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PaperclipPerfector  27d ago (text post)   25133 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 20, 2024

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As far as I can tell, the primary beneficiaries of "disproportionate impact" policies and hiring of "marginalized people" are black people. The people advocating and voting for these policies are white people.

How and when did this come about? Well, affirmative action dates back to the sixties, and was well underway in the nineties. As for where all these black people came from, if I remember your family history correctly, I am afraid you will have to blame your ancestors.

What if my ancestors didn't own slaves, and in fact fought to free them? Do I get a prize?

They weren't a problem when they were slaves. Your ancestors fighting to free them are why we're in this mess.

Slavery was a bad idea, and should never have been implemented. You might as well blame Kulaks and wreckers for the failures of Communism. Your ancestors should, in fact, have picked their own damn cotton.

You call it slavery, I call it animal husbandry. It worked just fine and while cruelty to animals sucks, domestication is not evil. Often it's a pretty great deal for the animals. Nature is harsh and wild animals are generally worse to each other than their human masters.

My ancestors are at fault inasmuch as they failed to adequately anticipate the fatal flaw in voting-based government, which is the incentive to expand the franchise to those who should never have had it in exchange for political support and dominance over the responsible opponents who refuse to stoop so low.

We allow all kinds of hot takes, including "slavery was good, actually," as long as you can argue the case civilly and in accordance with our rules.

You've broken a few of those rules, notably "Be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary for your argument" and "Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion."

Sometimes people really want to say something about a particular group of people, because this is what they really, honestly believe. Things like "Jews are vermin," "Women aren't sentient," or "Black people are animals." And when we mod them for saying these things, they complain that we are "protecting the feelings" of the group they despise. Well, no, we don't care that you might hurt someone's feelings (arguing that blacks have lower IQs and higher criminality, or that women are hypergamous, or that Jews have disproportionate power in Hollywood, likely hurts some people's feelings, but you are allowed to say that). But it's one thing to describe your grievances with the behavior of a group, and quite another to declare they are less than human and should be treated as such.

Assuming you are not just trolling, pretend there are black people participating here (sometimes there are) and that you aren't trying to insult and denigrate them (even if that's what you do want to do - you may not).

Yes, I think you're generally correct to flag me here as 'just being honest' isn't a great excuse for being so transgressive, though most of the rest of what you wrote doesn't apply in this case I think. This isn't an instance of me wanting to say mean things about a group.

Nor is my issue with 'black people' so much as... look, I'm having sincere trouble finding terminology that gets the idea across without being legitimately interpreted as 'antagonistic'. There's a continuum problem. "Human" is a fuzzy category and largely in the eye of the beholder. Is a gorilla which speaks sign language human? What about Lucy (A. afarensis)? Primitive Tanzanians who discovered fire, then lost the secret and apparently reverted to the lifestyle of other hominids generally not recognized as human?

Skin color is not especially interesting to me. But I agree that the language about human/non-human is inflammatory and doesn't really get the point across, so I'll try to refrain from it in the future. My sincere apologies.

There is a quality which is something along the lines of 'capacity for moral responsibility' that generally (but not perfectly) correlates with IQ and which I think is localized entirely within select groups of ancestries and almost entirely men. These embody and sustain priceless phenomena ranging from how they experience and perceive the world to cultural inheritances. This heritage is inestimably valuable, fragile, and, increasingly, endangered.

My take on 'humans' outside of those groups is that they're something more like children than like non-humans. The trouble, of course, is that they generally don't have the capacity to grow into members of those groups. So they're something else, a third category between children and animals. Something more like permanently disabled children which are helpful dependents at best and, if they get strong and numerous enough, serious existential threats to the system and individuals within it. Their existences are often improved by domestication (honest question: is that word okay? I feel like it's exactly the one I want, no shade) and in the process they can participate in the grand project and enjoy in many of its fruits.

Meanwhile, inability to see this picture clearly or even discuss it intelligibly is one of the greatest threats to the Good and I'm at great pains to figure out how to articulate it.

So that's the perspective, more or less.

There's a continuum problem. "Human" is a fuzzy category and largely in the eye of the beholder.

There is not a continuum problem, and "human" is not a fuzzy category largely in the eyes of the beholder. Awareness, sense-of-self, language, volition and Will are obvious and inescapably significant, despite more than a century of extremely popular lies to the contrary. The evidence you are gesturing at simply does not exist, and claims to the contrary have long been established as lies that no one bothers to maintain or defend any more.

Is a gorilla which speaks sign language human?

There are not, nor have there been, any gorillas that can speak sign language. Claims to the contrary appear to be a more elaborate form of Clever Hans, and more generally yet another example of how Psychology and Sociology are grifts that have polluted our society for more than a century.

What about Lucy (A. afarensis)?

We have no observations of Lucy's behavior or capabilities one way or the other. What we can observe is current humans, and the observation shows that while their capabilities may differ, the cluster is still significant and very, very well-separated from all other animals.

There is a quality which is something along the lines of 'capacity for moral responsibility' that I think is generally localized entirely within select groups of ancestries and almost entirely men.

