coffee_enjoyer
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User ID: 541
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
Because Australia is the odd man out in defining Peoplehood merely by the bureaucratic and capricious standards of who has obtained citizenship. The question must be asked, “why do the Lebanese consider other Lebanese their own people, but you want to consider Lebanese in Australians the same people as yourself?” Answering this question will give us important information on the nature of Peoplehood and whether it’s best to decide to define it on legal notions or ethnic notions.
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
It's absurd to me to think of an Englishman as being more "my people" than the Macedonian and Lebanese and Aboriginal and Sudanese players playing our national sport
Well, why is it the case that if you moved to these respective People’s “homelands” and lived there for three decades, they would never consider you to be a member? The Macedonians would not consider you Macedonian, the Lebanese would not consider you Lebanese, and the Aboriginals and Sudanese probably wouldn’t consider you one of them even if you were the third generation migrant Englishman. And the Chinese? Forget about it. You can be there ten generations and you would still be labeled a foreigner.
Could it be that there once was, or still is, an English cultural identity and even genetic inclination? In the same way there is for the Chinese? If that’s the case, that would be the #1 argument against the total inclusivity of Australian identity.
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
Rome did not have affirmative action, minimum wage, much of a welfare state, or an ideology of anti-racism (they were racist regarding tribal origin and stereotyping was common). As such we can’t compare the effects of immigration on Rome versus the effects of immigration on America. The middle class American subsidizes the education, policing, and healthcare of poor immigrants. It’s not like Rome where they tell the poor masses “figure it out” and the best rise to the top while the poor drown. Americans pay for all of it. And unlike in Rome, you can’t truly only hire people from your own tribe in order to protect your assets from a % change in population. The addition of a mediocre immigrant to America makes every American’s life more mediocre, because this is how the system of subsidizing and equalizing works here. In Rome, a mediocre immigrant would just be on the street dying. In 19th century America, too, you had this “libertarian” free for all.
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
It helps to be raised with religion for religiosity, in the same way it helps being raised speaking Chinese to master Chinese. But I think what you’re describing is adults having religious experiences. The absolute felt certainty of God is something like a blessing, not a pre-requirement of a religion. You mention the revivals of the previous eras. Consider John Wesley, one of the most important 18th century Christians, who founded Methodism:
In one of my last [letters] I was saying that I do not feel the wrath of God abiding on me; nor can I believe it does. And yet (this is the mystery), I do not love God. I never did. Therefore I never believed, in the Christian sense of the word. Therefore I am only an honest heathen…..And yet, to be so employed of God! And so hedged in that I can neither get forward nor backward! Surely there was never such an instance before, from the beginning of the world! If I ever have had that faith, it would not be so strange. But I never had any other evidence of the eternal or invisible world than I have now; and that is none at all, unless such as faintly shines from reason’s glimmering ray. I have no direct witness (I do not say, that I am a child of God, but) of anything invisible or eternal […] I want all the world to come to what I do not know”
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
Hamilton though, being an expensive broadway musical, mainly influenced the opinions of young white women and homosexuals. By casting all the villain characters (British) as white and making the protagonists non-White, it set up clear tension between the two with one side coded as losers. Hamilton reads to me as an obvious example of taking a positive white story (that everyone learns about) and subverting it shamelessly so that the viewer’s feelings can be altered for a social-political purpose. In this case, regardless of some original intention, the effect was that white girls and gays from affluent families were shown a revisionist story in which their white ancestors were evil and the heroes of a tale they heard as children were changed to an array of black and mixed race characters who speak, act, dance, and sing their stereotypical cultural art forms. The positive valence for these minorities increase, that of their white ancestors decrease, and they are left being less interested in the American Revolution (who are filled with the well-mannered white people specifically portrayed as bad).
