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Yeah, BAP just seems to be crying about more effecient and higher fit humans taking their rightful place near the top of the western hierarchy. It's literally no different to the usual complaints black people have about whites. BAPs laments come from the same place as those ones (namely envy) and should be discarded. The only difference is that unlike whites who for some reason listen to the unfounded complaints of blacks, we're not going to listen to the ones of whites. You set up this system, and now we're beating you at your own game!
Also this Indian Bronson dude (first time I am hearing of him) has a profile picture of a dude holding up a gun with no trigger discipline. That on its own makes me negatively predisposed to him, people have died because others couldn't keep their index fingers straight. It's something which needs to be shamed and removed from society.
I feel I should at least devil's advocate on this since while I think @SecureSignals believes this (please correct me if I'm wrong), he didn't actually spit it out and an argument unspoken cannot be debated.
HBDers aren't only interested in intelligence differences among races, although that's what they're most (in)famous for. Many of them also consider personality traits to plausibly differ substantially among the races. If true, this is relevant to policy because the proportion of a population with certain personality traits can greatly affect its ability to thrive, potentially even more so than raw intelligence. The most commonly-cited as relevant would probably be %sociopaths and %WEIRD, although I'm not especially-well-versed in HBD so people may have made other claims.
In particular, there is a claim by some white supremacists (including, from what I recall of that post, BAP) that East Asians have high relative intelligence but low %WEIRD (and thus high propensity to corruption). The conjectured scenario is that allowing East Asians to float to the top of Western society will result in institutional decay because they are statistically more likely to be corrupt.
I am not especially convinced of this; I have a low prior on cognitive differences between various groups of non-Africans due to the smaller timescales involved, and while shame cultures are currently quite common in East Asia and rare in white countries, I'm not convinced that that's more than a cultural coincidence. This is also, shall we say, a very convenient hypothesis for white supremacists, which increases the likelihood of it being floated even if false.
One case where I absolutely am sold on this, though, is thinking that eugenics on personality traits has a large potential to explode societies that practice it. I may doubt differential evolution for 40,000 years is capable of producing large gaps in these kinds of statistics, but artificial selection probably is and gene editing certainly is. And of course, if your designer babies are all geniuses in addition to being 10% sociopaths, that makes it worse, not better.
What is religion and culture, if not a mechanism for coordinating the breeding behavior of the masses? Culture itself is eugenics on personality traits. So when we talk about European culture throughout the ages, including the innumerable pressures on those populations (Kingdoms and Empires, Black Death, European feudal system, etc.) that is synonymous with discussion of eugenic selection for a European type. In the Roman era that culture looked different in some ways, but similar in other ways, to Christianized Europe.
Another, more explicit instance of this, is Judaism as a eugenic program for the selection of a Jewish type. The myths, the rituals, the symbols held dearly by the flock, actually lead to the formation of a type of person. One of the myths in Genesis is the patriarch of the Jewish people, Jacob, using media and "culture" to direct the breeding behavior of a flock of sheep, which he inherits by making them all speckled. Of course, in the bible flocks of sheep are symbolic for people. This is ancient and esoteric knowledge.
So given your own premises, accepting this fact, you should have an extremely high prior probability that people who were selected throughout the millennia in Asian culture are not the same as people who were selected in European culture, because culture is nothing except a program of eugenics or dysgenics depending on the frame of reference.
In the same way, my chief concern is dysgenics, not on maintaining a stasis that has never really existed. What would a eugenic culture look like in the 21st century? That is the question that concerns me, not maintaining homogeneity or something for its own sake, and certainly not a myopic obsession with IQ nationalism like you see in the rationalist sphere. At the same time, I am extremely concerned with a culture that accelerates dysgenic behavior and dysgenic changes in population.
The distinction I'm making is selection power. Culture does have selection effects, but they're noisy and very weak compared to "generate 10,000 embryos via IVF, the one with the highest genetic score for trait X is selected, rest are destroyed". And I'm not even sure that the cultural traits we're concerned with go back that full 40,000 years; Confucianism doesn't exactly predate Confucius.
