Here is how the cliodynamician Peter Turchin, in his book War and Peace and War (which I reviewed here), describes the outcomes of different pit-fight scenarios between the Romans and the Gauls:
Romans held no physical or technological advantage over the peoples they conquered. An average Roman was smaller and weaker than an average Gaul. In a one-to-one duel, an average Roman would most likely lose to an average Gaul. On the other hand, a hundred Romans could hold even against a hundred of Gauls, and ten thousand Romans would easily defeat a Gallic army many times their number.
Upon inquiry, it emerged that this assessment wasn’t backed up by statistical evidence:
@akarlin88 @quaerite Yes, this is from my War and Peace and War. But it's not a quantitative model, or a result from data analysis…
— Peter Turchin (@Peter_Turchin) April 9, 2016
Even so, the stereotype that Northerners are stronger than Southerners seems to be widespread in both fiction and more serious works:
Harry Turtledove – Give Me Back My Legions!:
Arminius smiled. “Well, maybe we would have.” He didn’t feel like arguing. But he also didn’t believe Chlodevegius. One German had an excellent chance against one Roman. Ten Romans had the edge on ten Germans. A hundred Romans would massacre a hundred Germans.
Stephen Williams – Diocletian and the Roman Recovery:
With the primitive, wandering farmer-warrior ethos in which each tribe was ready to expand into the space of its nearest neighbour, the Germans could recover quickly from all but the most punitive defeats. Man for man they were physically stronger than the Romans and certainly as brave: Their fierce fighting qualities had long compelled admiration: Tacitus, prophetically, saw in their warlike freedom a new reservoir of enormous energies which could have profound consequences for the Roman future.
But is it actually true?
This post is a quick survey of physical strength differences from an HBD perspective.
Race Differences in Physical Strength
- Araujo, Andre et al. – 2010 – Lean mass, muscle strength, and physical function in a diverse population of men
Black diamonds – Blacks; Black triangles – Whites; Gray squares – Hispanics
Physical strength of Whites and US Blacks are really similar.
2. Dodds, Richard et al. – 2016 – Global variation in grip strength, A systematic meta-analysis
There are obvious “Flynn” effects with respect to strength as well as IQ – the developed countries are a lot stronger than Africa (which was represented by Nigeria), which suggests that possible Flynn gains to strength are on the order of 1-1.5 S.D.
3. Leong, Darryl et al. – 2015 – Prognostic value of grip strength
This is more interesting, and really quite striking. It would appear that the weakest men (South Asians) do not have a stronger hand grip than the strongest women (Europeans).
PS. So much for the Pakistani martial race theory…
Though seldom used in today’s context, it has been alleged that Pakistan Military believed in the concept of martial races, and thought that they would easily defeat India in a war, especially prior to the Indo-Pakistani War of 1965. Based on this belief in martial supremacy, it was popularly said that one Pakistani soldier was equal to four to ten Hindus or Indian soldiers, and thus numerical superiority of the foe could be overcome… Defence writers in Pakistan have noted that the 1971 defeat was partially attributable to the flawed ‘martial races’ theory which led to wishful thinking that it was possible to defeat the Indian Army based on the theory alone.
4. Andersen Ranberg, Karen et al. – 2009 – Cross National Differences in Grip Strength among 50yo Europeans
Moreover, the Germanics really are significantly stronger than the Mediterraneans. The average Germanic seems to be around 15 years “younger” than the average Italian or Spaniard in terms of hand grip strength. These are remarkably big differences, around 1 S.D.’s worth. Average German, Swede, or Pole might have a 15 SQ (strength quotient) advantage over the average South European.
OTOH, the Italians and Spaniards also happen to be the two longest-lived European nations. (This is something of a pattern, too).
5. Mathieson, Iain et al. – 2015 – 8000 years of natural selection for height in Europe (see Razib Khan’s blog post)
Note that Central Europe Neolithic to Bronze Age and especially the Steppe strongly selected for height.
Even today, based on personal experience, you will observe many taller, burlier men in Germanic and Slavic Europe than you would in the Mediterranean.
Sex Differences in Physical Strength
For context, there is a ~2.5 S.D. difference in male and female grip strength.
- Leyk, D. et al. – 2007 – Hand-grip strength of young men, women and highly trained female athletes (see Razib Khan’s blog post)
- There is also this famous graph which was making the rounds on Reddit a year ago.
Women have around 60% of the hand grip strength of men. Huge difference… but remarkably, seems to be about equal to the difference between developed Anglo-German/Slavic Europe and the Indian subcontinent!
PS. Why do so many of these studies focus on grip strength? Because it is easy to measure, changes the least as people age (hand grip is the last to go), and is exercised more or less universally.
The Strength of Nations
My best guess is that in terms of S.D.’s it goes something like this in terms of hand grip strength (Flynn! denotes members of those ethnicities that dwell in First World environments).
- +1 Icelanders
- +0.5 Steppe!East Asians (i.e.Mongols)
- 0 Balto-Slavic-Germanics, Flynn!WestAfricans
- -.5 East Asians
- -1 Mediterraneans, Flynn!Indians, WestAfricans
- -2 Indians
Explanations of Icelanders, Mongols, and Indians follow below.
Prominent Outliers
Two nations in particular seem to be superlative in terms of physical strength relative to their racial groups:
Hafþór Björnsson (better known as The Mountain): World’s strongest man ever?
- Icelanders, with a mere 300,000 people, dominate the world strongman competitions. They have won 9 Gold medals, more than any other country other than the US, which has won 11 (and has ONE THOUSAND times its population).
In January 2015, at the World’s Strongest Viking competition held in Norway, Hafþór carried a 10-metre-long (33 ft), 650-kilogram (1,430 lb) log for five steps, thus breaking a 1,000-year-old record set by Orm Storolfsson.
Unfortunately, Orm Storolfsson broke his back performing this feat. Still, considering that the Icelandic population one millennium ago was ten times lower at 30,000, and they had yet to be supercharged by bodily Flynn Effect, perhaps the human race was at its genomic peak of physical strength in Iceland 1,000 years ago.
Agriculture is more of an aerobic activity, so explosive physical strength may have been selected against ever since.
Icelandic women have also won four years of the past decade’s worth the Crossfit Games.
- The Mongols, with just three million people, dominate sumo wrestling in Japan. (In fairness, the Japanese seem to be physically smaller than other East Asians, so they are probably weaker than Koreans and northern Chinese).
There is also the historical record of their military achievements.
Although these factors were mainly logistical and political, one consideration that is often neglected is that the ketogenic, steppe-forged Mongols may have also been physically stronger and more vital than their grain-eating bugman foes.
Jack Weatherford – Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World:
The Chinese noted with surprise and disgust the ability of the Mongol warriors to survive on little food and water for long periods; according to one, the entire army could camp without a single puff of smoke since they needed no fires to cook. Compared to the Jurched soldiers, the Mongols were much healthier and stronger. The Mongols consumed a steady diet of meat, milk, yogurt, and other dairy products, and they fought men who lived on gruel made from various grains. The grain diet of the peasant warriors stunted their bones, rotted their teeth, and left them weak and prone to disease. In contrast, the poorest Mongol soldier ate mostly protein, thereby giving him strong teeth and bones. Unlike the Jurched soldiers, who were dependent on a heavy carbohydrate diet, the Mongols could more easily go a day or two without food.
- Conversely, the Indians really might be the physically weakest race:
Only 5 medals. Record-setting (3 in Beijing, 0-2 in all previous Olympics) but that’s still atrocious for a country of 1.2 billion people – even a poor and malnourished one. Michael Phelps alone has won almost as many Gold medals as India has done as a nation for as long as the Olympics existed.
But the reasons for this become clearer when you consider that the average Swedish or Polish woman is probably about as strong as the average Indian male. And the average Icelandic woman might even be outright stronger…
The Indians also accumulate the most body fat for every unit of BMI.
Of course malnutrition is still a factor. Once that is solved and India gets its bodily Flynn effect, the average Indian male will surpass the Swedish and probably the Icelandic woman. And given the much higher S.D. of men, the stronger Indian men will of course be much stronger than the European women.
you ever see The Mountain before he started juicing? Total beanpole.
Some races may also respond better to steroids.
You are missing the point. The Romans of which Caesar’s legions originated from following the Marian reforms usually came from the lower-classes of densely populated villages and towns and as such often grew up with unsanitary conditions, urban diseases, less meat in the diet and so on.
Writers of the period unanimously agree that the Celts and Germans were taller and more handsome to look upon than the average Roman. Physical height = an obvious advantage in war.
Your methodology here is unsound. Contemporary data taken from nation averages has little relevance for other peoples inhabiting the same area over 2000 years past.
Sorry, that came across as unnecessarily aggressive, I thought it was arguing the opposite at first. Interesting data, but one has to be cautious about applying to the distant past. Thracians were commonly noted to have red hair for instance, can anyone say that of Bulgarians today?
I am surprised that Africans came through so poorly. India unsurprising.
Hmm, good, at least that reduces the threat from Indian rapists somewhat. They might just come in groups though.
Might is an understatement. I think almost all reported cases of rape against Western tourists in India involve multiple assailants.
Does ‘grip strength’ (which measures just a function of the hand) have a strong relation to actual individual strength in other areas (in terms of weight lifting or other strength talent)?
Isn’t it possible that the genetic or environmental basis for hand strength will be different to those of a different muscle group (for example, differences in shoulder strength or thigh strength could have a different genetic and environmental basis, and be stronger in different nationalities than others)
Also aren’t grip muscles one of the attributes most susceptible to environment factors (the reason weight-lifting as a training, exists).
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2
Is there a strong relation between weight lifting talent and individual fighting without weapons.
E.g. Andrey Drachev, World Weightlifting Champion is easily killed when he was tricked into a street fight with a small but more skilled Muslim guy in Khabarovsk last year.*
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So the direct relation to grip strength would only be in relation to their grip of the sword.
(Other things like aggression, speed, mental attributes and skill would be more relevant to combat with a weapon, than without a weapon).
Isn’t the distinction with Roman from Northern people they genocided, that they were not individual fighters, but organized and group fighters.
If Romans would lose in one-to-one, it is not because physical weakness (probably they were often better fed and stronger than the enemy, as they had more organized supplies), but because Romans had no individual fighting skill or experience.
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*
I am going with the safer assumption that such a feat of carrying that log did not occur 1000 years ago.
I would imagine almost certainly so, but yes, it would be good to check.
Is grip strength a predictor for total muscle strength in healthy children, adolescents, and young adults?
It seems very intuitive that more strength would very much translate into better fighting capability (with or without weapons), all else equal.
Yes, they were very well drilled, hence why large groups of them dominated (a few exceptions regardless). I very much doubt they were stronger than their enemies.
Yes, or that, LOL.
Why? In Ancient warfare, isn’t it knowledge of all military historians that group organization, coolness and organization of supplies are the secret to victory (and at a higher level organization of tactics).
