This week’s Open Thread.
Open Thread 116
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was written by Anatoly Karlin for Russian Reaction on August 27, 2020 .185 Comments
Anatoly Karlin is a transhumanist interested in psychometrics, life extension, UBI, crypto/network states, X risks, and ushering in the Biosingularity.
Inventor of Idiot’s Limbo, the Katechon Hypothesis, and Elite Human Capital.
Apart from writing books, reviews, travel writing, and sundry blogging, I Tweet at @powerfultakes and run a Substack newsletter.
This is the current Open Thread, where anything goes – within reason.
If you are new to my work, start here.
Ukraine descending into the new 90s. Such an improvement from…
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn%3AANd9GcQzhllln-vzP_pzpYU179Ey8QiGu1Ex6x4TMw&usqp.jpg
https://twitter.com/RyanGirdusky/status/1299174046794424321
Nash Van Drake, Skripal’s cat who was killed by British authorities under very suspicious circumstances, published another solid editorial on Navalny poisoning.
https://m.vz.ru/opinions/2020/8/25/1056756.html
Good cat.
https://twitter.com/akarlin88/status/1286761471263768580?s=20
This legend of a renaissance rock-priest takes us on a trip to explore madness & genius.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9b2R1pFMf8
Some points that might give you ideas for your mega essay.
The only positive effect of the bifurcation so far is the stagnation of Chinese student numbers in the US. There were 400k in 2019, about the same as in previous recent years. Without the Trump administration it would have kept on rapidly climbing. These students especially undergrads bring back neoliberalism.txt. In the past year gay rights became more prominent in China. I think the exposure to Western universities is a contributor.
There have been so many sanctions and export controls imposed by the US on China since June that it is hard to keep track (Xinjiang, HK, and Huawei). But the most warlike one is the export ban in August on microchips to Huawei. Taiwanese, Korean, etc. companies are subject to following the ban. The action is intended to outright kill off Huawei.
The Israel lobby might facilitate peace in the Western Pacific. Its most able member Sheldon Adelson is doing so with his influence over Trump. Adelson is worried about his casinos in Macau so he has not donated more than a bit to Trump’s re-election this year despite donating a lot to other Republicans. Trump even yelled at him in a phone call this month for not donating. Adelson won’t say why but we can guess. Adelson deserted Trump to protect his Macau casinos for sure. And there is also the prospect for a fierce China-Iran economic and military partnership if the US further menaces China in the Western Pacific. I believe since Adelson has perspective from Asia and thinking about Israeli security is the foremost political issue in his eyes, he catches on to the connection. Neocons in general aren’t as quick to see the link. (Russia is also negotiating a big deal with Iran.)
Lastly and most importantly. What is the road map for a China-Russia alliance to build a Eurasia-Pacific to squash the Indo-Pacific?
China and Russia make all the right noises at the political and diplomatic level. At the practical level things are rather less advanced. For example as recently as 2014 there was no agreed bureaucracy to ship coal by train to China. The first chickens went last year. This year, after the swine herd was massively reduced by African Swine Fever, China arranged the paperwork to make it possible to ship Russian pork to China. One trainload has made the trip. Given more than 5 years of Belt and Road you would think that at least the administrative structures would be in place.
It is also worth that the Belt and Road does not go through Russia. Also, the Power of Siberia pipeline takes the long way around to the Far East. The Russian Far East is Chinese territory according to Xi’s inaugural speech whatever the transactional deals with Russia since.
Russia’s import substitution programme is heavily targetted at goods made by China. Generally these are still low tech goods that Russia can make simply by updating production lines. Huawei, users of British IP, are an exception. Russia’s imports from EU/UK are things that are harder to make like motor cars or gas turbines or heavy machinery (admittedly John Deere and JCB have manufacturing in Russia now) or aeroplanes.
This contrasts strongly with Russia’s relations with Iran. The paperwork was put in order within months of the easing of sanctions. Roads and railways are actually being built. Trade flows in both directions. Russia had a choice of Iran or Turkey. Syria settled that. Turks still sell higher end washing machines, clothes and tomatoes to Russia and own the (apparently Anglo) brands in all the shopping malls but expressed in long lasting steel and concrete and stable usable regulations (The EaEU harmonizes with the EU, China with the US), Russia has picked Iran. There is a lot of scope for agricultural specialisation between the two. Iran can be seen as a future member of the EaEU. That warm water port in Bandar Abbas is so attractive. Load a river/sea class ship in Perm, transfer to rail in Northern Iran and South Asia and East Africa are yours.
In the same way, China has picked Central Asia over Russia.
AFAIK Karlin was writing a NRx/HBD book years ago. Wonder what happened with that. Jupiter Descending? or something like that.
Is Russia basically running out the clock until it gets the vaccine, btw skipping stage 3 trials just to rush this thing is stupid, even if they are 90 per cent sure of this, remember Dengvaxia when the vaccine actually made things worse? And Russia’s daily figures also seem suspiciously uniform, compared to say, France or Germany? Why can’t Russia impose China style lockdowns enforced by the military and the police with 5.45mm rounds if necessary, Interior Ministry, with forced contract tracings and forced quarantines if necessary, anybody who advocates against the lock downs and starts spouting conspiract theories can just be treated to a Siberian vacation for the next 50 years or so, where no one will ever hear fro them ever again, or go to jail for years for quarantine violations. I mean compared to other EU countries Putin actually has the political means to ram through the Duma the needed legislation, if Russia does not have them. I feel that since this is a pro-Russia blog, people here are deliberately downplaying Russia’s handling of this compared to the way, China, New Zealand, Vietnam, or Taiwan has handled this for some reason.
I think that you might be stretching here a bit? Do you really want to rely on Chinese cruise missiles made in Banda Abbas to control Sudan and Somalia? And then there’s the interference of Saudi Arabia and Israel that you’d probably encounter associated with any such colorful motivations.
They are not skipping stage 3, they are rolling out manufacturing concurrently with stage 3, which is smart. Each week delay costs 700 lives in Russia by official count, probably ~1,400 total excess deaths.
Russian vaccine is highly unlikely to kill excessive amount of people, it is based on cold virus, can’t be that bad. The only question is effectiveness, but even if it is low, its still better than no vaccine. Even 50% effectiveness will probably be ok to arrest virus spread.
Its a rolling epidemic. Large population centers got hit first and “burned out”, their cases are in decline now. Smaller towns are getting flare ups, so nationwide number of cases averages out.
Fortunately or unfortunately, Russia is not a collectivist Asian society, despite rulers’ best efforts. Herding Russians is worse than herding cats.
Russia may have failed the containment, but it looks like their medical system was able to handle it (they kept deaths low). Considering ongoing flare ups in other countries, it may actually be to Russian benefit – they may get away with lower vaccine effectiveness for example since so many people already had the virus. Similar logic would apply to US, at much greater cost in terms of body count, of course.
New Zealand? Vietnam? Taiwan is not authoritarian, Vietnam is, but still a lot less than China. Scotland still seems to be on top of this. For democracies, places run by female leaders seems to be doing OK compared to those ran male leaders, especially right wing populist style ones. Russia seems to be getting 4700 cases every day, within a very narrow band. I say going authoritarian and trying to get rid of this thing, which can be done is well worth the costs of coronavirus, especially how China is basically back to normal now.
Considering that even for mild cases, you still get effects like lung scarring or other side effects that lasts for months at least.
New Zealand is an island with less than 5 million people, and they have ongoing outbreak despite those factors. I don’t know their culture in depth, but I think they are fairly collectivist similar to Scandinavian countries.
Vietnam is straight up Asian Communist, ideal for collective response, Taiwan is an island. Russia has declined from ~12,000 cases/day, that band is not that narrow. No reason to go authoritarian since medical system is coping with case load.
New Zealand and Taiwan are islands without global cities, much easier to prevent the virus from spreading to and in such countries.
Vietnam is a Leninist one party state, the state most comparable to the PRC.
So it is funny that Lin Dinh escaped there to get away from American authoritarianism? Does Russia have any global cities aside from Moscow? If I recall right, this author basically described Saint Petersburg as an overgrown provincial grade millioniki. Point is that Russia had the political mechanism and a more docile opposition compared to say, the US, to implement China or Vietnam style measures to eliminate coronavirus but chose not to, for whatever reasons, maybe to save the economy?
You make it sound very easy, but Russia isn’t really authoritarian, it’s more authoritarian-lite. Not only was there a lack of legislation required to enforce a hard lockdown, it’s not clear how the population would respond. As it was, there was a fair amount of grumbling and the lockdowns were lifted earlier than they perhaps should have been. The system has to already exist for this type of rapid response and enforcement, it can’t be created in a month, especially considering Russia’s legendary efficiency.
Third world crapholes like Vietnam, Malaysia, and Thailand are more efficient than Russia? Have you ever seen what happens when you try to bribe a Thai or Vietnamese policeman, or a Malaysian politician? What is mystifying is how well some places that are known to be very corrupt like Vietnam, Malaysia, and Thailand have managed this.
You should check out Mali, Burundi, and Syria. They are even more efficient!
Hint – it has more to do with the capacity to travel for the general public, and how well your population takes orders from the government.
An interesting quote – serial stencil vandal ‘Banksy’ is donating big € (funding a whole ship) to the NGOs rescuing migrants from the med and shipping them into Europe.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8673063/Banksy-secretly-funds-ship-rescuing-migrants-trying-reach-Europe-north-Africa.html
The leader of the NGOs is quoted:
“Ms Klemp said that the artist’s role is strictly financial backing, she told the Guardian: ‘I don’t see sea rescue as a humanitarian action, but as part of an anti-fascist fight’ ”
So for Ms Klemp, the motivation behind fishing Africans out of the med appears to be more the desire to destroy Europe (because any natives who don’t embrace that are ‘fascists’), than actual concern for the darkies in distress.
Meanwhile in the UK, the Govt’s efforts to deport illegal migrants washing up on the shore in large numbers has been blocked by native human rights lawyers. The govt released a video blaming ‘activist lawyers’ for preventing their removal, and but were in turn condemned by the law society & law bloggers for ‘undermining the rule of law’ and spreading ‘trump-like propaganda’…
Looking on data sets on Russian demographics, it appears that rural Russians generally have much higher fertility rates than their urban counterparts. This trend seems to not only cover minorities, but also ethnic Russians. Does anyone know what is behind this trend?
I don’t really “get” the US. In my experience Americans, especially white Americans, are highly patriotic, jingoistic and sensitive about any criticism of their country from foreigners. Yet what is there to be patriotic about or rally around?
All the US is is an artificial state and big violent racial “melting pot”, I find it odd how anyone could derive any sense of identity or pride from that and yet they seem to do so. In many ways the US is a less unified and cohesive nation than even somewhere like Brazil, as at least Brazil is mostly culturally homogeneous – ie Catholic and Portuguese/Latin. The US doesn’t even have cultural homogeneity, let alone racial/ethnic homogeneity.
In the UK there wasn’t the laws in place to enforce the lock down, so they passed “emergency legislation” to put the required laws into place. Surely couldn’t Russia have done the same?
Generally true of all rural populations everywhere.
It seems that Adelson gets yelled at a lot: first by Bibi & now by Trump.
Adelson has never been very enthusiastic about Trump. He supported Rubio & Cruz first. Adelson was never as anti-Trump as Paul Singer was; but it’s no secret that Trump wasn’t his first or second choice.
Nice, it looks to be the most ‘effort-post’ thing you’ve done since you left your original ‘big-history’ blog. Do you still hold the same apocalyptic views on long-term Global Warming?
Did you ever see this study?
https://www.frontiersin.org/files/Articles/403592/fpsyg-09-02343-HTML/image_m/fpsyg-09-02343-g001.jpg
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02343/full
So Edward Dutton’s ‘spiteful mutant’ nonsense is debunked; to quote him from Spencer’s website:
https://nationalpolicy.institute/2020/06/27/the-next-great-awakening/
In reality, you find hardcore leftists (Dutton’s ‘spiteful mutants’) are hyper-natalists like traditional conservatives/far-right, with highest fertility rate. I always said SJWs and cons/far-right were the same on this issue. Unclear why Dutton is so deluded he thinks SJWs have “few [1] or no children” when they share his breeding fetish.
