ResoluteRaven
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User ID: 867
ResoluteRaven
11mo ago
Whether we see what we call progress or not depends in large part on the timescales we choose to look at. From the perspective of a hunter-gatherer 10,000 years ago, nearly all of subsequent history until the iron age at best or the industrial revolution at worst was a step down in quality of life for the average person, who had to live as a subsistence farmer. Technologies like writing (by the Greeks after the Bronze Age Collapse), metalworking (by the successors of the Old Copper Culture in the Great Lakes), architectural methods (Roman concrete), modern materials manufacturing (Fogbank), and even how to make fire (the Sentinelese and Tasmanians) have each been lost and had to be rediscovered years, centuries, or millennia later. Our own stores of information are more stable and numerous than our ancestors', but they are not invulnerable to breakdown of physical media, link rot, incompatible file types, or being drowned in a sea of AI-generated nonsense that will make separating fact from fiction nearly impossible. It would only take a single generation of broken transmission to lose significant portions of what we have gained.
If we look at moral concerns, say sexism for example, we see no steady change in any one direction over time. Women had more freedom in Dark Ages Greece (the time that Sappho was writing poetry) than in classical Athens (when they could hardly leave the house), then more in Roman times (now they could at least own and inherit property) and even more in the early Medieval period (see the letters of Heloise and Abelard for an example), which was followed by the Inquisition, witch trials, Puritanism, and eventually Victorian repression. We see the same thing in China, where in the Bronze Age there were female generals leading the Shang army into battle and whose supposedly ancient patriarchy with its notorious footbinding is less than a thousand years old and stems from the Neo-Confucian reaction to the liberal Buddhism of the Tang Dynasty. The gains of modern liberal feminism are almost entirely dependent on the energy surplus provided by fossil fuels that enabled labor-saving machinery like dishwashers, dryers, and microwaves. If the power were to ever go out (which is not inconceivable, just look at South Africa), then we'd be right back to a more traditional division of labor between the sexes in a hurry.
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
11mo ago
This isn't going to make you feel any better, but for many, if not most, people outside of the US the term "American" carries more weight than "white" only because they are taken to be synonymous. It is considered patently obvious to my Asian relatives that their (American-born, monolingual English-speaking children) are not "Americans" and that neither are blacks or hispanics, regardless of how long they have lived here. If you learn any Asian language you will hear such sentiments expressed regularly.
While I think our experiment in separating the concepts of nationality and ancestry has been noble and well-intentioned, its modern defenders would do well to remember that what they are fighting against is nearly the full weight of human nature along with the culture and mindset of every other civilization on the planet.
ResoluteRaven
11mo ago
Traditionally, the whole extended family would live in the same house, with all working-age members contributing to a shared pool of income and the elders making the financial decisions. Once enough wealth has been accumulated, the whole clan will move to a new house that would be better than one any individual member could afford on their own. As long as you have enough children and grandchildren bringing in money, your lot will improve over time.
This system is of course breaking down, as declining birthrates reduce the working-age population of any given family and as western individualism slowly dissolves the old social structures. The ultimate result will be as you imagine, with future generations unable to afford the homes they would like because the family accounts have been overdrawn and split up.
ResoluteRaven
11mo ago
It seems to me that many places outside of East Asia, mostly but not exclusively in the Anglosphere and Northern Europe, had within living memory (and in quite a lot of them still have, as a matter of fact) safe schools, clean streets, and as much innovation as there ever has been. The greatest advances in science and technology took place in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a time with a much more restrictive social order than we have today, and I remain unconvinced that the removal of these restrictions through successive waves of progressivism and liberalization over the past century has done anything to make us more innovative in engineering, literature, etc. One would be better off making arguments for those changes on deontological grounds than by any utilitarian calculation of scientific or artistic output.
America has never been an ethnostate. If anything it is the literal anti-ethnostate. As far back as 1776, Thomas Paine pointed out that less than a third of Pennsylvanians were of English descent and so any claims of being an English nation were already moot.
The direction has been clear since then: from just Anglos to accepting all Germanic and Celtic peoples to accepting all "Judeo-Christians" and so on. I too have colonial ancestry, but I don’t see how my New England Puritan, New Netherland Dutch, and Palatine German ancestors formed any sort of ethnos. They certainly wouldn't have said so, those of them that even had a language in common to communicate in. Their blood may be mingled in me now, but so is that of subsequent waves of immigration from Europe and Asia. Where do you draw the line?