Nobody is analyzing e.g. outcome of the Battle of Kannakh, because Carthage people (to reductio ad absurdum) were taller (or shorter) than Romans.
Quality of soldiers still matters a great deal at times, something which the Prussians knew and was able to use to their advantage historically. And as suggested by the Mongol rampage, it can be of even world-changing significance at times.
But as a parallel symptom of another underlying variable.
For example, if we say health of the organism is an underlying variable. A healthy person might have higher cardiovascular stamina, be more aggressive, and be faster and have more explosive strength, and incidentally better at weight-lifting.
But the weight-lifting strength would be the most irrelevant factor of those listed in e.g. a boxing fight.
Weight-lifting strength would also be a useful symptom of boxing strength (if you were using it to select winners), as it will also correlate with things like physical weight (i.e. more direct determinants of the winner in the boxing fight).
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As for group differences which are likely genetic, and distinguish people in the highest percentage – it can change dramatically on the particular activity.
It seems intuitive that black people are – as a group – better at running (the joke that they are running from lions). But in fact group advantage in long-distance running has a different basis from group advantage in short-distance running.
So Ethiopian populations will have a group advantage, other things equal, in 10,000 metre run, but a group disadvantage, other things equal, in 100 metre runs.
Similarly, group advantages in weight lifting, could easily have a different basis from group advantages in e.g. punching strength and speed (that would be relevant in boxing fights).
A particularly noxious recent case involved the rape and mutilation of a Latvian woman (Balts produce lots of strong men) in southern India (generally smaller and more timid than northern Indians) by a gang
https://www.deccanchronicle.com/nation/current-affairs/030518/latvian-tourist-on-kerala-visit-drugged-raped-before-murder-2-arrested.html
“Martial races” theory may have been flawed, but I think it had a reasonable basis: the northwestern subcontinentals tend to be bigger and probably consume more meat. Ofc size isn’t everything in war, hence the Marathas were the dominant power in India before the British.
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Yes but quality of soldiers in the modern period is determined on things like their mental attributes, combat experience, tolerance of discomfort and cardiovascular stamina.
Before the invention of fire-arms, there would be more physical determinants involved, although these are not always very clear (or related to weight-lifting). E.g. Greek phalanx requires pushing abilities. Medieval knights have to be good at beating people until their skulls are broken under metal helmets (perhaps while riding a horse), and the weight of the armor and weaponry matches more directly to weight-lifting. But in Roman warfare, the weight of the armor and weaponry is far less.
Limiting the “modern” in this case to the blackpowder era, wouldn’t stamina be pretty heavily coordinated to many markers of what we consider as strength? The guns aren’t paperweights. The pack would be heavy. Each and every action is probably made easier with physical strength to assist it.
I’ve always humbly referred to my own people as “one of the strongest martial races to ever walk the Earth” so I agree with the pakis that such races exist, though they are certainly not among them, lol.
My definition of a martial race would be people who are often tough on individual level and at the same time seem to be good at fighting and complex warfare. Mongolians are the easiest example indeed.
Blacks are not a martial race for the same reason oxen or buffalos are not a martial race despite their strength.
Chechens are a martial race for example – but unluckily for them, so are the Russians.
To the extent that could carry the rifle of the era (perhaps needing at least average strength), and then stamina is required and tolerance of discomfort.
Additional weight-lifting ability beyond carrying the rifle, supplies and ammunition, would be irrelevant surely? And cardiovascular stamina is then be more important.
In modern armies – beyond reaching stamina and physical health requirements – the mental qualities of organization, bravery, skill, initiative are more determinants of the quality of the soldiers.
No, the “strength” advantage is primarily in anaerobic. Weightlifters and strongmen can, pound for pound, exert more total force. However for anything requiring sustained effort, aerobic exercise, energy efficiency is key. Strength is max burst output, endurance is sustained output over x period of time using y number of calories. Shouldering a 3kg rifle is as no harder for a farm boy draftee than it is for the Mr. Olympic. The latter however will find it much harder to carry that rifle and his pack over a long march because his extra mass will require much more energy for the same amount of effort.
lol.
No way white people are stronger than blacks. This is just another way for Anatoly to selectively look at data to show that White People Stronk!
This sounds right, all of the special forces tests I’ve come across look for speed or the ability to do x push-ups, pull-ups, sit-ups, timed swimming, timed running, etc. I’ve never seen one asking how much someone can squat or bench. Of course I’m not an expert in this field, but when I was younger used to use those as a benchmark for my own exercise routine.
I’ve never seen a huge SAS guy. Well built and athletic? Sure – but not muscle bound.
Peace.
If you really want to talk about physical strength and voraciousness between the different nations, what about the Ukrainian Klitschko brothers? Their accomplishments in the world of heavyweight boxing are well documented and will not soon be matched:
From 2 July 2011 to 15 December 2013 all major recognized Heavyweight belts were in the Klitschko family. Vitali Klitschko (born 19 July 1971) and Wladimir Klitschko (born 25 March 1976), collectively known as the Klitschko brothers are Ukrainian heavyweight boxers. During their peak years from 2004 until 2015, the Klitschko brothers were considered the most dominant heavyweight champions of their era, and amongst the most successful champions in boxing history.[1][2] After the retirement of boxing legend Lennox Lewis, the Klitschko brothers held all heavyweight boxing world titles.[3][4] Known for their exceptionally large frames and robotic boxing styles, the Klitschko brothers developed a style that utilized their athleticism and using their arm reach to break down opponents.[5][6]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klitschko_brothers
BTW, they have always referred to themselves as belonging to the Ukrainian nation, not to some sort of a fictitious ‘third branch of the all Russian nation’.
All right, I see what you mean. Point conceded.
There is a massive diversity in Africans; Hausa are martial. Igbo? Not so much.
The invading Arab armies made mincemeat of both Byzantine and Persian armies; even when under-equipped and outnumbered almost two to one, but they couldn’t break past the Nubians and had to settle for a pact.
Peace.
There’s something wrong with you.
The most elite NATO soldiers – are considered units from a small Nepalese nationality called “Gurkhas”, which were taken by the British empire for military purposes from the early 19th century.
Externally not very scary, and not much larger than their master.
https://media.pri.org/s3fs-public/styles/story_main/public/story/images/RTR2J1B1.jpg?itok=zPnNrbee
Perhaps soldiers selected by the British for personality.
Anybody who has ever boxed or wrestled would agree that American whites and American blacks are about the same in strength, with whites probably being a little stronger.
The Mongol, really Steppe advantage in warfare isn’t biological so much as ecological.
Pastoralist economies can simply support more fighting men per unit of population than agricultural societies because the calorie-in/calorie-out ratio of livestock rearing is an order of magnitude better than farming grains. Farming is hard back breaking work that requires lots of manpower. Herding sheep and cattle can be accomplished by boys. Thus Steppe polities could in a fight bring much more of their available manpower to bear than settled civilizations. Basically half the men in a Steppe society can be brought into a battle without affecting the livelihoods of the rest. Large settled empires like Rome or China were never able to martial more than 1% of their total populations into their armies because that manpower was needed to farm for most of the year and the taxes could only pay for that amount. Even the most militarized small societies like Sparta or Prussia weren’t able to do better than 3% or so before modern industrial agriculture was availble to free up more men for the fight.
Even worse is that the strategic initiative lies with the Steppe. More dangerous than retreating horse archers is the advantage of the Steppes in that their entire populations are mobile. If they feel that the strategic situation is bad, they simply pack up and move and bring their food along with them. For a settled army to campaign into the Steppe requires bringing long baggage trains requiring massive expenditures of money to supply an army so far from home only to find that the enemy wont even engage in a fight. Thus the only way to effectively fight Steppe polities prior to firearms was to fight like them, with cavalry centric armies designed to ride down their civilian populations and force them into a fight under suboptimal conditions. That is how basically Steppe nomads war with each other.
I agree. The main advantage of the Steppe is logistical (above) and political (can strike, and typically succeeds best, during periods of state dissolution).
I was venturing the idea that physical performance may not however have been entirely irrelevant.
It doesn’t appear that you’re much of a fan of the Klitshcko brothers? How about the Ukrainian, Vasyl Lomachenko, who always appears ready to go to work draped underneath the Ukrainian Blue and Yellow.
https://youtu.be/9gptWqO_ErI
Aren’t they part Jewish? We all know how Ukrainians feel about that…
The Klit bros never demonstrated much physical strength in the ring. And they were both obvious juice heads.
Wlad was a genuine all time great but Vitali’s claim to greatness is LOSING to Lennox Lewis. He is the only “all time great” I can think of whose signature performance was a bloody and decisive defeat. Vitali was a tough guy but he was made of glass. The guy practically would get injured getting his hands taped.
Wlad in his prime had 2 losses: against Corrie Sanders and against Lamon Brewster. I’ve seen both fights many times. Wlad could have fought those guys 1000 times each and the results would have always been the same. I would give Wlad 0 chance against prime Lewis, Holyfield, Tyson, Ali, Bowe and Holmes. He would also lose badly to guys like Douglas, Tucker and Witherspoon when those guys were on their games (which admittedly was pretty rare).
Of course, either of them on their worst day are better than any Russian heavyweight ever, if that’s what you are getting at. But mainly they just dominated a weak era.
Yeah Gurkhas are tough guys – very valuable pound for pound.
Peace.
that video is disgusting. Little man’s syndrome run amok.
Had the big guy been properly trained he’d have broken that smurf in half.
Hitting the guy when he’s already unconscious on the ground was vile. Fuck that guy.
Quick question: did ANY of you tough talking Galician Neo-Nazis who invariably live in places like Canaduh actually go to fight for the Kiev putschists a la jihadis who volunteer in places like Syria??? What’s the pure, un-Russified Ukrainian word for ‘coward’?
That was the point.
Agree on that being disgusting behavior; it’s a street fight, not a war.
Peace.
You need to ask other users, not myself.
I do not know very much about boxing (sadly I didn’t have the appropriate television channel when I was growing up).
Sure, it is a cool sport.
Klitschko brothers are some legends of Ukrainian sports. But – like with Andrey Shevchenko – not sure how being awesome in a sport qualifies you as a politician.
Why?…did you, a big BadAss Putlerite go and fight in these inhospitable places? The Middle East is not Ukraine’s to interfere in.
Indians are too varied for averages to be meaningful. Pathans, Sikhs, Janjuas, Rajputs, Gurkhas etc. were all prized as soldiers by the British which would argue they had a higher than average grip strength. Wrestling was also a pretty popular sport in Punjab and Uttar Pradesh going back to the Mughal era and earlier. The reason for the lack of medals is more due to a cultural and official lack of interest in sports development. Unlike China and the USSR, the government never believed sporting success was necessary to promote the country. There is not much infrastructure or funding for the development of world class athletes.
Loma is a stud. I thought that he was Russian, not Ukrainian.
.