Apollo’s Ascent, I think. I personally feel that more talk about HBD is flogging a dead horse, we’ve all heard the endlessly recycled talking points… Africans are dumb, East-Asians are conformist, muh Haplogroups, the Hajnal Line, a radical dysgenic trend in the West, etc, etc etc.
Most of this was traditional common sense until the 20th Century except for the genetics details reconfirming many old beliefs, I don’t think there’s a lot more to gleaned from it.
I find it quite incredible how it’s become common place for Scotland to be referred to as a nation state in its own right. That is certainly quite an achievement on the part of Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP.
In reality Scotland is no more a nation state than Catalonia, yet no one other than Catalan nationalists themselves ever says “Catalonia” as if it were an actual country.
Your source contradicts you:
It doesn’t if you look at the mean values for all countries:
So if you look at the data globally (all WVS surveys), people with far-left and far-right political attitudes have the most amount of children on average. Sure, the data can differ per each individual country such as US. Nevertheless, Dutton is talking total BS when you look at all the countries.
The goat in the picture taken by Anatoly seems like a fine specimen. The goats have been an early domesticated species, although they as easily revert to being feral as cats do.
The finds in the Zagros mountains of Iran point to the domestication of the goat by Y haplogroup R2b people, although it is quite possible that there were independent domestication sites elsewhere. Interestingly enough, Y haplogroup R2b males are currently well represented in the Burusho of the Hindu Kush.
That’s quite a distant migration for neolithic people. Maybe their ancestors traded goats for lapis lazuli? (Just kidding). Burusho language is a linguistic isolate today. Perhaps it was more widely spoken when the goats were domesticated.
https://www.thoughtco.com/the-domestication-history-of-goats-170661
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burusho_people
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lapis_lazuli
Based Ukraine
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3gIuY2dQ9c
Fortunately, nobody can say that the Basque Country is not a country without contradicting themselves.
Spain wisely became a member of all the right alliances as soon as it could, in great part to solve its Basque and Catalan problems, so foreign governments officially supported Spain when the Catalans tried to secede but in fact, there was a lot of support for the Catalans outside Spain. The Spanish have not been able to get any single extradition request of the Catalan leaders who escaped abroad. Belgian, German and Swiss courts have expressly rejected them.
Likewise, I remember the times when all a Basque terrorist had to do to escape prosecution was just cross the border to France. If ETA asked you to pay the “revolutionary tax”, you just made a short journey to the usual taverns in the French Basque Country and nothing was easier than to find someone who would arrange the payment under the indifference of the French authorities.
The Catalans could have probably achieved some sort of independence it if they had pushed harder on the street and had properly arranged mass civil disobedience for the aftermath of the referendum. I don’t think the Spaniards were willing to use much deadly force. But the Catalans were also never willing to go too far. It’s difficult to mobilize people when most of them lead a comfortable live that they may lose if the revolt succeeds.
Another thing Dutton is completely wrong about is voluntary childlessness and anti-natalism. Dutton thinks being child-free or an anti-natalist is SJW/far-leftist (‘spiteful mutant’) yet if you look specifically at the most recent US data from 2010-2014 (where the left have least children on average) – far-leftists or ‘ultra-liberals’ on average still have a fertility rate of 1.8.
https://www.frontiersin.org/files/Articles/403592/fpsyg-09-02343-HTML/image_m/fpsyg-09-02343-g005.jpg
Not sure how Dutton gets from 1.8 to 0.0…. He’s clueless. And he has 2 kids himself close to 1.8 average of far-leftists.
What the data actually shows is all political ideologies are breeders. Voluntary childless people and anti-natalists in contrast tend to not fit any political ideology like myself and are heterodox; we view breeders regardless of political ideology as the same problem.
Not really when scientific consensus today is human races don’t exist.
A 2012 survey of 3,286 American Anthropological Association members found strong agreement that the concept of race when applied to humans is not scientifically useful.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ajpa.23120
The usual HBD response to this is “political correctness!” when this isn’t the case.
Apologies, the latter quote was distorted on another (rather unreliable) website I copied from. Here’s the actual quote having gone directly to the source:
Lieberman, Leonard, et al. “The decline of race in American physical anthropology”. Przegląd Antropologiczny – Anthropological Review. 2003, Vol. 66, 3-21.
https://repozytorium.amu.edu.pl/bitstream/10593/4333/1/01lieb.pdf
It makes though the same point – denial of race (a viewpoint scientists started adopting from the 1960s and is now the consensus or at least the mainstream view) is based on available genetic evidence, not because of a politically correct or far left-wing agenda.
Lolcow stalker appears again.
The data I’ve seen has shown that conservatives, especially highly religious ones, are more fertile than anyone else. This is an old rightoid cope – “we’ll outbreed le liberuls!”.
If your children are growing up in a society where liberal values dominate both media and education, there is precious little you can realistically do to inoculate them from that influence. Look at Kellyanne Conway’s daughter for example.
The higher fertility rate of rightoids is essentially “their pound of flesh” given to broader society, as a significant fraction of their kids will be converted into liberals. Remember, 200 years ago, everyone had social views far to the right of the current GOP. How do you think we changed? Ideological conversions due to liberal ascent of the peaks of society. Dominate the top, and you can disseminate your Weltanschauung – the plebs will be dragged along. That has not changed and won’t change. All the surveys of Ivy League students shows the direction of travel for the social elite, and hence society as a whole.
Who would admit that his/her views are based on the pressure of political correctness? Everybody will claim that he/she was convinced by scientific evidence? And most of them actually will believe it that it was so. But the truth is that they accepted a particular scientific argument that races do not exist only because of the political correctness pressure. If there was no pressure they would permit themselves to look at other scientific genetic arguments that show that races do exist and are perfectly well and objectively definable within genetics.
“we’ll outbreed le liberuls!” – They are consistent in their beliefs (which are wrong) thinking that political attitudes are determined by genes. The HBDers like Karlin who claim that each trait must have a genetic component should be proud of them. And indeed when you do twin studies to determine heritability you always get a nonzero genetic component regardless of how silly the trait is. Like for example the BDP trait, i.e, the booger disposal preference: you divide your sample into the flickers (they flick their boogers), the eaters (they eat their boogers) and the stickers (they stick their boogers under the desk or chair). Why is it so? Because indeed political attitudes are heritable or because there is a systemic flaw in twin heritability studies that overlooks some pathways of how nurture works by attributing it to nature?
Crowded lab rats in cages reproduce less well than lab rats with plenty of room.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EglwuidU8AEHuqC.jpg
Correct. I suppose it is a race within the West, will traditionalists produce enough offspring to overcome the inevitable loss within every generation to the leftists, until such time as the Weltanschauung changes. Some subgroups (Amish and Orthodox Jews certainly, perhaps Mormons also) appear to be winning this race so far.
Self-reported racial categories are not a reliable proxy for genetic ancestry-
https://humgenomics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40246-014-0023-x
The reason is racial categories are far too large and heterogeneous. So for example, self-identified ‘African-Americans’ can range from 0-100% ‘White American’ ancestry; the mean is around 20%, but varies considerably depending on the US state, e.g.
Population genetics has certainly invalidated ‘race realism’/HBD.
I find it surprising how little the “elites” have utilised the pandemic to force things like cashlessness, Agenda 21, etc. It feels almost like they had a window of opportunity to go “full NWO” but didn’t have the guts to do it.
In fact, in some ways things seem to be panning out the opposite of what many “conspiracy” types said would happen. For years they’ve said that the plan is to depopulate rural and regional areas and herd people into “sustainable” megacities.
Yet in reality it’s looking more like the pandemic will be the death of major cities, people no longer feel safe being crammed into such densely populated areas and most businesses show no desire to stop people working from home, and most workers have no desire to return to offices. This will have the effect of making many city centre businesses unviable as many serve offices and workers who will no longer be there for the foreseeable future at least.
Higher/lower fertility is actually a red-herring when you realise all political ideologies – right, centrist and left – are breeders (they all have a fertility rate above o). The left in the US still has a fertility rate well above 1 and in Europe (as a whole) about 2. They’re nowhere near zero. How are they really different to the right? They’re not.
Heterodox people who transcend the left-right political spectrum don’t breed.
At the end of the day, breeding (natalism) is boring and stupid herd-mentality.
From the picture you posted it seems like the left/right fertility rate disparity has flipped.
During the seventies left leaning individuals had higer fertility rates than the average, while the opposite was true for right leaning individuals.
While currently (2010s) right leaning people have higher fertility rate than the average, and the opposite is true for left leaning people.
The existence of mongrels like the so called African Americans who are a mixture of different races does not invalid the concept of races.
You silly argument would had that the existence of a mule invalidates the distinction between horse and donkey.
Using clusters based on eigenvectors of genotypes races are defined objectively. This definition closely correlates with a geographic distribution.
More Monopoly Power
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EyNm-T0460c
That data is only US-specific. When you look at modern (2010-2014) global means of 100 countries, the far-left have a higher fertility rate than centre-left and political moderates (centrists):
https://www.frontiersin.org/files/Articles/403592/fpsyg-09-02343-HTML/image_m/fpsyg-09-02343-g002.jpg
This debunks Edward Dutton’s ‘spiteful mutant’ theory that claims it is the far-left who have lowest fertility rates. When you look at the data globally, this is not the case.
However, it is true if you specifically look at only the US:
https://www.frontiersin.org/files/Articles/403592/fpsyg-09-02343-HTML/image_m/fpsyg-09-02343-g005.jpg
But as I explained in my other comment, while it is true in US the far-left have least amount of children on average – they’re still breeders with a fertility rate of 1.8, not 0. So Dutton is completely wrong about the far-left being childfree or anti-natalists. Dutton has never understood antinatalism, he mistakenly thinks it’s an SJW position when it never was. I’ve been on antinatalist discussion groups on Facebook for years – most antinatalists are heterodox and don’t fit the right-left political spectrum and are into syncretic politics (hybrids of disparate political philosophies) or are apolitical. The antinatalist community mostly came out against Black Lives Matter (for reasons that would take too long to explain here but some SJWs unfollowed me on Twitter after I made my position on this clear)- so Dutton is clueless if he thinks antinatalism is a radically left position. I explained this to him on his article he published on Richard Spencer’s site, but he deleted it.
My above response, was meant for you instead of Utu. My mistake.
In our modern, post-religion world, antinatalism is almost exclusively Schopenhauer’s world. I don’t think any modern thinker discusses it, apart from Schopenhauer – but for Schopenhauer it is one of the main end points of his worldview, and Schopenhauer has one of the most significant and well organized worldviews anyone has ever developed, so it is impossible not to be a bit persuaded on reading him.
However, there was a long tradition of antinatalism in history. For example – the New Testament, is one of the most obvious texts of antinatalism in the Ancient World – and which as Schopenhauer mentions, has innumerable antinatalist passages, in its millennial beliefs that the world is soon to end, as well as its general contradiction to Old Testament. (Sometimes quite a graphic style of writing https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke%2023:29 although it’s not clear if Jesus was just angry in this context about his execution and expecting immediate apocalypse scenarios; the other parts of the text have many teachings that would imply that).
In past centuries, you would probably be a monk or priest (if you were born in a society with sufficient Christianity or Buddhism), and probably happier as you would not have to justify your decision to “drop out” of family and work life.
One of the problems of the modern world, is a lack of institution like the monastery, convent or church. Someone who doesn’t want children, doesn’t want to work, doesn’t want to pay taxes, doesn’t want bank account, etc, in the past could become a monk, and without internet, shelter themselves from sex and business.
Nowadays, what are monks of our age?On the internet, there has been a disproportionately high number of people who would have “dropped out” in past centuries – whereas then they would be dedicated to viticulture and gardening, now they create subgroups of Reddit. I would not say the modern situation is preferable to the pre-modern one for those types.
In either case, it’s a meaningless argument “whether races exist” – it just depends on how you define “races”, and is an argument about categorization schemes. It’s as if you will argue about whether Spanish language and Italian language, are two separate languages, or if they are both dialects of Latin.
Different people introduce different criteria for what determines the word “race”, and that constitutes their real substance of disagreement.
Nobody with a functioning brain wants East Africa now or for a very long time. Maybe there is some use for 1000 acres of navy base at some port near the very tip of the horn?
