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WestphalianPeace


				

				

				
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User ID: 184

WestphalianPeace


				
				
				

				
0 followers   follows 14 users   joined 2022 September 04 21:53:39 UTC

					

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User ID: 184

I think it's difficult to understate just how important the effect of Stalin's takeover the Soviet Union had on American/European Marxist circles. There would forever after be two strains of thought that were perfectly intuitive and did not feel at all like a cop out.

1

Marxism works but starting it in Russia made no sense. The whole point is that Capitalism builds the capitol base and then once enough production exists only then do we shift how that production is distributed. But the only place Marxist revolutions happened were in Russia & China among peasants. This was an obvious corruption of original Marxism. It actually literally has never been tried.

For a modern day case of these, see Freddie DeBoer. The point isn't whether its true. It's whether or not a reasonable person who hasn't spend over 9000 hour studying microeconomics might find such an argument convincing.

2

It was going to work until Stalin betrayed the cause. A uniquely evil man. He corrupted Lenin's vision. He turned on all the original revolutionaries. He corrupted what would have otherwise been a functioning system. In this mindset the horrors of early War Communism don't exist. The USSR was going to work! Just look at those improvements in literacy rates! And Magnitogorsk! And all these rights that they had paper. But I'm not a fool. I know it didn't work. But just read Animal Farm. Or look at the Spanish Revolution. It's right there in how we were all working together until that bastard Stalin screwed it all up. I'm a communist because I approve of Lenin/Trotsky/Kropotkin's ideals, whose revolution was stolen away from them, but obviously i'm not a "Tankie". Those types of violations by the USSR is just proof of how Stalin messed it all up going forward.

And that's pretty much all you need. To the person who thinks in such a manner it doesn't feel like a cop out. It feels like sophistication. You can't even distinguish between communism, socialism, marxism, trotsky permanent revolution, Louis Blanque-ism Guaranteed Employment, Rosa Luxemburg thought, or Progressive Labor Union Revisionism for the Purposes of Getting Workers Used to Working in Committees Until the Actual Revolution. You just call all of it Marxist. But I know better. It's not that communism doesn't work. I know that in reality it was betrayed.

You don't even need to be personally invested in it all. You just need a disposition towards "everyone should have enough" and a smart friend who can answer your occasional question (or a youtube parasocial relation) and who can give you explanations that feel plausible. Enough to make you saudade for a world you've never known. Enough to make you put on the Soviet Anthem and smile on occasion before your next shift. Enough to make you call yourself a Marxist even though you don't think anything will change anytime soon. And then you listen to someone call Obama a Communist because he wants to create a.....marketplace for healthcare. And you roll your eyes and smile.

Because you know that real communism has never been tried.

The vast majority of this forum is atheist/agnostic. Some are Christian. But the numbers have to be seen to be believed

Source: Tracingwoodgrains's First Annual Survey, N = 885

Agnostic: 23%

Other Atheist 13.6%

Atheist Humanist 27.8%

Atheist Antitheist 12.7%

Making the total non-believer population round nicely to 77%. A little bit more if you include those who put down things like "catholic but lazy, not really believing" or "Taoist".

A census of what percent of the US is atheistic is difficult to pinpoint. An atheistic secular Jew may decide when asked on a polling question that his religion as ethno-religion is more important then a discreet theological claim and thus when the pollster asks "what religion are you" he answers Jewish. Even though when later asked 'do you believe in a God" he responds with a clear no. So too may the no longer believing Catholic who raises their kid in the church and keeps their thoughts to themselves because their Catholicism is too intertwined with their ethnicity to be unwoven. There is no contradiction here, just note that how big or small you want atheists to appear does depend on what precisely you are asking.