Did you watch the fight? He was ahead on all scorecards going into the next round, and was raring to go. He was, in all honestly, inadvertently head butted by Lewis that caused the bleeding to his head. It’s a shame that the match had to end in such an inconclusive manner. The fact remains, that for the next 10 years the brothers dominated the sport. If they were that ‘mediocre’ then somebody should have put them out of their misery, which never happened (and they fought a lot of fights). What about Lomachenko, what’s wrong with him?…
Another topic which is interesting (not that I know anything about the topic) is the greater intelligence and organization level of the Romans compared to their contemporary nationalities.
The extent of the disparity, and amount of generations it existed – seems something that would be statistically very improbable .
Watch the clip. What colors does he and his team display at each fight?
Why? What does grip strength in a population, have to do with Gurkhas’ perceived abilities as soldiers (for the British military)? (They are gripping their rifles more strongly than other soldiers, or they can be used to unscrew difficult jars?)
Engels used examples like this one to argue his famous quantity into quality transformation:
Yes, my beloved Confucian friend.
I am forgetting all the beautiful lovely yellow* ladies that also have an exclusive preference for LongSchlongs***
Like this one: Super sexy – sex goddess slut
Such as Kal Penn in Van Wilder, I would like to go down on this Japanese goddess and experience her love-canal juices, following the teachings of Master Laozi.
*** To be fair, the length of our schlongs are probably comparable.
Why is that? Do you feel that being a KGB operative somehow better qualifies one for the role of a politician? 🙂
I didn’t say the Klitschko’s were mediocre. I said that they dominated a mediocre era, which they did. Wlad was decisively beaten by Sanders and Brewster and he would never have been able to beat those guys when they were at their best. Vitali would have destroyed Brewster but I don’t know how he would have done against the Sanders that Wlad fought. Both Vitali and Wlad would have no chance whatsoever against Ali, Holmes, Tyson, Bowe, Lewis or Holyfield. Nor would they be expected to defeat guys like Witherspoon, Tucker or Douglas when those guys were on their games. What made the Klitschko brothers so dominant was the way they were able to tag team the division on top of the fact that they were in an exceedingly weak era. If the brothers were in their primes today, I would have both of them as underdogs against Joshua, Wilder and Fury. I don’t think Wlad would even have beaten an old timer like Liston and I’m not sure that Vitali would have either.
I do think they’d both beat prime Foreman though.
The Klits are ATG’s based on their dominance of their era, but they are unquestionably the weakest ATGs ever.
Samoans?
Vastly over represented in the NFL and infantry in Iraq.
“The Chinese noted with surprise and disgust the ability of the Mongol warriors to survive on little food and water for long periods; according to one, the entire army could camp without a single puff of smoke since they needed no fires to cook.”
Up to today there is this chinese habit of always drinking warm water and eating something every three hours or so. They seem to be quite dependent on constant cooking and heating.
With all due respect, Mr. Karlin,
That was a non-NSFW site.
I rest my idolatrous polytheistic case.
LOL! Pakistani grip strength!!! LOOOOL!
Brothers gotta stop eating them laddoos!
Peace.
I’m not Russian or a Putin supporter. It only seems natural, given their rhetoric, that the ultrationalists in Canada, US, etc. would leap at the chance to fight for the courageous Maidanist government and get to kill a few vatniki in the process, no? Cowaaardds!
I disagree with your general predictions of how the Klitschkos would have done against masters of the past. The game has changed immensely since then. By mere size alone, the Klitschkos were much taller and bigger than any of the rivals that you mention. And I think that the overall physical strength of today towers over anything the old masters could conjure up. Like it or not, the ‘butterfly and bumblebee’ antics and finesse of the past are overshadowed by the size and strengh of today (at least in the heavyweight class), and you’ll have to admit that the current crop of heavyweight greats look more like the Klitschko brothers than like Muhamed Ali or Tyson. We’ll never really know. It’s like in the chess world today, would Magnusson dominate Bobbie Fischer?…I think that the computer generated prognosis would give a decided nod to Magnusson, but I don’t know?…
You and Talha probably know more about this than me, but I believe that the Bengalis (who had been the backbone of the East India Company’s forces beforehand) were overrepresented among the Sepoy mutineers. So, while northwestern subcontinentals are probably more physically imposing than those from eastern or southern regions, there was a political motivation for the “Martial Races” theories: the Bengalis “betrayal.” Before that, there was also no disparagement of the Bengalis’ martial prowess, they had been regarded as highly reliable in the Company’s wars with the Marathas and the Manchus.
I always thought the Mongolian advantage was their mastery of horse-riding and superior logictic.
What do any of your insightful opinions about what Ukrainian ultranationalists in Canada might or might not do have to do with the Klitschko brothers or Vasili Lomachenko showing up to their professional fights donning Ukrainian national insignia?…
Obviously, but this doesn’t preclude a certain fitness advantage as well. In this case, the larger part of the advantage would be their horsemanship and archery allowing them to pick and choose their battles on their terms.
“I was venturing the idea that physical performance may not however have been entirely irrelevant.”
I think I have already mentioned it on this blog. I could imagine that differences in physical strength are not entirely irrelevant for economic success. Especially it might in part explain the fact that controlled for IQ Japan underperforms economical.
Recently I have seen a documentary about a new school for sailors in New Guinea. The german instructor said one Melanesian can work as hard as three Filipinos, who seem to dominate the market for sailors internationally today.
I have no idea what percentage of GDP in developed countries is dependents on physical strength today, but I would guess it is certainly higher that 5%. So a big enough difference strength between populations might actually matter.
Very interesting data. My personal impression has always been that there are overall no big differences between any “caucasian” sub-populations. Also Subsaharan Africans seem to be pretty similar to Caucasians to me. East Asians seem to be the big expection being shorter and especially much more gracile than everybody else. The data above indicates that this is not a very accurate description, with China having pretty average scores in the Leong and Darryl et al. paper. Then again their data is height-adjusted, so absolute grip strength might still be very low. Still, being exceptional gracile would mean having exceptional low grip strength also adjusted for height.
You interject extraneous material to troll all the time. Turnabout is fair play, right?
Well, if the “family” profession is soldiering, that would imply one was better able to cope with the physical demands of soldiering, be stronger than average and have higher grip strength than average.
I don’t know who’s trolling whom here? The topic of this thread is “The (Physical) Strength of Nations’. I’ve included examples of three bona-fide Ukrainian bad asses in the world of professional boxing. What have you brought to the table so far?
Here is a real military application of grip strength, on the Indian subcontinent, no less: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jarasandha#Fight_with_Karna
Sorry, that was the best I could do.
In a remarkable convergence with another UR story, I was just reading up on Einstein in Colombo, and he remarks on the relative toughness of the natives relative to their slight build: We rode on small one-man carriages drawn at trot by men of Herculean strength, yet of delicate build. about rickshaw pullers and the Colombo harbour was lively and bustling with workers of Herculean strength lifting cargo (a paraphrase). But the thing that amused me the most was: when he was in Japan, when he wrote a note of advice to a courier instead of a tip.
Anyway, despite this, Sinhalese make pretty lousy soldiers, at least under their own commanders, and the reason for this is most probably temperament, an extremely important factor.
edit: oops, article link: http://www.island.lk/index.php?page_cat=article-details&page=article-details&code_title=174223
Who said anything about the greater intelligence as such of the Romans?
Lactase persistence as an indicator of strength?
The distribution of the lactase persistence phenotype, or the ability to digest lactose into adulthood, is not homogeneous in the world. Lactase persistence-frequencies are highly variable. In Europe, the distribution of the lactase persistence phenotype is clinal, with frequencies ranging from 15–54% in the south-east to 89–96% in the north-west.[3] For example, only 17% of Greeks and 14% of Sardinians are predicted to possess this phenotype, while around 80% of Finns and Hungarians and 100% of Irish people are predicted to be lactase persistent.[4]
High frequencies of lactase persistence are also found in some places in Sub-Saharan Africa and in the Middle East. But the most common situation is intermediate to low lactase persistence: intermediate (11 to 32%) in Central Asia,[5] low (<=5%) in Native Americans, East Asians, most Chinese populations[2] and some African populations.[3][6][5]
In Africa, the distribution of lactase persistence is "patchy":[7][8][3] high variations of frequency are observed in neighbouring populations, for example between Beja and Nilotes from Sudan.[9] This make the study of lactase persistence distribution more difficult.[6] High percentages of lactase persistence phenotype are found in traditionally pastoralist populations like Fulani and Bedouins.[3][10] It is absent in the Bantu of South Africa.[2]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactase_persistence
The most comprehensive study on average human height would indicate the shortest heights can be found in South Asia and Southeast Asia, followed by sub-Saharan Africa and MENA. China is somewhere in the middle, comparable to Latin America. This means that, if anything, Leong understates South Asian underperformance in grip strength since they are on average the shortest ethnicity.
https://elifesciences.org/articles/13410
Hopefully Karlin won’t be annoyed we go so far offtopic – I’ll insert the “more” tag anyway.
What do you think about Shevchenko? – supernatural genius in AC Milan but failure in Chelsea.
I’m personally feeling like this when remembering his goal highlights for AC Milan:
E.g.:
Nice neighborhood.
I don’t think Karlin much minds people straying of topic…and since we’re discussing the ‘strength of nations’ a conversation about certain sports figures, shouldn’t be that far off topic. I used to follow professional soccer (football) in the states as a college student, when there was such a league in the US. The teams included mostly good local players with an infusion of older, great players from Europe and South America augmenting the lineups with their still occassional brilliant plays. I remember seeing an older Ace Ntsoelegoe and even Pele, grace the field with their presence. But that was a long time ago, and since those leagues have washed out, so has my interest in soccer.
As for Shevchenko, well I think that his numbers speak for themselves. Everyone gets older and has to move on. I read up a little about him before commenting back and see that he was once a supporter of Yanukovych, so I question his veracity. On the other hand, I see that he wants his children to all be fluent in the Ukrainian language. A mixed-bag, like most people. 🙂
The Romans kept their discipline in battle when things got tough. That’s what made them superior (at least that’s what I conclude from Caesar, Tacitus and Suetonius).
It’s a bit like African football teams – they can be physically imposing (although I notice that the Nigerians seem to be smaller than in the 90s). And when the game is going well they can play good football. But when they fall behind, they lose their shape. They chase the game and make bad mistakes.
A good European, or South American, side will grind them down.
“Does ‘grip strength’ (which measures just a function of the hand) have a strong relation to actual individual strength in other areas (in terms of weight lifting or other strength talent)?”
Of course. The deadlift.
What does boxing have to do with physical strength, as in the big four lifts?
The Old Ones performed many feats of strength, mostly as an outgrowth of their daily lives of physical labor. Check out these two dainty flowers from the 19th Century:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Cyr#Reputation_as_a_strongman
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angus_MacAskill#Adult_career
An unusually large, strong man could wield heavier weapons and wear heavier armor than a smaller man. If he trained in combat from childhood, he would maximize his coordination and agility, as well as his strength potential. In an era of armored hand-to-hand combat, an athletic giant (think Shaq, rather than Andre the Giant) would be an incredible force multiplier.