Urbanization levels doesn’t look like it can inversely explain fertility rates in Russia. For example, I just think about the list that journalists publish every year of the 5 lowest fertility rate regions.
Lowest 5 “total fertility rate” (this provides only estimation from current year) regions in the Russian Federation:
Leningrad region – 1,124 children per woman
Mordoviya – 1,255 children per woman
Tambov region – 1,333 children per woman
Voronezh region – 1,339 children per woman
Penza region – 1,348.children per woman
Note the country’s lowest fertility regions, are less urbanized than average for Russia.
Leningrad region – 67% urbanized population
Mordoviya – 64% urbanized population
Tambov region – 61% urbanized population
Voronezh region – 68% urbanized population
Penza region – 69% urbanized population.
Average of Russian Federation – 74% urbanized population.
So all 5 anti-fertility areas in the list of the most low fertility regions that journalists publish every year – are all less urbanized than the national average.
Everyone is a ‘mongrel’ in terms of having mixed ancestry at some point. The idea of “pure” races was debunked ages back. HBDers live in a time-warp.
Autosomal DNA tests only cover 10 generations into the past (roughly 300 years) because once you go beyond that point – well under 1% of your DNA is carried from those ancestors (at 9 generations, the figure is about 0.20% and 10 generations ~0.1%, so beyond 10 generations the figure is approximately 0, so is non-detectable, at least with current technology). In fact, you reach the 1% level at the 6th/7th generation with an ancestor probably born in the late 1700s or early 1800s.
https://i.ibb.co/SN4mVs9/DNA.png
So the kind of idiots on Daily Stormer, Stormfront or VNN posting their “pure European ancestry” by these tests don’t realise they only cover about 6 or 7 generations, c. 1800. What about from 3000 BCE, 100 BCE, 800 CE or the 15th century? lol.
When you look at MtDNA and Y-DNA you find a different story-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_admixture_in_Europe#mtDNA
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_admixture_in_Europe#Y-DNA
You’re probably right, however, your question would best be directed to Philip Owen, as mine was, who seems to have stepped out for a smoke?. 🙂
In the old days the > > notation would have made that unambiguous. Can we double up on the blockquote markup?
So quick to jump into conclusions, without any real life knowledge, arent we? I cant speak on behalf of the other schools of Buddhism, but at least in the Tibetan Buddhism and especially in the school of H.H. Dalai Lama, the Gelug school, the life of monk is hard, full of work and studying. There is much work with caring of cattle, so that they could have dairy products, with vegetable yards, with communal cooking, with educating young children, for the Tibetan monasteries fill the role of of the orphanage in the Tibetan society, constructing and maintenance of huge temples, painting of religious art, calligraphy, scholarship in Sanskrit, ancient Indian philosophy, epistemology, logic etc, daily rituals, debates and ceremonies and so on. Its life full of hardships and in no way comparable to the life of the Western dropouts, there are so called Masters of Discipline/Vinaya Masters, who constantly supervise younger monks and novices in the correct way of living(even beat them sometimes, although its getting rarer and rarer). There are no intoxicants and Monk automatically loses his position and is expelled if he brokes his Pratimoksha vows. Oh I also forget that many monks train to be masters of traditional Tibetan medicine, acupuncture and herbology, there are also many other topics to be studied or worked on, but they dont make much sense to people from west. Also I should mention that our monasteries are still huge institutions, even on this degenerate age, many are like small towns and have easily 5000-10000 monks each. And all that stuff I mentioned, even the construction work, is mainly done by monks themselves. Buddhist monasticism resembles more of an army life, than it does resemble of a life of college dropout. Like HHDL says that just like the soldiers in the army carry uniform, so too monk carries his robes as his uniform. After all Buddhist monks are spiritual warriors, they wage war against the real enemy of mankind, which is negative afflictions/kleshas, which are root of all human suffering, from Buddhist viewpoint. Our blessed Buddha himself was a man from the warrior caste and often he expressed himself in the way of the warriors.
But truly your view on this topic is a product of post-modernist, post-religious and shallow society, which has an impulse to reduce everything to the level of hollow stereotypes. Historical monasticism has been full of rigours, asceticism, self denial, hardships, it arises from a strong religious impulse and conviction! Although somewhat hedonist monks were probably reality in some monasteries of Europe in the 17th-19th Centuries.
Also I have personal knowledge about monks and nuns of Sakya and Nyingma schools of Tibetan Buddhism, they too are somewhat similar to Gelugs, but their monasteries are much smaller and they dont pursue as much intellectual studies as Gelugs. But some Thai monks are very fat, for they strictly follow the no eating after noon rule and then drink soft drinks whole day. Shame…
Very correct.
While monasteries always provided an escape from the regular world, there was still some structure and discipline, however minimal.
Beyond that there was the very respectable institution of the hermit and the religious wanderer. In Hinduism, you were actually expected to abandon normal life after you raised a family and fulfilled your social duties, and wander the hills and mountains till you died, having cast off your artificial social identity. This was envisioned as good nor just for some eccentrics – but for every one.
And mandarins and high officials in China would regularly abandon their posts after a certain time and live as hermits in the mountains or a simple life of poverty in the countryside. Much of China’s best poetry comes from this tradition.
And in Buddhism there is a long tradition of wanderers and people dropping out.
Clearly this is a human need that is not being fulfilled today, and leading to much mental illness and pointless suffering today.
Ah the Grand Troll is here again. Sadly the confused and lost spirit has not left us alone. Again making mistaken and simple declarations of others spiritual paths, draining all diversity and richness away from them. In Hinduism there are many different reasons for one to become Sannyasi, and no one has ever expected that people should abandon their family life in older age in Hindudharma(although ideally one should do so and its very suitable for dvija castes).
In the early Indian history it was mostly the Brahmins who practiced it, and it was extremely rare or didnt happen at all among Shudras or Dalits. Later many mendicant orders established by the Medieval Hindu reformers popularized the Sannyasi way of life for almost all varnas and ages. But in the end concept of Sannyasi very much depends on which strain of Hinduism you follow. Hinduism is probably the richest religion that there is, regarding the plurality of traditions, paths and philosophies.
Dropping out? I know that you are so attached to your worldview that you cant fathom different views, but please stop this tarnishing of others traditions. You probably dont like when some one accuses Judaism of racism, so too we Buddhist dont like when non Buddhists make this kind of statements. Yes the gap between your and our values is as immense as the space between galaxies, still you should try to be little more considerate. For us the pursuit of Buddhahood is the greatest goal imaginable, the life in Samsara is more like dropping out, monks who stop being monks or who couldnt keep their vows, are seen to be defeated and lost. They actually are the drop outs in a traditional Buddhist culture.
I wouldnt say regularly, that depended on which epoch or dynasty of the Chinese history we are talking of. In Qing it was extremely rare that high officials would abandond their post and start a life of a hermit etc. But yes it was common in some earlier periods, especially in those periods of Chinese history when the country was full of strife and fragmented, like the age of the Northern and Southern dynasties, Daniel Chieh am I right on this? It was my impression that these Taoist hermit pursuits were more popular on periods like that one? But yes you are mostly correct on this one, but then even a broken clock is right twice a day.
Yep leave us in peace and go to the forest. Oh almost forgot the “artificial social identity,” yes the driving impulse behind the religious mendicants of Asia was “artificial social identity.” You seem to be in sad state indeed, incapable of understanding of religious thought, seeing everything through post-modernist lenses, full of Freudian waste. Its like you cant imagine any possible alternative to the present western society and its sensibilities, like you innately think that the alternative is impossible. You have this idea of how things are and that your ideas should work in every ancient society too, so you impose your standards and motivations to other cultures.
I hope that you can answer in some constructive way.
I presume that this comment was direct towards me? Anyway, I try to use the tools that are currently available to me, and they seem quite good at indicating a quotation. Besides, you can always check and see to whom I originally wrote my response, just in case you get lost?…..
The Rhinoceros Sutra –
There was no need for antinatalism in ancient times or the Middle Ages. In 1000 AD the world population was under 300 million and in 1500 AD under 500 million. So if you go back then, the only antinatalists were depressed people who think all life is suffering (philosophical antinatalists) and weird cults who opposed procreation for their religious beliefs; the Cathars for example were a Gnostic sect in the 12th-14th century who opposed procreation because they thought the material world was evil.
Some monks throughout history have practised sexual abstinence but this is different to antinatalism because these monks don’t oppose human procreation, but avoid sex because of asceticism.
Modern antinatalism includes a broad spectrum of views. You still have depressed people who think all life is suffering. This has never been my type of antinatalism. What antinatalism means to me is people who simply recognise having a child is environmentally destructive because of overpopulation (there’s currently 7.8 billion people, and we’re adding over 220,000 people to this planet every day, equalling over 80 million more people every year which is insane) and it equates to a huge tun of carbon dioxide. My views are based on a very straightforward argument having children is bad to environment which of course is backed by the data i.e. having a child in a developed country equates on average to 58.6 metric tonnes of c02 annually. This is extremely bad for the climate crisis.
Too many phoney politicians waste their time debating nuclear energy vs. renewables when the most effective way to reduce carbon emissions is to not have children.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/07/best-way-reduce-your-carbon-footprint-one-government-isn-t-telling-you-about
The institutions substituted for role of monastery in modern society: prison, psychiatric hospital, and tenured professors in the university campus. And now – Reddit subgroups.
At least, monks producing wine and honey, were more productive than many of the modern professors, and life of gardening and praying might be more effective than the medications of the psychiatric hospital.
This would be a more idealized view- that people should fulfill social duties in the practical world, and then after repaying any debts to society: “drop out”. Rather than the modern model of university professors, who are mostly sponsored by society to “drop out” from practical considerations since youth – but also develop the most negative traits of useless bureaucratic government workers, which has corrupted their writing with its worst qualities: a combination of mechanical and impractical.
Schopenhauer is also interesting as the last (or almost last) philosopher who was not a university professor. But then he was a bourgeois hermit, able to “drop out” to the extent of his family’s wealth, and this might have corrupted his writing a bit too much with the indoor ennui of the delicate and wealthy.
There is not relation between post I wrote and your esoteric block of text which you attached to bottom of my post.
Impression I had from skimming your response – that you seem to be writing in an angry way about Dalai Lama and Tibet, and you are offended because you claim I implied that Tibetan monks don’t work (but of course, I said no such thing – and as I implied, monks in Europe are responsible for developing much of modern viticulture).
If random posts you meet on the internet is making you so apparently agitated, maybe time you “drop out”. Traditional monks of Tibet, don’t waste time writing angry and irrelevant things on forums, and it’s probably a benefit for their mental health
If you are so worried about being environmentally destructive, then why are you using electricity, and computers – all things which added to carbon emissions?
There are also simple ways to reduce your carbon emissions: emigrate to the third world, and you would use less energy – even if you have a lot of children.
You can even just emigrate to second world countries like Ukraine, and probably you and a couple of children, will use less carbon emissions in a year, than average single person living in America, especially as Kiev is complaining so often about the cut off from hot water. It’s basically regular unplanned “earth hour” for the whole population in countries like Ukraine and Lebanon.*
One person not having children, would not make a difference to reduce carbon emissions.
Moreover, how will you stop normal people having children, anymore easily than you would stop them from adding carbon emissions by flying to Turkey or Spain for summer vacations, or buying SUVs?
You would be more effective to reduce carbon emissions if you immigrate to Ukraine where your hot water cuts off every month, have children, and train them to become like Greta Thunberg.
The only way you can get the majority of world to reduce carbon emissions (if you believe this is so important), will be to change sources of energy and efficiency of energy use. People are not going to stop flying to warm countries for vacation, or to avoid having children, for such a cause – you cannot even stop them from buying inefficient cars, or over-large houses, in America.
It’s more like there is almost universal slowing down of fertility rates, but in discordinated ways – with some countries many decades more far into fall than others.
Fall in fertility rates is happening even across Africa – but their process will be perhaps a century behind Europe and East Asia, and the problem will be that Africa are not having demographic transition fast enough to stop enormous population growth in the intermediate time. (For people like Oliver above, who value reduction of carbon emissions – it will be a difficult question whether Africa should be encouraged to industrialize with such a growing population).
