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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29210 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 30, 2024

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Experts: "Demagogues whipping up distrust in us is irrational, unfair and disruptive to progress."

Also experts: "We can now admit we made up an entire species 50 years ago in a bid to stop construction of a dam."

What's funny to me is that all the "splitters" magically become "lumpers" when we're talking about hominids

@The_Nybbler replied to you above:

Extant hominids, anyway. I don't think it affects the arguments over the Neanderthal or whether H. Habilis and H. Erectus are the same species.

I'm kind of replying to you both. West Africans (and other Sub-Saharan Africans) have an estimated 2%-19% of their genome derived from an archaic hominin ghost population, a population less related to modern humans than Neanderthals or Denisovans (both of whom have introgressed into modern humans, especially Eurasians). That is, this ghost population split from the modern human line prior to Neanderthals and Denisovans.

As this ghost population gets better characterized genetically (or maybe even fossily, but fossils are tough to get in Sub-Saharan Africa) and the admixture percentage in Sub-Saharan Africans is better ascertained, I suspect that there will be an increased push to consider this ghost population as a sapiens subspecies or population (and thus Neanderthals and Denisovans would get lumped in, as well), especially if the admixture percentage from this ghost population in Sub-Saharan Africans is in the mid-single digits or higher.

Can't have Sub-Saharan Africans with the most archaic non-sapiens admixture, especially from an even more distantly related member of Homo.

I mean, clearly all three of these species were capable of producing fertile offspring with H sapiens, that's how the genetics got into the populations. Calling everything one species is therefore following the actual definition of a species.

That's a definition of species (or at least a variant of one), albeit arguably the most popular definition. I'd likely recite a similar definition if I got suddenly cold-called by God. However, see the Wikipedia article on Species I also linked to you elsewhere in the thread for more definitions. There are many cross-species hybrids that can produce fertile descendants, and sometimes even cross-genera hybrids as well.

Several feline taxa are capable of hybridization. The Chausie is fully fertile by the fourth generation, but the jungle cat and the domestic cat remain separate species.

The serval and the domestic cat are in different genera, but can hybridize to make the Savannah cat. Female hybrids are fertile right off the bat, and male hybrids can be fertile by the fifth generation.

Beefalo are fertile. Most Bison herds are actually partially descended from cattle. Yet not only do bison and cattle remain in separate species, they remain in different genera.

Grizzly bears (Ursus arctos horribilis) and polar bears (Ursus maritimus) can produce fertile female offspring; it has yet to be seen if they can produce fertile male offspring. Brown bears in general are also partially descended from polar bears.

Although hybrids can likely be had via IVF, it's doubtful if unadmixed Great Danes and Chihuahuas can mate due to the massive size and anatomical differences between them. Some on the internet claim that any photos of Great Dane-Chihuahua offspring are all—or at least mostly—hoaxes. Nonetheless, Great Danes and Chihuahuas are not only considered firmly within the same species, they're considered firmly within the same subspecies.

Speaking of canines, wolves produce fertile hybrids with species such as the coyote and golden jackal. Additionally:

In the distant past, there was gene flow between African wolves, golden jackals, and grey wolves. The African wolf is a descendant of a genetically admixed canid of 72% wolf and 28% Ethiopian wolf ancestry. One African wolf from the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula showed admixture with Middle Eastern grey wolves and dogs. There is evidence of gene flow between golden jackals and Middle Eastern wolves, less so with European and Asian wolves, and least with North American wolves.

Yet, grey wolves, golden jackals, and African wolves are all considered separate species.

And these were just examples using some more familiar animals. So producing fertile offspring does not appear to be a sufficient condition for being considered the same species (and perhaps for genus too); it may not even be a necessary one. To circle-back to the original Homo example, Neanderthals are still "generally regarded as a distinct species", thus likewise for Denisovans. Hence, if race can be dismissed as merely a social construct (except when justifying racial preferences and income/wealth transfers to benefit fashionable minorities at the expense of everyone else)—then so can species—where the social construction aspect is subject to fads, politics, convention, group-think, and outright invention (as in the case discussed by OP).

As a side note—it's funny how, at least within mammals, male hybrids look to have a much rougher go at reproducing than female hybrids. The male burden of performance is not unique to modern humans.