Didn’t the Brits themselves come up with the “martial races” theory, favoring the Sikhs and Punjabis over the darker Southern crew?
Gosh! Thanks for the good words! You’re a pal!
Yes. Easily.
In the Olympics, almost every medal in the shotput, discus, hammer throw, and Olympic weightlifting is won by Europeans, with the championship results skewing heavily in favor of the Eastern Euros.
Between this, the Worlds Strongest Man competition, and the Crossfit championships, what other objective proof would you require?
According to 23&me, genetic testing confirms that Africans are by far the strongest race and South Asians by far the weakest. With Europeans and East Asians in the middle:
https://i1.wp.com/www.thehealthymelissa.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/actnsss.jpg
Though just an interested layman (as in, I read this stuff, that’s all), the above is the overwhelming consensus of the professional experts (the actual soldiers and warriors) throughout human history.
And not just in Ancient warfare, in conflict situations from the prehistoric (think tribal warfare in ancient Eurasia, fought with stone-tipped spears, clubs and simple bows) to the present day. Okay, maybe not really the supplies part for the prehistoric, but group coordination, keeping your wits, and directed, instead of wild, aggression always apply.
Do stronger, faster, tougher (able to take more pain, function on less supply etc) soldiers, all things equal, ever hurt a military force? No, of course not, and no one has ever said that, far as I know.
It’s just that, provided you are not pitting “actual hobbits versus Uruk Hai” (okay, geeky reference, my apologies), sheer physical factors (brute strength, height, speed, endurance) have historically taken a far backseat to morale, organization, leadership, tactics and other “less quantifiable factors” in group fighting.
I saw a documentary once, in which a Marine sergeant instructor was being interviewed. He said, in his estimation, that at least 95% of fully grown men, on the entire planet (this guy had in the past trained third-world conscripts), were able to be molded to be deployable infantrymen.
“You give the Corps anyone, any skinny third-world kid, who’s not clinically retarded. I literally don’t care about his background. We take him and put him through the system. I can practically guarantee you a usable Marine private after we’re done with him. That kid WILL make the cut – and it’s my job to make it so”. This is from memory – words to that effect.
That was an eye-opening interview.
From what I understand, the American experience in the Forever War has indicated that regular infantry, as well as SpecOps, needed to develop a lot more strength and power relative to their endurance component. Urban combat required a lot of explosive movement, rather than the long marches of yore.
Although the training pipeline for such units as the SEALs still requires vast amounts of running, swimming, and cals, once the operators are in the Teams, they switch to personalized programs that are heavy on weightlifting, kettlebells, and grappling. Companies such as Mountain Tactical Institute and Tactical Barbell have arisen to meet this need.
Your opinions are sound and appear to be the result of much thinking (and you appear to understand the game better than I do). However, I do think that it’s quite possible that the Klitschkos only boxed to the levels required for them to win. As you’ve stated the period included a lot of mediocre figthers. If the level was higher, from what I’ve seen, their level of skill could have also risen proportionately.
Similarly, with Magnusson vs Fischer. Fischer was a great student of the game of chess and was always evolving and bringing the whole game up a notch too. I think that if he were still around, his own game would have evolved to even higher levels and he’d be more than a match for Magnusson.
And they aren’t the only boxers from the former Eastern Bloc to regularly commit white-on-black atrocities against overconfident Children of the Sun. Povetkin, Chagaev, Maskaev in the heavyweights, GGG in the middles, and the unbelievably-skilled Lomacenko in the lights…the list goes on and on.
My favorite is this guy — and at 7 ft. and 330, his example has a direct bearing on the topic of this article:
https://goo.gl/images/Lw6gdP
This guy’s skills are jaw-dropping. I had always thought the two Sugar Rays were the last word in boxing skill until I saw Lomo. He is not only a defensive will-o-the-wisp, but a powerful and precise puncher with “bad intentions”. Long may he reign!
Just typical example of 95% of Indians. They all use the same schtick when provoked, I’ve heard an earful even in formal meetings from such people. Though it was flattering to referred to as fully white I suppose.
This guy was a legend. He made his own infrastructure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Gama
Hack — my recollection of that fight matches yours, FWIW.
Pullups. Wrestling.
In this case, it wasn’t the tools, but the wielder’s will, that mattered. Morale is always crucial.
I admire his confidence, but I think the ol’ Sarge has his work cut out for him:
Wow, I think I may have read many similar sources to those of Duke of Qin.
It must be pointed out, though, that sedentary states, if unified and therefore ready to fight, were almost never taken down by non-urban cultures. Most of their defeats throughout history involve them getting attacked during a period of infighting, civil war, internal turmoil and cultural weakness.
Go ahead, research the historical pattern. You’ll probably agree with me that it’s the case.
Also, sedentary states have ginormous populations and economic outputs compared to the semi-civilized and the outright barbarian.
I even agree with the figures given – for the Roman, Persian and Chinese Empires (the truly big-time classical militarists) about 1% of the population would serve in the military during lulls, but growing to 3%+ during times of increased tension.
These percentages are accurate. We are talking here of professionally-trained, mostly very heavily-armored, and very-well equipped and provisioned armies of regular, very long-service troops – so the classical war machines, for their day, were jaw-droppingly awesome.
Put this in perspective: I personally love studying medieval warfare, and medieval armies world-wide. But the armies, of say medieval Europe, would have been mere small scouting forces when taken in a classical context! That’s how much prowess and power the ancients had.
Remember that a full 1% of say Rome’s or Persia’s population and economic output, let’s not even mention China’s vastness, would already be enough to crush, in a straight fight, almost any non-sedentary foe, and a good many medium settled states as well.
1 out of 100 of something truly enormous is still . . . very damn frightening indeed.
It would make sense, since the Brits are notorious for not wanting to get their own hands bloody and see their own children die.
They had to know who to recruit from.
lol. Did you really just say crossfit?
Maybe hipsterism hasn’t reached Africa yet.
Neither of those sports are things Africans probably even know about about much less practice.
Thank you!
This makes the most sense and is obvious, but HBDers and especially Anatoly have the habit of cherry picking data to show that white people Stronk!
I would agree with you, but it would depend on who actually started the violence.
Being either the aggressor or the defender changes the motivation, I think.
In that fight, who struck first?
Well, “white people” plus Mongoloids dominate strength competitions, whereas Africans tend to dominate speed competitions.
American blacks are also underrepresented in our Special Forces, which may be more of a cultural thing.
A US Korean War vet noted to me how relatively small ROK (South Koreans) personnel could do sand bag trench prep work all day at ease, much unlike the comparatively very well muscled brick shithouse US GIs.
Training to lift the absolute max contradicts the best aerobic result. It’s an art to blend speed, strength, stamina and flexibility.
Caesar regularly described heroic feats by his centurions like Scevae, Vorenus, Pulo, Crastinus, Baculus and so forth. Those were people of higher standing probably brought up on better nutrition and they handled Gauls and Germans handsomely.
FYI, I heard one of the Kltitschkos (the one who is mayor) say in a US interview after the Soviet breakup, that he appreciated the Soviet period. Their dad was a Soviet military officer.
That very same Klitschko recently said that Russo-Ukrainian relations should eventually their way out for the better.
No small wonder why he got some flack during the Euromaidan uprising.
Maybe you should first make sure Hindu women aren’t being entranced by nasheeds from love jihad minded Saracens before you advice other people.
The conventional answer is that the Mongolian grand strategic advantage was that they were a nomadic people, and so could devote a very large portion of the resources and manpower to war. Their diplomacy, spy-craft and assassination means were not inferior to their enemies’.
Their strategic advantage was that their armies were led by inspired commanders like Chinggiz Khan, Subotai and others, and they were the most mobile and maneuver-oriented force the world had yet seen. They could concentrate power over vast distances and in totally unexpected places. Also, they could coordinate geographically disparate campaigns in order to accomplish an over-all result – the result set by their leaders at the level (see above), including Chinggiz Khan himself.
Their operational advantages were their superbly developed logistics and message-delivery systems, allowing the above-mentioned deployed armies great coordination on campaigns, They could essentially set-up their enemies for total defeats in battles. No one could live off the land like they could – meaning very few supply problems.
Finally, their tactical advantage was having excellent leaders at the level of battles and skirmishes, long practice fighting in formal units, drill, flexibility in responding to changing battle conditions, extreme morale (during their epoch of invinciblity), their individual mastery of their fighting skills – archery, horse-riding, lance, sword, axe/mace and lasso use , and their weapons, armor and general equipment, which was of uniformly high quality for the era concerned. (They had unlimited access to the huge workshops and smithies of China, after they conquered that country).
I think I probably missed a few key advantages of the Mongols, but the above is an attempt at a start.
Set beside all these game-changing factors, Mongolian ferocity, toughness, strength and endurance played some part in their success (they cannot have hurt one bit), but probably pale in significance.
Here you can hear the Klitschko brothers lead the chearing Maidan crowds on, for yourself:
https://youtu.be/VxfC519HWwE
Vitalie’s wife sings an old patriotic Ukrainian song. Sorry, the Klitschkos seem to have forgotten their copy of Skoropadsly’s Edict proclaiming the unification of Ukraine with Russia, and therefore didn’t make any direct quotations from that ‘important’ document. 🙁
Some Russian friends from university got into a brawl at a bar with some blacks. They said they were shocked at how the more muscular-looking black guys seemed a lot weaker than themselves.
Who said ancient Romans were the same as modern Italians?
A lot of them are described as blue eyed, light haired.
Reconstruction of Lucius Sulla
http://www.luciuscorneliussylla.fr/image/fondsylla.png
More likely, modern Italians are more similar to the ancient, pre-Indo European Etruscans, rather than the lighter, probably more northerly shifted Romans of the martial and ruling classes.
Recalling the observation you made of Shevchenko.
Far as I know, there have always been a percentage of natural blonde, light-eyed people in the Mediterranean basin.
They existed in Greece, the Balkans, the Italian peninsula, and Spain.
As for the Romans, they weren’t north Italian, nor south. They were middle Italians, living in the Latium plain.
They probably were genetically similar to the Italians still in that region today, but with medium-dark brown hair and eyes. light skin and “classical” features (the strong, straight “Roman” nose, and so forth).
North Italians are more German-admixtured, due to the influx during the Germanic Migrations. More blue-eyed blondes, for one thing. Pre-German North Italians probably looked like Romans.