But even most of the people in the Muslim countries are fast converging to the falling fertility rates. The world’s fastest falls in fertility rates in recent years, were in Muslim countries. There is a 2011 projection:
https://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/11/2012/07/MDII-graphics-webready-05.png
Yes, and ironically, if you let people who want to drop out, they end up being more beneficial to society by developing viticulture or making good beer or whatever than if you force them to live the kind of mainstream life they hate. And even the harrassed city worker who knows there is a happy hermit wandering somewhere in the mountains is better for it.
But things are changing – https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/germany-grants-laziness-scholarships-do-nothing-university-hamburg-a9681466.html
https://twitter.com/fpleitgenCNN/status/1299745386115018752
This year is probably the strangest I can remember, everything seems to be getting crazier and crazier.
I wonder how bad 2021 will be.
I know a retired conservative ex-police chief of detectives in a major US county, who has been teaching crime related undgrad courses at a university.
He was recently offered to teach a course entitled White Privilege In Law Enforcement. He declined in opposition to the course’s title. He was then told that due to the present circumstances, the school was reluctant to have an ex-law enforcement professor. His student review rating is a 4.8 out of 5.
He has a daughter who is a left of center liberal arts academic. I recall him saying that she became brain washed. With his approval, his son recently left the police department for a trucking job paying more and with comparable benefits. Throughout the US, an increasing number of police officers are looking to get out before the 20 year of service full pension benefit.
At the end of the day, nonbreeders will not pass on their genes.
Thank goodness.
Aaron’s comments have no bearing or anchor to reality: this was most evident when he randomly conflated individuals into one. As such, he’s really not worth the time.
Nobody really claims in good faith that races do not exist. “Race do not exist” is just a political slogan. The slogan draws on Lewontin result that interracial genetic variance accounts for only 15% of total variance of human diversity. Obviously Lewontin could not deny race existence though he was on the side of the argument that superficial differences which historically served people to create racial categories are in some sense irrelevant and thus the concept of social construction of race was born. The “race does not exist” is the same as that “race is a social construct”, meaning that it is arbitrary and non objective and thus non scientific. This can be easily refuted by providing an objective scientific definition within the genetics by looking at structure of genotypes and by finding the orthogonal vector base on which the space of all genotypes is spanned. Even in the hiperspace of only top (most important) three eigenvectors you can already discern discontiguous clusters that are pretty equivalent to geographic races and to the “socially constructed races”.
You’d better tell us what your idols Schopenhauer or Nietzsche thought about various races instead of serving a half-baked dish of bad linguistic analogies.
This cope is older than you think, French catholics in the 1850’s were boasting that healthy Catholic peasants in the country will outbreed the decadent cities dying of cholera, tuberculosis and syphilis. Any day now.
About only place in the world where it is happening is Israel, where the ultra orthodox sects are really exploding in numbers.
When even ultra-patriots have signs in English and repeat bullshit learned from American internet, we can see that nationalism is dead and globalism rules supreme 😉
https://www.posterplakat.com/content/posters/0-pp-598/PP598.jpg
https://twitter.com/FinancialTimes/status/1299255423414013952
I happen to enjoy my work, so I wouldn’t want to go down in hours. But that is a privileged position. The vast majority of people don’t enjoy their work that much. Drudgery is a major factor holding back life satisfaction.
Agree.
People who like to work should work. More power to them.
Your attitude makes sense. But lots of people hate their work but cannot break their social conditioning – so they lash out at those who have managed to break out of their social conditioning. If they aren’t free, no one else can be.
I think everyone should do what they want as far as possible – if you enjoy working hard or inventing things or whatever, have a blast. If you enjoy hanging out in nature and watching the world go by, not feeling that anything needs to be done, enjoy yourself.
It’s a generous and large hearted attitude. Everyone belongs.
I don’t enjoy what I do very much. I don’t think I would enjoy doing anything for very long, because I don’t really have the sense that the world is lacking. I don’t feel like anything really needs to be accomplished. That’s not a judgement on anyone else.
I’ve negotiated a lower salary and killed my career prospects in order to have more vacation and free time, and less intense projects. That’s my choice. But unfortunately the fact that I am not ambitious and don’t care about status or money is felt as very threatening by some people – some on this board, also.
I’ve never really understood that. I feel such people also would like to live as I do but lack the courage to be free – so they lash out at those that have broken the bonds of their social conditioning.
Anyone who genuinely enjoys their work would have no problem with my lifestyle.
The important thing is to satisfied and happy with life – that makes you tolerant of others and not try and squash them out of jealousy or resentment.
The first step in deciding whether or not to breed involves finding a mate willing to engage in said activity, otherwise the question is moot. Beware rationalizations and putting the cart before the horse.
As has been pointed out here already, with fertility rates falling below replacement globally (ex-SSA), the overpopulation problem is not as extant as it was even a decade or two ago. There’s also a logic problem, the question becomes, for whom are you saving the environment if everyone stops having children? Are you worried about the fate of cute furry creatures?
There are some strong philosophical arguments for the anti-natalist, laid out primarily by Schopenhauer, but also by contemporaries such as Benatar. Dismissing them as made by people who are “depressed” suggests a lack of willingness, or ability, to comprehend. Your environmental canard is nothing more than virtual signaling. Most likely, though, as I suggested initially, you are just an incel seeking to explain away a very painful existence.
Right, nature and environment are nothing than billions years of mindless and pointless suffering, fuck them.
Antinatalism makes sense only with this attitude.
https://twitter.com/egoposting/status/1290087564234219520
(read also the Christian butthurt responses for good laugh, they are a riot)
Didnt you claim that there is some kind of equivalency between being a monk and dropping out in the modern society? If so then there is indeed a relation between your and my text.
Monk has a conviction, when dropout has lack of conviction, one has resolve, one has not, one is driven by a religious impulse, one is not, one extorts oneself, one does not, one has aim and motivation, one does not!
You should be smart enough to understand that your logic is based on false premises and false analogies and clearly you have never met any monks in your life.
It’s a bit more complicated than that. But, lest I be misunderstood, I am not proselytizing, nor advocating for, anti-natalism in any way. It’s simply an interesting perspective to consider, but only philosophically. The screed you posted is teenager-on-acid tier stuff.
Do you even know what Pratyekabuddha means and what is their path? Still I thought that you would not again step so low and take Buddhas words out of their context. No progress with you, none at all. The path of a Pratyekabuddha is lower than is the path of those who strive to become Buddhas, there are no Buddhist schools that promote or encourage going on such path, and there never has been such schools.
Among the Mahayana the Rhinoceros sutra is thought to be an inferior Dharma, compared to the teachings of Boddhisattva vehicle, for it is part of the Pratyekabuddhadharma, among the Theravadins it too is believed to be meant for those who follow the Pratyekabuddhayana, but there is no need for that, for we live in age when there has been a fully awakened Buddha, whose teachings are still preserved.
The Mahayana school is more pro-hermit. Tibet was full of Buddhist hermits.
This has less to do with globalism, then with some more basic instinct of making your enemy really angry by adopting things they accuse you of.
I saw it in Israel that whenever the Palestinians killed some family in a rocket attack, they would hand out sweets to kids and film it so that the Jews would see it on the news and get livid. Also in Ukraine where one side accused the other of being Fascists or Soviets, so that side adopted the symbols they were being accused of even though they did not fully believe it, just to piss off their enemy. At the beginning it’s like an elaborate joke, but you start believing it more and more with time. Usually this is done by the side that believes the other side has more power and this is their only way to hurt them psychologically. Unusually in Ukraine it happens on both sides, but I guess that’s because it’s a hot civil war.
Those German protesters know the elite in Germany now hates the US, and they are also not partial to Putin, so using English and American flags and also Putin pictures is a red flag to their enemies. It’s meant to enrage other Germans who are their ideological opposites. At least for now.
Interesting… probably you are right and the polarization and stereotyping are a logical outcome when two groups hate each other.
But this doesnt make sense to me? Does some TV news show Palestinians giving sweets to kids, I never have seen any news like that, and even stranger is why would any Israeli TV channels show such things?
Perhaps it is the way you convey your sentiments that poses the issue?
In any case working hours in America have been on a secular decline, though they apparently have few paid holidays.
https://clockify.me/assets/images/working-hours/usa-annual-hours-worked.png
https://clockify.me/assets/images/working-hours/paid-vacation-time-off.png
To take a longue durée perspective:
https://clockify.me/assets/images/working-hours/working-hours-through-history.png
https://clockify.me/assets/images/working-hours/uk-annual-hours-worked.png
So contemporary Britons’ working hours have fallen to below prehistoric levels but with a much greater level of wealth (and hence, actualised leisure).
I remember you are very much in favour of a Dionysian mentality as opposed to a Apollonian mentality.
But to create a world of leisure with free time and wealth (which increases not only the nominal but also the real options/choices of people) it appears to me that a rationalist-scientific mindset and the concomitant economic rationalisation is the easiest path.
https://clockify.me/assets/images/working-hours/productivity-annual-work-hours-vs-gdp-per-capita.png
https://clockify.me/assets/images/working-hours/gdp-per-hour-worked.png
https://clockify.me/working-hours
Personally I am ambivalent regarding utopian ideas and that kind of society that results from the creation of Crystal Palaces but I don’t really think that your philosophy of leisure can be achieved otherwise to the same extent.
It is possible to instead a doctrine of re-enchantment, but such a doctrine would likely have to be based to a greater extent on the glorification of struggle rather the promise of la dolce vita.
Yes, yes you are correct, but if you think that a Tibetan hermit is like a hermit, who never or rarely sees people and is all the time solitary, then you are wrong. Better term would be a wandering Yogi or Siddha. Its a very hard way of life being a Siddha.
Unrelated, but what is your impression of “beaconism”?
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3538736
Kenya is a growing economy (tea, coffee, flowers, vegetables) with a world class IT sector and a railway line to enough more of the same in oil rich Great Lakes Region (Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi) where the coffee grows best. The British aristocracy found the climate congenial and set up huge estates on the fertile land. Not to mention a steady flow of wind on the margins of the Rift Valley. Some of the world’s largest terrestrial wind farms. Chinese love the place.
Is a complex theory (ultimately blaming white people, naturally) really necessary to explain why Chinese would perceive obvious racial facts and not like immigrants/Muslims?
But you surrender responsibility in exchange for obedience. The stress of finding your own path through life is taken away.
Qanon is more serious than this.
It is serious, because it is so ridiculous and was hard to take seriously by serious people. 😉
Now it is spreading like wildfire, world wide.
https://twitter.com/RobynElyse/status/1299753292323586048
I can imagine future where Qanonism is in the 21st century what was Marxism in the 20th century, and CIA/FBI/NSA/FSB/MOSSAD/anonymous 4chan troll living in the basement (pick your choice who started this whole thing) will have the last laugh.
I would agree that no scientifically aware and educated person would claim that race doesn’t exist in good faith, but I’d say that a lot of white middle class “average” sort of people do truly believe that race doesn’t exist and that apparent racial differences in behaviour are political/environmental in some way.
An example would be how many Trump supporters claim that black cities are violent because they’re run by Democrats, as if having left wing politicians is the cause of black violence and not simply a result of having a violent low IQ black population in the first place.
https://youtu.be/UucjbGmJILk
Western concept of freedom is very different from the one found in Hinduism or Buddhism. This is of course a gross generalisation but for you freedom means to do what one wants or desires, for us being led by ones desires and impulses is no freedom at all. For the desires and whims are dependent on external conditions and growth/decay. But unlike Vedanta Hindus we Buddhists at least believe that we can utilize our will and desire in beneficial way, but its only possible through hard practice and the best enviroment for that is a monastery. Vedantins believe that our individual will is just illusion/Maya.
Our end aim as Buddhists is a spiritual liberation for all beings, which is only true freedom for us. By our human hands, by our human minds, we can and will achieve a state beyond all transient forms, beyond all attachment, beyond all suffering, the state which shant be attained by gods themselves. A true peace. If there are causes and conditions for our suffering, then those causes can be eliminated, if they can be eliminated then the true freedom is attainable. But thats when things get tricky… Two main strains of Buddhism have a very different opinion on the topic of liberation and what it does mean.
I think there has to be more than that to make a Beijing professor embrace the very American simultaneous glorification of Alisa Rosenbaum and Christianity.
https://www.readingthechinadream.com/wang-jianxun-american-spirit.html
When people say “races don’t exist”, they are not (unless crazy) saying “genetic differences don’t exist”. They are saying “genetic differences between human populations are not significant enough to constitute (our definition) of concept of separate races”.
