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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

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?

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

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-determined actions like free throws and golf (Tiger Woods an exception that did not exist yet).

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

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.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

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.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

The status increase going from America to actual Africa is pretty extreme.

Examples:

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

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

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

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.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

The Brooklyn District Attorney's website reports:

“Ghost guns are a threat to New Yorkers everywhere, and my Office is working tirelessly with our partners in law enforcement to stop their proliferation. Today’s sentence should send a message to anyone who, like this defendant, would try to evade critically important background checks and registration requirements to manufacture and stockpile these dangerous weapons. Every ghost gun we take off the street is a win for public safety.”

The District Attorney identified the defendant as Dexter Taylor, 53, of Bushwick, Brooklyn. He was sentenced today by Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Abena Darkeh to 10 years in prison. He was convicted of two counts of second-degree criminal possession of a weapon; three counts of third-degree criminal possession of a weapon; five counts of criminal possession of a firearm; unlawful possession of pistol ammunition; and prohibition on unfinished frames or receivers on April 16, 2024, following a jury trial.

Taylor, also known as CarbonMike, was both a CTRL-Pew 3d printing enthusiast and a New Yorker, a combination that Didn't Go Well.

The specific charges and sentencing are complex, but if I'm reading matters correctly, almost all sentences run concurrently, so the headline charge about ghost guns, like the charges about possession of pistol ammunition and so on, are kinda swamped by a ten-year sentence for 'assault weapons' and for 'owning five firearms'. There are a few border issues on the text of the statutes, but there's not a ton to argue on whether Taylor complied with these statutes.

((Not least of all because many are vague or broad enough that it's very much up to the local DA to make the decision anyway.))

There's a lot to be debated about whether the laws are constitutional, but not much chance that it matters. The New York Assault Weapons Ban has been the target of prolonged lawfare since before Bruen, with the FPC currently supporting Lane after the state was getting good enough reception in Vanchoff v James about lacking credible threats of prosecution, and that's the case with the stance furthest along. Other statutes, like possession of ammunition or "ammunition feeding devices" without a matching pistol permit, are difficult to write cases to challenge before enforcement at all. Even if the statutes for each of the longer sentences are overturned, bail pending appeal is extremely unlikely. Taylor will have served most if not all of his sentence first, especially given the glacial pace that courts have set for these matters (cfe Duncan).

Taylor also makes the argument that he did not have a fair day in court, and while almost every defendant does that to some extent, his argument is unusually compelling. No few gunnies finding a pull quote from the judge allegedly claiming that "Do not bring the Second Amendment into this courtroom. It doesn’t exist here. So you can’t argue Second Amendment. This is New York." but the gameplay about objections, if honestly stated, is as bad or worse. (I'm unable to find a direct trial transcript.).

Also doesn't matter. There is a right to an impartial judge, but this mostly covers matters like giant campaign donations or hating an entire nationality or literally copying text from a party's submissions, rather than just figuratively being on the prosecutor's side. Even assuming Taylor's (and his lawyer's) summary is accurate and complete, the appeals courts don't care that lower courts hate people accused of making guns.

In some ways, Taylor might be the ideal test case: nothing in the visible court records or DA chest-beating show nefarious intent like violent personal history or intent to resell (and New York law places a presumption on multiple possession as for sale), he (was) traditionally employed, he credibly claims that he's never fired a single one of the guns, and at 52, he's aged out of the various high-criminal-risk age brackets. To beat the HBDers to the punch, he's even visibly a minority.

((To beat the HBDers with a stick, if we're framing absolutely everything as part of the progressive stack, I think there's strong evidence that the real top of the stack is whatever matches the politics today in a far more direct manner than mere race.))

Of course, the Brooklyn DA brought the case, knowing that. The judge acted like this, in this case, knowing that. And no matter how dim you might think they are, they're winning, and this know what it takes to win. Whether that's because the courts punt on serious cases because defendants fail to present long evidence of futile requests, because they credibly believe that Taylor's not Perfect Enough for the courts to actually handle or for various gun rights orgs to fund, or because even if they're wrong they'll never suffer for it, doesn't really matter. It's possible that Brooklyn DA took the case because Taylor's social media made it easier to prove, it might be that we're only gonna hear about this case out of many because of said social media, and it doesn't really matter.

There's a lot of ways to snark, in "What's the penalty for being late?" fashion, about how Taylor's non-violent noncompliance with a law has gotten a much longer sentence than nutjobs who were separately violent, or a comparable sentence to a man who literally burned another man to death on the pyre of an Approved Cause. And that's not entirely fair, because the federal system doesn't have parole and New York does, and anyway there's a million different squiggly little variables about the crimes and sentences, and there's nowhere near enough cases to make a deep statistical analysis even if I wanted to try. Gun control advocates will certainly quibble, at the edges, about whether this is really 'non-violent non-violent', since there's always the possibility of later bad acts or theft or loss or mental break.