But for the simple "what religion are you" question. "Atheist" got 2% in 2007 and 4% in 2023. Source: Pew Research 2023 National Public Opinion Survey

What makes this forum so outrageously non-representative compared to the US population as a whole is not only that 4% vs 77% number, but also that the First Annual Motte survey also asked "what religion were you raised in". 30% were raised broadly non-religious. Meaning the average Motteizen isn't just non-religious, they are someone who was immersed and walked away. They say there's no zealot like a convert and I think this applies just as well to deconversion.

So if this forum has 3x as many explicitly anti-theists as the atheist population of the US as a whole and population here is more atheistic by literally 15x as much then your question transforms into something a little bit different. It's not just 'why does this forum broadly...' but rather 'why is a forum of this specific belief breakdown treating religion with such respect'

And for that I return us to perhaps the source. In favor of Niceness, Community, And Civilization, by Scott Alexander

I seek out people who signal that they want to discuss things honestly and rationally. Then I try to discuss things honestly and rationally with those people. I try to concentrate as much of my social interaction there as possible.

So far this project is going pretty well. My friends are nice, my romantic relationships are low-drama, my debates are productive and I am learning so, so much.

And people think “Hm, I could hang out at 4Chan and be called a ‘fag’. Or I could hang out at Slate Star Codex and discuss things rationally and learn a lot. And if I want to be allowed in, all I have to do is not be an intellectually dishonest jerk.”

And so our community grows. And all over the world, the mysterious divine forces favoring honest and kind equilibria gain a little bit more power over the mysterious divine forces favoring lying and malicious equilibria.

Andrew thinks I am trying to fight all the evils of the world, and doing so in a stupid way. But sometimes I just want to cultivate my garden.

Or as Our Own Tracingwoodgrains brought up iwhen trying to explain this place in On Mottes and Mythologies

It’s pretty simple. I remember the kid I was, born into and seriously committed to a set of beliefs that I would need to seriously examine and step away from later in life. I remember just how rare it was to have a candid, good-faith discussion with people on the other side. I remember just how damaging the Arthur Chus both in and against my community were, how much unnecessary pain they caused. And if there’s any chance in an increasingly polarized world to build a space that allows that kid to honestly discuss his most controversial, difficult opinions and get sincere engagement and pushback instead of being shut down or mocked?

I will drag myself across broken glass to maintain that space, and all the Arthur Chus in the world aren’t enough to convince me otherwise.

That’s The Motte for you. It’s not perfect. It doesn’t always live up to the ideals Scott Alexander and others have championed. But it comes closer to being a working discussion ground for people who hold dramatically different beliefs than anywhere else I’ve found, and that’s just not the sort of thing you give up on.

What we've all participated in constructing here is a precious little creature. I take seriously the horrific implications of why treat them with respect at all.

The Thirty Years War became the benchmark to measure all later wars. The inhabitants of eastern France interpreted each subsequent invasion int he light of stories told about the Swedes and Croats who devastated their region in the 1630s. Soldiers fighting in the trenches along the eastern front of the First World War believed they were experiencing horrors not seen in three centuries. In his radio broadcast on 4 May 1945, Hitler's architect and armaments minister, Albert Speer, announced 'the destruction that has been inflicted on Germany can only be compared to that of the Thirty Years War. The decimation of our people through hunger and deprivation must not be allowed to reach the proportion of that epoch' For this reason, he went on, Hitler's successor, Admiral Donitz, had given the order to lay down arms. Public opinion surveys carried out in the 1960's revealed that Germans placed the Thirty Years War as their country's greatest disaster ahead of both World Wars, the Holocaust, and the Black Death. - Peter Wilson, The Thirty Years War: Europe's Tragedy, pg 5-6

I find this forum to be a civilizational candle in the dark in these ircivilizational times. And that means taking the religious among us here seriously. If we are excessively demure to them then that is only a reason to expand that sensibility to others, not to deny them that environment in the first place. There is enough vitriol on every other website and in every other which side are you on boy shibboleth seeking interrogation-conversation. If you J'accuse this place of taking people who hold unsubstantiated beliefs ridiculed in greater rat-dom and engaging with them with seriousness of tone and tenderness of heart then I take your accusation in stride.

