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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

This post is far too "boo outgroup" to pass muster. You may as well have written it about cardiologists; it would not have been any less on the nose.

Extraordinary claims demand meticulous evidence. While I appreciate you providing some evidence in support of your claims, it seems sufficiently cherry-picked, and your account overall insufficiently steelmanned for your outgroup, that you have failed to clear the threshold here. Furthermore, you have not written in a way that evinces a sense that you are writing for everyone and want them to be included in the conversation.

This is your third warning in about a month; keep it up, and these will start becoming bans.

In cases like this I see a mod warning as more of a reward than a punishment. What is the OP coming here to do? Argue with a bunch of people. What are you doing? Arguing with them.

If you are willing to write up and say something it's costing you time and mental effort. 1 day bans feel like they should be a standard starting point, rather than what we apply after three warnings

That's what gets me, I have no idea if Lepidus wants to actually debate this or if they're just trolling and being weirdly dedicated to it.

Near universal participation in an activity amongst the upper classes in an activity is by definition not equivalent to selective posting regarding cardiologists. You can claim that it doesn't imply what I think it implies, but pretending it's selective is just open rank dishonesty.

A single instance of mass participation in an activity (mass cannibalism in the absence of famine) engaged in by no other modern society; is also entirely fair, in the same way it would be fair to suggest a deeper biological roblem if America was the only country where people had ever raped children.

As for the Yang Yue case or it's many counterparts, The Chinese themselves don't deny that they have a major crisis of callous indifference, they just blame it on modernity or if outside the CCP's jurisdiction, communism. Am I not allowed to interpret it differently in light of evidence of longlasting cruel tendencies?

Regardless of whether you agree that there is a meaningful link between cruelty to one's children and callousness to strangers', it's fundamentally against the spirit of this forum for you to threaten to ban me for it.

A single instance of mass participation in an activity (mass cannibalism in the absence of famine) engaged in by no other modern society;

While not completely analogous, there are a few other events that are at least comparable, including several incidents in the Pacific Theater of WWII (most notably Chichijima, nearly involving future president George H. W. Bush). It's not quite as recent, but the story of Johan de Witt is undeniably Western as well.

Regardless of whether you agree that there is a meaningful link between cruelty to one's children and callousness to strangers', it's fundamentally against the spirit of this forum for you to threaten to ban me for it.

I'm not threatening to ban you for drawing connections, I'm telling you that if you're going to post criticism of your outgroup, the rules place a number of restrictions on how you're allowed to do that, and you have failed to meet that threshold here. In particular, the rules suggest quite strongly that you should post about specific rather than general groups whenever possible, and I don't see a lot of evidence in your post that you even realize how many different ethnic (and, arguably racial) groups might be included in sweeping reference to "the Chinese." Furthermore, similar laundry lists of objectionable practices would be possible to assemble concerning any race of people or, indeed, of the human race. Even assuming the Chinese are every bit as bad as you say, that doesn't make them special.

If you think any of this is "against the spirit of this forum" then you have failed to grasp the spirit of this forum.