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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   27467 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 20, 2023

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Bantu-maximization

Not being familiar with this term, I had to look up "so what is so bad about the Bantu, anyway?"

Turns out that they were a migrant population that displaced hunter-gatherers and pastoralists, developed agriculture, and smelted iron:

Another stream of migration, having moved east by 3,000 years ago (1000 BC), was creating a major new population center near the Great Lakes of East Africa, where a rich environment supported a dense population. The Urewe culture dominated the Great Lakes region between 650BC and 550BC. It was one of Africa's oldest iron-smelting centres. By the first century BC, Bantu speaking communities in the great lakes region developed iron forging techniques that enabled them to produce carbon steel.

Huh. What was that again about civilisation arising out of agriculturalists, and science/technology coming with the use of iron?

The peoples of other continents (sub-Saharan Africans, Indigenous people of the Americas, Aboriginal Australians, New Guineans, and the original inhabitants of tropical Southeast Asia) have been largely conquered, displaced and in some extreme cases – referring to Native Americans, Aboriginal Australians, and South Africa's indigenous Khoisan peoples – largely exterminated by farm-based societies such as Eurasians and Bantu. He believes this is due to these societies' technological and immunological advantages, stemming from the early rise of agriculture after the last ice age.

The apartheid government in South Africa tended to refer to South African blacks as "Bantu" - mostly accurately, although the small number of remaining pure-bred Khoisan got lumped in with them - hence the names of apartheid-era laws like the Bantu Homelands Citizenship Act (which created the Bantustans). My experience is anyone who uses the term "Bantu" outside linguistic contexts (where it refers to a group of southern African languages) is dog-whistling support for apartheid.

That goes double for people like OP who use the term to refer to blacks who are not Bantu (or, to use modern politically-correct terminology, whose ancestors did not speak Bantu languages) - the vast majority of ADOS African-Americans have roots in west Africa, not southern Africa. So do most, but by no means all, recent African immigrants to Anglosphere countries.

Most African slaves in America were imported from Bantu speaking parts of west Africa. The vast majority of sub Saharan Africa is Bantu speaking; Southern Africa particularly so, but not uniquely.

Every claim you made there is wrong. Most slaves were from peoples of the Niger-Congo family of languages, not Bantu speaking peoples. Bantus, while the largest group in Sub-Saharan Africa are still a minority; if, also, a plurality. South Africa is, also, not particularly Bantu compared to Central, or South East Africa and has large minorities of Whites, Coloureds, and Indians.

Per Wikipedia the boundary between Bantu and other Niger-Congo family languages is near the Nigeria-Cameroon border, with Igbo and Yoruba being non-Bantu. About 60% of the Atlantic slave trade took slaves from modern Nigeria and points west, and so would not have been Bantu speakers. The other 40% came from Portuguese Angola (which is Bantu), and mostly ended up in Brazil.

Okay, that explains where they picked up the term and why they're using it in this manner. Thanks!

It's a play on Eliezer's paperclip maximizer thought experiment. Much like the paperclip maximizer has the goal of tiling the universe with paperclips, EA's actions (mosquito nets, etc.) have the net result of filling up the Earth with poor third-worlders. It's the same idea Garret Harding put forth in "Living on a Lifeboat" with a clever skiffy gloss.

the net result of filling up the Earth with poor third-worlders

Then just say "black people" or "Africans"; don't be clever-clever with "Bantu maximisation" when it seems that the Bantu cultures were the ones successful in the most similar to European fashion. It just makes you sound dumb because you end up saying you don't want the culture that was nearest to European ones, when surely you should want them instead of another!

(General "you" there, not addressed to any specific person in this thread).

Turns out that they were a migrant population that displaced hunter-gatherers and pastoralists, developed agriculture, and smelted iron:

ones successful in the most similar to European fashion

I think that's part of why it gained use among white supremacists in the first place, because it complicates the mainstream african colonization narrative. For instance they like to talk about how the vast majority of black people in South Africa are Bantu but there were few Bantu in the region prior to Dutch colonization, mostly the region was inhabited by Khoisan. So they can argue that the Bantu pushing decolonization in South Africa are themselves colonizers barely more native than the Dutch.

More generally, since the majority of sub-Saharan Africans are Bantu I'd guess it's a way to refer to the main African population without having to say "sub-Saharan" and without including smaller groups like the Igbo (often claimed to be the most intelligent African ethnicity).

Maybe a reference to the zero hp lovecraft 'bantu maximizer' game that was a reskin of the paperclip maximizer (cookiclicker style) game?

That seems really unlikely to me, it implicitly assumes that whether or not your current child survives has no impact on whether you have another child.

Every system has a carrying capacity, I don't think mosquito nets change the carrying capacity by that much, they just get there with fewer intervening deaths.

This isn’t true because the vast majority of Africa is not Malthusian- if the population of the DRC exceeds carrying capacity, it’ll be made up for with food imports(often in the form of aid).

I think the term as used by @futuristright-substack is a swipe at e/alts trying to save as many lives as possible. In practice, this (buying mosquito nets) effectively prioritizes saving the lives of sub-Saharan Africans over all other because they are the cheapest to save.

Okay, but using "Bantu" as a term of disapprobation is dumb, since the Bantu are one of the more "like us Europeans" in terms of "successful civilisations" in that context.

I do wish 'people who want to talk like racists without openly being racists' would at least do some fact-checking before throwing around terms.

I think anyone who is using the term "Bantu-maximization" is:

a) familiar with the history, using the phrase in the context of the Bantu expansion, and the negative consequences there-of b) familiar with the genetics, Bantu peoples being about as far away genetically as you can get from Eurasians, with the exception of KhoiSan, pygmies, ghost population remnants in Africa etc. c) probably comfortable being openly racist, not designed to disguise the target but in fact making it explicit (this Hakan tweet is relevant: https://images.app.goo.gl/Sr4T1UADRFBM4nCh9) d) and derivative of a, b and c, specifically including African-Americans in their sights.

It is naive to assume that someone using this language would consider a group to be 'more like us Europeans' because they developed iron. It is precisely because of this and a) above that the term is used.

/images/17005991991197555.webp

An important bit of missing context is that there are a couple prominent rationalists who seem to have a specific hate-on for the Bantu precisely because they are more like us than not and thus their existence harshes certain narratives.

I don't think I've seen one of these "Bantu"-bashing posts that doesn't just use the word "Bantu" as a synonym for black people in general, unless it's directly and specifically talking about the historical Bantu expansion, perhaps.

Which prominent rationalists hate the Bantu and what kind of rhetoric from them you found particularly hateful?

Granted the posts in question were written and subsequently deleted over a decade ago at this point but Harding and Yudkowsky were those guys back in the day.

Who's Harding?

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So what did Yudkowsky say about them that you think its anti black?

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