Yes. It is.

I think one of the big issues is the old core playerbase were nerds who approached fiction from the point of view of External Immersion.

"What is this world? what is it's culture? How would their people approach things? What has the universe made clear is normal and what is abnormal"

This is why Grognards still bring up "Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura"

Or they'll play fantasy mods (Anbennar) of Europa Universalis and not think twice about how every primary human faction is European inspired and fantasy races take up the entire rest of the world, creating and effective all European humanity. All with in universe expalantion of Orc slavery explained as reparations to humans for former Orc invasions. Because "well that's just what this universe is"

And this older nerd playerbase thrives on this. The actual diversity of settings is what's appealing about fiction and then their internal logic is to be followed through on.

But that approach to fiction is actually really rare! Most people are Inserters, not Immersers. They play games in order to insert themselves into a universe. What interests them is the challenge of achieving their mindset in each new circumstance. (sidenote: it's a matter of degree. not an either or.) To these people the setting itself is significantly devalued. There's nothing 'there' about making the Forgotten Realms setting stay in character with previously established lore. No instinct of dissonance. In fact each shift in the setting to better align with their perception of the world around them (and remember, most people have an astoundingly poor sense of what the demographics of any given country are. along with a complete inability to distinguish between what's normal in their local area vs the country as a whole) only makes more sense to these people. It feels more immersive for their insertions because it's more intuitive. And it's more intuitive because it's now more familiar. And that's normal.

Even though, personally speaking, I don't find very interesting.

I'd recommend Ross Douthat's book "To Change the Church" to get a good sense of that. Either in text or audiobook. It's really quit the engaging read, even for a non-Catholic or even non-believer.

Rather than an outright schism a soft coup looks more like manipulating public opinion through journalists ignorance, manipulating bureaucracies hiring (your ideological allies) & firing (or doing the catholic equivalent of "promoting" someone to Siberia), using ambiguous statements that motte (castle) in the text but bailey (field) in public understanding until the lay public is so unaware your old bailey (field) wins the battle for assumed public opinion. Use edge cases to create extreme exceptions to a long standing principle, then expand that principle to other comparable but less serious edge cases. Then after enough time has passed don't talk about the long standing principle at all and instead explain that it would just be hypocritical to allow exceptions for these extreme edge cases but not to those more common cases.

As an example of how long standing doctrine can become completely irrelevant to the common believer until that new generation forms the next generation of deciding authorities, see American Catholic Opinion on Birth Control. A mere 8% of American Catholics believe birth control is morally wrong. If you point this out to those other 92% of Catholics they won't explain in detail why they humbly disagree with the Church. They'll claim there is no disagreement! The most common reaction will instead be an aghast disgust over your bigotry in claiming something so ridiculous as that the Catholic Church opposes contraception. And the coup is complete.

Nearly half of Catholics don't even know Catholicisms distinction regarding the Eucharist. Athanasios may stand like a rock against the world. But the average member is not Athanasios.

To pull off a coup as Pope you have to make it look like you never pulled off a coup. Everything has to be continuity. But with the right voters added here, the right ambiguous statements added there, you can pull off a coup. You can alter unchanging Dogma because you convinced regular people that you never actually altered anything. It was always there the whole time.

https://tracingwoodgrains.substack.com/p/on-mottes-and-mythologies

It's motte-adjacent but directly relevant. TracingWoodgrains writes on why this place exists in the first place, what it's appeal is for those drawn to it, and then how it relates to his own personal crisis of faith within Mormonism. It ends with a very moving declaration to ensure others get the same charity & respect that he was given.

