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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 15, 2024

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You made a claim about the British colonisation of India and the Aztec response to Cortez. Both of those claims are false, and you were challenged on them, and your response is to... what? Assert that the Indo-Aryans somehow prove it as well? Despite not presenting anything that would plausibly indicate that?

And then you somehow pivot to ancient Greece, where Apollo is actually a deity of many things (including prophecy, music, light, disease, archery, healing, etc.), and the only arguments you make are firstly that one of Apollo's many epithets relates to the founding of cities (never mind that that is also true of many other deities), and that... you think one statue of Apollo looks like some guy on Imgur? Okay? This isn't even considering that an ancient Greek 'colony' is something very different to British India.

This is all, frankly, bullshit. You have some sort of general theory about superior racial archetypes - it's basically just a recapitulation of the old Nordic/Aryan category you get from people like Gobineau - but whenever any specific claim based on it turns out to be false, as indeed it does in both your initial examples here, you leap to some other isolated 'fact'.

Let's try to clarify this a bit.

Motte: More attractive, more physically capable people are more likely to successfully reproduce.

Bailey: There is a well-defined Aryo-Nordic race that is recognised across many cultures for its superior beauty and intellectual capacity.

The motte is true, sure. But the position you're arguing for overall is under-specified, you haven't made any actual argument for it beyond gesturing at a handful of isolated observations that fail to cohere into a theory, and whenever any one of those observations is indicated to be false, you ignore it and immediately jump to a completely different observation, often centuries or even millennia away. This is not a real argument.

What are the actual points of evidence here? Some guy on YouTube makes videos of himself flirting with girls around the world. The British colonised India. The Aztecs thought Cortez was a god. Indo-Aryan peoples conquered northern India around four thousand years ago. Apollo was revered as a founder of cities. One statue of Apollo has a similar nose shape to some guy. Even if all these points were true, they don't cohere into a plausible macrohistorical theory. Anyone could, with a similarly arbitrary process of selection, cobble together a theory of racial superiority from the same random noise. There is no rigour to this hypothesis.

It's not exactly a pivot to point towards more evidence of the deification of a certain phenotype, which was explicitly associated with the founding of cities and colonization. To say "the statue of Apollo looks like some guy on Imgur" is a pretty dishonest handwaving for what is very obviously a Northern European phenotype being venerated as the physical ideal of a Founder and Colonizer racial-type in ancient Greece and Rome. Yes, I do think that despite the obvious differences there is a similar dynamic at play in European colonization across the entire world, and this behavior was explicitly identified with a European phenotype in the ancient world.

An of course the Physiognomy of Apollo is just one piece of the puzzle. The broader mythos accounts the race of Hyperboreans emerging from the northern most land in existence and constructing the temples to Apollo at Delphi and Delos. The Ionians in particular, who constituted the Athenian elite, claimed descent from Apollo and were associated with tall stature and blonde hair by ancient sources. In Greek myth, among all the Olympians, only Apollo was worshipped by the Hyperboreans.

I do see a coherence in this dynamic in both the ancient and modern world, I don't think it's all a coincidence or that these myths and symbols have a non-racial meaning. They do point towards a racial archetype if such a thing can possibly exist, and of course I think they do.

whenever any specific claim based on it turns out to be false, as indeed it does in both your initial examples here, you leap to some other isolated 'fact'.

None of my specific claims have been false, they have all been true. The British colonization of India, the Aryan invasion of Iran and India in which the word "Aryan" was synonymous in civic society with "noble", the colonization of North and South America, the colonization of Australia and Africa. It's not exactly a stretch to relate this behavior to a racial archetype, especially when we have evidence for cult-religions in the ancient world which venerated Colonization with a racialized portrayal that is identical to the race of people who have colonized almost the entire world. Your comment reminds me of the mainstream which says "oh those race realists are just repeating the debunked claims of ye olde' racists who measured skulls", but actually the old theories were the correct ones and the new theories based on fraudulent science from the likes of Stephen Jay Gould or Jared Diamond are false.

It should also be noted that the "old theories" about the Aryan invasions of Indo-Europe were proven true by recent genetic evidence, whereas the politically correct post-War narrative that emerged about cultural diffusion of Indo-European languages were proven false. So the "new theories" are already on very weak footing, it's passe at this point to make fun of the old racial theories which are proving to be more accurate than politically correct post-war theories with every passing year.

What we call "wokeism" also picks up on the primordial reality of this racial archetype, they simply resent it and want to see it destroyed, and I interpret this as having a large amount of overlap with the war on beauty discussed by others here.

What are the actual points of evidence here?

I do think Kurt's videos are evidence of this phenomenon, that was the point of my post. You can take a look at another video of him wandering through a city in Bangladesh, the only foreigner in sight. You can say "he would get the same reaction if he were an attractive/physically fit Chinaman or African, but I simply don't believe you. I do think the dynamic Kurt leans into in his content is racialized specifically in relation to White people, the only question is whether this dynamic is contingent on historical factors or if it's pointing to something different.

One could say, for example, that since the English colonized Bangladesh then the people are primed to behave this way in Kurt's presence, but that's just begging the question.

There is no rigour to this hypothesis.

The pattern of behavior, for thousands of years, of European people colonizing the world is very strong evidence that points towards a certain racial archetype. Furthermore, there is direct evidence that one of, perhaps the most important, god of the Greco-Roman world associated a European, Nordic phenotype to that archetype. That is very strong evidence, and Kurt's content is a modern-day demonstration of a certain phenomenon which is taboo to acknowledge as anything except historically contingent brainwashing by Western media and the legacy of colonization.