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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   27742 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 23, 2023

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I typed out and then deleted a longer comment - something which I’ve done several times before whenever the subject of Australian Aborigines comes up. There’s nothing I can say that won’t be perceived (correctly) as cruel and dehumanizing. As far as I’m concerned, they are an actual honest-to-god Stone Age relict population. Not the blue-eyed fake Aborigines who’d be empowered by this farcical “Voice” venture, but the real ones out there in the Outback sniffing gasoline. They appear to have somehow avoided most of the evolutionary pressures which have caused nearly every other human population to develop modern human physiognomy and cognitive aptitude. I get genuinely distressed when I look at them or when I think about what Australia could possibly do about this population, and it would be beyond the bounds of tolerable behavior in this community for me to comment in any detail about what I foresee for them moving forward.

I've honestly always wanted to see a proper, unbiased longitudinal study of the Stolen Generation to establish what the life outcomes of the 'stolen' were versus those who remained remote. I suspect the results would shock the common narrative.

the real ones out there in the Outback sniffing gasoline.

You're a little out of date on this - we successfully reduced petrol sniffing in Aboriginal communities by 95%

All we had to do was develop special petrol that doesn't get you high when you sniff it and ban normal petrol in Aboriginal communities.

LMAO WHAT, I thought Rama Rama was just a meme.

“In 2006 when low aromatic fuel was first rolled out in Central Australia, there were around 500 people sniffing in our region with an average of seven deaths per year; it was an epidemic,” Mr Ray said.

This is some black-comedy satire article leaking into real life. I thought I was jaded, but this is horrific.

What's the denominator for those numbers? I'm reading that Central Australia has only about 40K people, 43% Aboriginal + Torres Strait, so call that 17K, so 7/17K gives a drug-overdose-per-100K rate of 41 ... which is higher than the USA (32/100K in 2022) but not by nearly as much as you'd hope. The US already has demographics with worse rates (and I'm talking "males", not anything with p-hacked granularity), and our rates are still increasing, not dropping by 95%. A lot of the increase is fentanyl, but cocaine and meth are going way up too.

I'm not shocked that people use drugs and a minority of them OD. I get that for opioids and meth.

But this is serious talk about an "epidemic" of huffing gasoline. That's horrible and so much worse than an American who sometimes does a bit of coke.

Oh trust me, it gets way more horrifying than that.

For example, approximately a quarter of Aboriginal girls in remote communities are victims of child sex abuse.

Are the pure native Australians able to speak in languages in a fully fluent way?

I'm not quite sure what you mean, but there are still a significant number who use their native language as their primary language. Most of them are still bilingual in English though.

How much of that is authorities tolerating Stone Age norms about consent and marriage, and how much is creepy uncles?

I don't know, but my impression is that there's plenty of both.

While that doesn’t surprise me, and a lot of Stone Age norms about age of consent, marriage, relationships, and sex wind up as just celebrating creepy uncles, it seems like it’s an important distinction to be made, especially because the authorities can in theory just say ‘no, you don’t get to marry 11-year-olds just because it’s your cultural tradition’ and the people stopping the authorities from doing so are probably mostly woke people who will proceed to pointing at that statistic in order to justify more of the woke program.

To be clear, I don't think there's any child marriage going on. But I think there's a non-trivial amount of 17 year old boy having sex with 12 year old girl and that being shrugged off as pretty much normal. As well as much older men using their power in the community to pretty much do what they like.

But, again, I'm no expert.

I’ve definitely read articles about aboriginal tribes that get to marry prepubescent or very early adolescent girls if they pinky-swear not to consummate it until she’s of age, which doesn’t seem like it actually happens(the waiting). Certainly similar arrangements among less sympathetic to the media people(eg Saudi Arabia’s child marriages with a clause delaying consummation), it seems pretty well documented that consummation is not in fact delayed, to say nothing of the ‘duh, married couples have sex’ aspect. But it’s entirely possible the authorities have put a stop to that custom and it’s mostly later adolescent on very early adolescent abuse(statistically the median case of CSA) being culturally accepted.

