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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   26796 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 23, 2024

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(I guess this comment may be somewhat low-effort and/or more suited to the Wednesday Wellness thread, but in light of recent discussion I feel that it may still be appropriate for this thread.)

Are racial sexual preferences natural and mentally healthy, or racist, unnatural, and mentally unhealthy? Is a white man who finds himself afflicted with "jungle fever", an Indian woman who feels a desire to become "bleached", or a black man who has succumbed to "yellow fever" suffering from a delusion that has been inflicted upon him by stereotypes in the media (both pornographic and non-porn)?* Or are these preferences inherent and natural? Is a person obligated to find sexually attractive all people who share the same general category of sex/gender, weight, and figure? Or is attraction permitted to hinge on such minor attributes as skin/nipple color, hair texture, and lip size?

*For example, perhaps the aforementioned black man suffering from "yellow fever" actually just finds skinny, demure-seeming women attractive, but has been brainwashed into thinking that the women who fit that role are overwhelmingly East Asian, and there's no use looking for them elsewhere. Maybe the Indian woman thinks that only white men are capable of building attractive levels of muscle, with few exceptions. Et cetera.

Are racial sexual preferences natural and mentally healthy, or racist, unnatural, and mentally unhealthy?

Racial sexual preferences are natural, mentally-healthy, and racist.

Attraction is about reproduction. If you want your child to be like you, to psychologically, phenomenologically experience the world as you do, to live again in them, it's important that their genetic makeup be very close to your own and this means mating with someone relatively closely-related. If a Frenchman has a kid with a Chinese woman, he'll be genetically more closely-related to a random French kid on the street than to his own child. His child will not experience the world the same way he does. Can never be fully French, or fully receive that cultural inheritance. Instincts, inclinations, minutiae of perception and cognition and desire will be blended with something very other. So in general it's the case that, all else being equal, it's vastly better to reproduce with someone of your own race, down to a fairly narrow scope.

Is a white man who finds himself afflicted with "jungle fever", an Indian woman who feels a desire to become "bleached", or a black man who has succumbed to "yellow fever"

Oh, I thought you meant preference for one's own people. Yeah, no, what you're talking about here is different and occurs to me as sad but understandable.

So look, women are hypergamous and have been selected to be aroused by foreign conquerors since before we were human. They generally do prefer males of their own race! But if that race is broadly marginalized in social and economic terms, it becomes imperative to try to mix with the winners. This is how the race blends and survives -- its beautiful women, i.e. storehouses of positive genetic innovations and low mutation load, are folded into the superior population which will continue on into the future in a dominant mode. All else being equal she'd be happier with a male of her own race if that race were (evidently) superior, than she will be with a male of a superior foreign race, but life demands such sacrifices and the proto-women who got on board with this program vastly outcompeted those who did not.

As to the men, yeah, the incentives are very different. Sperm is cheap and all that, and men are wired to be aroused by what we see as cheap or free opportunities to copulate with what amounts to a lower-status female because, hey, why not? But actually marrying one is a sign that a man couldn't get a higher-status mate of his own race and we all understand this.

Economic/attractiveness disparities among races fuzz the dynamic a bit; e.g. a member of a low-status race managing to marry a member of a high-status race is obviously a different situation than the opposite. Probably the key thing to bear in mind here is that it's not like all races are identical but for cosmetic considerations and some aren't higher or lower than others in critical, objective, documented respects.

So, it depends.

black man who has succumbed to "yellow fever" suffering from a delusion that has been inflicted upon him by stereotypes in the media (both pornographic and non-porn)?*

Oh come on. Asian women are obviously more feminine in general than, e.g., black women. I speak in terms of physical gracility, hormone balance, proclivity to physical aggression, and so on. It doesn't take media programming or indoctrination by porn to notice this. It's right in front of our faces all the time. Unfortunately for Asian men, they're also obviously more feminine than the men of any other race along exactly the same metrics. Everyone can see it and this is all born out in spades by dating app data. (It's also why there are so few male Asian leading men in movies, etc.) Come to think of it, from where I'm sitting, your perspective (as I understand it) is the 'delusional' one that could only have come about by social programming.

Is a person obligated to find sexually attractive all people who share the same general category of sex/gender, weight, and figure?

No. I can't even imagine what that would look like in practice.

Or is attraction permitted to hinge on such minor attributes as skin/nipple color, hair texture, and lip size?

These 'minor' attributes correlate with all kinds of major ones. Reminds me of referring to race as being about 'the color of someone's skin' which is rather less than the tip of the iceberg.