Many motte posts are interesting for their esoteric takes or niche knowledge. But tracingwoodgrains post captures the feel of the draw itself to this place. Of the frustration with an external world of fear and polarization. Of the drive to challenge oneself and find 'opponents' worthy of respect. Of remembering that often people's closest beliefs come from a point, not just of a model of what is true, but of a very intense personal relation to who they believe themselves to be. Of the two futures in front of one each time you encounter 'someone wrong on the internet' - to try to destroy them, or to try to live in peace with them.

On further look

at your image "The Israel Lobby and American Foreign Policy" by Mearsheimer probably shouldn't be on there. Mearsheimer is a thoroughly mainstream author. Anyone studying International Relations will have to contend with the Realist school of thought and Mearhsheimer is pretty unavoidable.

Likewise putting "On War" by Carl von Clausewitz on there is a bit like saying Sun Tzu's "Art of War" is a banned book. It's not just "Not Banned" it's prominent and pushed. The casual reader will like Sun Tzu's small chapters writing style far more than Clausewitz's "let us consider War from Idealism first principles and also here's 200 pages on Napoleonic era reconnaissance" (skip the Napoleonic stuff, but don't ignore the Idealism. It actually important to his argument) But On War is still literally the first book that will be presented to anyone studying the Europe & it's descendants Way of War.

At most there is a vague sense of "Clausewitz is outdated because he deal with states and not non-state actors". But On War is the elephant in the room at any given time. No one gets a masters by saying "ehhh clausewitz is basically still correct". That doens't indicate any intellectual development. So while there is a bevy of people criticizing Clausewitz that certainly doesn't rise to the level of Banned Book.

The Afghanistan Papers revealed that if the truth is sufficiently awful people will refuse to believe it or discuss it because they are convinced it's more plausible that racially biased people are making unfounded accusations.

https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1457753480840372231 (US forces unable to stop child rape and because 'it's their culture')

"Homosexuality was taboo among adults but it was not uncommon for afghan men of means to commit a form of sexual abuse known as bacha bazi, or boy play. Afghan military officers, warlords, and other power brokers proclaimed their status by keeping tea boys or other adolescent male servants as sex slaves. US troops referred to the practice as "man-love Thursday" because Afghan pederasts would force boys to dress up or dance on Thursday evenings before the start of the afghan weekend. Although American soldiers were sickened by the abuse, their commanders instructed them to look the other way because they didn't want to alienate allies in the fight against the taliban"

I also recall an old Foreign Affairs article that made an addendum to why it happens on Thursday. Broadly speaking, many Afghans believed that prayer on the Islamic holy day, friday, cleansed them of their sins. So if you rape someone on Thursday, pray on friday, you are then clean and worthy of paradise on saturday. Of course the sin was the homosexuality, not the rape.

What makes it doubly insane is that Bachi Bazi was a source of illegitimacy among the wider populace. which means destroying it would have an actually removed a source of Taliban legitimacy.

https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1366444372972081153 (bachi bazi as source for taliban support)

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ELZD1UIU0AE8WxU?format=jpg&name=large (Afghan governor was a drug dealer and tyrant but his province was actually stable)

When the US was stuck between a hardliner who could keep the peace and total anarchy it was incapable of biting the bullet as a matter of policy. If stuck between a plan that had proven successful but icky or a plan that would be unsuccessful but sounds good it went with the sounds good.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ELZE6_TUUAI9rdH?format=jpg&name=large (US aid would filter through contractors over and over again until about 1/20th actually made it to the country)

Literal actual corruption would have been more efficacious then what the US did. The US would spend outrageous amounts of money on domestic actors and not make any use of the purchasing power difference of Afghanistan being dirt poor. Who do we have to thank for this lighting money on fire policy? Thank staunch conservative senator Jessie Helms.

"...because when the soviet union fell apart we had to cut a deal with Jessie Helms to continue our aid programs. The deal with Jessie Helms was that we would spend the money in the United States. We would buy American products, American grain, American consultants, American Security experts, and they would implement our aid programs."