I know there are multigenational ligers. Just keep breeding the mixed females with pure tigers or lions. I don't know if someone is trying to make a stable fully fertile hybrid population.

I was thinking about including ligers/tigons, but I already had multiple examples so I de-prioritized ligers/tigons, and ended up not getting around to them for the reason you mentioned: males have been established to be sterile with a fair degree of certainty.

I went with the grizzly/polar bear example, since at least two female hybrids have been shown to be fertile (in the wild, no less!), it's merely unknown if male hybrids are fertile or not, and brown bears are partially descended from polar bears.

It also made me chuckle that you mentioned ligers but not tigons. Ligers (lion father, tiger mother [not that kind of tiger mother]) are more famous than tigons (lion mother, tiger father), likely due to the large body size of ligers (larger than both lions and tigers, whereas tigons aren't any larger [and may be smaller] than lions and tigers).

Life must be rough for male tigons. Small, infertile, and forgotten, while female tigons, ligers, lions, and tigers put in their Panthera dating profiles: "Don't bother if you're under 10' or 1,000 lbs."

However, it's noteworthy that lions and tigers are able to produce fertile female offspring as it is. They diverged about 4 million years ago. Lions are actually more closely related to leopard and jaguars than they are to tigers and snow leopards; tigers are more closely related to snow leopards than they are to lions + leopards + jaguars. Humans and chimpanzees split about 5.5 million years ago.

As a side note—it's funny how, at least within mammals, male hybrids look to have a much rougher go at reproducing than female hybrids. The male burden of performance is not unique to modern humans.

Not an expert, but I’d imagine this has to do with the male only having one copy of certain genes due to XY while the female has two.

It's indeed a thing called Haldane's Rule:

Haldane himself described the rule as:

"When in the F1 offspring of two different animal races one sex is absent, rare, or sterile, that sex is the heterozygous sex (heterogametic sex)."

Most mammals abide by the XX-XY system, where males with the XY are the heterogametic sex.

West Africans (and other Sub-Saharan Africans) have an estimated 2%-19% of their genome derived from an archaic hominin ghost population.

Really? Could you provide me with some further reading?

Neanderthals or Denisovans (both of whom have introgressed into modern humans, especially Eurasians)

IIRC, Denisovan admixture is only significant among Austronesians, though East Asians have a tiny amount.

Interbreeding between archaic and modern humans, summarizes Neanderthal, Denisovan, and African ghost population admixture.

Current state of affairs suggests Melanesians and some other populations in Australasia have about 4%-6% Denisovan DNA on top of the 1%-4% Neanderthal DNA of Eurasians in general.

Right now you have several posts in the mod queue, some for triggering rage by posting left-aligned contrarianism, but some are just low-effort bait, like this.

You also deleted all your posts after your last posting spree, which gives you the appearance of someone who is just here to stir shit.

Knock it off or since this account is new and has contributed nothing of value, I will have no compunctions about banning it.

Don‘t worry about it. If the powers that be treated every left-of-center opinion as trolling, why, there would hardly be any left-wingers left. Heh.

Anyway, how would the interracial mandate work? Would intraracial couples be put on waiting lists if the quota wasn‘t met? Would love be forced underground ?

And all that gets you is a spectrum of races, the basic hierarchy would be maintained, brasil-style.

No, the real solution requires forcing everyone into a marriage with opposite color at once, so that the entire population-solution is blended into chocolate milk. And to maintain homogeneity after that, outliers are re-blended, and immigrants have to go through the procedure, they can live out their interracial lives on ellis island while their children go on to the post-race paradise.

There are hardly any left-wingers left, in my observation most explicitly left-wing posters who don't quit are eventually deemed trolls.

There are several things going on here:

  1. Explicitly left-wing posters do get reported, constantly, for being trolls. There are a number of regulars in particular who report any left-leaning opinion with the same mindfulness as a knee jerking when the femoral nerve is tapped. We see these reports, we see who is making them, and we ignore them.

(In fairness, a couple of our remaining leftist posters do the same thing, to the same effect.)

