ancestors, and to promulgate the traditions that were passed down to them without change being forced on them from the outside.
The issue (for us Americans at least) is that the United States by its nature is hostile to the latter sort of mindset. An offhand remark in this post by Bret Devereaux gets to the heart of the matter, to wit: "In a way, one may feel pity for the born-American who emotively longs for the comfort of the nation because it is something they cannot have, but then there ought to be a country for the people who would rather not be in a nation and here it is." Many of us here, including me, long for a nation. I don't want to rule the world, I don't care for American exceptionalism, I don’t care about having the most Nobel Prizes or the most innovative companies or being at the forefront of technology, I just want a home inhabited by my own people, though I've already accepted that I will never have one (being not only American but mixed-race as well).
Going off of your point about urbanism, what has always galled me is how much more beautiful European cities and frankly people are compared to their American counterparts, knowing the difference in wealth. Some of the few things Europe has left going for it (in purely material and aesthetic terms, of course people have an attachment to their own culture/language/etc.) are gothic cathedrals and a lack of visible homeless drug adicts or morbidly obese people walking around in public spaces.
It's pathetic that the richest country in human history can't close the gap on these things when you consider how far ahead the US is by any other measure. We could build our own Vienna or Paris if we wanted to, but all we can manage is Las Vegas and Disney World. When it comes to small towns and rural areas, the only place where the manmade environment hasn't depressed me has been New England (crossing from Massachusetts into upstate New York and seeing the contrast in what the small towns look like feels like crossing the iron curtain into some post-industrial wasteland).
On pretty much any other topic I will happily argue against liberals who romanticize Europe, especially when they're immigrants ("If you think Denmark is so much better then why did you choose to move here?"), but I have no counter on this one.
There is a reason many of those urban cores lost their population and it isn't just because the people there decided they wanted to move out one day because of changes in technology or lifestyle. Without the increased crime rates, race riots, and domestic terrorism of the 60's and 70's, America's cities would probably look much more similar to those in Europe.
My understanding is that a family home is explicitly not a third place, because a third place is by definition a neutral public meeting ground with a semi-rotating cast of characters who have no obligation to be there. It might be possible to make one's house a third place by hosting enough open and regular events and parties, but that would be quite unusual, and would be made unnecessary if more typical meeting spaces e.g. coffee shops, bars, bowling alleys, dance clubs, etc. were common enough to meet people's need for socializing.
More options
Context Copy link