Finally just for a final kicker. Rural Afghanistan could be so isolated that it would literally inbred. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FDr8Z6lVIAMK_O6?format=jpg&name=4096x4096 ("I hate to say it, but there was a lot of inbreeding. The district chief had three thumbs" he said in an Army oral-history interview.)

That's a lot of scattered stuff. So lets return to my central point. When the truth is so awful people will take accurate descriptions of the situation as proof of racist evil rather than of tragic suffering.

It would have been tragic but true to describe Afghanistan as a land of inbred child rapists who believe that Islam means that if you commit a sin on Thursday then on Friday its cleansed away. That stability at the hand of tyrants would have been more valuable for producing peace than Western european style metrics about the percentage of women in parliament. And that literal direct bribery and corruption applied at the point of local discretion by the military would have been order of magnitude more effective than actual policy. And that the cause of restricting the military's discretion and demanding Made in America contractor corrupt fiscal suicide was due to a Conservative Senator.

But could you have said that? Does anyone believe that you could walk around in polite society and talk frankly about such issues and how we are going to approach solving them. Could you ever imagine Obama making destroying culturally acceptable religiously justified child rape as his first priority in an hearts & minds strategy?

Twitter personality InverseFlorida invented the term Sanewashing to describe how people watered down "Abolish the Police" into something sane sounding. That people would get angry at you for saying "Abolish the Police means exactly what it says and the people who first started saying it are very clear about this" because those people had actually come to believe that X actually meant Y. People who sanewash really believe their revised version of a statement to be the real meaning of the original statement.

The Afghanistan papers showed that people will Sanewash away not just Insanity, but also Evil. If forced to confront uncomfortable truths they will not just disbelieve a statement but they will go through a process of putting it through a sanewash sieve. Once they have their watered down pseudotruth they will then use that 'truth' as proof that the actual truth is just a racist overexaggeration.

Now consider how many people are unwilling to believe the accusations that Hamas uses hospitals as munitions bunkers & military HQ's. And you will be unable to unsee the instinct to Sanewash Evil.

I would back On War if only to get it across to those seeking power that the point is to achieve a goal. it's to instantiate the world you desire. Too many find power, exercise that power, and then are befuddled when they didn't get what they want.

"But I won. I won the fight/beat the army/socially humiliated the opponent. Why don't they give up?"

well, if you didn't get what you want then you didn't actually win now did you? Art of War is great for impressing upon someone that they should maximize their chances of winning On War is great for impressing upon someone that they should know what winning looks like ahead of time and then pursue victory. Not the other way around.

most of what I see on the list is ignorable drek. And most manifesto's make for awful reading. At best useful to seeing the difference between their literal words vs how the media represents them.

That said On War is pretty much essential reading for anyone who wants to understand war beyond a peasants sense of "Who are the Goodies & Who are the Baddies/Why don't we just nuke everyone as a first resort?" The Michael Howard translation is fine.

Democracy The God that Failed has awful prose and relies a lot on buying in to Austrian Economics but is useful as self-refinement for exactly why one ought to support our current end of history style of government. Either walk away from with a real sense of the unavoidable flaws in democracy, convinced that there must be a better way. Or alternatively confront it's arguments and be made tall by fully understanding the steel man motte for democratic governance.

Or if you want something more readable just go with Caplan's little discussed "Myth of the Rational Voter". People always bring up his education book and his open borders book but his 'Democracy barely works in practice and the academic theory for how it works is hilariously unrealistic' just sits there quietly.

Don't forget, you're here forever

I'd be interested to see also a list of effectively banned videos related to these books. Extremist groups often create video's arguing their worldview and these video's often veered into the mixing together seemingly unrelated ideologies. It's a combination of fascinating and hilarious. Imagine, for example, seeing a video on Northern Irish Loyalist extremism and then suddenly the video starts explaining the necessity of a Land Value Tax. Incredible.

Or if in the midst of a Kahanist speech there was some side ramble against the Israeli government because of the importance of environmental regulations on water usage for sustained economic use.