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
We’re back to the same question of what “believe” entails. Does it entail “believe Jesus’ warnings and statements”, or does it entail “believe he exists”? These are very different, as “believe in his statements” means everything he told us must be done to not be damned. For instance in John we read,
If anyone does not abide in me he is thrown away like a branch and withers; and the branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned. As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love
Consider also that both the Greek words for “gospel” and “at hand” were commonly used to refer to a messenger carrying a good message, as in the case (for instance) of a messenger bringing good news about the decisions of a faraway King. If I believe in the Messenger, then I believe in all of the contents of the message. If the messenger says “believe in me or be damned”, I don’t say “I believe you are a messenger”, instead I read and believe the contents of the message. In this case, Jesus came with a message from the Father in Heaven. Most of the gospel is this message, and contains dire warnings to sinners. If Jesus says “those who don’t help the poor go to hell”, we should take him at his word, and not presume that this command is abrogated later. It would make no sense to issue these commands only for the command to later be totally abrogated in the easiest possible way (believing Jesus exists). It would essentially nullify half the Parables as having no utility, because the warnings are useless as all you have to do is believe a being exists. In fact it would be impossible to make sense of the Rich Man and Lazarus, where a rich man was sent to hell forever for being greedy. And it would again be impossible to make sense of the passages about the sinners who say “Lord, Lord” being damned, because Christ’s juxtaposition is between Doing Good to Brothers versus Not Doing Good. The juxtaposition wasn’t “believe I exist” versus not.
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
Can we pause and note the absolute race to the bottom that America is gunning for with its culture here? The consequences of this technology will be ruinous for whole generations. “Let’s persuade people to use a platform where we entice them with the most addicting possible videos and text, the kind of stuff that glues them to their phone” is something Satan would cook up. It is the most abysmally bad idea humanly possible. It will show the low self esteemed the exact, razor sharp, minutely precise content to keep their self esteem low and their eyes glued to the phone. It will show whatever keeps fat people fat, and consequently glued to their phone. It is going to show you whatever leads to the most drama, which glues you to the phone. It is going to show you content that makes you despise your neighbor and community, because the algorithm knows such content reduces sum total phone gluey time. Anything that promotes you to engage in a hobby is going to be at the bottom of the algorithm, because such content takes you off your phone. The algorithm and its brainpower of 20,000 PhDs has one purpose: to keep you on your phone. Its purpose is to, literally, reduce your happiness and engagement with the world as much as humanly possible, so that you will stay on your phone. And, because it’s an intelligent algorithm, it does this with the artful subtlety of a sociopath with an expertise in Stockholm Syndrome.
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
Going to use bullet points just for ease of replying to individual things
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If Protestants hold that “believing in the crucifixion is sufficient to save us from the punishment of sin and guarantee the new life”, then they can’t also hold “Christ says you must perform certain actions to be resurrected into the new life”. Christ specifically says that those who believe in him but do not perform certain actions will be thrown into hell, because Christ is found in the poor-off brother, and so whatever you do to him you do to Christ. These two conceptions of the Judgment are mutually exclusive. If anyone holds that “believing alone” guarantees salvation at the judgment, or that the crucifixion alone as something one agrees happened, they have to deny what Christ said on numerous actions: that certain actions are required to be saved from hell. Now, if instead you take “faith” to mean “assenting to every word Jesus says”, then this expansive-defined faith is sufficient. Because under the umbrella “faith” you find “must do certain actions to be freed from hell”. These actions are in Christ in the sense of spirit, they spring up from the Christ in a person versus a person’s identity. Yet, they must be performed using your mind and body and heart.
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Re “it would not itself be the doing of those things”, Christ specifically says that it is the doing of those things. If Christ wanted to say that simply professing he is God saved, then he would say that. But he says certain things just be done, else hell.
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The Protestants you posted do not believe that imitating Christ is what grants heaven and the new life. Instead they suggest you do it. This is actually what I wrote by the way. The problem is that there is hardly a motivation, because simply believing that Jesus died for sins is sufficient to save someone from damnation.
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Re: truth of Christianity, no. Truth does not necessarily mean historicity or literalism. Literalism is not the way many early Christians interpreted scripture. A thing can be true because it represents greater truth.
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
Protestantism is a strange case, because iirc the original Protestants (Luther et al) believed that works followed nearly intrinsically from proper faith. Today, I don’t think this is really the case among Evangelicals. I find this impossible to square with the contents of the Gospel, for instance that those who say “Lord, Lord” but do not help poor brothers are damned and in fact never knew him. This is one of the last things Christ said before the Passion and it is clearly explicated in the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus. I think what happened is a kind of superstition where “believe in Christ” turned into “believe I don’t have to do anything because Christ will do it”, whereas the original believe/faith meant in assenting to the whole of Jesus as a living message from God. As Jesus clearly says for us to do things, “believe in Jesus” would very much mean that we have to do things. But it’s more expansive than that, and also means that we have to imitate him.