South Italians, for their part, have Moorish blood.
another example
http://www.respublic.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/ММА.jpg
“The Russian (actually-Dagestan) team won all the gold of the world MMA championship in Macau. Russian (Dagestan) athletes did not leave chances to any of rivals, having taken away all gold of tournament and having repeated success of the European championship. The winners were:
to 61.2 kg – champion of Russia and the world Omar Nurmagomedov
to 65,8 kg – the champion of Russia and the world Kurban Tagirov
up to 70.3 kg-champion of Russia and the world Murad Ramazanov
up to 77.1 kg-champion of Russia and the world Alibeg Rasulov
up to 84 kg – two-time world champion, winner of the Russian super Cup Gamzat Hiramagomedov
up to 93 kg – two-time world champion, champion of Russia, Cup of Russia Magomed Alkalaev
over 93 kg – the champion of Russia and the world Amirkhan Sagadiev”
When several tribes from the North Caucasus win all the gold medals of the world championship – it’s impressive
My God! Incomparable bugman butthurt!
As I remember, modern Italians Bellini, Verdi and Vivaldi were described as blue eyed, light haired.
both boxing and strength (in terms of big four lifts) are related to rather big and dense bones
I’ve looked it up and apparently what happened is that the little guy started the fight with the big guy. The big guy was a weight lifting champion but by all accounts a bit of a gentle giant so the little guy, who is a professional MMA fighter, kept goading him until the big guy finally agreed to fight.
The big guy died from his injuries and the little guy is still at large. The little guys older brother is currently serving a 4 year prison sentence for doing basically the same thing: he goaded an unaware bigger guy into a street fight and then killed him.
Tell me if I’m wrong, but don’t the Pakistanis have ancestry similar to the Northwestern Indians? If Northwestern Indians are really strong (in comparison to the rest of the country), why do Pakistanis have weak grip strength?
Mat Fraser said “Crossfit”.
https://www.menshealth.com/fitness/a19598008/mat-fraser-fittest-man-crossfit-open-workout-18-5/
My question stands. If they don’t wrestle, or lift, or throw heavy objects, what then would your test of strength entail?
I am guessing a bunch of young Dagestanis would win a street brawl against the same number of Russian Hooligans.
Btw, I thought it was interesting how the Russian hooligans in the video above said how impressed and inspired they were by the notorious British football hooligans.
For good or bad the brits, more specifically the English, in the UK and the US, have been the most influential people on the planet, for at least a couple centuries. Jews and Africans have also played prominent roles in the Anglosphere’s domination. I don’t see this state of affairs ending anytime soon.
A lot of Italians look like this guy today, even in Southern Italy. Not all Italians look like Al Pacino.
Icelanders have been into picking up weights for a long time. There’s a bay with weight stones that you lift to prove strength.
https://www.icelandtravel.is/attractions/djupalonssandur/
Another site translates Amlóði as “useless” and says Hálfdrættingur was the minimum strength for a boat job, which seems more likely.
PS – the Brits soon recognised who were the fighters and who weren’t in India – I’m sure the ‘martial race’ idea has a basis in reality. The early Brit officers and officials, contrary to today’s received wisdom, learned the languages and were interested in the culture – even if that interest was partly for self-interested reasons.
Well, the non-martial races would make up most of the population across the sub-continent including the northwest. I wonder whether the historical martial races are genuine outliers, have not seen any studies on that.
Well, that changes things A LOT.
So essentially, the small guy played the gentle big guy, deceived him via his small size, and set him up to murder him.
Whoever the MMA fighter is, they should make an example out of him – come down on him like a ton of bricks.
I am surprised law enforcement hasn’t found him and thrown him into a cage yet.
Well, the ketogenic diet of nomads enabled them to stay alive in the winter without food. (By the way their horses were also way better adapted to the winter steppe, without much food, either.) They didn’t need to organize supplies that much, because their supplies were carried in their bodies. If military historians are dismissing this, then they are just dismissing a very important explanation for nomads’ success. For example it’s impossible to understand Timur’s campaigns against the Golden Horde without understanding the soldiers’ and the horses’ individual ability to withstand starvation in the winter.
I’m also not sure which experts you’re talking about. For example it’s a well-known fact (mentioned by Martin van Creveld, to cite at least one expert dissenting from that alleged consensus), that modern militaries in the first half of the 20th century always preferred farm boys for soldiers. When farm boys were in short supply, they were going for blue collar workers, preferably from smaller towns or cities (these provided the backbone of the Germany armed forces in both world wars, though they were in somewhat shorter supply by 1939 than they had been in 1914), working class from big cities were the next (i.e. relatively low) on the list preferred soldiers, and only once the supply of these dried up (the working class was often protected from conscription during wartime because they were doing essential work in war production), did they resort to people with white collar backgrounds like clerks etc. These were usually thought to be the worst soldiers, and present-day first world populations are usually similar to these.
Martin van Creveld mentions that nomads were always considered better soldiers on the individual level than even farm boys, and that hunter-gatherers were similarly considered more formidable warriors than any civilized soldier. The one disadvantage of these two groups was that they were often lacking in discipline, which was especially true of hunter-gatherers. However, if anyone could instill discipline into nomads, then he had a truly formidable army indeed, the two most famous examples being Genghis Khan and Timur. Hunter-gatherers were also lacking in numbers, which after industrialization started to become a problem for nomads as well. Until modern times nomads had enough numbers given their much higher ratio of warriors relative to their population.
He would say that, wouldn’t he? He’s not going to say that the material he had to work with has deteriorated considerably from what they had back in the 1960s (soldiers are apparently often unable to properly squat), or that as a result soldiers are way worse now than they had been before.
By the way there’s a huge ideological push for saying that physical qualities like strength don’t matter, because then they can say that women can be just as good soldiers as men, provided they go through the magic of the “system” and thus become disciplined. I have seen articles where various supposed experts (including active military officers and soldiers) all said how having female (Muslim, etc.) soldiers was the next best thing since sliced bread. It doesn’t mean it’s true.
Maybe, but there’s probably a reason why there are weight groups in boxing. While they never become professional powerlifters, they do a considerable amount of weight training themselves.
Also boxing is a highly unnatural way of fighting. Wrestlers will defeat boxers any workday and on the weekends and holidays, too. And with wrestling, strength matters probably more than with boxing. (Of course, being strong is never enough, but all else being equal, strength means a lot.)
In ancient times stamina, a strong immune system, the ability to withstand cold, the ability to go hungry for days on end, etc. might all have been important, but a lot of these (like the part about cold or hunger) could’ve been overcome by better organization. A more developed civilization could provide its soldiers with better weapons or armor and shield, which was also very important in a fight.
So on balance, the individual size and strength and other physical qualities of soldiers were often insignificant, but I’d be surprised if it never played any role at all. We know for sure that many campaigns of Genghis or Timur needed the ketogenic diets of their soldiers, so at least there are some examples.
“No way white people are stronger than blacks.”
Do you have any arguments to back this assertion?
Whites are stronger than blacks, especially in weightlifting and powerlifting competitions. It’s about somatotype and body levers. An endo soma (whites and Asians are more likely to be endos) is more conducive to strength competitions whereas meso/ecto somas (blacks) are more conducive to running competitions (it should also be noted that fiber typing seems to be correlated with somatotype, but this is just a random observation of mine).
https://notpoliticallycorrect.me/2018/06/03/black-white-differences-in-anatomy-and-physiology-black-athletic-superiority/
The “blacks are stronger than whites” canard is false. It has no basis in reality. Just by observing somatotypes this assertion that blacks are stronger than whites is false.
https://notpoliticallycorrect.me/2017/12/23/race-and-strength-on-the-big-four-lifts/
https://notpoliticallycorrect.me/2017/03/25/racial-differences-in-somatype/
A good example is Mark Henry. Sure he’s black, sure he’s one of the strongest men to ever walk the earth. But look at his somatotype. He’s a classic endo.
The fact that you’re extrapolating that from an association study done on Polish powerlifters is comical.
Furthermore, “power athlete” does not mean “powerlifter” or “weightlifter”; they’re nowhere to be found.
Here’s the paper you’re referencing:
http://sci-hub.tw/10.1519/jsc.0b013e31828155b5
And here is a meta-analysis stating:
Results of this meta-analysis show that US African American carriers of the ACE AG genotype (rs4363) were more than two times more likely to become a power athlete compared to carriers of the ACE preferential genotype for power athlete status (AA) in this population.
http://www.systematicreviews.nl/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/genes_and_muscle_growth.pdf
Not to mention how foolish it is to look for genomic associations as “gotchas” to actual functional strength competitions.
How does it make “the most sense” and how is it “obvious”?
How do the reconstructors know what the soft tissue looked like since soft tissue doesn’t fossilize? Don’t fall for facial “reconstructions”, there are a few fallacies associated with facial “reconstructions”:
http://sci-hub.tw/10.1016/s1355-0306(03)71776-6
I don’t think they’ve got Sulla’s skull, the reconstruction must be based on a bust (though it’s of course questionable how secure any attribution can be).
The info about skin tone, hair and eye color presumably comes from Plutarch’s life.
So the dead big guys are Russians and the little guys who killed them as Caucasians and the latter either have not been punished or been given light sentences. This in the Russian country.
Sulla had sculptures of his head, so it might be based on those. Even the color might simply be based on the original color of the sculpture.
Or from the original painting of those sculptures.
https://twitter.com/crimkadid/status/1008038702415859712
I am amused to see that Poles and Lithuanians constitute Iceland’s biggest sources of immigrants by a considerable margin.
All Europeans are characterised by light pale pigment variable hair and eye colour and European facial features and the ” ancient Romans ” are not particularly that ancient when you consider Europeans today still retain much of the same characteristics as our Cro Magnon ancestors from forty thousand years ago.
Some women will be better candidates than most men as soldiers, – because modern warfare, the key distinguishing factor is psychological, and relevant psychological attributes can be found distributed in both population groups (although in different proportions).
Many physically strong, externally people will break and become useless when confronted with a battlefield, although statistically it may be a lower number than for women.
Other personalities can be tortured to death, and not lose their minds duing the process.
The difficult part will be to find the mentally suitable soldiers. And this why in the future they will be using brain scans and assigning different roles based on the brain scans (that indicate level of fear, reaction to stress, cold heartedness, etc – many traits may be a little similar to psychopaths) .
I’ll copy some random links I had posted earlier on the Sailer forum (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyudmila_Pavlichenko
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariya_Bayda
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lydia_Litvyak
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larisa_Litvinova
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natalya_Meklin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manshuk_Mametova
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natalya_Kovshova
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kseniya_Konstantinova
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roza_Shanina
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandra_Samusenko
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanya_Baramzina
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zinaida_Portnova
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariya_Tsukanova
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandra_Boiko
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aliya_Moldagulova
The typical carb heavy and low protein Indian diet doesn’t help, I think.
It is one of the largest news stories of the last year, including in Western media.
The Muslim is going to trial for murder – because he killed on video Andrey Drachev who is the weight lifting champion of Russia and the silver medal winner of the World Championships.
From the video, at least, the fight seems to be fair – but there may be some unfair behaviour occurring before the fight.
I actually have never heard ANY serious soldier anywhere (emphasis on serious – no careerist, PC, SJW “right-think” mindset) say that females are proper raw material for soldiers. The man in the interview said males, after all.