If anyone else remembers, there was a time in early ISIS when they spooked the world by virtue of having a good media game instead of Al Qaeda style grainy shaky cam in the mountains. They produced a video explaining how after ISIS will fix the economy by brining back the Gold (Dinar) Standard in resistance the Federal Reserve. It is inadvertently hilarious/voyeuristically fascinating as they go back and forth between ancient history lessons, quotes from the Quran about weights & measures, and Free State Project tier screeds against the Federal Reserve. All in English.

You can still find it on Internet Archive (views: 150) but it's otherwise effectively scrubbed from the internet.

I can't help but find such absurdities to be interesting to collect.

It's not everyday I get to use so appropriately so I couldn't help but comment.

It's led to the most hilarious accusations though.

Turns out that if you say "maybe follow a norm where you don't interfere in the internal affairs of another country and they agree to do to same to you" you'll find yourself accused of being both ultra far left and ultra right wing

"Seeing like a State" continues to stay relevant.

Interesting stories, fandom goodwill, and developer reputation continue to be the illegible benefits of the varied forest biome. All sacrificed for a cadastral map of Norway Spruce accessible to investors who can only work by algorithm.

Imagine being one of the most combed over subjects of all time, to the point where people use your field as an example of ground so well trodden there is nothing left to say, and then someone unrelated walks in an discredits a major source all because he got super into early 00's internet religion fights.

Have you ever considered reading the War Nerd translation of the Illiad? I confess to not having read the original poetic translation. But I found myself literally spontaneously guffawing and feeling as though relaxed next to a campfire storyteller in his novel format retelling. Sensations that I'm not sure are as easily flow-into-able in the more high brow accurate translations.

That said I'd like to read it in the original someday. Do you stand by the Fagles translation for the average man?

I quibble but it's a reasonable argument. We've definitely largely forgotten the degree to which defeating the Nazi's was rhetorically presented as Smashing Junker Prussian Militarism and stopping the Germans from reading On War is consistent with that.

All the more absurd that then a few years later the US would be so taken in by the histories of Halder and Melenthin.

Would love to see a list of texts banned by US occupation forces in Japan. My impression is that there was a strange combination of renaissance of writings from the simultaneous abolishing of Japanese censorship while also starting American censorship of militarist/expansionist texts. But I'm far less exposed to the Pacific Theater and could be wildly off base.

I'm perfectly happy to describe 80%+ of the entire population (aka a large majority of women plus a sizeable majority of men) as "most people".

80%+ seems sufficient to be described as 'Most'

I also believe that women and normie men are 'People'.

this is why I distinguished in the beginning about old core playerbase demographics being a distinct population. They were a skewed population, where a minority approach to matters had a majority control over marketshare. Within that small population the majority culture was different.

is it really your contention that the best way to decribe "Most People" is to exclude the near entirety of one sex and the majority of the other sex?

For anyone who finds this type of military puzzle solving interesting I'd recommend listening to Drachnifel's video's on these exact US Navy Fleet Problems. Great write up on the history and use of such programs.

I've also actually played some old school commercial wargames before! Historicon is a great convention with some incredible set ups.

And yeah when you find out about real life wargames you see that they fill that important niches of teasing out just how one might ought to respond under unstable circumstances. Kaiser Wilhelms insistence on winning the wargames he partook in was a gross violation of the Prussian traditional of the Professional General Staff.

Speaking from memory without a direct source I recall an anecdote that Field Marshall Paulus of 6th Army/Stalingrad fame wargamed how Operation Barbarossa would play out and concluded that after a few weeks of initial breakthrough the supply situation would become a shitshow, and then the entire offensive would grind to a halt near Moscow. I imagine he felt positively Cassandra-esque.

But for those proper military games implemented on a grand scale in real life - any war nerd worth his salt ought also to check out the Louisiana Maneuvers pre-ww2.