  1. Left-wing posters also get dogpiled a lot. This is understandably hard for a lot of people to deal with constantly. Worse is the antagonism and hostility that comes out, which we do moderate when it crosses the line, but below a certain threshold, you're just constantly weathering accusations of bad faith and trolling and ignorance. We do our best to keep anyone from being dogpiled or abused, but as the culture of the forum has definitely shifted rightward, it's certainly true that it's a more comfortable place for rightists and a less comfortable place for leftists. Probably the majority of posters consider this a good thing, which means the cycle is unlikely to break. Even if we managed to get an influx of new posters, including a lot of new leftists, we'd probably shed most of the leftists over time, as has happened in the past.

But this brings me to my last point:

\3. I've commented on this before, and many others have made the same point: this forum, by virtue of the fact that it even allows right-wing opinions, naturally attracts a lot of right-wingers, and not just the civic Republican types, but the Holocaust deniers, the Repeal the 19th types, white nationalists, "pedophile fascists," armageddon-cosplayers like Kulak, etc. We don't attract a lot of leftists, especially not hardcore, ideologically committed leftists, because they have everywhere else on the Internet where their views are the norm and anyone arguing with them will get banned. We occasionally get a new leftist here who is shocked and appalled that we aren't banning Holocaust deniers or people who post about low black IQs. They usually either flame out or leave. Online leftists nowadays mostly just aren't used to dealing with rightists in an environment where they don't "win" by default because the mods are on their side.

So it's not really that left-wing posters who don't quite are eventually deemed trolls; we mods really do try to be fair to everyone, and we're not all rightists. The problem is that the leftists who (a) don't quit because badthink is allowed here; (b) have the persistence to stick around; (c) don't lose their cool and start responding belligerently, is a very small set.

(And again, in fairness, there are rightists who lose their shit that leftists are allowed to post, and they get banned a lot, contributing to the evaporative cooling and claims that we have our thumbs on the scale for leftists.)

What, you don't think "dae women should be property, also all sex is bad and evil and if u don't agree ur a cuck?" for the thousandth time is driving positive or thoughtful engagement?

Ironically it's only the female and the gay posters that have ever provided any worthwhile insight into relationship dynamics; I think about the framing of 'devotion fatigue' [extrapolated from old postings, never quite explicitly stated] quite a bit, since now that I have more language that reminds me it's a thing I just see it everywhere now.

Devotion fatigue sets in faster for the "leftists", partially because the things they tend to be wrong about are more emotionally charged/there's very little emotional validation for what they are right about by comparison; the trick is, uh, not being obnoxious about it. That's harder in a collective for what should be obvious reasons.

Honestly, /r9k/ had a solution to this especially if you coupled an LLM knowledge base trained on threads that go the same way; it would be nice to identify and auto-hide uninsightful consensus positions without having to think about it. Alas, no such platform exists.

That was the joke he was making.

in my observation most explicitly left-wing posters who don't quit are eventually deemed trolls.

Who specifically do you think was unfairly called a troll? And given your objection above, who do you think was banned for being a left winger?

that's the joke

It's hard for me to tell whether you're trolling or just an unusual character. It's definitely the second part—mandating interracial marriage—which has the stronger effect there for me. (The first part seemed a bit more plausible, given that it is kind of cool that Africans have the highest genetic diversity.)

Anyway, Fruck's advice is good.

Because when we post extreme views, extreme right wingers typically have a history of consistently taking positions equivalent or similar, in a variety of contexts.

Well, it's usually pretty clear that those people are serious. In your case, it's not as obvious to me that you're serious (but it's still entirely possible). That's all. I get that objectively both positions are pretty far outside normal overton windows.

you can extend me the same courtesy.

But why should anyone do that when all your responses clearly show you're doing this to get a reaction, rather than sincerely arguing for the position?

What he's saying is that you haven't currently engendered the goodwill necessary to tolerate jokes at others expense. With this post for example, while you may have meant it to stake out your position with the added fun of a lightly barbed jab at your ideological opposites, it looks the same as trolling. And deleting all your posts increases the probability you are a troll pretty severely I would think. So the Tldr would be you have to start posting some stuff with a bit more substance, and ideally stuff that shows you want to be a part of this community or you are going to get banned.

Okay, I'll try to provide an intuition pump. It's somewhat biologically implausible, and exaggerated, but it might help you understand why people find your reaction bizarre.

There's this big family. They don't exactly look like other people; their mouths are a bit big and they're unusually hairy. There are ugly rumours going around that they're all really low in IQ and have a habit of biting people, but you figure it's probably just prejudice based on their looks.

