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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 27, 2023

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Let's assume that your poorly-developed, unsourced arguments are all 100% true. They're not, and throwing music and novels in there is almost absurd enough to suggest parody, but I don't want to deal with your Gish gallop, so I'm going to use my imagination.

Why should I care?

If, as you seem to think, Asians are unfeeling automata who may neither comprehend art nor build genuine rapport...I'm not seeing the problem. Explain to me why the existence of such people is a bad thing.

Some people seem to think that you need to have a "personality" in order to have a right to live.

Some of the arguments are sourced, some are not. I think, as poorly argued as the position is, there are undeniable expressed differences between divergent population groups. I don't know on what basis anyone can deny this considering the widely divergent cultural norms and expressions. Let alone physical and psychological differences. I also, like you, don't know exactly what the person is arguing towards. It reads similar to anti-China CIA threads on /pol/, without the industrial accident webm's.

If, as you seem to think, Asians are unfeeling automata who may neither comprehend art nor build genuine rapport...I'm not seeing the problem. Explain to me why the existence of such people is a bad thing.

I think there is an undeniably obvious problem to develop between two people, one an unfeeling automata and another who deeply feels and sympathizes with everything around him. Now neither the Chinese nor European live up to those descriptors, but I think the principle holds firm regardless. That there is a clash of 'values' there.

I think a lot of the world has been playing by western rules for a while now. And I see no reason to assume that any country anywhere in the world would continue to do so if the west fades as a power. I don't see it as a ridiculous deduction to say that this potential loss of power, coupled with different values of a rising power, represent a threat to the people who value all the things the 'west' has stood for internationally.

I don't think you necessarily need to demonize the Chinese to make this argument, but there does seem to be a numbness to the western population when a threat is proposed that is anything other than the media flavor of the month. A sort of automatic assumption that, no matter what, the status quo established by White expansion and global dominance throughout the recent ages is a universal that was always the case and that it will hold no matter who is 'in charge'. I think that assumption is obviously faulty. But, again, I don't think you make those arguments literally, like is being tried here. I think you just show a Chinese person boiling a dog alive and let the 'visceral logic' do the speaking for you.

Calling a series of factual statements a “gish gallop” is basically telling on yourself. There’s no argument here, but you’re admitting the conclusion you would draw is uncomfortable ergo assuming bad intentions.

It is interesting to try to compare the reaction of this site to this poster to the common reflexively hostile one most reddit subs have to HBD in general (which this site doesn't share and/or looks down upon)

There seems to be some history I'm missing with the user that might explain it though. Maybe.

There seems to be some history I'm missing with the user that might explain it though.

His post a week ago started with "Our struggle with China is racial", focused on the supposed inherent cruelty of Chinese people rather than something more supported like East Asians being higher conformity/conscientiousness, and was poorly argued and focused on anecdotal evidence. So there's some carryover, where people take this post as a continuation of the same argument rather than just being the (quite plausible) assertion that East Asians have personality differences separate from the higher intelligence. Obviously "this race is so incompatible that we're destined for racial conflict" is a much more dubious claim, especially when the argument isn't even about the resentment that flows from differing capability or from violent crime but vague personality differences. And as I pointed out in response to his original post, he's focusing on Chinese people but they don't have that much genetic separation from other East Asians, most of which do not have China's reputation for low empathy or its political antagonism with the U.S.

Regarding this post specifically, my largely uninformed impression of the infant studies is that they're small and potentially questionable for the usual replication crisis reasons, but unfortunately it's probably difficult to do an improved version of them for political reasons. (It's also harder to know what implications they have for adults.) It would make sense, but a lot of replication crisis stuff makes sense, that's why people were investigating the hypothesis in the first place. It's not comparable to intelligence research on population differences, where the state of the evidence is much firmer and more extensive.

Not at all.

I think he’s wrong on the merits, such as with his inability to name Asian (-American?) authors or musicians. He’s also not making only factual statements. Part of what makes it a Gish gallop is mixing in assertions, like the claim that the gap between law associates and law partners implies Asians lack “personality.” He is throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks.