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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

If the claim is "Look at this terrible thing that high-class Chinese people did to their children; they crippled their bodies for social fashion.", we can point to the whole trans-grooming brouhaha in the west as a comparison. People are social, and fucked-up societies can and will override the instincts of parents and lay their children on the offer of their particular Moloch; this does not appear to be a race-specific trait, as far as I can tell.

And we can look at a lot of other individual instances of moral atrocity in peoples who don't seem to do that sort of thing super-regularly; we've got the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War off the top of my head. And while I consider that an existence proof against people claiming that the Spanish are saints, I don't think it proves much other than that.

As for the aesthetics, I will point out the degree to which Michael Bay and James Cameron have done really well in China with their movies. I mean, I don't really like the Bayformers aesthetic, but clearly a lot of my fellow Caucasians do, and so do a lot of the Chinese, apparently.

Look, if you want to make an argument here, why not get some actual stats? What do Chinese charity rates look like, both in the mainland and across other nations? How do you see the behavior of Chinese people changing from first, second, and nth-generation immigrants? What are your thoughts on popular Chinese media? Do you have any opinions on the popularity of cultivation novels and stories?