And Taylor ain't dead yet, despite an (alleged) no-knock raid. The actuarials put decent odds on him even seeing the light of day as a free man again, parole or no. Unlike Mr. Lee, had Taylor expressed his dislike of current law enforcement with a bit what the ATF calls a destructive device through a bit of what I call a broken window, the odds would not be looking so good. But there's no magic court case, here, and no golden BB. This isn't even the strawman of a scifi writer drawing up villains who just want their laws as threats to hang over innocent men. If you are ruled by people who hate you, giving puppy-dog eyes and saying this is just a paperwork crime and no one was hurt won't buy you a cup of coffee before you get absolutely reamed in all the least fun ways, and contra a once-prolific-now-banned poster here, everyone who cares about this stuff is ruled by men who hate them.

This is what table stakes looks like.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

First of all beautiful and erudite post.

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.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

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.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 6, 2024

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.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

What is it with spicy race rambling as top level posts today?

OK. On to the contribution. Passport bros are not primarily a reaction to the shortcomings of western women. They're a reaction to the brokenness of western dating markets, where some fraction of people- both male and female, simply cannot find a reasonable match for structural factors. In an ideal world these people would be matched up together because, and I repeat myself, femcels are a thing. This is not an overwhelmingly male group and in an ideal world the redpillers and female dating strategy crowd would get over themselves and find their way together. Alas, we do not live in an ideal world, and neither do the denizens of the third world, who find the USA irresistible.

Nor does it surprise me that redpillers are much blacker than average; gender relations seem much worse in the black community and redpilling is much more common as a reaction to broken down gender relations than it is to endogenously hating women.

Black men, due to higher muscularity, higher extroversion, and other “traits”, are viewed as the most masculine of the races. This bears out in interracial dating statistics where BMWF couples (excuse the porn-inspired abbreviation—it’s just efficient and I don’t feel like reinventing the wheel here) are well over-represented compared to WMBF couples who are under-represented.

Except this is partly just because no one likes black women very much, including black men. Either as attractive in themselves('men do not find African features attractive' is a statement at least as true as 'men don't like fatties' and 'men prefer younger women'), nor for their stereotypes(nobody is going to describe their ideal woman as bossy, demanding, and lazy. Precious few will describe her as strong and sassy, either, if you're trying for more positive stereotypes), nor for their individual characteristics which tend towards obesity, single motherhood, etc.

It will be interesting to see if this trend spreads to White America or if it stays confined to Tiktok and Black Twitter.

White men with Mexican wives are everywhere. White men with filipina wives are almost as common. It's not like no one knows this one weird trick. Whites just bluntly refer to mail order brides(or 'Russian brides') instead of using terms like passport bro.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

There could be complex cyclical trends in the Middle East. People get overly domesticated and decadent, then the next wave of steppe nomads arrive and conquer them, infusing more aggression and willingness to die. Effete intellectuals in Baghdad hit hardest by latest horde (or any disruptions really), ignorant peasants in the countryside are valued taxpayers and food suppliers. Cities were likely IQ shredders for millennia, you'd have plague and urban fertility reduction burning off natural enhancements in intellect, perhaps there was a delicate homeostasis, periods of rise and fall.

There's good reason why people dismiss HBD as explaining too much, just storytelling. But this is the social sciences. Few things are simple, there are all kinds of factors we can't measure.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

Do you have a specific objection?

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

Black people, whose natural inclinations are adverse to lifelong monogamy, quickly devolved back into their ancestral mating patterns when released from the straitjacket of traditional Christian morality.

This is totally out of left field.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

SEX AND THE BIG CITY

or

THE LAST UNINVADEABLE THIRD SPACE

In the digital age of escorts on demand and cheap flights to indulge in sex tourism, why would adult entertainment venues that offer sex-adjacent services persist, when one can get your rocks off for a much cheaper price? In observed practice within Asia, these venues exist not for booze and girls, but for establishing membership in the brotherhood: you are in our world now, and the initiation is sin.

This came about after I made a post about the adult entertainment scene in Singapore in a necro'ed thread when I saw @Pasha complain about the lack of visible seediness in one of Singapores premier red light districts. Details about the mechanics therein can be found here for context and to provide a primer for my below.

https://www.themotte.org/post/981/smallscale-question-sunday-for-april-28/211124?context=8#context

So what is this brotherhood mentioned up top? Basically it can be summed up as 'I need to know you will not fuck me over when push comes to shove'. This is perhaps foreign to professionalised pseudoacademics where people are best experienced as minimizeable windows on a zoom call, but in professions relating to physical goods and services, human trust is a shorthand for task success: better to get shit done with someone you know has your back than to waste tims searching for the MBA approved 'best fit'.