If I could be most charitable to early Protestantism, I would say they were trying to prioritize motivation from love with no fear of hell and no care for conscious imitation. The atonement works through pure spectating, with none of the “carry our cross daily”. Instead of imitating Jesus, the focus is purely on how Jesus healed your sins. This should turn into maximal thanks and gratitude; the gratitude then naturally leads you to follow Jesus because he suggests you do, but you do it with zero faith. I think such a theology could work if a person has a perfect love for Jesus. But that perfect love is hard to come by. I think contrite repentance, continual thanks, and some fear is much more likely to develop a perfect love over time than a “once and for all” Herculean spectator crucifixion.
merely human sociological phenomenon. Do you think it's beneficial, but not true
I definitely think Christianity is beneficial, provided it is explored in the right way. I consider it something like… “clothed philosophy”. The Logos becomes Man, to ease the yoke and lighten our burdens. Because I think if a person is able to see how maximally joyful human life could be, they would consider their current lives to be approximately hell. Religion is about the perfection of human life, so it turns philosophy into story and ritual. So I see everything in Christianity as intended to make us better, not just morally but in emotion (spirit) as well. I think without this in mind, religion is apt to become superstitious and then wasteful and ultimately deadening.
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
There’s probably a lot of interesting overlap, but a key distinction in my mind is that a child is the creation and heir of a parent. The parent has an evolutionary instinct to love their child and vice versa. So we allow for more freedom in how parents raise children because we assume that it is done with good intent, and we also assume a parent has certain rights about how to deal with children. Are these rights deserved? I think so, not out of any magical principle of fundamental rights necessarily, but because no one on earth is more likely to have your best interests in mind and be more invested in you than your parents. And no one will know your genetic inclinations more than your mom and dad. As such it makes sense to preserve the power of parents over children. In exceptional cases this power is taken away, which is also good. And if our society finds that parents have an insufficient interest in their kids, this is probably a symptom of a very deep problem that needs to be addressed, because there is nothing that should come more naturally to a human. This is one of the invisible problems of too much economic competition by the way: stressed adults are less interested in their kids and have less energy to spend on them, which leads to net negative consequences down the line, including expensive diseases like obesity and addiction.
Another distinction is that a child will one day be an adult and have decades of freedom. So their period of “indentureship” is brief. We are more okay with contracts that last a few years than one’s whole life.
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
What I mean by deterrence is that the excellent philosophers of antiquity (probably including Philo) crafted Christianity in an attempt at an optimal way of life, which included the essential concepts of reinforcement and punishment baked in — or, incentive and deterrence. As in, the concept of hell has a utility. This is why the living philosophy of Christianity matches so well an optimal prosocial reinforcement model of behavior; because that was the point.
What would be the purpose of Christ in a narrative seeking to be the best possible reinforcement / punishment model of behavior? There’s a lot accomplished here. For one, if Jesus saves us from hell then it increases love for Jesus optimally. Second, if imitating Jesus is the way to heaven, then the person imitates an optimally prosocial and wise way of life. Third, a community gathered together to mourn our Perfect Martyr is a community which has perfect guidelines, a perfect exemplar, a perfect story, and a perfect friend and mentor in spirit, or in persona et spiritus Christi. Fourth, we see the damage of sin on display when humans killed God. Fifth, we see the holiness of God on display that he bore man’s sin while forgiving him. Sixth, we see the eternity of God in that he is resurrected.
Importantly, at least IMO, a Christian must fear Hell. This is literally commanded of us:
I will warn you whom to fear: fear him who, after he has killed, has authority to cast into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him!
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
This depends on what you mean by “actual thing”. Philo of Alexandria was an influential Jewish Platonist who interpreted the Old Testament allegorically and had a large influence on early Christianity. Does this mean he didn’t think the stories were “actual things”? He believed that they conveyed actual, spiritual truths by way of allegory and symbolism. Same with Origen, another influential early Christian. When we talk about the reality of religion we also have to understand that perfect certainty in God is rare; hence the leap of faith, the “I believe, help my unbelief” in the Gospel. Believing with all your mind and heart that God is real, and tries you and judges you, and hell is an ever-present danger, is hard even for the most fervent literalist.
the people being deterred can't know they're being deterred
Religions must persuade people, and they are competing against lifestyles that abound in much more primitive pleasures. A person can believe in hell and know that hell is a deterrence IMO, but there’s a moral or philosophical development that must take place, or else they might opt out of the entire religion.