Then, breaking news: back in 1930 a mad scientist a century ahead of his time experimented on the family's patriarch without his consent and spliced his DNA with wolf genes.

Does this make you believe the rumours are more likely or less likely to be true? And, separate from the question of whether you value liberty over eugenics, do you think that spreading those wolf genes across all of humanity is good or bad?

(I mean, I suppose that given the entire paranormal romance genre I have to admit that a significant chunk of the population finds dangerous half-human hybrids "cool", but still.)

Aside from that, "So Africans are even cooler than I thought?" likely came across as a bit sassy under the circumstances.

Is "I think it's a good thing there are significantly less teenage pregnancies" bait?

Might reel in Stannis Baratheon or Weird al-Yankovic....

Black interracial marriages have the highest divorce rate, so maybe not a wise public policy

In fact, marriages between black women and white men have a substantially lower divorce rate in the US than between white women and white men.

The greatest predictor of divorce is whether a white woman is involved:

White woman + black man: more than twice the white/white divorce rate (wwdr)

White woman + asian man: 1,60 times the wwdr

Whereas white man + asian woman is at the wwdr and white man + black woman at half that.

https://www.healthymarriageinfo.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/But-Will-It-Last--Marital.pdf

Uh, does this break out african american vs african african women? Not hard for me to believe(given the paucity of such pairings) that most of the women are from africa blacks who have little in common culturally with AADOS, and despise them in any case.

That is also a very rare coupling suggesting there is strong affinity between the two parties.

Amazingly the version in which the median white person in the marriage is very likely to out earn the median black person.

I'm probably just tired but trying to figure out what you mean by this.

Presumably the implication is that marriage is most stable when the man out-earns the woman.

Let's be honest, there are dozens of possible confounding factors for these kind of statistics. Age-related effects, urban-rural divide, religiosity, socio-economic groups, ... I would need to see a really rigorous analysis before believing any specific claims like “interracial marriage causes higher/lower divorce rates”.

I'll do the work. Here is what @MaiqTheTrue was saying:

Marriages where the male partner outearns the female partner are more stable. Whites tend to outearn blacks. So, all else being equal, a white male / black female pairing has an advantage since the male is more likely to outearn the female.

Note: I don't have stats to back this up, but on the surface it seems to make sense.

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Is there data on the average age of marriage for these racial configurations?

Why is this cool?

Not the previous poster, but unusual-feeling genetics things in general are cool to me, as long as it isn't indicative of some pathology. Neanderthal ancestry? That's cool. Rather high genetic diversity? That's cool. A mix of several relatively divergent populations? (well, this isn't unusual) Huh, that's cool, I wonder what exactly that looks like. Same with this.

This was actually done in Paraguay in 1814 in order to reduce overall race tensions.

In spite of this, the direct neighbor Uruguay has four times the nominal GDP per capita and around two times when PPP adjusted. It is number 3 in South America for HDI while Paraguay is number 13.

One interesting thing about Paraguay is how the Guaranì language remains in use—I think it's the only American Indian tongue where that's still happening on that scale.

Quechua and maya remain widely enough used for Guatemala and Bolivia to be de facto bilingual; Paraguay is however the only country* where you’ll hear non-pure Indios speaking a native language.

*I’m excluding Métis because it’s a creole.

Maya (or languages in that family) is/are widely spoken in Guatemala.

Ah, fair. It looks like a decent amount of Quechua and Nahuatl survived as well, among others.

Without going into the HBD of it all, Uruguay is not a good point of comparison because it's basically the Luxembourg of South America.

Alright I didn't know it had that reputation, but it is in the lower half for all of those stats regardless.

Uruguay doesn't border Paraguay (contra what you implied), and is in a much more productive location (borders an ocean, at the base of the Río de la Plata)

Well you just caused one of the most embarassing moments of my life. Thanks for the education.

You first.

I would guess the rate of interracial marriage on The Motte is above average.

I'm doing my part.

Definitely certain kinds.

Yeah but it’s all WMAF-, pretty boringly common combo

I'm white and my wife is black, so it's not all WMAF at the very least!

I guess (based on other comments) you can worry about divorce less than you otherwise would.

I'd guess lots of white man/Latina pairings as well.

Present

Rationalist types and latinas make quite an odd couple

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