I observe capacity for moral responsibility in my wife, and in the females of my family generally. They make choices and live with the results. That does not mean there is a difference in how they think versus how I and the males in my family think, but the difference is not a matter of "greater" and "lesser" in the way you seem to be claiming.

If domestication is a thing, it is a thing that all humans require. I can identify ways in which I myself have been "domesticated", how my instincts and desires have been shaped away from raw selfishness and self-gratification toward responsibility and care for others. in this sense, I see no way to argue that domestication is something white men do to white women in particular and blacks generally. In other senses, I cannot see support for an argument that "domestication" exists at all.

Well, firstly, thanks, because now I feel like we're having a good, interesting, and productive conversation.

What do you think about Alex the parrot, who (allegedly, and feel free to object) combined words to make neologisms?

And what's your take on humans with nasty FOXP2 mutations such that, uh, let me grab a quote,

FOXP2 came to light through the discovery by Jane Flurst, an English geneticist, of an unusual London family whose existence she reported in 1990. The family consists of three generations. Of the 37 members old enough to be tested, 15 have a severe language deficit. Their speech is hard to understand, and they themselves have difficulty comprehending the speech of others. If asked to repeat a phrase like "pattaca pattaca pattaca," they will stumble over each word as if it were entirely new. They have difficulty with a standard test of the ability to form past tenses of verbs ("Every day I wash my clothes, yesterday I ___ my clothes"; four-year-olds will say "washed" as soon as they get the idea). They have problems in writing as well as speaking. The affected members of the family have been given intensive speech training but mostly hold jobs where not much talking is required. "Their speech is difficult to understand, particularly over the telephone, or if the context is not known. In a group of family members it is hard for you to pick up the pieces of the conversation, which is difficult to follow because many of the words are not correctly pronounced," says Faraneh Vargha-Khadem of the Institute of Child Health in London.55

Some of the first linguists to study the affected family members believed [Page 48] their problem was specific to grammar but Vargha-Khadem has shown that it is considerably wider. Affected members have trouble in articulation, and the muscles of their lower face, particularly the upper lip, are relatively immobile.

It could be argued that their defect stemmed from some general malfunction in the brain, which was not specific to language. But the IQ scores of the affected members, though low, fell in a range (59 to 91) that overlapped with that of the unaffected members (84 to 119).56 The core deficit, Vargha-Khadem concluded, is "one that affects the rapid and precise coordination of orofacial [mouth and face] movements, including those required for the sequential articulation of speech sounds."57

The affected members of the KE family, as it is known, have each inherited a single defective gene from their grandmother. They provide the results of an experiment that no one would even contemplate doing in humans, but which nature has performed nonetheless — what happens if you disable a critical speech gene? And the one disabled in the KE family seems to operate at such a sophisticated level that it looks as if it were one of the last genes to be put in place as the faculty of language was perfected.

In 1998 a team of geneticists at Oxford University in England set out to identify the defective gene by analyzing the genome of KE family members. Their method was to look for segments of DNA that the affected members shared and the unaffected lacked. The Oxford team soon narrowed the cause of the problem to a region on chromosome 7, the seventh of the 23 pairs of chromosomes in which the human genome is packaged. Within this region lay more than 70 genes, and it seemed that it would take several years to study each gene and see which one was responsible. But Hurst then turned up a new patient with the same rare set of symptoms. The patient, a boy, had a break in his chromosome 7 that disrupted one of the genes in the section the Oxford team was studying. It was an easy task to identify which of the new patient's genes had been broken. It was a gene known as forkhead box P2, or FOXP2 for short.58

The Oxford geneticists, Cecilia Lai, Simon Fisher and Anthony Monaco, then analyzed all 267,000 DNA units in the FOXP2 genes of the KE family members. In all the affected members, and in none of the normal members, just one of these letters was changed from a G to an A (the four different kinds of chemical units in DNA are known for short as A, T, G and C). The [Page 49] switch to an A at this site in the gene meant that in the protein molecule specified by the gene, a unit that should have been an arginine was changed to a histidine (proteins are made up of 20 different kinds of units, known as amino acids, of which arginine, and histidine are two).59

How could a single mutation in a gene cause such a wide range of effects? The FOX family of genes makes agents known as transcription factors, which operate at a high level of the cell's control system. The agents bind to DNA and in doing so control the activity, or transcription, of many other genes. FOXP2 is active during fetal development in specific parts of the brain, and the protein transcription factor it makes probably helps wire up these brain regions correctly for language. Brain scans of affected KE family members seemed normal at first glance but a more sophisticated type of scan has shown they have considerably fewer neurons than usual in Broca's area, one of the two brain regions known to be involved in language, and more neurons than usual in the other region, known as Wernicke's area.60

I don't think capacity for language is magic and I don't think it's a good yardstick for humanity. And I don't think awareness, sense-of-self, or volition are uniquely human either. As it happens I work with animals and have a lot of time to consider this. Their internal experiences are indeed very different from ours, but not, I think, in the ways you're proposing.

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