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jeroboam
10m ago
Despite making up 13% of the population, 15% of NFL players are black
Typo. 53% are black.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
12m ago
Certain domesticated dog breeds are much better at complex pattern recognition and sequences than a wolf, like the border collie. This requires training beforehand, but so do humans (all socialization from infancy is training).
jeroboam
15m ago
That was a beautiful and erudite post. Thank you for sharing.
As late as the 18th century, there was still a case to be made that China was the most powerful and prosperous nation on the planet
I believe that, excepting nuclear weapons, China is currently the most powerful nation on the planet. It's true that the western nations are in general more creative but this is offset by China's higher population, higher IQ, and higher diligence. In 2024, China produces most of the things that matter.
So, if China was ahead before, and they are ahead now, what happened in the meantime?
My answer: The Industrial Revolution was unique. Productivity increased at an extremely high pace for 200 years. In this brief, high-growth environment Western creativity dominated over Chinese diligence. But this period of history appears to have ended. Growth has slowed in the West, allowing China to catch and even surpass the West in many key areas.
Caveat: AI is a major wildcard.
Shrike
23m ago
I believe there are back-breeding projects, or you can compare cows from more "primitive" (wild) conditions, such as longhorns, with other cattle. In my experience longhorns come across as considerably more intelligent and resilient than shorthorn cattle, although I have little experience with the latter.
non_radical_centrist
13m ago
I never heard of him before, but I read a couple of his Palestine posts, and a couple on other topics. I wouldn't really call him rat-ty from what I've seen, he seems to really beat around the bush a lot and then not even offer clear conclusions and solutions when he's done. He follows the leftist intellectual playbook of pointing out something terrible, waxing poetic of how we really need to stop that terrible thing, but then not actually offer any alternatives or ways to implement a solution. He had a post where he used Fidel Castro's death as imagery for how the today's state of Cuba is the death of revolutionary socialism, since Cuba today is an example of how even best case scenario socialism has rather pathetic results compared to the average capitalist democracy. But he didn't seem to actually seem to stop being a leftist or start advocating for democratic capitalism, instead the piece was just mourning socialism's death without actually abandoning socialism.
I might be misunderstanding him, but I'd place that entirely on him for not being more clear, I shouldn't have to do literary analysis on a political commentator.
srf0638
33m ago
Yeah, it's been my impression for quite a while that strip clubs and such in the west are much more about you and your boys than they are about you and the girls. Good posts.
Felagund
59m ago
But in order to sell promises and get real goods, you need promises to sell. Promises are expectation of future goods. If you don't uphold those, you'll have to stop selling promises. This makes it harder to get the real goods you want, since you can no longer just offer promises and then pay them back.
Promises are better—that is, you can trade them for more—the more trustworthy you are. Being more profligate with your promises than you can afford tanks the value of your promises and makes it harder to keep getting those real goods from them.
Worst case you just inflate the pain away.
This is precisely where the problem lies. Yes, you can always just inflate it away. The problem is that this has harmful effects. Namely, a change in trade balance. A high inflation rate will mean nobody wants their wealth in dollars, worldwide. A lot of dollars are overseas. For the past while, we've been able to get more stuff from importing than we export, because everyone wants dollars. This is great. Just now we're at a spot where if that changes, suddenly the economy will be a lot worse, as everyone tries to shed dollars, making everything more expensive in dollars, beyond just the direct effect of the increased money supply on inflation. Because the whole US runs on dollars, dollars going down relative to the world economy beyond just the direct effect of inflation is bad. It becomes harder to buy anything, especially things made overseas.
A lot of countries have tried "inflate the pain away." How did it work for them? (Hint: pretty disastrously)
Yes, they didn't control the world's reserve currency. But give the US dollar enough inflation, and it will no longer be the world's reserve currency, as everyone drops it.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
16m ago
I think there is an element of self-domestication somewhere in European prehistory. It’s noteworthy that blue eyes are unheard of among wild mammals yet are found in domesticated goat, dog, and fox breeds. (See: Morgan Worthy’s obscure 1970s writings). Similarly, blonde hair is uncommon but found in the amicable golden retriever. While Asians have neotenous features they lack other features that go with high-trust animal domestication like wide eyes. There’s even a study showing that when Asians are evaluating faces they don’t normally look at the eyes but the middle of the face, although this may have to do with default mode network differences
Sometimes violence is pre-planned and calculated, like a sniper watching carefully for the moment to take the shot
Re: Morgan Worthy mentioned above, in his “eye color: a key determinant in behavior” he talks about how light eyed hunters across species more often “lie in wait” before engaging in a ”self-starting” hunting action. Dark eyed animals are more likely to hunt by chasing and reacting. Worthy then looked at sports and found that blue eyed athletes performed better at non-reactive, self-regulated actions like free throws and golf (Tiger Woods an exception that did not exist yet).