Selection is a thing, yes, obviously, but honestly at this point I don't think it's currently worth worrying about. High-power eugenics techniques are coming to fruition, nuclear war's pretty likely in the near future, and we could all be killed by AI or whatever in the next couple of centuries. It's like worrying about rain acidification eroding a limestone cave when the cave also has an armed nuclear bomb in it; the current direction of the trendline is of no consequence because there is essentially no chance that it will have enough time to go anywhere before getting scrambled.
You sorely underestimate how quickly evolution happens. It only took a few very silly ideas to become memetically enshrined in our collective consciousness to radically alter the genetic trajectory of the United States. And that's only within our own lifetime.
Evolution does not take hundreds of thousands of years. Events like the Black Death, Feudal Law which likely led to a genetic pacification of European people due to persistent executions of something like 2% of the most criminal population annually, will change a population within several generations. The feudal system likewise brought higher TFR for the upper classes which functionally led to the genetic replacement of the lower classes and the emergence of a Middle Class. You cannot ignore the millennia of evolution in Europe and assume that they are selecting for the same type of personality as in Indonesia, or that these differences are not radical enough to lead to powerful selection effects. They absolutely are.
And I've already presented a very clear example of memes becoming genes in the form of the Jewish religion, although I don't mean to single Jews out because we are all products of the same forces, it's just one of the clearest cases out there of myths and symbols leading to the selection of types of people, and not over tends of thousands of years, either- much faster than that.
Embryonic selection is not high-power, it is extremely low power. High-power eugenics is filming a Movie that convinces people they should be really concerned about demographic change and organize to mass deport illegal immigrants to keep the country majority white. Or making a movie that convinces them they are an evil person if they care about racial demographics (high-power dysgenics!).
Embryonic selection cannot hold a candle to the high-power eugenic technique of planting an idea into the heads of the collective consciousness. And the rationalists most eager to pretend that something like embryonic selection is a substitute for the harder task of memetically challenging the Culture are just proving they are still slaves to it just the same.
Ah, perhaps I should specify more fully. Widely-deployed embryo selection is far higher-power than culture. This is because, if you kill/sterilise the most offensive 2% of the population every generation, you're only cutting off a bit of the tail - and a tail imperfectly correlated with the genes, because penetrance is not 100%. Embryo selection is powerful because you can cut off 90%+ of the distribution, and you can select on genes directly.
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I don't expect a response since you're on Mandatory Vacation, but I have a mildly funny anecdote from the Olden Days, before we moved off-Reddit.
I had someone DM me asking if I was Indian Bronson, and not knowing about the Twitter personality, I interpreted that as an accusation of being Julius Bronson, or an Indian equivalent. I reacted with quite a bit of annoyance, since I certainly didn't think I was within 6 degrees of separation from JB, but he later clarified he meant this dude.
After looking him over, I can sorta see why someone might suspect we're the same person, but you can take my word for it that we're not.
(The dude in his profile picture is Amitabh Bachchan, and given that you've always been vague about which South Asian shithole you hail from, I'll take that as clear evidence it's Pakistan, since even the most sheltered upper-class Muslim from India would have at least recognized the most famous Bollywood actor alive)
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This post is pretty clearly bait, and it's bait of a sort that you have racked up seven warnings and four tempbans for. When this post came through the filter, my initial reaction was to let it be, given that you didn't start this thread, and your comment seems primarily aimed at BAP, mirroring his own zero-sum ethnic hostility back at him. The problem with bait, though, is what that it attracts, and the escalating vitriol this post inspires is exactly the sort of thing we do not want here. If it were an isolated incident I'd argue strenuously for a warning, but this is pretty clearly your thing, and we have been giving passes to similar borderline comments from you all week. You were last warned just over a week ago, and your response seems to be an increasing commitment to ride the line.
Given the givens, a 20-day ban seems appropriate here. When you return, kindly desist from this sort of behavior.
In addition to the below, congrats and perhaps condolences on becoming a mod. Wishing you the best. Sincerely.
Thanks, sir. It means a lot.
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"trigger confidence" is an emerging meme in the gun culture. People turned "trigger discipline" into dogma, and then into cliche, and the fact is that if you are comfortable around guns, having your finger inside the trigger carries no significant risk of an accidental discharge.