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
Christianity solves this problem in a neat way. Imagine that you have with you a perfect friend and mentor who wants to shape you into a morally great person, and who uses the moral principle of “do unto others what you would have them of unto you”, and who has a collection of teachings he sent you. Now imagine he died to rescue you from eternal punishment. Then imagine the power of his moral teaching (the substance in a sense) resurrected himself, and that he will come back to judge you according to your soul — and those who are evil he will cast into hell.
Whatever action results from the belief is the next step, which is wholly contingent on a person’s background, personality, place in the moral process, etc (as it should be). By this I mean that a repentant pathological liar who cuts his lies by 5% every day is going to please God, versus a usually truthful person who has begun to lie 1% more every day without guilt. And it’s like this with all sins obviously. This is one of the points of the parable of the tax collector (an immoral profession) and the Pharisee, and the lesson of the widow’s mite. This is why the topic of moral discussion is not the consequent effects (actions) but the antecedent source (“out of the heart…”).
Then you might say something like, “oh, well then I will save my repentance for much later in my life”, but of course if you imagine an intelligent future judge this will not fly. What will be magically different about your procrastinating soul that is not in it today, when you are younger? It will be even harder to repent if your soul grows hardened, and of course there are many parables about this too. How would you personally judge someone who puts off the most important tasks out of cleverness? That is how God will judge. And in any case, the hour is near (the early Christians lived as if Christ was already “at the door ready to knock”; whether they truly believed that the world will end is far less significant than that they lived accordingly).
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
The problem that religions face regarding hell is that the adherent can pick whether or not to believe in it, and whether or not to go to church or believe in anything at all. Hell as a concept is ultimate punishment in the psychological sense; it is ultimate deterrence, so the point is to modify our present behavior. As a method of ultimate deterrence it can’t be triumphed over by good deeds. Why? For too many reasons to list really, but the big ones are: doing good deeds for their own sake puts the focus on an action, whereas morality comes from focusing on the Good which is God, and there would be no need to focus on the Good if a simple ToDo list saves all eternal ills; not every person can immediately do good deeds, even if they are essentially on a perfect moral path given their past behavior, which could lead to people like alcoholics and the infirm to feel that they are damned until they are cured; it reduces a person‘s interest in all religion, if all Good can be received from a simple checklist, and Christianity is a religion designed to socialize morality communally within the fully human Christ.
If hell is perfect deterrence, a huge problem arises in how to condition a person into this deterrence who is not seriously religious. A serious Christian sees the options as heaven or hell, but someone less religious sees it as “non-hell and probably heaven” vs hell. In other words, they are deterred from buying into the deterrence. Why have a fear of hell, when I’ll have less fear if I don’t believe it at all? So in order to even buy into the punishment of hell, you need to first buy into religion generally; in the same way that first you need the boy to sign up for the Great War, and only later can you force him to walk through no man’s land at the battle of the Somme.
This is very ironic, but hell is only for the believers. It is for the believers in the sense that the believers reap the full harvest of fearing hell. But in order for the magic of hell to work, you need to be always and perpetually saved from it by knowing the next moral action or step. And, in an ideal variant of Christianity, this is Christ — the socialized Good — and every step in your moral life would be his very steps on his path.
I am a big fan of hell, as an idea. It should be conceived of as not an additional thing to fear, but instead the One True Fear. So the kids today who are afraid that their zoomer haircut isn’t perm’d well enough, or that the Taylor Swift tickets are sold out — all of their petty fears would be sublimated to one great fear, the fear of evilness (which in Christian thought is eradicated from believing and imitating Christ).
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
You could have just posted the article and talked about why it’s interesting in the OP
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
Plato would likely argue that an intellectualized interpretation of art should have no influence on whether art is permissible. The purpose of art is to better the mind and soul of the median viewer, the citizen. If the art fails to do this, it ought to be banned. The public viewer is not going to over-intellectualize the art, but come away with an essentially intuitive understanding of what is happening. Peterson’s art is degenerate, and has no good in it whatsoever for a citizen of Plato’s Republic, for these reasons:
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The viewer just saw an ugly and violent scene, but with no practical and memorable warning to his own conduct, and with no cathartic release of emotion. In other words, the scene promotes stress but with no prosocial or beneficial emotion or consequent. So, you’ve just made a common person stressed for no reason.