On the other hand, people who say “races exists”, are replying that “genetic differences between human populations are significant enough to constitute (our definition) of concept of separate races”.
Here is a terminological debate between two sides using different definitions, as the argument is about to what extent of genetic difference, is constituting our concept of race.
Why they are arguing about terminology, is another (often politicized) question.
They are implying that the amount of genetic variation between populations is not significant enough to constitute (our definition) of different race. Here the relevant thing is that their definition of race implies greater genetic variation.
Whether the genetic differences between populations are significant enough to explain many aspects of history or not (and this is where people argue about “social construction of race”) is another argument. It may or may not be connected to the one about how to define different races, depending on how muddle head the people are who are arguing.
For the purposes of this meaningless but politicized debate (“do separate races exist”), that depends on how much discontiguity is allowed in their definition of race. One side says no, other side replies yes. Both are talking arguing about terminology and how much tolerance for discontiguity the words imply.
It can be assumed, they would be able to see that this debate (“are there different human races?”) are two sides debating about word “race” for political reasons, rather than an interesting argument about physical reality.
Nietzsche uses word “rasse”, to refer to populations which are referred in 21th century as ethnicity – or in German as “volk”. E.g. his interest is in “German race”, “French race”. So he uses the terminology with what you would call today a “very low tolerance for genetic variation”.
In Nietzsche’s use of word “race”, separate races are already constituted by small genetic differences. And he thinks genetic differences have very significant effects – for example, in his final stage before mental collapse: “And with this I touch on the question of race. I am a Polish nobleman of pur-sang, to which not one drop of bad blood has been added, least of all German.”
You seem to “read” a person’s post (or just read certain key words), misunderstand what the person has written, and then write angry denunciations which may or may not have relevance to post you responded to.
Like you, I also have habit of writing posts which do not directly respond to the other person, but I’m aware that I am not replying to them, and don’t imply that I am writing anything relevant to their post.
On the other hand, you seem to be unaware that your comment is not related to what the other person has written.
If you are going to write all these angry denunciations, then you should first read the person’s post carefully and ask yourself if you interpreted their meaning correctly.
Again, I don’t read other peoples’ posts carefully either, – I am sufficiently lazy – but knowing that I didn’t read their posts carefully, I usually avoid writing impolite denunciations of them.
What I wrote is that people who could drop out in past centuries, and be encouraged to direct their energy – which today would be forced into the office, into business, into Reddit – into something more productive in monastery (for example, viticulture, preservation of ancient texts).
You seem to think that I am implying that monks were lazy, and write some angry denunciations of my “attacks on monks”. Amusingly my post implied the opposite. People who drop out, are not lacking energy. But their energy is not being harnessed correctly by the current jobs available for them.
I find it bizarre how the BLM riots in the US seem to be turning into white people brutalising white people. What a messed up country. It doesn’t look like a race war, but more a white on white war.
There is also aesthetic (and very convincing from this viewpoint) aspect to the objection against a present overpopulation – which is dislike of crowds, and experience of the beauty of less people.
Coronavirus lockdowns, especially, has shown us the beauty of cities, when there are less people in them.
First time I could really appreciate the urban beauty of city where I work, was during coronavirus lockdown, when all the crowds were removed, and the number of people walking in streets was probably the least that has been since the 18th century.
Actually the atmosphere of less people in the city, created appreciation of city’s historical beauty, and more understanding of how the city had been to walk through in past centuries.
–
I was recently watching an interview with Bertrand Russell (born 1872-1970), where they asked him about what life was like in the 19th century England. And his reply is that “he remembers that everything seemed far more beautiful and green in the 19th compared to mid 20th century”.
Obviously one of the main causes for this, is just that the number of people in the England was almost half in his early childhood, than it was in his old age.
He lived through such a population boom, where even ignoring urbanization, country became twice as crowded as it was in his youth:
https://i.imgur.com/6QZGodn.gif
This kind of historical change might not be just in terms of too many crowds in the city. For example Jung’s argument against overpopulation, was that perhaps the vast increase in numbers of people, also one of the main drivers to a sense of individual insignificance in the 20th century.
Actually one of the most similar things to Kant’s concept of sublime (where man understands his personal insignificance before nature) in our time, is to go to the top of skyscraper in city like Tokyo, and contemplate the vast millions of people below you, that you could never even conceive of knowing a tiny fraction of.
But of course its good that people choose their own paths. I have never heard of such cases that some one has been forced into monkhood. They tried that with the Sixth Dalai Lama, but in the end senior monks relented and the Sixth One then could lead a life full of merry drinking, women and writing of romantic poems. At least for sometime before the Mongols who didnt approve his behaviour captured him and then probably killed him in collusion with the Qing emperor. For the Sixth one died as a prisoner of Khoshut Mongols, in mysterious circumstances.
AaronB is gonna love him, one rare and unconventional(even by Tantric Buddhist standards) Lama in the history of Tibetan Buddhism. But his behaviour brought a great misfortune for the Tibetan people, and led to the catastrophical invasion of the Tibet by the Dzungar Mongols.
Some of his poems:
“Even the stars can be measured,
Their arrangements and influences.
Her body can be lovingly touched,
but not her deep longings.
Those cannot be understood
by science.”
“My lover and I, we meet in complete
privacy, in the southern valley forest.
Then I hear some parrot in the market
jabbering our secrets.”
“This house has thin walls,
The neighbors will interrupt us!
You shameless girl,
Your moans are much too loud!”
“I know her body’s softness
but not her love.
I draw figures in sand
to measure great distances
through the sky.”
Oh then we do understand “dropping out” differently, for me it has an explicitly negative connotations, that are connected to failure and lack of determination, at least in most cases. Like for an example if someone just likes to be a stoner, drops out of school, and does then part time jobs. For me that kind of behaviour is the very opposite of the monkhood. Also I just dont see any connection between the driving impulses of a monk and someone who is committed reddit user. Forced into the office or reddit? Isnt that sign of lack in ones resolve or conviction? Maybe there is somekind of forcing, but in my opinion that forcing is quite mild. I really dont believe that those people would become monks in a traditional society.
I am just an angry dog, who thinks that I somehow guard my master by barking. Still even a guard dog has its uses…
I pay a renewable energy supplier (100% green electricity and 10% green gas; the rest is offset through carbon reduction projects), but since all electricity comes from the National Grid, it’s from a pooled network of not only renewables, but nuclear energy and fossil fuels. That’s unavoidable, but the proportion of high-carbon fossil fuels is sharply declining in UK; coal is down to about 5%.
Renewable energy for electricity and gas though isn’t my focus since it doesn’t much lower someone’s carbon footprint (see below), secondly, it’s difficult and very expensive to generate gas from renewable energy and there’s only one 100% green gas supplier in UK. The people who waste too much time debating renewable energy to solve the climate crisis are mostly left-wing greens who are too politically correct to address the elephant in the room- overpopulation, so instead they bang on only about renewables. But by far the most effective and least costly method to reduce carbon emissions is to not have children, followed (very distantly) by not driving a car and avoiding travelling by plane (I’m car-free and have never used air-transport):
https://i.ibb.co/bXc0Xn8/Tonnes.png
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541/pdf
The 58.6 t co2 estimate for being childfree provides the broadest coverage of the carbon footprint impact of having children (many carbon legacies), but if you look at other studies which use a more simple methodology, they agree the smallest carbon footprint is someone who has never had children in developed countries. Nordström et al. 2020 for example studying the average carbon emissions of households in Sweden found “the smallest carbon footprint therefore appears to be someone who lives alone and has never had children.” https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0231105
CO2 emissions per capita in Ukraine is still high: 5.22 tons per person (this is above global per capita.) You’re correct though the average person in Ukraine produces much less co2 annually than someone living in US, but then compare Ukraine to somewhere like Niger (per capita /c02 t = 0.1).
I don’t have any plans to move to another country. Secondly, countries with extremely low carbon footprint are in poverty and have the poorest quality of life. I don’t obviously suggest people live in mud huts. To avoid the worst climate impacts, global carbon emissions need to drop by half in the next few decades and note it is developed countries that emit 86% of global CO2 emissions.
Another great post. One can say the same about technology btw. I visited Lviv before it’s rebirth, when electricity was rationed, the restaurants and cafes were quite limited in number, and the city was dark at night. In the center of the city, one could see the stars as if one were in some isolated mountains in Utah or Idaho, except with 16th and 17th century buildings all around. It was an experience like being there centuries ago, walking those cobblestone streets (and tripping at times) amongst beautiful architecture and enjoying relative silence and stars. Probably not fun for local residents, but utterly charming for a visitor.
This is largely because of large inefficient heavy industries, not personal usage. Just move to a small town in Ukraine, Romania, Armenia, etc. and have two kids; you will produce less carbon than a single person in the West.
It’s too bad we no longer have Roissy’s blog and the Alpha of the month/Beta of the month competitions. If we did, this kid would have a decent case for the former:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/19/us/politics/aaron-coleman-kansas.html
Not that I approve of the guy. If I had a daughter I certainly wouldn’t let her bring him home. But, as with J. Edgar Hoover, I’d rather have him inside the tent pissing out than outside pissing in. He’s an intelligent young white man from the heartland who’s obviously not “woke,” but he ain’t attracted to VDARE-style American nationalism, probably because at this point it’s basically a celebration of low intelligence.
It doesn’t look like a war at all. There is hardly any blood on the streets. Most Americans are pussies(though not quite as much as decadent Western Euros).
I hope you’re not trying to convince this pinhead to reproduce.
Yes that’s absolutely true. My childfree views aren’t only based on reducing carbon footprint but many other things like this. It’s pretty amazing to walk around London at 4 – 5: 30 am and see virtually no one, and I used to do this when I was studying at Roehampton University and lived for 3 years at one their campuses. As soon though as you got to around 6 am you start to see some buses and cars, then from 7: 30 – 9 am overcrowding at bus stations, traffic jams etc, when most people start work.
One of my favourite movie scenes is from 28 Days later:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCdRFMp8Xwo
Yes, it also significantly improved quality of air by huge drop in nitrogen dioxide. There are many other positive things the coronavirus lockdowns did for environment, but with the lockdown restrictions being undone partially or fully, air pollution has come back.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969720338754
https://www.pnas.org/content/117/32/18984
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/07/12/in-views-of-diversity-many-europeans-are-less-positive-than-americans/ft_16-07-11_eu-usdiversity_overall/
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/07/12/in-views-of-diversity-many-europeans-are-less-positive-than-americans/ft_16-07-11_eu-usdiversity_ideology/
Important when considering these sub-groups is not only how “conservative” or religious they are, but how they can partially isolate from broader societal trends and occupy an economic niche that allows them to reproduce themselves.
The Amish have essentially rejected much of modernity and rely upon agriculture, traditional craftsmanship, the pet trade, etc. to generate much of their income.
Orthodox Jews get by essentially on parasitism, various welfare scams and the like, so they tend to be concentrated in urban areas. “Tradcaths” are a more benign form of this. It’s most a movement in Protestant countries which takes advantage of various religious tax exemptions. I doubt Mormon fertility is long for this world, but they are notorious for taking advantage of outsiders(In the past, Quakers had the same reputation).
From what I can tell about Amish fertility, it tends to follow many of the same trends as the rest of American society, just from a higher base. In the case of these religious groups, particularly the Amish, I doubt liberal conversion is the main cause of fertility declines. Economic factors are likely to play a large role. Even Amish are impacted by land prices, demand from consumers for their products, etc.
What Orthodox Jews do doesn’t really work if you don’t have a large population to feed off. To some extent, this is probably true of all the other groups I mention. Trying to boost a majority group’s population by mimicking behaviors of non-conforming minorities is therefore unlikely to work.
I cautioned antinatalism consists of diverse viewpoints. Go to any antinatalist Facebook/Reddit discussion group and you will see the depressive “all life is suffering” Benatar philosophical types of antinatalists clash with environmentally-oriented antinatalism (although Benatar has published one interesting paper on ecological antinatalism I read years back arguing against procreation because of suffering humans inflict on other sentient organisms, but this is not his usual work).