If a Frenchman has a kid with a Chinese woman, he'll be genetically more closely-related to a random French kid on the street than to his own child.

This is obviously factually untrue.

It's not obviously factually untrue, assuming we exclude the offspring of recent immigrants from randomly selected French kid and consider only those of legacy Frenchmen.

Chimpanzees and humans share about 98.8% of the genome, and two randomly selected humans share about 99.9% of the genome. Suppose you had an offspring with a chimpanzee, like in Next. The offspring would share .5 * 100% + .5 * 98.8% = 99.4% of the genome with you, less than that of a randomly selected human.

Similar principle within/between human populations. This isn't quite the right metric since it's a different one, on the population rather than individual level, and presumably using SNPs, but we can use it as a proxy for illustrative purposes (ran out of mental calories hunting for inter-individual genome-wide figures). The English have about 99% genetic similarity with Italians, so that puts a hypothetical lower bound on the within-English genetic similarity (which I believe is definitionally zero by this particular metric). In contrast the English have about 88% genetic similarity with Southern Chinese (same genetic distance ratio as the previous human-chimpanzee example, interestingly enough). Thus, .5 * 100% + .5 * 88% = 94%, well less than that of the English-Italian similarity of 99%.

In contrast the English have about 88% genetic similarity with Southern Chinese

This is so obviously and enormously untrue. Orders of magnitude off from a justifiable statement. Can we start defining our terms for what counts as related or genetic closeness? People here must be using very idiosyncratic understandings of these terms in order for their posts to make any sense.

Thank you for quantitatively stating this unlike other poster's baffling and wrong subjective statements about genetic similarity. The lowest outliers of estimating the genetic similarity of humans and mice are in the mid to high 80%s. I strongly suspect that Englishmen and Asians are more closely related than humans and rodents. In what manner do you mean 88% genetic similarity? How did you type any number other than 99.9%?

As an anecdote, we absolutely do see this with livestock. Females bred to a male of very different breed will visibly have more trouble relating with their own offspring than with non-relatives of their breed.

You don't really appreciate the importance of genetics until you see a group of young animals foraging in dense brush just like their sire's breed does (despite never meeting him), while the spooked mothers yell for them to come back and eat grass properly like they were taught.
Having noticed this is why Scott's line about "I don't understand why he's acting like his violent psychopath father: he couldn't have been a bad influence because they've never met!" made such a strong impression on me.

Before writing a chest-thumping, bombastic comment with an "obviously" and an additional adverb, it's good practice to pause for a beat and consider if you're having a Dunning Kruger moment, especially when I already pre-emptively explained the difference.

The key aspects are when I mentioned "genome" in the human-chimpanzee example, and "SNPs" in the English-Italian-Southern Chinese example. SNPs are sources of common variation within humans; researchers often use SNP data when working in human genetics, as SNP data is easier and cheaper to create and obtain, and easier and cheaper to work with computationally, than genome-wide data (since among most humans, most of the genome is identical or near identical). Usually the cutoff for what constitutes a SNP is if its rarer allele copy is present in at least 1% of a given population, or set of populations. So there was no such oversight nor contradiction on my part in the above comment.

Suppose, just as a stylized example, chimpanzees and humans both had only 10 loci in their genome and just one chromosome. Now suppose a chimpanzee (PT), an Englishman (EN), and a Southern Chinese (SC) had one-strand reads of:

PT - A A A A A C C C C C

EN - T G A A A C C C C C

SC - G G A A A C C C C C

Where the first three loci are SNPs, common sites where the base varies in humans. We can use a simple metric for genetic similarity, just if the letter at a given locus is the same or not. PT and EN share 80% of the genome; PT and SC share 80% of the genome. EN and SC share 90% of the genome. We could consider 80%, 80%, and 90% to be their genetic similarities. However, if we look at just SNPs, now EN and SC have a genetic similarity of just 67%.

So now we can go back to real-world data and extend the cocktail-napkin exercise if we want to get a proxy for genome wide; previous caveats still apply. About 1 in 1,000 sites in the genome is a SNP; most sites are rare variants. Thus, we have 99.9% common variant loci, 0.1% rare variant loci. Let’s assume the previous 88% EN-SC similarity as representative of all SNPs; this is likely too permissive. However, we can balance that out by assuming all rare variant sites have a similarity of 100%, which is conservative. Now we have our back of the envelope genome-wide genetic similarity between EN-SC of 99.9% * 100% + .1% * 88% = 99.988%, and EN-Italian of 99.9% * 100% + .1% * 99% = 99.999% as the EN-EN proxy. This exercise actually worked pleasingly well and got us in the right ballpark, since the 99.9% from before is any two particular humans (and lacking the additional decimal precision), and modern West and East Eurasians diverged relatively late in human evolutionary history.