Oh man, that’s almost parody. Like something a conspiracy theorist would attribute to Feds. “We need to cull the gun population!”
I like having some cliches on which to fall back. The laws of gun safety are pretty good ones, and they make it way easier to impress the overall strategy on a new shooter. If that’s cringe…then I don’t want to be based.
There's a steelman where establishing 'vital' rules that must necessarily broken on a regular occurrence is counterproductive for all but the dimmest bulbs. Mike Rowe's Safety Third talk is a more generalized version.
Saying that you can't get hurt if you follow these simple rules in every circumstance isn't even strictly true -- ricochet matter! -- but even were it true, it's not very useful, when you have to break those rules on the range, dry-firing, tearing down some guns for cleaning, doing common drills. It's 'okay', because you're only breaking one rule at a time! But while Trigger Discipline ends up being the thing people focus most on because it's so visible in every photo, it's also one that -- as Sig has proven at length -- is particularly awkward for how consistently you have to break it for a variety of situations.
I don't agree with it, myself, still: Cooper's Four Rules are about producing habits, not behaviors. But it's less obviously crazy.
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This is first I'm hearing of it and yours was essentially my reaction as well.
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True under normal circumstances, but in exactly the sort of stressful situation where self-defense might become necessary (e.g. in a building where there's a shooter) I'd expect having your finger inside the trigger guard to indeed risk accidental discharge.
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It's very low cost to have trigger discipline, and very high cost if something does go wrong because you don't. It might be an insignificant risk, but why take the risk at all? If nothing else, the competent people using trigger discipline so the incompetent people follow along too is a good idea. Because I guarantee you if there was a policy of "You're only allowed to have your finger inside the trigger if you're comfortable with guns", you'd see a ton of people who aren't comfortable but want to pretend they are putting their finger inside.
If I were to argue the other side, I think I would start with "because life is irreducibly risky, and it is better to consciously accept that fact than to chase increasingly marginal safety measures. At some point, you need to draw the line and say 'this far and no further'".
Mainly, though, I'm just interested in the evident social dynamics. Status games are really good at eroding norms.
I agree with that to a degree but I think it's all about costs. If I was told that to increase gun safety I should wear a piece of plastic on my finger that may slightly increased safety but caused me significant annoyance(as a made up example), I wouldn't want to, because it wouldn't be worth it. I agree there are lots of things like that where our culture is insisting in ever more costly measures for ever more marginal gains. But keeping fingers out of the trigger feels very low cost with a benefit that's more than marginal.
Interesting comparison: trigger guard safeties. I bought a Garand recently, and putting it on safe entails pulling a metal tab in with your trigger finger. Since this tab is on the front of the trigger guard, taking it off requires the user to put his finger on the trigger, then push out. It’s not something I expect to actually be dangerous, but I can see why it has been unpopular compared to thumb safeties.
I'm actually more surprised that more bones aren't made about the safety on the SKS (or to a lesser extent, the SVT-40, though those aren't exactly common in the US)- you have to sweep the lever down towards and behind the trigger to disengage it and if you do it BAD-(lever)ly enough you could probably fire it with the same finger stroke. Maybe the people who fire their guns accidentally this way probably successfully cover it up since this type of gun can slam fire if you fail to clean a part that takes effort to remove.
I think the second biggest reason thumb safeties aren't popular is just because modular trigger assemblies don't lend themselves to it (the Garand is basically just a purpose-built bolt-action rifle conversion anyway, and with the trigger where it is there's very little room in the action itself for it). Safeties that directly block the hammer from moving are better than those that just disable the trigger, too, so if you can get away with it, why not? (For that matter, the AR-15 can't be put on Safe when the hammer is down, which would probably prevent people from seeing not being able to do that as "unsafe" by itself simply due to being a gun everyone and their dog owns.)
Also, competitive shooting with the meta gun(s) in Production requires you to pull the trigger when you don't intend to shoot to lower the hammer down, all the way, on a live round, on a gun that has no firing pin block- so it'll go bang if you drop it in the right place just like SIG P320s did. It's true that nobody's downrange when you do it, but it's still the most common gun handling thing apart from actually shooting it. The preferred 1911s can also do this, but you're starting those with the safety on so it's much less of an issue.