Philosophical antinatalists often don’t think green antinatalism is true antinatalism and I’ve had plenty of those people reject me as an antinatalist – which is fine by me as I’m not interested in labels and I view those people as crackpots. You can’t ‘sell’ philosophical antinatalism anyway. How many people has Benatar converted with his bizarre life is suffering philosophy? Virtually no one.
My childfree view in contrast to Benatar is primarily based on the most effective solution to the climate-crisis and overpopulation, furthermore, it is backed by scientific consensus – last year 11,000 scientists from 153 countries signed a statement saying the world population must be drastically cut in size to reduce GHG (including carbon) emissions.
https://populationmatters.org/news/2019/11/08/11000-scientists-call-population-action-prevent-catastrophic-climate-impacts
I don’t want to extinct humans (an extreme view which will not gain public support for obvious reasons) and I’ve debated the founder on VHEMT, Les Knight (the extremist of green antinatalists) on this, however, I’m sympathetic in the sense that if the world population is massively declined say to 300 million as it was 1000 years ago- the danger is it will increase and over time the world will again become overpopulated. This is why Les Knight doesn’t want to reduce the world population to much smaller and sustainable population size but supports human extinction.
As for the global trend in fertility rates falling, that’s true for decades, but fertility rates need to be reduced more and more for the reasons I’ve already outlined. Fertility rate in the US is currently 1.8 but look at per capita carbon emissions. So the fewer people being born there the better –
“People in the developed world, such as Europe and America, have a disproportionate impact on the planet. For example a person in the UK produces 70 times the CO2 of someone in Niger. That means that fewer people being born in these countries has the most immediate and positive impact on our environment, climate and sustainability.”
https://populationmatters.org/mythbusting
Projection?
Do you have kids?
I find incels are usually always alt-right/white nationalist types who promote a “save the West! have loads of white babies” message, but have zero children of their own. Why is that? Because they’re racist keyboard warriors who cannot get girlfriends. I’ve never promoted that message, but the opposite.
I didn’t even know about Qanon until about a month or maybe two ago. And now I just know the outlines, probably because I don’t regularly read the news and these days mostly learn new things from following one local paper and links on articles of people who’s timeline I follow on twitter. None of them believe in Qanon, but also none of those people believed in Russiagate. For now I’m assuming that Qanon is as demented as belief in Russiagate, although I know much fewer details about the former.
It has something to do with sexual trafficking and children. I always wondered if there are some stats on how many people actually are interested in sex with children, because if half the elite people are, then you can probably extrapolate it to the rest of the population and I’m surrounded by pedophiles, even if you make allowances that you force yourself to become a pedophile to have an ‘in’ when you’re in the elite. This is probably not true.
Of course, this is not helped by the Catholic church, but they probably concentrate those types of people due to the whole ‘vow of celibacy’ and the recent Epstein saga where the intelligence agencies made up a fake hedge fund manager billionaire who was used to gather compromat on the rich and scientists by sex with teenagers on the <18 side. It is an unbelievably ridiculous story that latter one, and it's highly likely true. This kind of stuff gives Qanon lots of wings. I got it from watching the following podcast episode a few months ago, where Eric Weinstein (a serious person) recounts meeting Epstein and realizing he's a front:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJNjH4SP6vw
A comment I made in response vanished but can still be found on my page-
https://www.unz.com/comments/all/?commenterfilter=Oliver+D.+Smith
https://archive.is/Z1jV4
https://web.archive.org/web/20200831012618/https://www.unz.com/comments/all/?commenterfilter=Oliver+D.+Smith
I’ll finally leave this useful link-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Individual_action_on_climate_change#Family_size
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is one of the very few hard-left politicians to briefly discuss the taboo dimension of climate change (overpopulation). Liberals and conservatives don’t discuss it.
Covid hysteria is such BS.
https://www.bitchute.com/video/GKc8akQn0ZZG/
Hoping for an improved situation Montenegro:
https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2020-08-30/montenegro-votes-in-tense-election-testing-long-ruling-party
https://www.rferl.org/a/30812282.html
“People in the developed world, such as Europe and America, have a disproportionate impact on the planet. For example a person in the UK produces 70 times the CO2 of someone in Niger. That means that fewer people being born in these countries has the most immediate and positive impact on our environment, climate and sustainability.”
Yeah, but one of my kids is 700 times more likely than someone in Niger to invent some new technology or application that lowers the overall CO2 use by tens of thousands of humans a year. (Especially if they go into my research field…) They might invent something worse of course, but they are way more likely to invent something better than an, er… Nigerian. Unfortunately, this means that for every child that I have we have to cull 699 Nigerians for the math to work out with the least possible harm to Terra and for us to avoid global warming. Even if don’t do a small scale genocide though, Terra and all Terrarists are better off with me reproducing as much as possible and the kids visiting my lab when they are at an impressionable age.
Unfortunately, very few zero-natalists are willing to do the hard experiment of having a child for 10-20 years, and then getting rid of them after their views are confirmed, so there is some experience that is lacking, making it hard for the two sides to argue in good faith.
From a geopolitically correct author:
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/middle-east-watch/why-russia%E2%80%99s-great-power-game-iraq-matters-%C2%A0-168051
Not only Russiagate. Qanon is a mirror image of left as whole.
As modern leftists believe that world is controlled by secret Neo-Nazi cabal and thousands of innocent black people are lynched by white racists every day, Qanonists believe that world is controlled by secret satanist pedophile cabal, and thousands of children are every day kidnapped and sacrificed in satanic rituals.
Meanwhile, based and black coal pilled Russian official twitter celebrates historical achievements of Russian people.
https://twitter.com/Russia/status/1300366602110631939
People all over the world remember Russian heroes of labor, while some never satisfied “anime patriot” losers whine and squeal as usual. No one cares.
Well… It was done to motivate the miners who had fought with the Whites during the civil war. The White Army received thousands of volunteers in Gorlivka. Russian ethnic immigrants fighting against the Red proposals for an independent Ukraine.
As is still remembered in South Wales, the coal was loaded for him and the face was undercut the previous night by others using machinery. He had to pull down already weakened blocks. This was still a physically demanding task and he definitely did it. The US folk song, 16 tons states the amount a record breaking miner could do under normal circumstances. His normal quota was roughly 7 tons.
So what? Did you ever stop to think that the UK also has a much higher standard of living than Niger? If you’re worried about your country’s so-called carbon footprint, move to Niger.
But first you might want to consider the WHO data showing that only 9.6% of Nigerians have access to “safely managed sanitation services,” while in the UK and Northern Ireland, the number is 97.75%.
This idiotic obsession with the beneficial trace gas CO₂, and the mythical, entirely contrived “carbon footprints” has taken a terrible toll on our wallets due to Comrade Barry’s promised and delivered “skyrocketing energy costs.”
Meanwhile, in 2013, The Federal Government had extended, for 30 years, a no-penalty phase for wind energy companies whose wind turbines sometimes kill eagles. Reportedly, the extension was made in order to promote “green renewable energy.” However, in 2015, the 30 year extension was cancelled by U.S. District Court in Northern California, but 5 year killing permits remain available to wind energy companies.
In the United States, virtually all bird species are protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. I cannot take or possess even a single feather from any of those protected birds, under penalty of law, but the wind turbine operators get a free pass to chop up eagles and hawks because of hysteria in the West about CO₂ and carbon footprints.
Only deluded men, encouraged by shysters and fanatics, are mad enough to disdain our most abundant and cheapest fuel in favor of unreliable, intermittent, rumbling, expensive, difficult to maintain, unsightly, bird-chopping contraptions like wind turbines.
But wait! There’s more…
https://www.sciencealert.com/this-solar-plant-accidentally-incinerates-up-to-6-000-birds-a-year
I wonder how many carbon feet it takes to trample common sense?
I can’t help but think that Qanon is a mirror-image of how women dominate the politics of the establishment. It is about sex and about children. Earlier conspiracy theories on the Right were about the Clintons killing people. Qanon is evolved into the feminine-mold in order to appeal to women, in a way that simple murders would not. I’ve heard women talk about pizzagate in a way I’ve never heard them talk about the earlier Clinton stuff.
Maybe that has something to do with the discovery of a vast elite Jewish paedophile ring in the last two years?
Also a large part of our concept of “luxury” and “romantic” is just – removing crowds of people. First class carriage in train or plane is mainly preferable, because it is less crowded.
The benefit of going to private beaches, is that they reduce the number of people. Similarly the dream of popular culture, is to go to Thailand with your girl, and find a private, undiscovered island, which somehow other people don’t know about. The empty tropical beach is stereotyped as being romantic and enchanted, while crowded resort full of sun burned masses is a symbol of disenchantment itself.
Ideal of aristocratic estate or castle, is that you have your private forest, and your private lake, etc. Perhaps the main real pleasure of a country estate, is from removing the masses of people that are on public land, and keeping this land empty except for your friends and family, where you can contemplate nature without masses of people.
Reducing the numbers of people (while at the same time not exposing ourselves to the dangers of untamed nature) is in 20th/21th century culture part of our ideal.
Even for a simple things like to go collecting mushrooms with your family. In the ideal, wholesome image, in our mind, this is you alone with your family, in the forest, finding undiscovered mushrooms.
But the realities of modern demographics, means the experience in the mushroom growing areas, will be probably be “less romantic” (i.e. which is almost co-extensive with saying that there will be too many people when you arrive at the mushroom area).
https://static.ngs.ru/news/2020/99/preview/5d4165b5b5d1e1a2c8c0e7393dc00bc70d4ea4ea_945.jpg
Ooops. I must correct my mistake. WHO data show that only 9.6% of Nigeriens (not Nigerians) have access to “safely managed sanitation services.”
Citizens of Niger are called Nigeriens, while Nigerians hail from Nigeria.
I don’t know, there is something amusing about an anonymous internet cult voice leading a nobody to whack a mafia lord out of the blue.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7767359/Mob-boss-murder-suspect-believed-CIA-infiltrated-mafia.html
I don’t think drop out, implies you stop doing anything after.
For example, a large part of the billionaires are described with the noun “drop outs”, because they they drop out of their education institutions before completing courses.
https://www.salary.com/articles/top-10-richest-dropouts-in-the-world/
You are concocting something to confirm your bias. Or you do not know women too well. Women have much less hang-ups about sex than men particularly the men on the Right. During Clitnon Lewinsky scandal men opinions were full of self righteous outrage while women seemed to be more understanding.
If you are talking about Epstein, what he did was very odious. (Just like the Paki gangs – I think it should be severely punished. It is a special crime to exploit the young women of another group). But it’s not pedophilia, and should not be conflated with pedophilia, which involves pre-pubescents.
And I suppose they were understanding of Trump, Kavanaugh, and Clarence Thomas? Prog women don’t care about cases, when it’s their guy – it is as simple as that.
There were rape allegations against Clinton.
That’s how the word is used
This is first time when I hear about Ryokan, I checked and he was a member of Soto Zen sect of Japanese Buddhism. Same stuff with your Ikkyu. The so called “monks” of Soto Zen have not kept their Pratimoksha vows for centuries, there for they are not Buddhist monks, but frauds, without ANY AUTHORITY regarding religious matters. A monk who breaks his vows is lower than any layperson. I am bored to remind you once again that Japan is an exception among the Buddhist countries. Vices of their so called monks are well known. Some of their masters were even homosexuals in the Medieval period, even though Vinaya prohibits such monks and it was consensus among the ancient Indian masters that such beings should be expelled from our religion.
But then you ask what about the Yogis and Siddhas of India and Tibet? Siddhas and Yogis dont take Pratimoksha vows, but instead they take much stricter Samaya vows, although at least with them you dont need to be a celibate. And MOST IMPORTANTLY they never use monastic robes or Kasaya, unlike Japanese false monks.
I know that there are such exceptions, and I thought that surely you dont bring them up in this discussion, for they are after all just exceptions, not a rule.
AaronB and many westerners want to imagine that our Dharma is not a religion but somekind of wishy washy philosophy, without any real obligations, duties or hierarchy. Just a lifestyle among many different lifestyles.
Religion comes from the Latin word Religio, which also means religion, but its derived from re-ligare, which means something which binds, obliges or connects. Therefore religion is something that binds us, or is a system of moral obligations and duties.