Thus, a hypothetical EN-SC offspring would share 99.994% of the genome with the EN parent, less than the 99.999% from a randomly selected EN person. The conclusion remains—despite how triggering this thought appears to be for some—a father can be more genetically similar to a randomly selected person from his population than to his own offspring, if the mother of his offspring comes from a different population.

This isn't quite the right metric since it's a different one, on the population rather than individual level, and presumably using SNPs

The entire conclusion hinges upon this point, and I'm not convinced.

A quick search turned up this master's thesis (ok, not the most impressive source), according to which two random Europeans' genomes have 3.8 million differences. A random European and a random African have 5.5 million differences. (Numbers are from pages 14 and 15.) So a European/African mixed child would have 2.25 million differences with each parent, still a bit closer than two random Europeans.

The master's thesis is using an old version of that publicly-available dataset (1000 Genomes). For example, it uses about 38.2 million of what the author calls SNPs; more recent versions have at least 88 million genetic variants. His stand-in for "African" is "LWK," Luhya from Kenya, who like most Eastern Africans, have a material amount of European-appearing admixture in varying degrees.

I also don't know if his calculations were correct. Not only do I not wish to spend my time and effort replicating the findings, the thesis appears rushed. For example, Figure 1.1 has inconsistent digits on the labels, stretched images, panels that overlap one another, in addition to formatting looking like Microsoft Excel 97. My "pls fix" alarm is going-off. That being said, I'm not dunking on him and I can understand; you gotta do what you gotta do to graduate ASAP.

Even if we accept the thesis's findings as is, that still implies a woman from an earlier diverged and/or less admixed populations such as West Africans, San, and Pygmies could have a child with an European man that would be less related to the European man than a randomly selected child from his childhood street. In such a case, we'd be agreeing that she's a whore (in the generic, rhetorical sense, not the woman from the previous sentence); we'd just be discussing the price.

Sure, but Europe is a big place. Two natives of Aix-en-Provence(say) are likely much closer related than two random Europeans, and should one of them have a romantic evening with a Hutu woman, their child might well be less related to him than his next door neighbor growing up.

Thanks. I didn't feel like bothering with that. This stuff is super interesting to me and I'm very sure of what I'm saying but it really does seem to upset people and then they want to argue and no matter what it never seems to be enough, which leaves me wondering what their hangup is in the first place.

Depends on how you define it, I guess?

Defining it the way you do raises a lot of questions that feel fundamentally unserious. (If a Frenchman has a kid with a French woman, are there still some random strangers he might occasionally meet in the street who he's more closely-related to genetically than his own child? What if it's an Italian woman? etc) It feels like a reductio ad absurdum of a racialist mindset, and for that reason I would expect it to be rhetorically counterproductive for you.

It feels like a reductio ad absurdum of a racialist mindset

I guess I don't see what's absurd about it. That's just how it works.

(If a Frenchman has a kid with a French woman, are there still some random strangers he might occasionally meet in the street who he's more closely-related to genetically than his own child? What if it's an Italian woman?)

Possibly? But the gulf will be a lot smaller, which is the point. More genetic distance is, generally speaking, more phenomenological difference. More is more. That's... just obvious, yes?

I guess the absurdity being pointed out is an expectation that the modal response to this hypothetical would be something along the lines of "well of course I'd care more about my child than this stranger who happens to be more closely related to me", which seems like a reasonably strong argument that the primary object of value here is something other than genetic distance

I want to be clear that this idea (blood relations don't matter that much) is not what I was trying to get at here; I was not by any means calling TitaniumButterfly's ideas absurd on their face because they were pro-blood-relations-mattering. I was saying that it was absurd on its face to treat father-and-son-but-racemixing-happened as a looser blood relation than eighth-cousins-thrice-removed-but-you're-all-super-racially-pure, and it speaks, IMO, to running screaming away from the actual mechanics of how blood relations work because you're desperate for a kludged-together definition that supports your racialist worldview. It hits my ear the same way as something like "actually, black people have more in common with chimpanzees than they do with you or me". I don't think that that's true, and I don't think that you think that that's true. I think that you would like to think that that's true, and I think that that's very silly.

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