There is a path towards a single American nation, the same one followed by the Romans from a civic identity that encompassed the whole of the Mediterranean world from Gauls to Numidians to an ethnic one of Greek-speaking Romanoi living in the Eastern Empire after losing most of the Middle East to the Arab invasions.
However, the road to Byzantium is a hard one and involves the loss of prestige and power on the world stage and a retrenchment into more parochial, local concerns. In many ways we are already on it, but it is not the rediscovery of a centuries old white ethnic identity (though depending on the exact demographics it may be framed that way by some) but rather the binding together of those populations that are already here, be they of European, African, Asian, or indigenous descent, and from our perspective it may seem as strange for that new people to claim the mantle of "American" as it would be for Augustus to see some Greek Christian from Anatolia in the 10th century claiming to be "Roman."
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
11mo ago
it would be distinctly American as opposed to the corporatized globalhomo we're descending into today
What is "corporatized globalhomo" if not distinctly American? Ask any Frenchman, Russian, or Indian and they will tell you quite clearly where it comes from. Now that doesn't necessarily make it good, but some monsters are homegrown.
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
11mo ago
I mean, even if cultural assimilation is weaker than civic nationalists would like to think, there is still the matter of literal assimilation. All the white Americans I knew growing up were either the stereotypical "1/16 Irish, 2/5 Italian, 1/4 German, etc." mutts that European nationalists like to make fun of, or the children of recent immigrants from Eastern Europe. The former cannot obviously be sorted into any of those individual categories, unless we are going by self-identification and not actual genetics (let's say our 1/16 Irish person claims to be Irish-American). But of course if we are going by self-identification then at best any differences are some mixture of culture and self-sorting by personality e.g. all the alcoholics identify as IrishPolish and they have some genetic factors in common apart from Polish ancestry.
The other way around this would be to claim that you can do a population-level analysis by the overall % ancestry from each immigrant group, rather than by counting individuals i.e. the way some people would analyze Latin Americans by the population level breakdown of European, Indigenous, and African ancestry, even if every individual is mixed. Whatever utility that has I doubt it works for differences between European ethnicities, if you could ever disentangle them (23andme can't even distinguish between French and German ancestry yet).
ResoluteRaven
11mo ago
Burma
One of the many conflicts around the world that has been overshadowed in the past year by the Ukrainian war has been the ongoing civil war in Burma (or Myanmar, if you insist). Now, there is a sense in which there has been civil war in Burma for the entirety of its postcolonial history as various minority groups have attempted to secede and established de facto independent states in the highlands, often funded by selling opium, but the past two years have seen a marked increase in violence, including in the formerly peaceful lowlands, following the 2021 coup d'état. Even with increased popular support, the various insurgent groups have been unable to break the impasse and descriptions of the Burmese military's attacks on villages in the countryside often read like something out of the Vietnam War. This is all made even more sad by the fact that this is a country that seemingly should be a development success story, having once been the wealthiest nation in Southeast Asia.
ResoluteRaven
11mo ago
If we're not embracing full cultural relativism there must be a line somewhere beyond which certain things are unacceptable even if they are part of some group's culture. Jumping the subway turnstiles in New York or shoplifting in San Francisco are actions that are widespread and largely overlooked and while it would be personally unwise if an individual attempted to stop someone doing those things (in the same way it may have been unwise in this case for the pregnant woman to press the issue of these teenagers camping on the rental bikes), I think society would be better off if instances of antisocial behavior were challenged by citizens when the authorities are unable or unwilling to intervene.
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
11mo ago
It would be more properly described as Galician collaboration rather than Ukrainian collaboration. The inhabitants of left-bank Ukraine had about as much to do with it as Serbs did with the war crimes of the Croat Ustaše.
ResoluteRaven
11mo ago
I think Albania is the best choice. It's cheap, relatively safe, has decent amenities and some nice beaches. Depending on where you're from, you may also get a better reception from the locals than you would elsewhere in the Balkans (i.e. you'll find American and NATO flags all over Tirana, while street peddlers in Belgrade sell Russian Z merchandise).
ResoluteRaven
11mo ago
Japanese life may seem depressing from a western perspective, but what they have managed to do that nearly every other country has not has been to adapt to modernity without losing the core of their culture. Rather than splintering into one faction that blindly apes Americanized global culture and one that tries with desperate futility to turn back the clock to the good old days, as most societies have (see Dubai vs ISIS, Westernized Russian oligarchs vs Putin-style revanchists, etc.) they have adopted the technological trappings of the West without becoming a poor imitation of it, and are able to export their own culture back in the form of anime, samurai movies, video games, food, and the general sense that there is something ineffably different about them and their way of life.