We call our religion by Sanskrit name Dharma or Dhamma in Pali. Dharma is derived from Sanskrit dhr, which means holding, or keeping, therefore Dharma means something that supports us, something that keeps us from falling down. Although Dharma and Religio are different words in different languages, their innate meaning is very similar.
What more proof do you need that our Dharma is a Religion?
By the way I believe that the Russian word держать is cognate of Dhr of Vedic Sanskrit.
Truly the Eastern Slavs are the most Aryan among the Europeans! Take that Hitler!
Okay maybe the Ossetians are also very Aryan?
Has anyone here been able to get past the CAPTCHA using Tor to access Unz.com? Whenever I try to use Tor to come here I’m given a CAPTCHA challenge (fair) but it seems broken, restarts after I complete the challenge. Does not happen with other sites’ captchas.
I completely agree renewable energies are harmful to wildlife such as turbines in wind farms (888,000 bat and 573,000 bird deaths per year in US according to a 2013 study) and the example you gave for a solar power plant. I’ve raised this issue before when debating left-wing greens. However, fossil fuel and nuclear power plants also kill hundreds of thousands of bats and birds each year. I don’t focus much on the fossil fuel / renewables / nuclear energy debate (although I pay a green energy supplier) because the most effective way to reduce carbon emissions is not to have children. It’s primarily left-wing greens who debate nuclear vs renewables because they’re too politically correct to discuss overpopulation. The last left-wing green I debated on this blocked me on Twitter after I Googled him and found he has 4 kids – I asked him why if he cares about the environment did he have a large family which is environmentally destructive. No answer, but he irrationally screamed ‘racist’ when he read the word overpopulation.
Ryokan is indeed one of my supreme favourites 🙂
Also the poems of Cold Mountain (Hanshan) – a great mountain wanderer and drop out.
Christgau no like Twitter
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FP6rDqYKxSo
I thought I was neutral to positive here, but it still weirdly pissed people off – the idea that one can lack ambition and be content with a simple life.
Mainstream society has a stake in making people feel they have no intrinsic worth and can only obtain worth by winning social approval through accomplishments.
Without this social conditioning, rich people would have no insecurity to exploit. No one would take abuse from a boss or work insane hours to enrich him.
So there is a huge backlash to any philosophy that goes against this social conditioning, often most intensely by victims being exploited by it. Misery loves company.
I think there is nothing surprising in this and it’s always been so – historically, the speed with which philosophies of liberation from social conditioning were turned into socially sanctioned philosophies of striving is remarkable.
Gorn
https://classic.esquire.com/article/1988/12/1/st-boss
https://youtu.be/HKHvhshNMDM?t=252
Except, apparently, spamming us with your drivel.
Finally had a chance to look at it, but it seems that it was mostly paywall locked. Some of it is really wild speculation, like this specific part:
I’m not really sure what the Late Qing has to do with anything, though it is perhaps accurate that China did absorb quite a bit of European ideas of race around that time, and kept it in a modified if preserved form. This can manifest with any of factions, including the more liberal faction.
Ultimately, this ties into common ideas of Chinese reformists from 1900s onward:
That China itself is poisoned and doomed. White nationalists who call China an “unhesitant Han fascism” or the like are deeply unaware of the vast and ingrained levels of self-hate that is also inculcated and this can be seen whether from Communist formal condemnations of Chinese Confucian thinking, accusations of “feudalism”(amusingly, China had shed actual feudalism a long time ago), or the many efforts to abolish aspects of Chinese culture seen as holding back development(bans on fantasy writing, for example).
That America is a near-perfect polity is an interesting development, but it also fits in with the need for another model once the idea that the self is damaged and something else has been found. Historically, the center of admiration has moved variously around from Japan to Germany to England(for HK’ers) and now seems to have rather settled upon the US.
It is, in a way, an honest viewpoint. Since the measure of the self must be judged by accomplishments and the accomplishments are not great, then the self must have failed. Then it is hoped to look elsewhere for answers. The lack of picking up SJW values is part and parcel of the fact that SJW values are rather insane religious evangelical ideas that never have managed to be widespread in China.
Except, you didn’t actually with any of the issues I raised such as the secular decline in working hours in wealthy, industrial and economic rationalist countries while having rising GDP per capita.
Here is more concerning materialism in various countries:
https://makewealthhistory.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/emerging-consumerism.jpg
While all countries have a greater degree of people (or in case of China and India an equal amount) who feel pressured to perform well in society than who exhibit public materialist desires it is lower (with some exceptions like South Korea) in the wealthier countries.
While you are not under a public service pledge as an internet commenter, unless you have an adjutant to develop concrete and practical solutions (or any kind of policy appeal really) to your philosophy, you are unlikely to convert people if you merely ignore any ideas that poke at the weak sides of your vague philosophy.
Indeed! I also love Han Shan.
https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Chinese/HanShan.php
Xu Yun (Empty Cloud) was also an accomplished poet.
https://www.emptycloud.net/poetry-%e8%af%97/this-foolish-man/
Xu Yun was also a perfect monastic, very much attached to Vinaya and an exemplary member of the Sangha. His biography is one of the best possible readings about Ch’an and Chinese Buddhism.
https://www.emptycloud.net/articles-2/the-masters-story-%e5%b9%b4%e8%ad%9c/
I don’t think an application that broad is logical.
Are teenage boys who admire their coeds pedophiles? Was Shakespeare aiming at some aberrant audience with Romeo and Juliet?
The Chinese come out as the most materialistic people in the whole world. This is what you get after being fed Communist indoctrination for a couple of generations.
Chinese Civilisation has many accomplishments to be proud of. Are present day Chinese more impressed by the West technological prowesses than they are impressed with the wisdom of the traditional Chinese culture?
Sorry, you did make some good points, I just didn’t have time to address them sufficiently.
I am actually now in Wyoming, the wildest state outside of Alaska, to do some camping in the mountains for a few weeks. Will have very sporadic internet after I leave my hotel today. Being here is worth every penny in lost income and status 🙂
This is an excellent point. I believe the wealthy countries are entering a pre-Buddhist phase – there is a steep decline in motivation to work and make money.
It’s very pronounced in Japan. The current generation there is known sarcastically as the “Satori generation”, because they lack ambition and drive yet report themselves being more content and happy than previous generations. This is a capitalist heresy.
Western Europe is also well along this path. See that article I linked to about German university giving degrees in laziness and doing nothing. Pure Taoism 🙂
Places like China which are still “rising”, are obviously the worst in this regard. This is partly why I rail again at China so much here. It obviously represents the bad old system the world is trying to move beyond. Presenting it as some kind of positive alternative to the West is foolish, especially in moral terms. I suppose people who mourn the decline in ambition and drive might feel that way, and that’s fair enough.
But it is an old Taoist saying that things start to fall when they reach their peak, and rise when they reach the bottom.
The US seems to be at a midpoint between Europe And Japan and China and the poorer countries. I my self have noticed a drastic decline in motivation among regular people. It’s much harder to get people for certain projects even for quite decent money. But the US still has that unusual structural divide, in that the top level remains exceptionally driven and ambitious, while everyone else is losing interest.
I am not so much trying to craft pragmatic solutions as to observe trends. As a good Taoist, I don’t really believe in interference or “forcing” things. Things develop according to their own logic and we can fight it or go along with it. Its wisest to go along. Its natural that motivation should be declining in the West – the West reached the top, there was nowhere left to go. Achieving your desires doesn’t really satisfy you in the end – all spiritual traditions know this, and the West is a good example of this. Achieving everything it wanted, the West found that it was bored and dissatisfied. It us now gradually shifting gear, slowly.
Its natural China should now be ambitious – and that won’t last, either.
Thanks, I will check him out!
Getting invaded and experiencing a conga line of humiliations is pretty memorable.
And scarring.
Much of the idea there is whatever the worth of said wisdom, it certainly didn’t stop being having someone and his drunk friends walk up to you and pee in your generation direction while laughing at you in your own country. I imagine you can relate.
At some point, power is its own justification and its own righteousness. 成者爲王，敗者爲寇
Chinese I have met (living in the West and young, obviously) seem like the least self-hating people.
On the other hand, they also seem to have zero knowledge of China pre-1949, even when they are well-educated about Western history. Just that it was ‘feudalistic’ and bad for women. Inversion of most foreigners who like to talk about their nation’s historical greatness but complain about the present.
Young Chinese in the West often tend to identify with the power of present day China as a form of self-esteem, or alternatively fall in fully with SJW considerations.
A number are also “fu er dai”(wealthy second generation) or the progeny of the wealthy sent overseas, with famously venial attitudes. They are surprisingly ignorant of Chinese history – even of Chinese historic greatness.
They simply don’t care. Though to be fair, my experience with rich Anglo elite is sadly not much different. Historically, the elite were presumably more learned but these days they seem much more knowledgeable about cocktails and flaunting private flights.
I do not disagree.
But do we live in a world of justice and balance? No, we live in a world where monsters in the guise of humans walk unpunished, replete with the destruction that they wreck upon others uncaring and prideful. And many would call cowardice peace, because it is right to surrender to such fiends and not seek to restore balance?
You, too, have known such thoughts:
I hope to live long enough to see them hung or shot and their offspring entirely stripped of all their assets. This would be a proper and humane vindication for the millions of broken lives these Novye Russkie have trampled upon while building themselves into a parody of the Russian Aristocracy.
Order is indeed beauty and harmony is gracious. But there is a time when a wolf age is most appropriate and wisdom lies in having the means and will to inflict what is needed.
I’ve seen too much to feel any different. It is not for nothing that Nemesis bears a scourge and a sword.
The great covid hoax
https://www.bitchute.com/video/ijXgWGu9Fgkq/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElN5nlGUAi8
I can relate, I’ve also witnessed enough. And yet, I still wish we could evolve towards a better tomorrow without getting into hurtful situations where innocent people are at high risk of suffering.
As has been said some 2500 years ago:
“He abused me, he struck me, he overpowered me, he robbed me.” Those who harbor such thoughts do not still their hatred.
“He abused me, he struck me, he overpowered me, he robbed me.” Those who do not harbor such thoughts still their hatred.
https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/kn/dhp/dhp.01.budd.html
Maybe one day we will be wise enough as a species to understand that in Common Good there is everyone’s good as well. That being excessive in our pride and selfishness is the root to a world of hurt. That is if we survive long enough as a civilization.
Obviously not, or the word would have no meaning. People like you and Adam Rutherford (PC quacks) confuse categories normed on extant clusters with ancient categories as if they are equivalent. And since when did gene flow invalidate subspecies? Maybe 3000 years ago there was gene flow from another cluster. That doesn’t invalidate it. It just changes its nature. Nobody claimed “pure races” in the sense you and Adam Rutherford do, i.e. an unbroken line from the beginning of time. “Pure” here refers to modern races unmixed with other modern races, recently. Not that there was never any historical gene flow, obviously there was.
https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/OliverSmith03.jpg
Physiognomy is real
This kind of survey (although the results seem to attain authority through their “quantitative” presentation style) is generally not a reliable indication, as different cultures interpret the question different ways.
Superficially, my personal perception, is that in North Western Europe culture seems to idealize consumerism less than in contemporary Russia (and from what some people say, in China consumerism likely even more extreme than in Russia).
In Russia, there is enough money, that a significant proportion of the population can participate in the consumerism lifestyle, while another proportion of the population only reaches its ankles. In such a middle income environment, participation in consumerism of minor products, is still quite a social indicator, that you have not economically failed in life. It is psychotherapy for a lot of people to buy new automobile or even new fridge, and then not appear to be a “failure” (in the material sense) of life.
Whereas in North Western Europe, nowadays a larger majority of the population can afford to participate in consumerism of most products, and as a result such purchase lost much of its social significance as anything like class or economic indicator. I.e. the stereotype that upper class English people like to drive shabby cars.
However, this does not imply that in North Western Europe, there is less consumerism. Just that the consumerism of normal products, does not have social significance, as too many people can afford them. A lower income man can buy a nice car in England if they prioritize it, so the nice car has lost its use as a social indicator, and women might not even be very impressed.
Yet when you look at products where supply is really limited, and great majority of the population can never buy, such as purchase of luxury, historical houses – then English will be as consumerist as people in China or India might be in relation to purchase of new cars.
For English, you would have to look at their attitude to luxury houses, to see they will have the same attitude that people in poorer countries have in relation to a luxury car.
