I assume Mongols, Magyars, Turks, and so on don't count?
Not that it matters, but their blood lies, spilt, in the dirt of the Pannonian Plain, not in any modern Europeans in appreciable quantities.
I think you're regurgitating a lot of, far leftist, Frankfurt school theory uncritically. Stuff like The Authoritarian Personality, and countless other works. There is a whole cottage industry of stuff like this by post-modernists and cultural Marxists. Not that I have any sympathy for the far right either; but, to uncritically regurgitate Marxist-Freudian psychoanalyses done by their ideological opponents seems like a bad way to get to the bottom of their actual psychology.
I mostly just wish people would take to the idea that Marx and Freud were bad social scientists and that the entire edifice built on their works should be cast aside.
Hyperion
1d ago
No, with pillarization everyone is still under the same government with the same laws. The millets were more like autonomous zones, but defined entirely by ethno-religious affiliation, not by the territory the people lived in. They had formal laws and collected taxes.
Pillarization is more like what the middle east was like before the millet system and now after. People lived in pillarized ethno-religious communities with in the various states, but there was no formal system of legal division at the level of the state.
Hyperion
3d ago
Those college campuses still had actual conservatives on them, don't forget that. The radical left and leftists in general, were a minority of a minority then. Conservatives and centrists still dominated the campus. Now the radicals are the minority of the leftist majority, bolstered by the foreign and immigrant Islamic student population.
Also, the radical minority from before is now running the asylum. They pushed for the creation of 'studies' programs that could only accept leftist professors and pushed out conservatives and moderates wherever they could. They use DEI initiatives to further marginalize anyone who would go against them even in STEM fields.
The march through the institutions is almost complete, now we just have to wait for perestroika and glastnov in 3 generations, if we're lucky, maybe I'll still be alive then.
Hyperion
6d ago
Now in practice I think it's more complicated; 'if only the tsar knew' is a meme for a reason. But- formal one man rule seems to incentivize anti-corruption drives at the very least.
You don't seem to be advocating one man rule. You seem to be advocating feudalism. China had formal one man rule and this rule was carried out by a massive, powerful bureaucracy. Same thing in France, Britain or Prussia. Whether the state was being run by a parliament of nobles, an elected parliament or just a king. They all needed bureaucracies once they became centralized.
Hyperion
7d ago
How are kings and nobles going to run anything except through bureauracies? These were things created by kings to run their countries. Kings and aristocrats will still need bureaucrats and courts to run things, your just changing who gets to decide what the laws and regulations are, not the need for them.
It didn’t happen in ancient history like after the siege of Melos.
There are countless examples of women and children being massacred throughout history. The sack of Magdeburg, the sack of Baghdad, Nader Shah's sack of Delhi, the Sand Creek Massacre, or this massacre of Globular Amphora Culture women and children(they might have even been killed by proto-Germans). History is littered with stuff like this, human brutality isn't rare and it isn't exceptional.
Hyperion
15d ago
I have trouble embracing the progressive worldview on Gaza because those same principles, applied to WWII, would have me side with the Axis powers. And I am quite certain that the world is a better place because the (Western) Allies won the day. Not that they are perfect (ha!), but I'll certainly stan them over the major Axis players.
The Germans and Japanese starving to death weren't POCs. It's that simple.
Decolonization means removing the colonialists. It's that simple.
Hyperion
20d ago
Oh, I completely agree with you. I'm just coming at it from the other side.
Given how insane their policies were, for all the reasons you listed, they should have never gone down that path; or, realized long ago that it was fruitless.
Given that they did do all those things anyway; yes, only something really shocking could have changed their minds.
Hyperion
20d ago
I wouldn't call Germany asleep at the wheel with regards to Russia. I would consider them turning the wheel as sharply as they could towards Russia.
The only surprising thing is that a crisis as immense as the current war in Ukraine was what was needed to wake up their leadership.
Hyperion
20d ago
Whatever you, personally, believe, it all stinks of embarassed conservatism.
Why can't conservatives be 'classical liberals'. If you look up a list of historical classical liberals it's people like Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Thomas Sowell, and Ronald Coase. People like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were considered neoliberals. They were and are considered conservatives as well!
Hyperion
23d ago
I don't think it's just counter-signalling. Freddie really is a dyed in the wool leftist who does have contempt for any remotely rightwing people, even principled liberals and moderates. He hopes he can win those people over to leftism by presenting a more reasonable version, but he knows which side he is on.
Just read this piece from his substack. He hates the anti-woke. Full stop. He hates James Damore and he hates Quillete and he hates Jordan Peterson. He is a leftist. He is 90% woke, he just wants to push for a less insane version.