You would have to be steeped in internet leftist culture to understand that, "Trolling, threatening, harassing, or inciting violence towards individuals or groups will not be tolerated. Racist, sexist, or otherwise intolerant language in both comments and submissions will be removed." means that pointed questions against the progressive consensus will get you tossed out.
And was it your impression that reddit moderators were not "steeped in internet leftist culture"? This seems to me like jumping into a pool and wondering why it's wet.
ResoluteRaven
11mo ago
There are certain banks without ATM withdrawal fees (Credins Bank is the main one) that you should look for when exchanging cash. I think some places will also let you pay in Euros, but there will be a hefty markup.
ResoluteRaven
11mo ago
The death penalty has various serious problems
Are your problems with the death penalty pragmatic or moral? If they are pragmatic, then as you point out this proposal is even farther outside the overton window and will never be implemented. If they are moral, then all I can say is that I think that if we as a society decide that someone should die we owe them the respect of shooting them in the head instead of bullying them into suicide with mind games or financial incentives to assuage our guilty consciences by only killing indirectly.
ResoluteRaven
11mo ago
it’s tough for me to wrap my head around the idea that most adult women’s beliefs are malleable to that extent
It's not that women's beliefs are malleable to that extent, it's that people's beliefs are malleable to that extent. Having consistent political beliefs serves no purpose for the vast majority of people the vast majority of the time, and is often actively harmful to one's own social standing. Their behavior is not what requires explanation; it is a perfectly sensible way to go about life and reduces the likelihood of interpersonal conflict, including in this example of relationships.
We are the weird ones here, and even to the extent that any of us have unchanging, well thought-out principles with regard to certain issues, we all have other areas where we haven't spared a single thought and are happy to go along with the herd. As an example, my father has strongly held political beliefs and acts according to them, but he has almost no opinions whatsoever regarding food. Whatever he is presented with, be it burgers, sushi, silkworms on skewers, African peanut stew, or roasted guinea pig (all things he has actually eaten), he will eat it without complaint and promptly forget about it completely unless asked a set of leading questions, and he finds it baffling that I remember the characteristics of different foreign cuisines or have any sort of ranking of them in my head.
ResoluteRaven
11mo ago
So any time you engage in conflict, you should probably go for broke and try to completely eliminate the opponent from the gene pool
You don't need to kill all of them, you just need to thoroughly assimilate them (although this usually involves killing a lot of them). This could be thought of as removing them from the meme pool, I suppose. Modern French people are mostly descended from Gauls who were massacred and enslaved by the Romans, yet Napoleon's armies proudly fought beneath the Roman eagle and he adopted the titles of Consul and Emperor for himself. The same goes for Arab nationalists from Egypt, or Italian and German nationalists from any of the dozens of formerly independent states that once occupied the modern territory of those countries.
And of course if the progressive dream of "browning America" were to succeed and we became a completely ethnically and racially homogenous society (a surprisingly trad vision of the future if you think about it), then it would be impossible for any one group to pay reparations to another because we would all be descended from both the perpetrators and the victims of whatever historical atrocity was being adjudicated. Not that I expect us to get much farther than Latin America along the path of race-mixing, and they still have distinguishable groups with lingering grievances.
ResoluteRaven
11mo ago
The taste is pretty good, like a cross between chicken and rabbit, but picking meat off all the little bones is quite time-consuming.
ResoluteRaven
11mo ago
There have been societies where suicide is an option presented to and taken by many criminals (Classical Greece and Rome, Premodern China and Japan), but these societies were all much more shame-based than our own, and were places where the stain on one's family reputation and the posthumous treatment of one's children, spouse, friends, etc. could be noticeably improved by choosing to do "the honorable thing." I think you would need that sort of understanding hardwired into the culture before people would accept this particular bargain, and simple bribery just doesn't carry the same weight as all of society, your ancestors, and the gods pressing down on you to do it.
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).
Given the genetic evidence I think it's certainly possible that most of mainland Southeast Asia was ruled by South Indian kings who brought in an appreciable number of settlers in the hazy period before recorded history proper began in that part of the world, but I agree that it wasn't the Medieval Chola state that did that.
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