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I did a bit of small bore shooting during my time at university and we had an hour long lecture when I started about how we MUST MUST not put our finger around the trigger before they would even let us get into a sling. There were plenty of examples in the lecture of things going wrong and the aftermath of these accidents and while I personally don't mind guns (in the hands of the right people of course, I absolutely mind them in the hands of the wrong people) I would not be comfortable around someone holding a loaded gun like that. To me proper trigger discipline is an act of basic courtesy to your fellow shooters signifying you value their safety.
I don't particularly disagree, just pointing out an interesting social pattern. People who do disagree often point to the numerous examples within the firearms pantheon who evidently did not follow the rule rigorously.
What is actually happening, I think, is that it became a low-effort callout, and thus grew associated with people who were evidently in it for social points rather than actual gun safety, and normal social dynamics are doing their thing from there, helped along by the mutual disdain between what one might uncharitably call old-timer "fudds" and the younger Cawladooty crowd. It's interesting to watch the norms shift in real-time.
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The complaint he has about Asians at Harvard seems somewhat valid. If there's a large tendency among them to just go for a comfy upper-middle class professional lifestyle, than these people have no business being at an elite school, if 'elite' is to have any meaning. Harvard should probably select people in a different way. 100% there are way you can figure out who has leader potential and who hasn't.
It means they should be at 2nd tier schools which can adequately prepare them for their careers, and leave places for the real elite - intelligent, ambitious, ruthless people for others who are a better fit.
Indian Bronson is a known bad actor, associated with J.Arthur Bloom who is some sort of fed baby and who Thought to be involved in some BS 'deradicalisation' meaning channelling all politics that may change the status quo into fruitless directions.
Might I just note that taking people with a known absence of morals and putting them in charge of your society falls under the heading of Bad Ideas?
I'm not a totalitarian. No one should be 'in charge' of society.
Is there a plan for putting that wish into reality that you're not sharing? If not, I fail to see the use of stating the 'should's in this case. The question was if you really think putting elites that are ruthless in charge of society is good for us.
Who is 'us' here?
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Isn't BAP's point that he thinks Han people are relentlessly ruthless in their pursuit of sociopathic ambition to the point where it degrades culture? He says:
I don't mean this as a gotcha, but the biggest frustration I have around "race discourse" is that people seem to just ladle on negative adjectives to the race under discussion instead of being precise. Are they smart-but-passive rule followers, or smart-but-sociopathic rule breakers?
No, he says too man Asians who graduate from Harvard just become highly paid upper-middle class professionals instead of actual elites- business, media, political leaders etc.
As any population, mix of both. Consider e.g. the illegal taxi thing.. It's rule-breaking of a useful but only mercantile kind. Doesn't impress him in the same way, e.g. Chinese seizure of Vancouver would.
He's right though that the Chinese with their ideas are going to wreck a system that evolved to work for a population much more prone to guilt and ideas about morality.
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I believe the synthesis would be, “They assiduously follow rules when the local context has a rigid and actively-vigilant authority structure which can be reliably expected to hold them accountable for transgressions. They break the rules when in a context where the authority is lax, or when the rules can be easily gamed. In both cases, their attitude toward the rules is not motivated by an intrinsic sense of guilt (conscience), but rather by a keen social awareness of what it’s possible to get away with at any given time and in any given context.”
Coherent, thanks.
I guess my response would be an addendum: "And that's a good thing." People are universally selfish, and I'd attribute better success at recognizing when to follow rules and when to break them as just a natural outcome of intelligence instead of a lack of character. (I also recognize that many would see that just as a defect in my own character.)
I think there is an additional distinction to be made here though. Towards what end was the rule broken?
Rule-breaking to achieve the true honest to god objective more effectively? Good.
Rule-breaking to accomplish apparent/personal objectives (that are often orthogonal or antithetical to the true objective). Understandable, but bad. Think of fluffing up meaningless KPI's and other forms of underhanded rent seeking.