This isn't a rhetorical tactic, it's what he really believes.
Hyperion
27d ago
We had, for a while, a middle class of technicians, educated from normal schools, who were able to use our brains to make a good living. But that option seems to be hollowing out.
This upper middle class group hasn't been hollowed out, it's been growing. What is hollowing out is the middle class factory line worker who makes good money despite being effectively a low skilled laborer. The skilled knowledge workers have been growing in numbers and income.
Hyperion
28d ago
From what I know about 19th century Georgia I don't think it would be that exceptional.
Hyperion
29d ago
The question is over what kinds of people we are going to make in the future, not over who to cull now. I don't think all beings have an equal right to life.
Hyperion
29d ago
A world without natural selection would lead to an accumulation of deleterious variants that would quickly lead to the extinction of any species. If I was given a choice between health or sickness, intelligence or ignorance, and life or death, I'd choose life every time.
Hyperion
30d ago
I find your talk about genetic engineering for intelligence to be basically a form of genocide.
By that definition evolution by natural selection is genocide. Anything that caused differential reproduction of genotypes could be considered genocide even.
Hyperion
1mo ago
But then in the 70's a bunch of psychologists saw computers and were astonished at how much they reasembled human thought, and came to the conclusion that the human mind works like a computer. I'm personally against the expression "Artificial Intelligence" because computers are neither intelligent nor dumb.
All physical processes can be simulated by a computer. They are all computers. You seem to believe animal brains are special, but they aren't. An Intel CPU or an Nvidia GPU are both made of electrons and quarks, just like the neurons in your brain. Both are the same particles governed by the same laws of physics and just as computable as any other configuration of particles.
Hyperion
1mo ago
That was Robert H. Frank's argument for a steeply progressive consumption tax. It would reduce zero sum status competition while keeping savings/investment high.
The greater male variability hypothesis and the related cluster of explanations is still the best theory I've seen bandied around for this.
The Y chromosome has a much higher mutation rate and its presence determines sex, which makes men the volatile and unstable genetic testing ground, and women the selectors and carriers of the successful experiments.
What?
No, the reason males are more risk taking is because a male can impregnate multiple females, where as, a female can only be impregnated by one male. So a male has a higher expected return to risk taking mating strategies.
Chickens are the opposite of humans where females have ZW chromosomes and males have ZZ chromosomes; however, roosters are famously aggressive and risk taking. You can't stop them from fighting if enclosed together.
In contrast to the XY sex-determination system and the X0 sex-determination system, where the sperm determines the sex, in the ZW system, the ovum determines the sex of the offspring. Males are the homogametic sex (ZZ), while females are the heterogametic sex (ZW). The Z chromosome is larger and has more genes, similarly to the X chromosome in the XY system.
Hyperion
1mo ago
The Christian theory has the same problem the Positivist one has unless you just assume the consequent. If we were made by God as rational being we can be rational, but how do we know we were made by God and are rational except through our senses and reason? If we were made irrational by a demon or evolution then the Christian theory is wrong and the secular theory could still be right for the wrong reasons.
This reminds me of Lob's Theorem, or as Scott Aaronson puts it.
Do you remember the puzzle from Thursday? The puzzle was whether there's any theorem that can only be proved by assuming as an axiom that it can be proved. In other words, does "just believing in yourself" make any formal difference in mathematics? We're now in a position to answer that question.
Let's suppose, for concreteness, that the theorem we want to prove is the Riemann Hypothesis (RH), and the formal system we want to prove it in is Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory (ZF). Suppose we can prove in ZF that, if ZF proves RH, then RH is true. Then taking the contrapositive, we can also prove in ZF that if RH is false, then ZF does not prove RH. In other words, we can prove in ZF+not(RH) that not(RH) is perfectly consistent with ZF. But this means that the theory ZF+not(RH) proves its own consistency -- and this, by Gödel, means that ZF+not(RH) is inconsistent. But saying that ZF+not(RH) is inconsistent is equivalent to saying that RH is a theorem of ZF. Therefore we've proved RH. In general we find that, if a statement can be proved by assuming as an axiom that it's provable, then it can also be proved without assuming that axiom. This result is known as Löb's Theorem (again with the umlauts), though personally I think that a better name would be the "You-Had-The-Mojo-All-Along Theorem."
Hyperion
1mo ago
This is just a kind of argument style common among educated Christians. We have a couple other ones who comment frequently here and think this Alvin Plantinga style skepticism is a slam dunk against naturalism and empiricism.
There is some in the Balkans, but you have to remember that after WW1 and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, there were massive population transfers between Turkey and the Balkans. Ataturk, father of the Turks, is almost certainly just a Turkicized Albanian, what with his bright blue eyes.
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