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
23m ago
everyone who cares about this stuff is ruled by men who hate them.
Indeed. The Supreme Court position on the right to keep and bear arms is "Sure, people have the right to keep and bear arms. That doesn't mean any particular person has the right to own or carry a gun." Very conservative position, actually.
ChestertonsMeme
35m ago
This hypothesis is advanced in e.g. Gregory Clark's books (Farewell to Alms, The Son Also Rises) with violent European criminals being executed before they could reproduce, causing the population to become less violent and more conscientious over time. It's also mentioned in other older works (I forget the exact reference but maybe Lynn or Rushton) observing that the average IQ correlates with gracility/robustness and other traits like age at puberty.
One of the key claims in The Son Also Rises is that social status is heritable and genetic. This I think is the encompassing fact (if true). Races can have different average social status that's genetically determined, and the details of which specific traits mediate that status aren't as important.
jeroboam
35m ago
The status increase going from America to actual Africa is pretty extreme.
Examples:
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I had a friend whose father was an exchange student from Ethiopia to the US. The father remained in the US for obvious reasons and became a professor of African studies or something. When the family returned to Ethiopia as tourists they had a private audience with the president of the country.
-
I traveled to Tanzania to walk up Kilimanjaro. (Quick aside: this is not an impressive accomplishment. It is quite doable by anybody with money and a modicum of fitness). Our hotel, average by American standards, was like staying at the Ritz. Anyone who was anyone stayed there. Middle class Americans wearing cargo shorts mingled with the top 0.1% elites wearing bespoke suits. And honestly, we were probably much richer than them.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
50m ago
BMWF couples are well over-represented
I recall a far-right talking point 'black on white rape 20,000, white on black rape 0'.
This link goes into detail on that and provides a fair few charts that show black women are generally considered unattractive: https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2023/02/white-on-black-vs-black-on-white-rape-statistics/
Personally I don't know why we'd need charts to show that black women are unattractive but they're there! The OkCupid and reply rate data is pretty clear, if gut instinct wasn't enough.
Kierkegaard also argues that black women who date white men are smarter than white women who date black men, which also makes sense. https://twitter.com/wayotworld/status/1789038821981495741/photo/1
OliveTapenade
52m ago
This is an area where I think it's also useful to start reading thoughts from other perspectives entirely?
Have you ever read Wolf Totem? It's a novel by a Chinese author, Lu Jiamin, who spent some time in Inner Mongolia, and he has a theory that Han Chinese people are 'domesticated' - he calls them Dragon Totem people - and as a result have been outcompeted and brutalised by wild steppe people and their descendants, which he calls Wolf Totem people. Notably he sees Europeans as Wolf people, and as the descendants of the steppe.
Here are a few passages to give you the impression:
“In world history,” Chen continued the thought, “nomads have been the only Easterners capable of taking the fight to the Europeans, and the three peoples that really shook the West to its foundations were the Huns, the Turks, and the Mongols. The Westerners who fought their way back to the East were all descendants of nomads. The builders of ancient Rome were a pair of brothers raised by a wolf. Images of the wolf and her two wolf-children appear on the city’s emblem even today. The later Teutons, Germans, and Anglo-Saxons grew increasingly powerful, and the blood of wolves ran in their veins. The Chinese, with their weak dispositions, are in desperate need of a transfusion of that vigorous, unrestrained blood. Had there been no wolves, the history of the world would have been written much differently. If you don’t know wolves, you can’t understand the spirit and character of the nomads, and you’ll certainly never be able to appreciate the differences between nomads and farmers or the inherent qualities of each.”
[...]
Chen, mesmerized by the sight, was deep in thought. “We’ll have to study him closely,” he said finally. “There’s a lot we can learn from this. Our dog pen is a microcosm of world history. I’m reminded of something Lu Xun once wrote. He said that Westerners are brutish, while we Chinese are domesticated.”
Chen pointed to the cub. “There’s your brute.” Then he pointed to the pups. “And there’s your domestication. For the most part, Westerners are descendants of barbarian, nomadic tribes such as the Teutons and the Anglo-Saxons. They burst out of the primeval forest like wild animals after a couple of thousand years of Greek and Roman civilization, and sacked ancient Rome. They eat steak, cheese, and butter with knives and forks, which is how they’ve retained more primitive wildness than the traditional farming races. Over the past hundred years, domesticated China has been bullied by the brutish West. It’s not surprising that for thousands of years the Chinese colossus has been spectacularly pummeled by tiny nomadic peoples.”