A skinny, third-world-raised fully grown man is still an adult man, after all.
And the statistical over-lap, in terms of strength, between large samples of males and females, regardless of ethnicity or nutrition, is I believe very small – which is why very strong females are noteworthy, while very strong males are much less so. (We just take them for granted).
Because the external appearance will only have a positive correlation on a graph with fighting, and this correlation is likely becoming weaker all the time in America, where many weak men are doing weight-lifting in order to look strong aesthetically.
If women had “psychological strength” of any significance, they would have at least more than the most minimal of representation in top video gamers – where considerations of physical strength are completely absent and the primary considerations are decision-making under stress.
Most presentations of “female soldiers” are gross exaggerations comparing vastly unequal quality of training; the presence and effect of hormones should not be understated, being far more akin to a brutal strike to the brain for one set of behaviors or another.
The sample of physically strong women (in modern war only physical toughness and stamina is important, rather than weight-lifting strength), also having the mental attributes (no fear of death, etc), is getting smaller statistically.
In future wars, first you will do a brain scan to find the population who have the mental attributes (no fear, cold under pressure) for a role, and then you will assign them to training for different roles.
If you could see and understand their brain scans, someone like Portnova will not be suitable to employ in the kitchen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zinaida_Portnova
This argument makes no sense. Top video gamers are a small proportion of men who usually need autistic spectrum disorders to become interested in the games (beyond how most of us play them, which is for a couple of hours of distraction). The role has no relation to fear, death, risk-taking, as it has no risks involved, and it has no relation to any real world situations. The people attracted to it may seem the opposite of those with relevant personalities for combat (if you want pre-filtering of people who would be suitable for combat, you might look at populations who do risk-taking hobbies and are attracted to risking their lives – people without normal levels of fear).
The writer of whom I was thinking was John Keegan, though yeah I definitely respect Martin Van Creveld. (Let’s not call either of these guys experts, and reserve that term for victorious commanders and good junior leaders.)
As per Keegan, he broadly agrees with your statement above, but reversed the preference, in regards to recruiting pools.
While farmers’ sons made good soldiers, young men drafted from towns and cities, who worked in occupations like steel smelting, mining, construction, manufacturing and transport were the first preference.
The pre-industrial equivalents, say in Medieval Europe, were black-smithing, mining, carpentry, logging (requiring tools, so were town-centric not “rural”), tanning, and large-scale droving.
And the reason? While young men on the farms and the rural ares were obviously fit, the young men who worked physical occupations in cities and towns were also quite fit, educated and (maybe most importantly) already used to discipline, schedules, hierarchy and regimentation.
Their urban lifestyles were already organized for efficiency, and streamlined for carrying out orders, from their bosses on the workshop floors, smithies and construction sites.
So, while the outdoor life made for better individual warriors (hunting, trapping, survival skills), town and small city life made for better disciplined soldiers , and more crucially organized units.
When we talk about city dwellers, don’t think about fast-food munching service workers or white-collar desk jockeys, think rather physical manufacturing, construction, utilities maintenance, machinery operation, and plumbing/carpentry – requiring physical exertion AND at least trade-school level education.
Since I only read, I just go by what seems reasonable. John Keegan seemed to make a good point in his writings about the classic preference for townsfolk as soldier material.
Perhaps you could drop her in the Battle of Stalingrad – and there would be hardly any activity in the amygdala.
People without normal levels of fear might be prone to getting themselves killed, that’s not ideal for combat either.
I don’t have military experience myself, but I doubt psychos of any kind make good soldiers.
You’re not a fan of how the football fans are practising?
I predict that it varies with the battle-field and historical era.
In a Roman battlefield, or in a Macedonian Phalanx, someone without fear of death, who runs ahead suicidally, could perhaps damage the discipline and shape of the formation.
In WW1 the abnormal people who have no fear (and some even without disciple like example below) are usually remarked in a positive way.
For example, I read in the article of English peace activist, Siegfried Sassoon, it writes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siegfried_Sassoon#The_Western_Front:_Military_Cross
In reply to your first paragraph, I think ( and the paper that Anatoly linked does seem to back me up ) that the grip strength/body strength relationship becomes much more scattered among those who are stronger than average. Overhand and alternating grips are the norm on heavy deadlifts as a way to bypass the limitations of forearm strength
he provoked a guy that he knew had no chance against him. If you watch the entire fight, it was clear he had already established his superiority but the big Russian was too proud to back out. When he knocked him down with the head kick the Russian was done and the next kick had the Russian out at which point he gave 3 or 4 shots to an unconscious man whose head was on the pavement. It was cold blooded murder.
Total fearlessness is as useful as total painlessness, actually; there is a reason why it has evolved. Decision-making under stress, on the other hand, is a very relevant attribute, especially in a more g-loaded combat environment.
My experience with women with less fear is NOT what you would want in a comrade. It’s basically a form of masochism and will take you down with her.
The ideal “female” soldier is a transsexual.
This is how the police are viewing the incident. He stupidly killed an internationally famous athlete (the weight lifting champion of Russia and the silver medalist in the world).
However, from the video, it seems to me simply a fair fight, as a dual, in which both sides are active and voluntary participants.
Lol these Indians, a most strange people
He knew who he was. They used to train together when they were kids. The Russian was initially a wrestler but left wrestling for weight lifting.
I don’t know why you are defending a brutal, senseless murder. Maybe you have little man’s disease yourself?
How can it be fair when you hit a guy already lying on the ground several times…on the head? Even a layman knows that’s potentially lethal force.
Greasy’s interpretation seems obviously correct to me.
I don’t like big guys either, but I don’t think they deserve to be murdered
I can’t imagine in a first world country, the average physical strength notwithstanding age structure has a meaningful effect on economic performance.
Japan is a respectable #23 in GDP per capita on a nominal basis. But of course it’s supposed to do better because it is smarter.
However, it really lags the US which stands at $60,000 per capita. On a PPP basis, it does worse at #28. It could partially be explained by Japan’s median age. It is the world’s oldest country. Germany is younger by only a few months but at least has a lot of good quality immigration from the rest of the EU to replenish its workforce.
Can Karlin explore Japan’s laggardness? I know he has observations on Asian countries generally as part of a global review of wealth and IQ. Japan is one generation ahead of South Korea and Taiwan so it removes the “still too early to tell” explanation (e.g. South Koreans over the age of 50 are unskilled and unschooled so the economy is hobbled by a lack of good senior managers and experienced workers).
Some thoughts building on comments and Karlin’s posts.
Curiosity – Japan seems like a country with curiosity but as Karlin has mentioned its per capita Nature Index contribution is about 1/2 of Germany.
Social capital – Japan seems like a country with high social capital because of its cohesive social fabric but I don’t know much about the sociological profile of Japan. Maybe they don’t have civic associations, volunteer, talk with and help out their neighbors, etc.
Hikikomori – “adults who withdraw from social life, often seeking extreme degrees of isolation and confinement”. There are a lot of them in Japan. Among the most recent adult generation in affluent, urban East Asia a large percentage of men seem to have a mild form of Asperger’s or something on the end of the spectrum. I associate mild Asperger’s with a broader syndrome that includes low career ambition, just getting by in work and life, and not wanting to accomplish something big. I wonder if there is a way to calculate a national Aspie Quotient and the correlation with wealth among first world nations.
Read real stories of the war. There have been Russian women who had more success confronting death than any of the Queen of England’s Gurkas.
This is historical reality, not conjecture about what one wants of hypothetical comrades in imaginary situations of hypothetical wars.
The future issue that is very open and unknown, is about the proportion of personalities like this in different population groups, and weighting of different characteristics (or composition of characteristics which would be suitable for different roles – something which will vary a lot in different historical and technological eras).
I will add some more stories below the “more” tag as well as the ones before. There are also documentaries on these, but I cannot find them at the moment in English (it seems American women were only baking cakes in this era).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyudmila_Pavlichenko
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariya_Bayda
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lydia_Litvyak
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zinaida_Mareseva
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larisa_Litvinova
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vera_Kashcheyeva
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natalya_Meklin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manshuk_Mametova
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natalya_Kovshova
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kseniya_Konstantinova
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roza_Shanina
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Morozova
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandra_Samusenko
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanya_Baramzina
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zinaida_Portnova
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariya_Tsukanova
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandra_Boiko
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aliya_Moldagulova
I agree punches on the ground are unfair and from the legal perspective constitute some kind of involuntary homicide. But it is also typical in these fights (even on the sports level) and it is what all MMA fighters are trained to do.
My view from the video is the overall circumstances of the fight were a fair “dual”, in which both sides are active participants. The case is being prosecuted as a murder.
I don’t watch such sports (seems a bit primitive to me tbh), but that seems illogical…I’d expect all the more self-control and restraint from a professional MMA fighter because he must know how dangerous violence against an incapacitated opponent is. And the fight was so one-sided that there was no plausible reason for the Caucasian to get enraged either. I’d suspect it was premeditated, and I’d hope the killer gets locked away for a few decades at least.
It is clearly a fair brawl, with two voluntary and active participants who could have left at any time they wanted. The security guards of the central department store even stopped them during the fight, asked them if they had any complaints – they both said no. And then the guards left, and they continued the fight.
Are duels to the death common in Russia? I hadn’t heard so, but what do I know?
It is how MMA fighters are trained. (And yes MMA is a stupidly designed sport for sure, and someone who does it on concrete can expect what has happened – going to prison).
As for the fight – it was not all one-sided, as they spend a lot of time wrestling on the floor. And they were allegedly wrestling each other even before the security camera footage has filmed them, which is why people complained, and security guards were called from the department store originally to talk to them (when they both tell the security guards that they are both happy and not fighting).
They were stopped and talked with twice for fighting – by the department store security guards (before the video), and then by the cops (at the beginning of the video). Both times, both of them said they were fine and happy.
Rather than propagandized accounts, one of my closest friends actually happens to be a military officer/academic who has a role in integrating units, so I’m actually well familiar with the arguments for female soldiers and even then, its pretty much understood that women perform worse under combat.
http://www.thelizlibrary.org/undelete/1110-GregorW.pdf
Further studies have shown that at heavy weapons with high recoil, there are aggregate statistics when trained women have only as much accuracy as an untrained male. Strength does still matter.
The main counter from my friend(who does not think his role is useless, of course) is that there are a huge array of tasks in the military, even on the front-lines, where skills such as spotting, reporting and awareness are needed as much if not more than direct action/force, and even if women were relatively poorer than men at it, it still is better to have someone rather than no one doing it. That, I can concede to some extent, but its not considering the negative externality of adding women to units.
Actually in MMA the fighters usually keep punching after the other guy in unconscious and only stop when the ref has broken them up. It is normal to see an unconscious fighter take another 3 to 5 shots before the referee finally pulls the other guy off. It drives me crazy.
Even if it was a fair fight, that’s not acceptable, the perpetrator must get a few years in prison at least, to send a message.
