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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   26723 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.

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).

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