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Not only have you wantonly stressed the viewer, but you’ve done this when he has expected something quite the opposite, and you’ve taken the spot of something that could otherwise have been very beneficial to the median citizen.
I find the question of what is beneficial and what is degenerate art easy to answer, it just requiews reasoning about the implications of the exposure. Let’s consider It’s a Wonderful Life. It’s a stressful movie with some tragic elements, but the stresses act as a warning to your practical conduct in world affairs. This will increase the chance of living a wonderful life in the future. Let’s consider the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus. A true tragedy with a fate of everlasting torture! What could be the benefit? Well, to induce a beneficial fear. Let’s consider a Clockwork Orange. Does it condone violence? Yes, and perhaps it does this too well — but it asks the viewer the important question of whether we ought to modify behavior using top-down conditioning (apropos!). How about, hmm, a Wes Anderson movie? If there are beautiful shots and scenes that sooth a person and inspire someone to live a more wholesome life, it is good. And so on. What would be banned? A show like Ozark that is a kind of “stress porn” stimulator but with no discernible practical takeaway to your life. A show like Kardashian’s which reduces sum total happiness among women. Fast and Furious movies. And so on.
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
They already have a martyr, so I don’t think adding 100 more will do them any good. France may get a terrorist attack in the future if they pushback on the North Africans, but the cost of these riots is already worse than the cost of the median terrorist attack in Western Europe. Right now, from any measure, it’s the lack of real pushback that is leading to increased rioting.
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
It hasn’t been too successful for stopping mine from looting the closet for shoes. Although I think posture could factor in too (exerting a dominant position over dog)
I genuinely think the best solution is to just start shootin’. Muslim youths in France respect force, just like their prophet used and just like their rap idols extol in their music. If you just start shooting them, even just with rubber bullets (but lots), or even better with paintballs that smell horrible when they break, they will stop rioting.
The key missing topic in the discussions on the French riots is that these guys really want and enjoy to light things on fire and loot. I would too, if I hated the people in the country and could get away with it. There is fundamentally no way to counter that except with punishment, ie violent. The punishment has to come with no social approval — prison, while bad, comes with social approval among their culture. But pelting them with rubber bullets, going into their neighborhood and smashing their cars, going into their neighborhood with a helicopter filled with a gallons of durian juice to drop on their apartments… they very quickly realize that the benefit is no longer worth the cost. You essentially have to humiliate and subject them. Just like any of us would feel living in Singapore or Hong Kong, that we would be swiftly punished for malefaction.
I have a dog and one of the things most interesting to me is how reinforcement and punishment is so clearly on display in its most primal way. You have to think like a dog with her. I can’t chase her when she steals something, because she likes to be chased. Yelling is ineffectual, because she likes yelling (barking). Even slapping her paws would do little, because the way dogs play with each other is more aggressive than that. If I’m dealing with a creature that likes aggressive play, being chased, and risk, the punishment has to be very much not pleasant. So a good one is crate time, but if you can’t do that you can give a painful physical punishment — I don’t do the latter because I love my dog, but I think it’s fitting for people blowing up libraries and so on.
I think the idea the “French people will move on” is wrong. This is a blow to the morale of the French people. They have received a serious injury to their identity. Living among people who can destroy your car and shop whenever they want is demoralizing and in some invisible way probably leads to an 80k monetary injury per every affected Parisian resident. It decreases sum total happiness and induces a feeling of helplessness. So it’s really serious. It’s not the same as if it were 10000 unrelated instances of minor theft.
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
I’d argue that the human mind does not like “complexity, action and fast paced strategy”, instead it likes learning, risk-taking and figuring things out. Learning to play music is going to be more satisfying in the long run than a video game, because while you’re learning and figuring things out you’re also expressing the best emotions communicable (plus cognitive enhancement, plus a social dimension if you want). And if you want fast-paced action, there are sports for that, which again promote other benefits.
Similarly, we aren’t drawn to “immersive world building”, we are drawn to beauty, and I don’t think a lifetime of final fantasy could compete with an hour under a waterfall or in an Italian city. It lacks so much of the sensory. Walking in a pixelated world does not compare with walking through Reykjavik half-drunk with friends or family.