400k men moving around with umpires determining exactly what happened at each step. All done with 1940's technology. They had charts to figure out who beat who! Imagine maneuvoring around and then going "wait. I've got 20 dudes. You've got 10. But you have a machine gun and I have one mortar team. okay get a ref." and then waiting 30 minutes, getting a resolution, and then doing it all over again on the next hill. Mindnumbingly tedious but incredibly important for teaching US Generals what modern war might look like.

Quakers still exist. But you are directionally correct. There are like 100k Quakers left in the entire US. Even fewer depending on how important you judge continuity of method to be.

But yes. Quakers used to be something like 2/3rds of Pennsylvania and now they are a drop in the bucket and mostly old and dying.

Also surprised you didn't add in Hitler's Table Talks by 'The Brown Eminence' Martin Bormann. There are translations available but the translations are flawed and unreliable. Which means that unless you speak German you are restricted from one of the top 5 key books to getting a window into Hitler's Worldview. Decades of the topic being done to death and yet here we are still waiting for a reputable translation of one of the key books.

Weirdly enough some of the critiquing of the translation by the book was done by one of the New Atheist minor figures, Richard Carrier. Once you get into the weeds these things really do become a small world.

When ISIS first started doing propaganda video's I recall a real sense of "wait these people are actually serious. they are actually trying" as opposed to a sense of pathetic LARPer's who'd have Dog Catching the Car syndrome if they ever actually took power.

Similarly I recall reading of Al Qaeda lifers basically complaining that the only people they can recruit are violent young men and the mentally ill and so they were desperate for more bureaucrats/judges to oversee the territory they've briefly overrun.

Anyone who starts really getting into WW2 will eventually learn of Khalkin Gol. Zhukov's presence helps since he's everyone's first USSR general they learn about. But for the average person it's still obscured by several orders of magnitude. And even for the amateur enthusiast it's not exactly a clear "next operation after d-day, north africa, & stalingrad" type battle to learn about.

Has anyone here ever ran a Petrov Day celebration before?

I've no connection with the actual rat community, but I found the idea to be interesting. Held my first one last year (a small edit of the Jim Babcock version). It had rough patches but overall felt like there was a kernel of something there and I'd like to smooth it into something more satisfying. I'm curious if anyone else has ran one before and, if so, did you edit the program at all?

Also if anyone is in the Greater Philadelphia area and would be interested experiencing a cringe yet sincere rationalist ceremony I'd be happy to have guests.

People of all races reduce people of other races to flat cheap characters in romance novels or pornography, and imagine dating that flat character when you ask them about interracial dating.

I think its worth making explicit that Asian women are also the thinnest grouping in 'racial group broadly defined'.

Asian women are vastly less obese than the non-asian population of the United States.

There is this idea that white people (and weebs in particular) think of Asian women as this old practically Victorian Era submissive 3 steps behind the husband trope but I contend that that's not the primary appeal of Asian women to White guys.

In an American context Asian women are far more likely to be

  • Japanese, Korean, or Chinese descendent

  • roughly speaking are thinner than white women by 30 pounds, hispanics by 40 pounds, and black women by 50 pounds

  • more likely to be intelligent as well as college educated

  • less likely to come from a family that's undergoing social breakdown from fentanyl/drugs.

  • match speech patterns/accent to the local White population if they grew up in a predominately White area instead of adopting a distinct dialect of opposition.

If the Hispanic population in the US was small, distinct, and had the same level of thinness and educational attainment I maintain that Hispanic girls would have a similar highly desired status as Asian women today. Imagine a situation where the US was 4% Chilean, Argentinian, and Uruguayan with the same traits as expressed above. I guarantee if you talked to a random white guy he'd go 'oh yeah. hispanics are cute. I love hispanic girls'. But hes just using physical features as shorthand in order to estimate an what is overwhelmingly an expression of body type & compatibility. It's not a desire to obtain a lifestyle of tropes from old media and/or pornography about what "foreign women" are like.