It actually improves my view of Russia that the guy gets indicted for murder. In Germany there are frequently cases where the young and vibrantly diverse assault and kill people for trivial reasons and get off with ridiculously lax sentences. Just recently there was a case of a 19-year old “Ahmet” who beat and killed a German family father without any provocation at all (it was one of those “have you got cigarettes” aggro tours the Muslim underclass trash likes). The killer got a probationary sentence of two years, so he could literally kill someone without ever being sent to prison for it.
Sounds like a really primitive and barbaric sport, that should be prohibited.
The Rashidun gave certain groups of people like this (Turkic tribes like Jarajma, groups of Daylamis and certain Arabs) exemption from the jizyah in lieu of help defending the borders. Assyrian cobblers, bakers and others that would be considered doughboys and a liability on the battlefield we’re not considered.
Creveld is absolutely awesome on these subjects.
Peace.
It’s not comparable to the cases you mention in Germany.
Watch the whole video.
These two guys are desperate to “duel” with each other in a “fair fight” (probably even part of some argument between MMA and weight-lifting). And they both pretend to be friends when the police talk to them, and then continue the fight afterwards.
Duels were fashionable for centuries in Germany as well.
The victim is no Pushkin, so I don’t think the country and media has to cry that he has been killed in such a duel (even though the media was treating it as the loss of a great hero and champion). And neither for the Muslim MMA guy either.
Grip strength correlates very closely with testosterone and ‘manliness’ in general.
(Our ancestors knew this, which is why they judged people based on the firmness of their handshake.)
This is history of an actual war, of a kind of seriousness America has never experienced.
I prefer looking at the real events of history, when there was a serious war, than opinions of friends in peaceful America, which did not seem relevant to the argument (nobody claims that women on average are a more suitable recruiting population than men).
If you have evidence that e.g. Kovshova did not kill German soldiers, please post them.
Agree here, but in the case of the Nubians, it was both. The Arabs called them the “eye smiters” because of how accurately they could hit a man with their arrows from a distance. The Arabs had seen nothing comparable in any of the various people they had fought.
Peace.
These rules are from America (invented as UFC – ultimate fighting championship).
The Japanese equivalent sport is K-1, which doesn’t involve any fighting on the ground, and feels more civilized.
But when he tried MMA, he was beaten by a Japanese wrestler, a completely very different sport with rolling around and kicking people’s heads on the ground.
But that correlation may not have precisely the same factor across major racial boundaries. Everyone knows the Gurkhas are pretty manly, whatever the average Nepalese grip strength is. (Incidentally I didn’t see Nepal on Karlin’s graphs but what is with Pakistani men having the grip strength of Bangladeshi women? Something weird there.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War
If one man strikes another first, regardless of relative strength or skill, the other man is not obligated in society to walk away – it’s no duel, simply self-defense on the part of the one attacked, even if he is larger and stronger, and his attacker weaker.
By striking first, and striking some more, the attacker has initiated violence and committed murder – simple as that.
A “real history” of events, for a given value of “real.” The notion that Pavlichenko’s numbers were padded or mythical is hardly even new, and it is obviously in the favor of the governments in question to manufacture such a myth, especially of lone kills. In contrast, the person who is considered the greatest sniper of history, Simo Hayha, stated that:
So no, as far as I am concerned, scientific controlled studies are far superior to ancedotal propaganda. it seems silly to even have to argue otherwise.
They’ve names like Piero Gross
Is there genetic evidence for this? Not that many Ostrogoths were involved in the Ostrogothic kingdom. Many historical migrations which seem even larger, judging from contemporary records, (e.g. Slavs in Greece or Magyars in Hungary) seem to have had little genetic impact.
Maybe they are just more like Southern Germans because they are much closer to Southern Germany, and further from North Africa.
Yes, I’ve seen this in some diminutive people. My uncle (a homeopathic doctor) from Pakistan visits often. He is elderly and fit as a fiddle. Hand grip like a vice and his daily routine includes clean and jerks of 50 pounds. Pretty good for an octogenarian.
Some people make great soldiers but need someone else to lead them. My Egyptian friends have mentioned it is a running joke among them that they make a fine fighting force as long as some Kurd, Turk, Albanian, etc is leading them.
Peace.
Excellent points. Soldiers who get helicopter dropped into an urban jungle are definitely different men than those of the past.
Peace.
The Punjabis and Pathan combined are over half of the population of Pakistan. Pakistanis have weaker grip strength than Indians and Bangladeshis.
I guess it’s possible that non-Punjabi, non-Pathan Pakistanis are extremely physically weak, but why would they be weaker than the Indian or Bangladeshi populations?
We have a historical record, with examples of many Russian women who have distinguished combat service in a war which had a level of brutality America has never experienced (and whose population might potentially not survive).
You mention one particular sniper who is recorded as killing over 300 German soldiers, that maybe they killed less? How does taking this single record, even if you want to reduce the numbers she killed, compare to the record of the average soldier?
Because you need to argue that she was – and all the other women heroes of Great Patriotic War – a failures as a soldier, given our argument is nothing about population distributions, but about absolutes.
For your argument to make any sense, you’ll have to go over every one, and claim that their war record is below the average level.
(Because if not, then their recruitment and combat record, you will have to acknowledge, was a success).
But you are arguing the theory that people’s war-records cannot be trusted, and therefore Simo Hayha has lost the status of a privileged source.
And we have claims like…
Based on computer games.
Except the war, was not America of 2018. It took decades in the Soviet Union before many of the women were awarded for heroism, as the bias was in the opposite direction than in America of 2018.
Note again – we are not talking about the America of 2018 (An area of no interest to my posts).
What does it have to do with big?
Two idiots (one famous, one not) voluntarily made a kind of “duel” between each other in the street, continuing even after interruption by security. The important guy died and the loser MMA guy (perhaps unfairly) is going to prison.
It could have been a hate crime, out of hatred against big people.
It’s an interesting case though, please inform us of the verdict when the trial’s over.
Hate crimes against big people… under such a regime?
https://cdn.img.inosmi.ru/images/23884/80/238848019.jpg
Biryani and laddoos…and too much ghulab jamun.
Peace.
Maybe they mostly tested a bunch of Sindhis and Muhajirs like me – I had the most difficult time putting on muscle mass.
Peace.
Women are:
* Physically much weaker than men (almost all women are weaker than the average man)
* Physically more fragile than men
* Emotionally more fragile than men
* Will undermine unit cohesion
* Impose costs on the military way out of proportion to the marginal (if not negative) value they add
Here is Fred Reed on this, who has military experience: https://www.unz.com/freed/women-in-the-military-fiat-equality/
The USSR was not the feminist exception you seem to think they were.
Where we they most active in the ground forces? As snipers. The one sphere in which they can be somewhat competitive with men (women can be good at aiming guns). Never as infantry.
This idea that things can be otherwise is I suspect a product of today’s culture of asskicking babes on TV, RPGs where men and women differ only cosmetically, etc.
I don’t doubt the physical differences and generally agree about women in the military, but what’s the basis for “emotionally more fragile than men”? Is this based on studies about mental health, depression etc.?
If you consider average weight of Chinese is about 20% less than Westerners, but only 5-6% shorter… China’s result is not bad.
The weight adjusted result of Chinese men would be as good as (even slightly higher than) Europeans, and Chinese women would be a lot higher than Europeans.
@Anatoly Karlin
If you read the paper, given that only “1 in 1000 women” had equal or more VO2 max(the gold standard for cardio fitness) compared to even the bottom percentile of men, arguing about the veracity of any particular myth is really as useful as disproving the existence of Zeus for all practical purposes.
And these were not unmotivated women.
The ROI to disprove your particular unicorn is quite unfavorable; I can use the time to do more useful things like shitposting elsewhere.
This list smacks of northern eurasian bias.
Icelanders are strongest because they dominate a ridiculous fringe competition that is popular only in
a tiny northwestern corner of Eurasia? Mongolians from the northeastern corner of Eurasia are right behind the Icelandic Vikings in strength just because they recently had a run of success in Sumo, a sport in which your competition are almost all japanese?
Get real.
Look instead at the most popular competitive sports which place a premium on strength such as American Football, Rugby etc and the heavier divisions of Boxing, Wrestling, MMA etc. Any objective observer can see that people of West African and Samoan ancestry dominate disproportionately.
The Samoans are the strongest outliers of all. They have the highest bone and muscle density. Despite their tiny numbers (comparable to Icelandics) they are very disproportionately represented at the top levels of many strength sports: American Football, Rugby, MMA, Sumo, Wrestling etc
It’s not an issue of generalities. Generalities are useful for time-saving or in situations of lack of knowledge.
E.g. In general women are significantly less intelligent than men, so if we are building a wunderwaffe we could bypass recruiting any women and save a lot of time.
However, if you already knew in advance that Emmy Noether is going to be smarter than everyone here, then you should recruit her to build the wunderwaffe, regardless of belonging to a bypass category with far stupider people. The category is useful as heuristic.
The physical issue I believe we have discussed above – in modern war, you would be usually selecting for stamina and toughness, in which case very few women would match the advanced levels required in top units of professional armies (but they could probably reach some minimum requirements of more ordinary units).
For tank soldiers, they would not be strong enough to change the tracks on many tank models.
In terms of recruitment, it’s more efficient now to recruit only men (especially as there are more than too many recruits for the few wars in the world).
But not so far away, when you can use a program to read relevant aspects of a people’s psychology through brain scans – and search the population to find recruits with the relevant traits of less empathy, less fear, greater obedience, etc. Women with these traits (to the extent they can be found) – you can guarantee to be more effective in many roles, than men without these traits.
As these traits themselves are quite rare, there will be pressure to recruit people with them – in fact even those (such as most women) who may far weaker in other requirements could be over-looked if they had rarer psychological traits.
I don’t think was feminism, but shortage of human resources forced them in.
And of the numbers entered into a quite a lot of roles there are example cases who have a good record.
The snipers that were successful themselves in such a harsh environment – it’s less because of aiming skills, and more because of their unusual psychological traits.
Aside from snipers, you can search around and find different kinds of roles in the war.
I’ll the add some links as examples below to Wikipedia.