I get genuinely distressed when I look at them or when I think about what Australia could possibly do about this population, and it would be beyond the bounds of tolerable behavior in this community for me to comment in any detail about what I foresee for them moving forward.

Gene therapy. If there's a good reason we're not going full steam ahead on it, it's yet to find my ears (GATTACA and associated neo-ludditism is excluded from good).

Oh wait, the sterling and terminally resistant to reality claim that all human populations are equal, especially cognitively so, acts as a barrier to even recognizing there is a problem, or at least it's not the kind of problem you solve by giving them handouts or schools.

I'd argue that the prior British policy of encouraging interbreeding was a step in the right direction, even if I suspect that diminished the capabilities of inter-racial children. It would all have been worth it, if it eliminated a disgruntled population of millions that modern Wokists can point to and yell "systemic racism" without much in the way of pushback since HBD left the Overton Window.

If there's a good reason we're not going full steam ahead on it, it's yet to find my ears (GATTACA and associated neo-ludditism is excluded from good).

Can I interest you in Brave New World, or the more recent and pop-sci-fi Red Rising? This is the first step towards genetically predetermined caste systems, for further hominid speciation. You don't get Gammas or Reds without people like you arguing for Alphas and Golds.

While mildly entertaining works of fiction, they're about as accurate a representation of the future.

Without something going seriously awry, there's no chance that humanity ends up in a caste system of that nature, since-

  1. We have robotic automation, which is more efficient and less ethically dubious than breeding a slave caste.

  2. Genetic augmentation is unlikely to be expensive after economies of scale develop, and there is no plausible path to having such a wide gulf between the haves and have nots.

  3. HBD suggests we already have stark differentials between different populations, so it's a moot point. How many aboriginal Australian Nobel Prize winners are there again? And how many Jewish ones? Your brand of ludditism makes a terrible tradeoff of denying the uplift of one end of the spectrum while claiming to prevent what already exists.

Oh wait, the sterling and terminally resistant to reality claim that all human populations are equal, especially cognitively so, acts as a barrier to even recognizing there is a problem, or at least it's not the kind of problem you solve by giving them handouts or schools.

I predict that progressives will turn on a dime on the idea of HBD as soon as gene therapy becomes a viable way to bring all groups into IQ parity. They might not acknowledge the change publicly, but there will be zero barriers to implementation.

Just as environmentalists dismiss geoengineering out of hand, modern progressives will never accept eugenics.

I'm going to take the opposite side here, progressives tend to go by moral purity over factual accuracy, the denial of HBD will continue far longer than we have robust methods for intelligence augmentation. Right now, the best bet is embryo selection, which may be good for 2-8 IQ points unless you go for more intense selection, at which point you can really push the envelope.

Yeah, we aren't at Gattaca style Luxury Gay Space Communism yet, which is a viable barrier.

Aren't there already gene therapies being developed? Isn't it instead that testing on human subjects is subject to agreed upon international standards? I think you can do this research but you are subject to Institutional Review Boards or your country equivalent. I don't see any involvement of neo-luddites in preventing this research, unless you consider human rights to be a stumbling block.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_Helsinki

With how much panic and FUD there is over simply eating GMOs versus becoming them?

https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/crispr.2020.0082

A large majority of countries (96 out of 106) surveyed have policy documents—legislation, regulations, guidelines, codes, and international treaties—relevant to the use of genome editing to modify early-stage human embryos, gametes, or their precursor cells. Most of these 96 countries do not have policies that specifically address the use of genetically modified in vitro embryos in laboratory research (germline genome editing); of those that do, 23 prohibit this research and 11 explicitly permit it. Seventy-five of the 96 countries prohibit the use of genetically modified in vitro embryos to initiate a pregnancy (heritable genome editing). Five of these 75 countries provide exceptions to their prohibitions. No country explicitly permits heritable human genome editing. These data contrast markedly with previously reported findings.

That seems like regulatory hell if I've ever seen one.

I think you can do this research but you are subject to Institutional Review Boards or your country equivalent

Ah, IRBs, a pox on human progress, without even smallpox around to contest for the greater evil.

unless you consider human rights to be a stumbling block

Why, I do, so good guess even if purely by accident.