Some might argue this is reaction to communism (Jung actually had predicted that the Soviet Union would become more materialist than the West, as a result of communism’s focus on material conditions).
But I do not think this is the cause.
For example, if you read for 10 minutes of 1950s America culture, such as reading Life Magazine. https://books.google.ru/books?id=O0kEAAAAMBAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
You can see a large part of magazine is writing literary poems about the qualities of electric shaver and women’s underwear.
In world history, 1950s America is the reductio ad absurdum of extreme consumerism culture, and it didn’t require communism before it.
It’s also probably not related to trauma of “Great Depression”, as there was signs of this extreme consumerism of 1950s, already in the “Roaring 20s”.
Probably, the main driver of the communism, was the middle income status of the economy of the time, where consumption of those products was still a social indicator. Whereas in America now, everyone can afford an electric shaver – the consumerism has moved to more expensive product categories like McMansions or being able to pay for tuition fees in elite universities.
https://twitter.com/ArtyomLukin/status/1301085606726991872?s=20
Can’t argue with that!
Here in my final paragraph, I intended to write: “Probably, the main driver of the consumerism”, not “Probably, the main driver of the communism”*.
(A confusing similarity of the words “communism” and “consumerism”).
https://twitter.com/BoogalooBarkeep/status/1300634967244853248?s=20
Since zoologists debated the subspecies concept and tried to agree with a definition going back to the 1950s or earlier. Example: “Edwards (1954) and Pimentel (1959) in which the subspecies would become a measure of isolation, by restricting its use to completely isolated and ‘obviously different’ populations” (Lidicker, 1962) Subspecies by this zoological definition are pre-zygotic reproductively isolated populations meaning geographically isolated (allopatric populations). This has always been the most straightforward understanding and concept of subspecies, hence if you read old zoological literature, subspecies were once widely considered incipient species and geographical isolates. The definition of subspecies (geographical race) in zoology and other fields of science has though changed over time and modern political ‘race realists’ use the most trivialised and less strict definition for obvious reasons i.e. if we apply the definition of race mentioned above as geographically isolated populations – there are no human races unless you’re talking about remote tribes in the Amazon or inhabitants of the Andaman Islands who are completely isolated with no gene-flow between them and other populations. If you’re talking about those, I would have no problem with accepting races exist per the zoological definition of allopatric populations. ‘Race realists’ though don’t limit the definition of race to those populations as they don’t match their politics.
I’ve never read Rutherford’s book so don’t know what his views are. A reviewer on Unz Review (see James Thompson’s blog) however said he actually believes in race, but is arguing against racism. So his views on ‘race realism’ are probably more similar to yours than mine. Are you describing your own position as PC? What a dumbass.
https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/OliverSmith03.jpg
Referring to yourself as voluntary childless is a bit of a reach
https://www.obama.org/europe-2020/
Pretty interesting if one wants to know which “young leaders” in Europe are favoured by the American liberal establishment (not that Trump with his ostentatious love of blacks and homos is much better). “Young leader” for Belarus is a sodomite with a nose piercing.
imagine having nasiolabal folds and worry lines at age 18
you must look like a corpse by now
Wow you had to go back to 1950 to cherry pick some nonsense. That’s even stupider than usual.
No, he makes exactly the same idiotic strawman attack on pure races you do. I’m sure it’s effective in impressing white liberal cat ladies. How did you go from being a British nationalist to making the same “arguments” as some mediocre pseudoscientific woke-science BBC-promoted mass-immigration-pushing quack? Were you just looking for people to troll to take out your psychotic episodes and you felt state dissidents would be an easy target?
No, I explained that definition was there from the beginning when zoologists came up with definition(s) and debated what subspecies meant in the 1950s, or earlier. You have no clue of the literature and about the only books you’ve read on race are pseudoscientific crap by Rushton.
Is the definition of subspecies (geographical race) I posted still in use? Yes, absolutely:
“As is well known, all subspecies are allopatric (either dichopatric, with non-contiguous ranges, or parapatric, with contiguous ranges); parapatric subspecies interbreed and exhibit intergradation in contact zones, but such taxa maintain the required level of distinction in one or more characters outside of those zones.” – Smith et al. 1997 “Subspecies and classification”. Herpetological Review 28 : 13 – 17
“Since subspecies interbreed where they come together, it is impossible by definition to have two subspecies of the same species in the same locality — to have sympatric subspecies. – King, J. C. (1981). The Biology of Race. University of California Press. p. 17.
“Subspecies (a trinomial scientific name) should be used in two situations: (1) allopatric populations where definition of the populations is clear, distinct, and total (or very nearly so); and (2) situations where secondary contact between distinct populations has occurred and the zone of intergradation is relatively narrow.”
– Monroe, Burt L. “A modern concept of the subspecies.” The Auk 99.3 (1982): 608-609
“Subspecies are generally considered to be a population or populations within a species that are found in different breeding locations (allopatry) and have been equated to ‘geographic varieties’.”
– Wang et al. 2015
https://zoologicalstudies.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40555-015-0115-x
Is this “cherry-picked” nonsense? No.
Despite what I’ve posted isn’t a strawman (see above). Subspecies is invalidated by the definition I posted- if there is gene flow between populations (unless gene flow is restricted to a narrow zone of contact). Of course though there are different definitions of race. Depending on the definition, race may or might not be invalidated. In contrast you think there is only one definition the “Mikemikev definition” virtually not in use by anyone but yourself and then you label anyone who disagrees with you an Antifa.
I also have no interest in Rutherford. In contrast, you seem to have an unhealthy obsession with him to the extent you harassed him on Twitter on one of your accounts, before suspended, with 8000 tweets: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Michael_Coombs#2020_activity
Because I’ve never been a ‘British nationalist’. There’s a fake biography on several sites mostly copied from one source – Emil Kirkegaard – which claims I’m a former BNP member, white nationalist and Holocaust denier who became an anti-racist far-leftist and Antifa or something as bizarre, plus false allegations about mental illness and inaccurate rumours of my sexuality.
Anatoly Karlin who owns this open-thread for example incorrectly claims I’m a former BNP member and I once posted on the BNP website. Neither claims are true, but lies he made up or copied from Kirkegaard.
Very broadly true, but remember Paglia’s words (in Sexual Personae):
Legend!
I’m now 30 not 18 or 19 and look very different. It was Karlin/Kirkegaard [the url of that photo is emilkirkegaard.dk, but it was copied to Karlin’s site] lame attempt to ridicule me by posting old photos of me as a teenager on their blogs. Here’s what Karlin looked like when a spotty scrawny teenager:
https://i.ibb.co/N6bTCzD/Anatoly-Karlin.png
Would I want to upload his ugly mug when 18 to my blog? No. But that’s what they do to me…
Ps. Here’s what Mikemikev (Michael Coombs) looks like now.
https://twitter.com/jdpoc/status/1252679592495759360
I like how your own quotes allow for current gene flow let alone historical. What a moron. And yes obviously races developed in different locations. Did they develop in the same location? What are you even arguing against here?
Per the subspecies definition I posted there may be gene flow between subspecies, but it is confined only to a hybrid zone. Do you know what parapatry is? There may be gene flow between subspecies at the borders of their geographical range in a narrow range of contact between different populations of subspecies but the subspecies remain isolated outside of the narrow zone of contact.
Put down the pseudoscientific Rushton or Richard Lynn book garbage and spend some time reading an actual zoology or evolutionary biology book or paper for once…
“As is well known, all subspecies are allopatric (either dichopatric, with non-contiguous ranges, or parapatric, with contiguous ranges); parapatric subspecies interbreed and exhibit intergradation in contact zones, but such taxa maintain the required level of distinction in one or more characters outside of those zones.” – Smith et al. 1997 “Subspecies and classification”. Herpetological Review 28 : 13 – 17
“Subspecies (a trinomial scientific name) should be used in two situations: (1) allopatric populations where definition of the populations is clear, distinct, and total (or very nearly so); and (2) situations where secondary contact between distinct populations has occurred and the zone of intergradation is relatively narrow.”
– Monroe, Burt L. “A modern concept of the subspecies.” The Auk 99.3 (1982): 608-609
Is this applicable to humans? No obviously not. Different human populations aren’t mixing only in narrow contact zones, look at any cosmopolitan city.
Contrast to allopatric subspecies in animals eg. –
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ece3.4405
Two allopatric subspecies of Macaca assamensis are wholly isolated by the Brahmaputra river in northeastern India, but this paper discusses potential hybrid zones at the edges of their geographical ranges with changes in climate, therefore these subspecies will become parapatric.
If you picked up individuals from several subspecies and put them in the same place would that make the division invalid? What a stupid argument. Presumably zoos invalidate the distinction between African and Asian elephants. Races developed under those conditions and still exist, regardless of very recent movements. Anyway I’ve wasted enough time reading your stupid posts.
Yes, but it also produced the Beat generation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamachine
I think there is a sort of dialectics at play here…
Your argument as usual is invalid:
Zoos aren’t the natural environment. This why the eminent zoologist Ernst Mayr when he defined species and subspecies limited the definition to natural populations because breeding may take place in captivity that would not in nature. Plenty of examples of this.
On another note, it’s interesting that Mayr throughout his earliest career argued for a weak definition of subspecies with no required allopatry. He merely defined a subspecies as groups of populations that are morphologically (or genetically) different which is what modern ‘race realists’ would say. What happened? Mayr realised the many problems with his weak definition and changed his mind, first questioning his original definition in the 1960s and abandoning it in the 1980s and 1990s – to define subspecies by the strong definition I’ve already outlined that is based on allopatry and geographical isolation.
Here’s also a major 2012 paper on subspecies in butterflies explaining all this:
And.
And-
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1095-8312.2012.01909.x
But according to you all this “nonsense”, “woke leftist agenda pro-immigration” blah blah. You’re an imbecile with no understanding of the scientific literature on subspecies.
Look at this fool use pre-genomics definitions of species. Next he’s going to explain that polar bears don’t really exist and that North American wolves and coyotes really can’t be distinguished from each other.
Good to know ODS has had some fun here but time to ban him, he is not entitled to use my blog comments as a platform for his demented ravings (especially considering also that he Blocks me on Twitter).
Your blog seems to attract people with amusingly shaped heads.
Lately I have been busy so I couldnt answer your ignorant and very AaronB like message.
The very basis of Dharma is renunciation, to understand that Samsara is not source of happiness, the path of renunciation is based on vows that the Buddha himself gave to the Sangha. But that is not only transgression and violation committed by the Japanese Sangha, no for that has not been enough for them. Almost all Japanese temples are family owned businesses. I understand that you are not a Buddhist, but even you should understand why that is not okay in our religion. That those fake monks use monastic Kasaya, marry, drink and are businessmen at the same time.
2nd Major sign of Japanese Buddhisms heretical nature is their sectarianism, nowhere in the world, except in Japan, has Buddhism splintered into such multitude of sects, with highly heterodoxical positions. As Buddha said, making of Schism in Sangha is as grave transgression(Anantarika-Karma) as killing ones parents, and most Japanese Buddhist sects have been established by such individuals, by monks who have committed this sin which is beyond all comparison.
And now you start to explain about Vimalakirti like a blind and deaf man, like AaronB, who is spiritually lobotomized. Didnt I explain before to you that in Mahayana there are two truths, ultimate and relative? Of course in ultimate reality nature of everything is same and there are no distinctions, but to really see selfless and luminous nature of oneself and others is not possible without preconditions and without purifying ones cognition.
But after all you are agnostic, which is a sign that you are in the end a follower of a western philosophical tradition, or one of them. Buddha explicitly denies the creator God in Brahmajala sutta. We believe in Pratityasamutpada/dependent origination as origin of everything, unlike you, Boddhidharma too believed in Pratityasamutpada and in two truths and in Pratimoksha vows, as did Vimalakirti.
In Chan the Two truths doctrine is possibly even more important than in our tradition.
Please try to avoid denigrating of others religions, or how would you think if I would, after reading of Bible, barge to Orthodox Church and say why they are doing this and this wrong, after all “the kingdom of God is within you.” Luke 17:21. So who the hell needs priests or churchs, prayer or fasting?
http://www.buddha-vacana.org/sutta/samyutta/nidana/sn20-007.html