This is not limited to physical tradespeople like laborers and soldiers, but includes B2B sales professionals, commodity traders, shipbrokers, construction/civil engineering. In these environments, decision makers responsible for multi million dollar trades and projects care less about saving a rounding errors worth of marginal savings in favor of knowing who to yell at when shit goes tits up.

In the KTVs and Indian Dance Clubs and Thai Discos in Singapore, the patrons are often groups of men, usually professionals in the same cluster. Oil traders and refinery site managers, construction project managers and engineers with their lawyers and bankers, shipbrokers with agents. The booze and the women show up, the mens wallets open up, but more importantly their mouths open too. Industry gossip is adjacent to insider activity, and being part of these networks gives incredible insight into the movements and activities of not just the people in that group you are with but those groups they are part of as well. By joining or initiating these activities, an opportunity is presented to quickly establish a bond with the other men present, to immediately let it he known that you can be called upon when needed. There is incredible power to be had when you are one of the first names on the tips of powerful peoples fingers, and for many punters a successful night is not when your dick gets wet but when you get the phone number of a useful contact.

So why the sex revue? Well it is because of the steady decline of third spaces that have been invaded by credentialed professionals, especially women, who dislike legacy networks that are impenetrable. There are legit professional reasons for this, such as contravening of KYC protocols or tender processes, but for the most part the dislike of legacy networks stems from jealousy. There are plenty of women who have successfully entered halls of power, especially in Thailand and Hong Kong where female scions are groomed for succession by their fathers, but for the most part a lack of trust in these women to bother with handshake agreements leads to their exclusion from networks of power. Thus, the networks must be dismantled as much as possible, starting with removing the exclusivity of their assembly grounds. Male only social clubs have steadily been eroded to be female inclusive, from the Knights of Columbus to Freemasons, and other threads have highlighted youth organizations being the starting point of this rot, with the Boy Scouts being mixed gender while girl scouts remain female exclusive. Whatever organizational benefit there is to opening up the genders, it does mean there are less third spaces for men to discuss the ongoings of power.

Therefore, the last venue is the strip club, the sauna, the banya, the KTV. The men say they are going there to be sexual degenerates, and many often are purely socially retarded men seeking base human interactions, but the true sustenance of these places is being the third place that women have zero interest in demeaning themselves to enter. That alone will ensure their continued presence even as the world gets continually anonymized into the homogenous digital soup: the last bastions of human connections will concentrate under the pressure, hardening its borders to continual external forces till they are fully impenetrable.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

Another reason is that the manosphere is closely associated with other rightwing internet subcultures where white nationalism is frequently celebrated

In my more "woke" lurking days it was hilarious to see the tensions here. A common refrain was AWALT - all women are like that. It's just the science bro. But when the WN/HBDers started applying the same judgment to blacks, TRPers had to scramble for some reason it didn't apply to them or their comrades in arms.

A real shame the YT era seems to have more message discipline and people like Fuentes can apparently hang around with black manosphere types for clout without similar drama.

It’s interesting that passport bros tend to be black because, theoretically, black men should have an advantage in the dating market. Black men, due to higher muscularity, higher extroversion, and other “traits”, are viewed as the most masculine of the races. This bears out in interracial dating statistics where BMWF couples (excuse the porn-inspired abbreviation—it’s just efficient and I don’t feel like reinventing the wheel here) are well over-represented compared to WMBF couples who are under-represented. And this is not even accounting for the fact that if, instead of looking at stable couples, you look at people’s most recent sexual encounter, the disparity grows even further.

I have a simpler theory for why black men do better than black women in interracial dating.. This doesn't run into the problem faced by the theory above: "higher muscularity" as an unalloyed good requires not knowing a lot about the US and how groups are perceived.

I'm not going to get into the distribution of passport bros by race (I come from a country where this is so bad old white women are in on it, whites have sheer mass going for them). But, granting for the sake of argument, it seems like there's a simple explanation here too: black men gain more in status being American outside of America than other groups.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

I'm of essentially the exact opposite opinion. The linear game has almost no reason to exist. If my input has no effect on the outcome, why is it even required? All I'm really getting is a movie, but made objectively worse by the fact that it insists upon repeating a given scene until I complete an arbitrary task.

What's the point? Is there a movie that would be improved by making me win a round of Tetris every ten minutes to stop it from rewinding? Hell, why even have death animations or other displayed failure states in a video game? After all, it's not like the protagonist being eaten by monsters or falling down a hole to their death is what "really" happens.

Those failure states exist to create the illusion of agency. No game advertises itself by telling you the princess can already be considered rescued, because that's the artistic intent, but hey you can come push buttons if you want to see it. No, they want to create at least the pretense of the player's input having consequences.