In my observation, non-westerners (including the elites) don't have a strong cultural taboo towards the second kind of objective. (And what's the problem as long as you and your family is richer off in the end?). Westerners don't either, but a higher enough proportion of them do, for it to be worth something.
Ofcourse if you are observing a system with a birds eye view, it's obvious why the second system is worse.
It's hard to quantify this but it just feels to me that placing an utmost devotion to the honest to god objective even at the cost of one's own status and wealth is a very.... Christian/Western notion. Other cultures do that as means to an end towards personal status/wealth, not vice versa.
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Whether it's good or bad, while a fascinating discussion, is not germane.
It is at odds with how Western civilization works. We expect the individual to police himself and society with an internally consistent ethic and guilt. God is always watching you in particular.
And the people who are educated to form the elite of Western society should understand and hold to Western values. In principle.
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Well congratulations, you’ve just described all humans in every historical context, with compulsive rule-followers being the rare exception.
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Just winging an answer here, but I think the idea is that when it comes to personal gain they don't feel guilt and will ruthlessly defect against norms to get what they want. If caught, they will feel shame, which is distinct. C.f. the staggering rates of academic misconduct right down to cheating in university, which afaict is much more a Han problem than anyone else's.
OTOH, when it comes to official dogma, they don't seem interested in questioning it much at all. Much more conformist. This is a difference on average and there will be exceptions. But, they're two different things. Conflating both with 'rule following' is the problem here.
Scandinavians seem the same way re: conformity. It's interesting to wonder why and how. Again, the off-the-cuff supposition would be that Scandis are that way because they evolved in high-trust societies with low corruption and could generally benefit from believing the authorities, who were generally correct and benevolent. Whereas the Han evolved in a low-trust environment where people questioning authority tended to have their families exterminated to several degrees. Point deer make horse. Not questioning authority is beneficial either way, but for very different reasons, and so will play out differently.
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Actually, the system was set up explicitly to keep you all out, you can be the top of the hierarchy in your own nation and see how that works out. Only very recently did that change. But it certainly was not how the system was set up, and not the system under which western civilization was actually created such that there are uncountable numbers of people like you begging to join it.
This whole thread is not great. You guys are winding each other up, and I think it likely you all know you're winding each other up. You've got several AAQCs, a couple warnings, and three tempbans. This time, you did the best job riding the line so congrats on that, I guess, but you're still getting a warning for your contribution to the general melee. This is a warning: adjust course, please.
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This isn't the sort of discourse we expect here. Direct personal attacks aren't allowed. You have two AAQCs, a warning and a tempban awhile back, but you are very clearly defying the rules here, and that can't be allowed. Take a week off, and please refrain from such behavior in the future.
It's a shame too. After this you guys seemed to rein it in, and actually converge on a real discussion. Still, rules are rules.
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Who says I'm not trying to adapt? I can be accused of a lot of things, but not trying to adapt isn't one of them.
Exactly, which is why the system itself is so important. Let's not pretend this system isn't a brand new upheaval and that it was always set up to be this way. It wasn't, they are only now allowed to join in on this Western hierarchy at this point, this is a grand experiment with a lot at stake.
I know he's being tongue-in-cheek provocative when he says "higher fit humans taking their rightful place near the top of the western hierarchy", and I greatly prefer that banter to 2rafa's "the real British are the people who drink tea and attend Wimbledon". But I'll respond in kind: the Western hierarchy was built and was at its long best before this suicidal sociological experiment that has graciously allowed him to pretend he is one of us.
I'm sorry, do you realize how recent the mass immigration of cognitive elite in University, tech. etc. actually is? Absolutely none of what you mentioned can be attributed to the impending demographic replacement of the cognitive elite. So they have no "rightful place", it's just an experiment to see what happens when we replace the cognitive elite that built Western civilization with a cognitive elite that built worse civilizations in other parts of the world.
It turns out, there was a measurable genetic change due to non-European migration to Imperial Rome immediately before its decline and collapse (which was later completely erased by the barbarian invasions). I'm not saying that is going to happen in the United States, I'm saying BurdensomeCount is the Arab merchant who shows up in Rome in 300 CE and claims he is taking his rightful place in the Roman hierarchy.
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