Now there’s also a second-order analysis. You should consider what the activities you do afford in the future by way of implicit practice. After a few months of final fantasy, you’re going to find it difficult to shlep to the bars to meet chicks and friends, or to decide to enroll in a course that requires boredom and travel. But after a few months of arduous but rewarding trekking in the wilderness, you’re going to find you have the energy to pursue all manners of outside enjoyment. If you can have fun while increasing your physical health and mind (and walking is excellent for the mind) this will pay off invisibly in the future.
Then there’s a third-order analysis: what memories will we remember? We remember the most sensory memories. In fact, we often forget the arduous parts of life and selectively remember the greatest parts (eg nostalgia). So if we want to collect enjoyable experiences, then we should be looking at collecting the most memorable and optimal experiences, which would involve sensory novelty and other people interspersed with long periods of waiting / wakeful rest to devote to memory. I actually wrote a post on here a bit ago about how the optimal life certainly consists of optimal memories; if all we wanted was pure pleasure then we would simply inject heroin and then die, because time/memory wouldn’t matter, but we don’t do this.
A fourth order analysis would be, like, what will produce less guilt? Society judges people by experiences and creations. You can play zero games and never have a wince of guilt, because society will likely not judge video games as a facet of a fulfilling life.
I’m pretty sure videos games are objectively inferior to their real life equivalences always. So, permitting you can do the real life alternative activity, you shouldn’t play video games. The competitive fun is best found in team sports. The adventure is best found in nature and one’s own life. The memories are best made with friends. The novelty is best spent on wisdom.
Productivity doesn’t factor into this at all. If your object of life is Superior Enjoyment, then it’s simply the case that real life offers superior enjoyment. Because when you’re done playing team sports, you have had fun plus some. You had a fun experience you don’t regret, and you’ve also had necessary socializing, sun light, nature exposure, and exercise. An hour spent on team sports is always going to be better than an hour (or even three hours) of gaming, in your unhealthy room, staring at pixels, not moving your body, alone, unchallenged, etc. The memorable adventures in reality are always better than in video games or books. The exploration of wisdom is always of greater benefit than anything in Oblivion.
Note that Abrahamic religions are against gambling and other vices, but don’t have a word to say on productivity. Christ doesn’t care whether you work hard at your job, and in one parable even seems to commend a man who wastes his boss’s money to make friends. The argument against video games is all about the fact that its enjoyments are base, lowering, and fleeting. They are inherently inferior than real life alternatives, and the base pleasure lowers your sum total enjoyment. In a year’s time you will be measuring your real experiences, not your dumb video game exp.
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
I think many Arabs look like they have African admixture, and indeed the evidence says they do:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0002929707606302
We have analyzed and compared mitochondrial DNA variation of populations from the Near East and Africa and found a very high frequency of African lineages present in the Yemen Hadramawt: more than a third were of clear sub-Saharan origin. Other Arab populations carried ∼10% lineages of sub-Saharan origin, whereas non-Arab Near Eastern populations, by contrast, carried few or no such lineages, suggesting that gene flow has been preferentially into Arab populations. Several lines of evidence suggest that most of this gene flow probably occurred within the past ∼2,500 years. In contrast, there is little evidence for male-mediated gene flow from sub-Saharan Africa in Y-chromosome haplotypes in Arab populations, including the Hadramawt. Taken together, these results are consistent with substantial migration from eastern Africa into Arabia, at least in part as a result of the Arab slave trade, and mainly female assimilation into the Arabian population as a result of miscegenation and manumission.
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
Ambition is a strong desire for socially-evaluated achievement, almost always involving peer competition. Some of this is probably personality, and some of this is probably learned and honed. It’s a useful construct, why not? There’s a nice documentary on Netflix about Arnold Schwarzenegger, who is the embodiment of ambition. His entire life was about dominance over competitors, many of whom were peers that did not necessarily see themselves as competitors. This “ambition” drove him to be a top bodybuilder, then a millionaire in business, then a top actor, then governor of California.
Ambition, then, is the overzealous pursuit of gain. It’s going full Conan the Barbarian. The problem with ambition is that (1) it’s zero sum, and (2) it’s narrow-minded. A society filled with Schwarzeneggers would terminate itself. The dominance-hungry who fail would self-implode and lash out, and all the necessary thinking and consideration outside dominance would not get done.
Everyone is free to decide anything; knowing why most people on Earth choose to define peoplehood by blood could be useful for checking our neoliberal biases.
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