This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Millenia later, time enough for psychopathic genes of original Indo-Europeans to be selected out and more pro-civilization traits emerge. Before it happened, Indo-Europeans achieved exactly zilch. Nothing "vague" about it, straight HBDIQ materialist science.
Razib is right, there is absolutely nothing to respect about continent size psycho killing spree, nothing to admire about people so stupid that cannot grok even idea of slavery.
...
Perhaps if you aspire to be school shooter or serial killer. If you have higher ambitions, the IE "legacy" has nothing to offer you.
They may not have had much in the way of settled civilization, being nomadic and far away from any enduring population centers, but for that very reason the idea that their only advantages were in... stupidity and an appetite for bloodshed, you're suggesting? should strike you as immediately implausible. Archaeological and linguistic evidence show that they and their close kin were the inventors of the wheel (or at least the first to find a use for it, in the form of wagons which enabled them to colonize previously uninhabited regions of the deep steppe, and chariots which were only later imitated by the big kids on the block) and the first to domesticate the horse -- at first for food, but later turning it into a practical means of transportation by inventing the bridle. They were the richest and most technologically advanced pastoralists the world had seen, while enjoying a higher standard of health and personal freedom than any contemporaneous agricultural civilization. The extant evidence probably underrates their cultural achievements, in that, as pointed out elsewhere in the thread, they were able to force their language and many of their customs even on those host cultures that they were not able to overwhelm numerically/reproductively.
Later inhabitants of the steppe -- the Cimmerians, Scythians, Goths, Huns, Mongols, etc. -- also made a name for themselves by terrorizing the settled peoples of Europe and Asia. The low population density and lack of geographic barriers to movement removed the ordinary mechanisms by which tribal hierarchies are solidified into inward-looking governments, while the people adjacent to the steppe always made for tempting targets. The Indo-Europeans just did it first and best.
More options
Context Copy link
Pre-history was a violent time, Western Hunter Gatherers were likewise displaced by the early European farmers. It's pretty tone deaf to compare school shooters to the migration of pre-historical population groups and subsequent violence, which was a pretty common experience across the world. The sheer scale of the IE conquests is what makes it stand out especially.
The Corded Ware culture is the common ancestor to Italic, Celtic, Germanic, Baltic, Slavic, and Indo-Iranian languages. That makes it a candidate for the most important culture in world history, as far as "what did they accomplish", any reasonable perspective would likewise attribute the accomplishments of these cultures, in some degree, to the genetic and cultural contribution of their common IE ancestor.
Corded Ware was itself only 60% Yamnayan and most of the remaining European farmer, the synthesis is an indispensable part of the story of the European. But Khan's "imagine what the European farmers would have achieved if they wuzn't interrupted" is what I am challenging here.
Yes, ancient history was full of violence (just like modern history), but we (we non psychopaths) admire other ancient achievements.
There is difference between someone who, when thinking about Roman empire, thinks "The Romans built roads, bridges and aqueducts that lasted for millenia, they created unparallelled law, literature, art and architecture, they were so cool!" and someone who thinks "The Romans razed and burned cities so thoroughly that no trace remained, they perfected the art of torture, they decorated their roads with lines of crosses, they fed people to the beasts for fun, they were so cool!"
Spread of black plague was even wider and faster. Do you too find Yersinia pestis "inspiring"?
And yet the destruction of Carthage is well known even today, an entire religion was founded based on crucifixion, the "lines of crosses" scene is popular in modern entertainment (including Game of Thrones), as are gladiatorial battles against people and of course lions. It seems a lot of people think that stuff is cool. The popularity of Conan's paraphrase of Genghis Khan ("to crush one's enemies...") demonstrates this as well.
More options
Context Copy link
You don't have to be a psychopath to think genocide is cool. Psychopathy is the state of having no empathy for people in your ingroup. Lack of empathy for people in the outgroup is far more common and can't really be considered an abnormality.
More options
Context Copy link
Come the fuck on, your first post was consensus building already, no need to take it a step further and paint like, 90% of the guys I grew up with - including myself - as God damned serial killers just because we think conquest is cooler than road building.
Well, conquest is parallel killing, not serial killing, so naturally there's less current resistance to it.
More seriously: although it's unfair to say that conquest is no more pro-social than serial killing, because conquest at least implies you have a social circle that includes enough people to form a cohesive army rather than one that might just include yourself ... they at least share the nature of "can be both morally and selfishly opposed by anyone outside that social circle", no? Alexander "the Great" is instead "gujastak", "accursed", in Zoroastrian literature; he was "the evil-minded (badgumān) tyrant who killed our ancestors one by one" to the first Sasanid. The more successful you are as a conqueror, the lower the ratio is of people who benefitted to people who were conquered.
On the other hand, it'd be easier to dismiss conquest as completely useless if history had a better track record of nations being able to combine and unify when necessary without it. Wiki's list of proposed state mergers is pretty short (even considering it doesn't have anything before 1300AD? really??), and if you then omit the failed mergers, the failed-shortly-afterward mergers, the barely-a-treaty "mergers", and the pseudo-voluntary mergers backed by threats of violence, it gets even shorter.
Damn it man, can't you see I'm trying to be cranky?
More seriously, the utility and sociality of war don't even enter the equation for me, I stop short after thinking about popular culture, which considers a lack of conflict a complete non-starter in terms of entertainment value. Our brains are wired to think conquest - competing and winning and celebrating your power - is cool regardless of its utility in our current climate. Boys and men in particular are drawn to it and no amount of peer pressure is going to change that. Eetan obviously wants to stigmatise indo-european studies, and I assume it's because he doesn't want the cw thread to fill up with Aryan supremacy shit - which I sympathise with - but all of the prehistoric civilisations were fascinating as hell and I have to push back against his attempts to stigmatise learning about them. And to then go the step further and claim only psychopaths enjoy battles is just preposterous.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Nah. The looting and plundering phase of warfare is seldom romanticized, but warfare in general is not. Gladiator arenas are also one of the first things that come up when you ask people about cool things Romans did, and if you ever went to a museum of torture, it's hard not to be impressed by the sheer creativity of some of these inventions.
I would, if I was a bacterium!
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
He never says anything like that. You are tilting at windmills here. Razib thinks the Indo-Europeans were cool, he also thinks they were barbarians par excellence. Both are objectively true.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link