Chen rubbed the cub’s head and continued. “Temperament not only determines the fate of a man but also determines the fate of an entire race. Farming people are domesticated, and faintheartedness has sealed their fate. The world’s four great civilizations were agrarian nations, and three of them died out. The fourth, China, escaped that fate only because two of the greatest rivers—the Yellow and the Yangtze—run through her territory. She also boasts the world’s largest population, making it hard for other nations to nibble away at her or absorb her, but maybe also because of the contributions of the nomadic peoples of the grassland... I haven’t satisfactorily thought out this relationship, but the more time I spend on the grassland—and it’s already been two years—the more complex I think it is.”
[...]
Chen sighed. “The way I see it, the most advanced people today are descendants of nomadic races. They drink milk, eat cheese and steak, weave clothing from wool, lay sod, raise dogs, fight bulls, race horses, and compete in athletics. They cherish freedom and popular elections, and they have respect for their women, all traditions and habits passed down by their nomadic ancestors. Not only did they inherit their courage, their militancy, their tenacity, and their need to forge ahead from their nomadic forebears, but they continue to improve on those characteristics. People say you can tell what a person will grow up to be at the age of three and what he’ll look like in old age at seven. The same holds true for a race of people. In the West, primitive nomadic life was their childhood, and if we look at primitive nomads now, we are given access to Westerners at three and at seven, their childhood, and if we take this further, we get a clear understanding of why they occupy a high position. Learning their progressive skills isn’t hard. China launched its own satellite, didn’t it? What’s hard to learn are the militancy and aggressiveness, the courage and willingness to take risks that flow in nomadic veins.”
“Since I’ve been herding horses,” Zhang said, “I’ve felt the differences in temperament between the Chinese and the Mongols. Back in school I was at the top in just about everything, but out here I’m weak as a kitten. I did everything I could think of to make myself strong, and now I find that there’s something lacking in us...”
Chen sighed again. “That’s it exactly!” he said. “China’s small-scale peasant economy cannot tolerate competitive peaceful labor. Our Confucian guiding principle is emperor to minister, father to son, a top-down philosophy, stressing seniority, unconditional obedience, eradicating competition through autocratic power, all in the name of preserving imperial authority and peaceful agriculture. In both an existential and an awareness sense, China’s small-scale peasant economy and Confucian culture have weakened the people’s nature, and even though the Chinese created a brilliant ancient civilization, it came about at the cost of the race’s character and has led to the sacrifice of our ability to develop. When world history moved beyond the rudimentary stage of agrarian civilization, China was fated to fall behind. But we’re lucky, we’ve been given the opportunity to witness the last stages of nomadic existence on the Mongolian grassland, and, who knows, we might even discover the secret that has led to the rise in prominence of Western races.”
Now as a historical theory, there's a lot here that's doubtful - the proposed genetic link seems weak, Han are genetically closer to Mongols than Europeans are, at times he can't seem to decide on the racial associations (are the Romans weak decadents sacked by the Wolf people, or were the Romans Wolf people themselves?), and some reckoning with the fact that the Chinese have spent centuries kicking steppe peoples around seems necessary - but I think it's at least interesting as a window into how this sort of thing looks from another angle.
That is, here we have people immediately concluding that whites and Asians are both in the 'domesticated', Dragon category, but here's a Chinese voice utterly convinced that whites in the wild barbarian Wolf category.
I think it's also worth looking at theories in this in the context of trying to answer particular questions. Lu is writing in the context of the long Chinese tradition of wondering how the West outpaced them and how the Century of Humiliation happened. As late as the 18th century, there was still a case to be made that China was the most powerful and prosperous nation on the planet, and then in barely a century the Europeans comprehensively embarrassed, defeated, and exploited them, and even today the Chinese still struggle to understand how that happened and what to do about it. Lu's Dragon/Wolf, Farmer/Nomad distinction is an attempt to explain what's different about Europe and China on the macrohistorical level (and consequently places like Africa just don't rate a mention at all).
By contrast, when Westerners come up with theories about race and domestication and so on, they are trying to answer different questions. They perceive a different problem in front of them, which requires explanation. What's the mystery that is supposed to be solved?
The current SC is not exactly shy about overturning precedent, have they recently affirmed this position or is it an older decision?
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