So stop with the pretense and give me the real thing. Give me actual agency and consequence. Or commit to your singular vision for the story and write a book instead.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

This has been considered by HBD aficionados. There are indeed behavioral differences between the races that go beyond IQ. A good place to start is with Rushton's work on r vs K strategy.

But overall, controlling for IQ gets rid of the most of the difference in life outcomes between people of different races. But you do see a residual: for example if you control for SAT scores, black applicants to college are still predicted to perform somewhat worse (measured e.g. by GPA) than an equivalent white applicant. This is somewhat ambiguous to interpret since part of the effect will be due to regression to mean causing the true intelligence of a group of white people and black people with the same average SAT score to be different. But a part of it will be behavioral differences that can be credibly called "domestication"--traits like conscientiousness, the ability to delay gratification, the ability to follow instructions, not being impulsive enough to get kicked out, etc.

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 12, 2024

In Australia we just expelled a Chinese student for working on linking drones together to navigate through environments without GPS, since it was apparently 'WMD-related'. You should tread carefully, a lot of people are getting very excited/scared about drone navigation and targeting.

Honestly they're not wrong, I'm waiting for the moment 10,000 kill bots swarm out of a shipping container somewhere, they'll make 9/11 look like a joke.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

Social analysis of the bear-or-man meme is a waste of neurons. The initial poll showed very-online urban women did not know bears were at all dangerous. After that, all discourse has been a toxoplasma of gender war signaling — feminists get to signal how super-duper-extra they condemn men with a cherry on top, while anti-feminists get to grandstand about how stupid and man-hating women are.

There's nothing else to it.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

I think you're actually wrong there- whites are on average more physically imposing

Despite making up 13% of the population, 15% of NFL players are black

Whites and Asians having more domesticated traits also needs a causative mechanism which doesn't run into obvious flaws- eg complex civilization as a domesticating force doesn't account for the middle east today.

I think there are multiple factors at work for different civilizations/races being succesful. I think HBD is part of the reason for civilizational differences, but I buy into the WEIRDest People in the World cousin-marriages leading to clannish honour culture being why the Middle East is behind the West. I know there's a complexity penalty for theories that incorporate multiple factors like this but it still looks the most plausible to me for why the Middle East is so backwards.

I think it seems very likely that all humans have been domesticated compared to our primitive great ape ancestors. Whether some races are more domesticated than others is a more open question. But I think it's quite plausible that they are.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

I have a somewhat alternate theory to the standard HBD concept, one that may not be original but I haven't seen before, although I haven't delved the HBD forums much.

The standard HBD argument is that different races have different IQs, and that is the primary factor leads to all sorts of different outcomes. Instead of IQ causing so many differences, which I think might be true but is a lesser factor, I think different races are domesticated to different degrees. I read the book The Goodness Paradox about a year ago, and it was about how while humans kill each other in vastly larger scales than any other animal, we're also much less likely to try to tear each other's faces off in the woods than any other animal. The author first divides violence into two categories: reactive and pre-mediated. Sometimes violence is pre-planned and calculated, like a sniper watching carefully for the moment to take the shot. Other violence is reactive, like someone punches you or even just insults your mother and you hit back before you even think. The author presents a simple answer: That there is a relatively straightforward evolutionary process through which animals are domesticated, and domestication leads to much lower rates of reactive violence. The mechanism is that the animal is essentially forever childlike mentally. But not just mentally, also physically; that's why dogs look like wolf cubs, and domesticated foxes have converged on similar traits like floppy ears.

I think black people are similar, in that they are a more "adult" human. They tend to be physically bigger and stronger. I often see black women called masculine, and that is the explanation for why they're less attractive and do worse on dating apps- but I think it makes more sense to call them more adult(whatever the opposite of neotony is). Black women are well known for large secondary sexual characterics like big ass and breasts, that's hardly masculine. And east Asian women by contrast, a race widely considered more on the high end of genetics by HBDers, tend to be more neotonous, with smaller secondary characteristics and young looking faces. And their men tend to be smaller and less physically strong. So I think it's quite plausible that that domestication mechanism, while probably not the sole factor, is a sizeable one in making black people have such higher rates of crime and east asians such lower rates of crime.

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 12, 2024

Anti-colonialism.

If you look at Irish history, they had settlement and land expropriation from their stronger, religiously distinct, ultra-Western neighbour. They had vicious and protracted wars with Britain, insurgency, atrocities and terrorism.

It's quite similar to Palestine v Israel. More Western vs less Western, stronger vs weaker, religious conflict, land confiscation. Britain has been closely aligned with Israel since Suez.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

The protagonist exists in what is, essentially a linear corridor, and he can only move forward. Whatever he may want to do, there's nothing he can do but move forward.

Half-Life does kind of lampshade this theme, actually; Gordon essentially is trapped in a linear path, given only the illusion of choice, living only half a life.