The AMA condemns it, for example:

The American Medical Association's Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs stated that "genetic interventions to enhance traits should be considered permissible only in severely restricted situations: (1) clear and meaningful benefits to the fetus or child; (2) no trade-off with other characteristics or traits; and (3) equal access to the genetic technology, irrespective of income or other socioeconomic characteristics.

Imagine if they banned elective surgeries or something like braces because, gasp, it costs money, and the rich can better take advantage of it than the poor.

Make no mistake, the whole field has been pushed back decades by intentional lobbying from bioethicists and the usual useful idiots on the environmentalist side.

So in your view the current model where mostly unlimited animal testing is allowed, we should instead jump to human embryos, edit them and allow them to grow as fetuses, and as humans under comparable conditions and then test the editing results through IQ tests? Or do you think that editing of embryos should be allowed for research but not allowed to progress further toward human birth?

Edit: Or do you see embryo editing as something that should be allowed as it exists in its current state that should be completely allowed with no exceptions like elective surgery totally separate from medicine entirely?

So in your view the current model where mostly unlimited animal testing is allowed, we should instead jump to human embryos, edit them and allow them to grow as fetuses, and as humans under comparable conditions and then test the editing results through IQ tests?

Yes.

The expected benefits so grossly outweigh the costs that it's ludicrous.

I'll only accept that my opponents on this matter are being internally consistent when they advocate for every mother who grabs a glass of wine during their pregnancy to end up in the gulag. We certainly won't agree about anything, but I'll respect them more.

Humans are allowed to consistently harm the potential of their progeny, and yet a systematic approach that acknowledges the risk and considers it in service of the greater good, that's verboten. We live in a clown world, and the inmates were the ones who built the asylum, let alone run it.

Or do you see embryo editing as something that should be allowed as it exists in its current state that should be completely allowed with no exceptions like elective surgery totally separate from medicine entirely?

The fact that it's theoretically legal is little consolation when there's minimal opportunities to engage in it. Besides, there are plenty of restrictions on elective procedures, as the constant ruckus about gender reassignment surgeries can demonstrate.

It would all have been worth it, if it eliminated a disgruntled population of millions that modern Wokists can point to and yell "systemic racism" without much in the way of pushback since HBD left the Overton Window.

Interbreeding was a good idea, and European genes seem to be dominant over aboriginal ones in basically every instance, but it’s important to note that the remaining pure-blooded aborigines aren’t the ones that are crying racism, it’s the mixed race descendants who everyone thinks of as just white.

I'm aware of that, but I think they'd have a much harder time getting sympathy if they didn't have their pure-bred cousins to point at, implicitly conflating the problems they face.

It's not like you can tell most of them apart from "pure" whites, which makes keeping identity cards straight when you're a card-carrying activist difficult.

Eh, white looking people that are actually half or a quarter indigenous or whatever seem to have sufficiently worse outcomes that Wokies can still claim ‘discrimination’ on the basis of things no one knows about. Being obviously wrong doesn’t stop them in other contexts.

GATTACA and associated neo-ludditism is excluded from good

But Gore Vidal is in that movie!

Consider the Dingo which may be a feral descendant of previously domesticated canines brought to Australia but for some reason were neither managed nor bred for thousands of years. The implications make it a bit of a controversial explanation.

Even if you take out HBD, they live in the middle of nowhere. How can they possibly generate wealth out there? I was just in the Midwest and the rural downs out there are straight up just dead and full of zombie opiate addicts wandering downtown. I was just in Peoria, IL and I have never seen such a dead rust belt city before. And this is with white people in the US. There is no opportunity for them where they live.

Each year millions of people willingly uproot themselves to go to a different country in search of better economic wealth etc, and those who have potential manage to achieve it to varying degrees. India is extremely poor, Indian Americans are very rich, high human capital Indians when placed in an environment conducive to generating wealth do extremely well. Australian aboriginals don't, e.g. Australian aboriginals in large cities don't do paticularly well compared to the median inhabitants of those cities.

People move for economic opportunities all the time. The catch, of course, is that they have to be economically useful.

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