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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

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Our struggle with China is racial

There are aspects of human civilization which would, with enough time be understood and adapted by any sexually reproducing species of sufficient intelligence, simply because they are instrumentally valuable with regards to the instincts that all biologically similar animals share. Animal likes food too. Animal likes sex too. Animal plays games too. Animal fights enemies and wages war for resources too. Many animals beat few animals, so animals have incentives to form alliance structures or be outcompeted and exterminated. Yet wouldn't it be surprising if they valued the same things, or felt the same ways, where instrumental necessities didn't require it? Shouldn't we then expect to see, dramatic differences in what are superficially institutions, even amongst intellectually comparable animals?

Consider the family. Every functional civilization has been patriarchal at least until recently; and the physical and cognitive differences explaining this are seen in the animal world as well. Woman needs man, and man must find his mate. It'd be great if she were loyal though. Yes you could punish disloyalty after the fact but that's not exactly foolproof. Hey what if she literally couldn't run away? If every couple breaks the feet of every daughter then she'll make a perfectly suitable mate! The logic here is of course unimpeachable; and yet is there any reason to believe Nero himself wouldn't react with a similar disgust to it as modern (non-anthropologist) man?

Where unimaginable cruelty naturally pervades even the closest family bonds between the strong and the weak; concern for outsiders may be expected to be similarly lacking. A toddler bleeding out in plain view to the complete indifference of most passers by is not at all surprising when you remember what their close genetic ancestors did, nor are the countless similar videos you can find on the Chinese interwebs: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ECeC4R-Gjtc.

I don't need to mention that where humans cannot expect compassion, the fate of man's best friend is not at all uncertain.

Other areas of human life like the ability to be moved by beauty seem similarly lacking in a civilization whose pre-1800s painting and sculpture never approximated that of Ancient Rome, much less Michael Angelo, when portraying human subjects (as opposed to landscapes were they admittedly excelled).

A people with innately different instincts in one field, might also be odd in other ways, like committing mass cannibalism against political enemies in the absence of famine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guangxi_Massacre .

Their literature might include bizzare scenes, like a inferior man demonstrating his pious hospitality to his superior by secretly killing and cooking his own wife to feed him. https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ghmx4v/what_can_romance_of_the_three_kingdoms_liu_an/

Different from birth

Someone covers your nose or lays you face first against the bed. What do you do? Seemingly every non-disabled European American newborn that isn't cognitively impaired has the same reaction; to move, struggle and fight against this horrifying imposition. Nearly every Chinese American baby has a different reaction; complete non-reactivity.

Isn't this precisely the kind of difference common stereotypes, a history of slavish behaviour, and the above section would suggest? Can you think of a more elemental test of innately different instincts than a newborn's reaction when you screw with his breathing? Have you noticed that basically everyone still wearing a mask is Asian?

https://sci-hub.ru/10.1038/2241227a0

** The necessity of racism **

What does it mean to allow members of a high IQ species of alien fundamental moral and aesthetic instincts to increase their power in our institutions?

What does it mean, for an entire nation of them to become the dominant power on the planet?

  • -37

I'm pretty sure I can answer all your half-assed leading questions with "no."

No, a Gish gallop of of historical anecdotes is not a convincing argument, nor a particularly impressive one.

You need to go practice your five virtues.

The multi-century near universal practice of footbinding amongst the most educated and intellegint strata of society (but going down far lower) is definitionally not anecdotal. Footbinding represents a fundamental qualitative deviation from any widespread european practice and was continued up to the peak of independent Chinese civilizational development. Unless you reject HBD entirely, it is exceedingly stupid to claim that it cannot be cited as evidence of differing innate genetic dispositions.

Unless you reject HBD entirely, it is exceedingly stupid to claim that it cannot be cited as evidence of differing innate genetic dispositions.

Only if there was no plausible explanation in the distinctive historical features of Chinese culture.

Of course it's evidence. It's not convincing evidence.

You've crawled astonishingly far up your own ass. It could mean that you are innately optimized for the effort, a real ubermensch. Or there might be another explanation. Until you put in the effort to disprove competing theories, and defend against others' counterarguments to your own, you haven't proven anything.

You've crawled astonishingly far up your own ass

Don't do this, please.

You cant simply cite cultural practices as evidence of genetic deviation. Statistics doesn't conform to our whims to that extent. You can cite genetic predispositions that might have given rise to that practice, not the practice itself. You must realize the illogic of trying to correlate a qualitative measurement with a quantitative one. Let alone not taking into account that culture itself is probably an independent variable if exotic enough. Or disrespect the notions of chaotic systems altogether.

With this line of reasoning I can make a convincing enough case that something about Anglophone genetics really predisposes them to get confused about their gender. If it only were that simple.

Let me indulge this theory, like a person with basic curiosity might except for German genetics:

Bordering on the Suiones are the nations of the Sitones. They resemble them in all respects but one - woman is the ruling sex. That is the measure of their decline, I will not say below freedom, but even below decent slavery. - Tacitus on a German Tribe

The dowry is brought by husband to wife, not by wife to husband. Parents and kinsmen attend and approve the gifts - not gifts chosen to please a woman's fancy or gaily deck a young bride, but oxen, a horse with its bridle, or a shield, spear, and sword. In consideration of such gifts a man gets his wife, and she in her turn brings a present of arms to her husband. This interchange of gifts typifies for them the most sacred bond of union, sanctified by mystic rites under the favour of the presiding deities of wedlock. The woman must not think that she is excluded from aspirations to manly virtues or exempt from the hazards of warfare. That is why she is reminded, in the very ceremonies which bless her marriage at its outset, that she enters her husband's home to be the partner of his toils and perils, that both in peace and in war she is to share his sufferings and adventures. That is the meaning of the team of oxen, the horse ready for its rider, and the gift of arms.

  • Tacitus on Germans generally

Wait, what? A society where men gift their brides swords?

But wait, there's more...

"The Naharvali proudly point out a grove associated with an ancient worship. The presiding priest dresses like a woman."

Ok, fastforward roughly 1900 years.

From Wikipedia:

[1908!] A transvestite pass (German: Transvestitenschein) was a doctor's note recognized by the governments of Imperial Germany and the Weimar Republic – under the support of sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld – identifying a person as a transvestite. Transvestite at this time referred to all individuals whose gender identity and preferred clothing was discordant to that associated with their assigned sex, and so included both crossdressing and transgender people.

Karl M. Baer (20 May 1885 – 26 June 1956) was a German-Israeli author, social worker, reformer, suffragist and Zionist. He came out as a trans man in 1904.[1] In December 1906, he became the first transgender person to undergo sex reassignment surgery.

1931 – In Berlin in 1931, Dora Richter became the first known transgender woman to undergo vaginoplasty.

I don't know I'm really starting to think there might be some genetic link here... Unfortunately, none of this explains the current problems of the anglosphere. It's not like we have any German DNA or anything [/sarc].

The explination for current problems, looking at the Hirschfeld, Baer and Richter examples is antisemitic.

There have been millions of Jews outside of Germany and Austria, especially in the Russian Pale of Settlement, but those did not particularly care for transgenderism. I guess an anti-Semitic explanation of jewspecialization of subversive activities per country is not hard to come up with, but the point is even then it takes two to tango. Hirschfeld, Baer, Richter, Freud and others worked in the cultural context where their ideas fell into fertile soil.

There's always a cohort ready to embrace degeneracy.

They found fertile soil right up until they fled the country.