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9B%D0%B5%D0%B2%D1%87%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%BA%D0%BE,_%D0%98%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0%B0_%D0%9D%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BB%D0%B0%D0%B5%D0%B2%D0%BD%D0%B0
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A1%D1%82%D0%B5%D0%BC%D0%BF%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%B2%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B0%D1%8F,_%D0%95%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B0_%D0%9A%D0%BE%D0%BD%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B0%D0%BD%D1%82%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%BD%D0%B0
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9C%D0%B0%D0%BC%D0%B5%D1%82%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B0,_%D0%9C%D0%B0%D0%BD%D1%88%D1%83%D0%BA_%D0%96%D0%B8%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B3%D0%B0%D0%BB%D0%B8%D0%B5%D0%B2%D0%BD%D0%B0
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9E%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B0,_%D0%9D%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0%B0_%D0%90%D0%BD%D0%B4%D1%80%D0%B5%D0%B5%D0%B2%D0%BD%D0%B0
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%91%D0%B0%D1%82%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B0,_%D0%9C%D0%B0%D1%80%D0%B8%D1%8F_%D0%A1%D1%82%D0%B5%D0%BF%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%BD%D0%B0
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9D%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B4%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B0,_%D0%90%D0%BD%D0%BD%D0%B0_%D0%90%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%BA%D1%81%D0%B5%D0%B5%D0%B2%D0%BD%D0%B0
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9B%D0%B5%D0%B2%D1%87%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%BA%D0%BE,_%D0%98%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0%B0_%D0%9D%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BB%D0%B0%D0%B5%D0%B2%D0%BD%D0%B0
I don’t think it is simply a fashionable discussion. People have had these discussions since the beginning of history. You can read people having our (or similar topic) discussion thousands of years ago, in Plato, or joking about it in Aristophanes.
The advantage we have is an understanding now of statistics, or a better feeling for it.
The future advantage (of the government) will be an understanding of the physically observable correlates of personality.
It’s already possible, from brain scans, to identity people who have an abnormal lack of empathy. The practical benefits of this for some roles are quite easy to find – if you can scan a population for this trait, you will have no problem identifying suitable job candidates to be executioners.
Future militaries will have increasingly reliable and accurate technologies (and perhaps access to scan a database of the whole population) to identify people with certain traits – people without empathy, people who have unusually low fear responses, and perhaps even people with higher traits like obedience. Perhaps a psychopath (with too much impulsivity, etc) would not be desirable.
Well he’s discussing generalities, but it is not necessarily relevant if you are filtering for the relevant kind of mental illness.
There are many mentally unstable and emotionally abnormal people that were successful in battlefields, especially with people mentally unbalanced in the sense of being suicidal, which includes some famous poets (for example, Lermontov was famous for bravery and apparent suicidal tendencies).
There was a long discussion of this issue on one of Karlin’s posts called “Cville [something or other]”.
How is that relevant? Your claim was that they cannot be soldiers. But in the most brutal war in history, there were quite a number of documented good soldiers.
You can climb down the tree, and recognize a mistake in your claim was from a lack of thought about statistics.
Obviously, on average, men will be a lot more successful, even in a modern fire-arms using battlefield, than women will be.
At the same time, a list of famously successful female soldiers during the Great Patriotic War can be posted.
How to reconcile the two points?
There is no contradiction here – number of successful female soldiers in the war was vastly smaller than the number of successful male soldiers.
Such a simple numerical difference of course doesn’t imply you or I – for example – sent back in time to the war, would have been more successful on the battlefield, than was Roza Shanina.
Most of the women in your list were snipers, aviators, medical personnel or irregular partisans though, that by itself is already some indication that women aren’t suited for infantry combat.
Snipers are part of infantry. But there were some successful non-snipers.*
I think we know the argument here doesn’t make sense since the invention of firearms – there is no special ability to hold a gun and shoot it.
A child (given a rifle) could be a successful soldier – if you found a suitably mature-thinking one.
There are significant group differences in stamina and psychology between men and women, and there are cultural reasons not to allow them, like group cohesion or the societal dislike in risking women to death. But it is not a square circle.
The existence of things like women mathematical geniuses or computer scientists, is surely something far more improbable in the history of the human race, than the existence of a woman who can shoot a rifle, run for medium distance, and not care about dying.
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*
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vera_Kashcheyeva
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zinaida_Samsonova
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nina_Gnilitskaya
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valeriya_Gnarovskaya
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariya_Bayda
The use of women as standard combat infantry soldiers only happened though, during the First World War, in 1917, in the Kerensky Offensive – after the Russian army introduced all-women infantry battalions.
The first all-women infantry battalion charged the German army in Krevo in July. In the first battle, 30 women soldiers were killed and 70 wounded (out of 190 women soldiers in first battle).* But the historians claim the battalion was otherwise successful during fighting over the following week.
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*
http://rus-istoria.ru/component/k2/item/372-mariya-bochkareva-kratkiy-biograficheskiy-ocherk-russkogo-voina
They cut their hair on arrival.
http://diletant.media/upload/iblock/9ca/9ca4d0c4a05879949290d7c87d76f97c.jpg
So they looked in the bootcamp.
https://images.aif.ru/005/559/d900b59c84fe68b84dac9645741e6828.jpg
http://izhlife.ru/uploads/posts/2015-02/1424330520_16920.jpg
In Petrograd, where Second Company’s of Women’s death battalion was to defend Winter Palace. (They surrendered immediately after the shots of the Aurora.)
https://www.ljplus.ru/img/o/l/old_fox/zb_zimnij.jpg
Very true. Functional strength is the Grail. Probably best exemplified by the top amateur wrestlers.
Can you provide a link to Häyhä’s quote? I could only find a Reddit comment.
“Speaking generally, in these regions the women possess the vigour and might of men, and the men those of wild beasts. Indeed, they say that often times in campaigns the mightiest warrior among the Gauls has been challenged to single combat by a quite slender Ligurian and slain” Diodorus Siculus
http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Diodorus_Siculus/5B*.html
What is the dispute? As I understand all agree that the woman on average is much worse at war than the man. But (according to the laws of statistics) among women there are soldiers of extra class who fight a lot better than the average man. Rosа Shanina in one case entered into battle (contrary to the order of senior officers) and captured two German soldiers. One this episode puts her above the average male soldier.
The reddit comment is what I’m working from, though he’s said similar things in person up until his death and mentioned he never ever counted his kills for obvious reasons of trying to survive and thought his legend was quite exaggerated. The most recent historical count by Risto Marjomaa puts his kills around 200, rather than 542 which was by a single source and almost certainly wartime propaganda.
In addition, Girl warriors were common among Scythians and related tribes.
Archaeologist V. Gulyaev : “Our expedition found that in six of the 59 investigated burial mounds near the village of Thorns and Kolbino was buried armed young women from noble families. Next to them is a common set of weapons: a pair of Darts, a spear, a bow and arrows with bronze and iron tips. Then expensive jewelry of the Greek production and objects of purely female use-bronze mirrors, earrings, beads, spinners from clay and lead“.
It’s not a parade weapon, but a combat weapon because some girls have war wounds on their bones.
https://sheokhanda.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/scythian-warrior-woman.jpg
This is increasingly spinning into nonsense.
Modern war is not some situation where a child can pick up an AK-47 and be highly effective if all fear was removed from him(not even sure what is this magical mature-thinking is present). You could look up the war history in Rhodesia for the effectiveness of child soldiers where they fought trained white government soldiers, and this was largely a bush war, infantry against infantry. Essentially the child soldiers accomplished nothing except against the defenseless. Off the top of my head, their weaknesses included:
1) Engaging too far. Child soldiers usually lacked patience to engage targets at a reasonable range, and therefore gave away their position far too early.
2) Abysmal situational awareness. Child soldiers had terrible decision making in regards to what was defensible, or what wasn’t.
3) Terrible accuracy. Lack of discipline on the field reflected lack of discipline off the field, child soldiers did not practice avidly.
Such child soldiers did not lack in rifles, nor in courage(many were drugged). They did not accomplish very much against trained soldiers, even with numerical superiority.
In the end, the best African opposition came from tribes that were traditionally militant, such as the Zulu, largely using tactics similar to what worked historically, but updated for modern times such as close ambushes at ranges below 100 yards. As in many things, past performance is often the best predictor of future performance.
Well, there were also Celtic invasions in ancient times, who took over all the northern Italy (and burned Rome, iirc?)
We have genomes from ancient Rome.
ISTR Razib Khan(?) blogging about this. The upshot was that modern Italians from Lazio are pretty much identical to ancient Romans.
All the mass immigration from the Empire seems to have had little effect. The reason being that the city was a population sink.
I’d have said emotionally more unstable, which I guess is sort of the same thing. I think female emotional instability is so obvious that it hardly needs proving. It’s why women are unsuited to any jobs that require judgment or rational decision-making.
However, you seem to agree with him that physical strength doesn’t matter for soldiers any more. I think the “mature-thinking” part by Dmitry exactly meant that they’d avoid these three types of problem.
To which an interesting thought experiment. Let’s assume you are on a patrol with a comrade. You get injured. Does it matter how strong your comrade is? Does it matter if it’s a 60kg reasonably lean and fit woman or an 80kg reasonably lean and fit guy? After all, if your comrade is not strong enough, he/she can always just leave you there…
LOL, not the case.
Fitness(including strength) impacts a lot of things; I agreed with Duke that explosive strength has limited utility and cardio generally matters more than strength. But being able to reach a target in time, being able to control burst, and the overall threat profile all have something to do with fitness.
Even something like accuracy is physical on some level: reaction time(is something happening?), target distinguishment(Something is happening. Is it an enemy?) and execution of action(Something is happening. It is an enemy. I will shoot him.) is all affected by biological factors. We know there are gender differences because at least two of the three above have been tested for as part of intelligence testing.
None of the above, of course, is as important as actually making anything akin to correct decisions, and on a larger level, the planning/tactical ability of the unit(war isn’t really much of a singles activity). It doesn’t matter how fast you can run if you are running in the wrong direction, for example.
Which returns to the original point I made about the importance of decision-making under stress in combat, and why I indicated the lack of female pro-gamers suggested their weakness there and in SK, pro-gamers were indeed hired by the military in order to help design wargames so that suggests decision-making under pressure and speed to be valued by the military.
Of course, of all of the above, drugged child soldiers led by dubious “commanders” are probably scraping the bottom of the barrel for competence on any level. Still quite good at murdering the defenseless, unfortunately.
Males have simply evolved for combat:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/223959003_The_Importance_of_Physical_Strength_to_Human_Males
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Df8iLhSX4AAu25l.jpg
Technology has mitigated some of these factors, but what was good 100,000s of years ago cannot be considered completely irrelevant now.
Note to Ron Unz: funny things are happening when I try to post. It goes to another screen for a few seconds, and either fails to post or goes through.
Given that Cloudflare is running, I think Unz is getting d-dosed. It happens pretty often these days – Mr. Karlin can probably run down a list of sites labeled “alt-right” which keep getting hit by liberal organizations. There is a twitter handle that actually indicates their targets; I’m not sure as to the legality of such attacks given their willingness to admit to it. One would imagine that it is illegal.
To the credit of Unz, no attack has managed to actually take down the site to any meaningful extent, although some content loss was inflicted once.
It’s not “Magnusson”, it’s Magnus Carlsen. If 29-year-old Bobby were given a year to study modern developments, he would easily beat every current player except Carlsen and Caruana. It is debatable whether he could have upped his game to beat Kasparov, or Carlsen, I’d take either side of an even money bet there. It’s a little too early to tell about Caruana but he has a chance to be on the same level.
Grandmaster William Lombardy was Bobby’s second in Reykjavik (and very important in his success, the two of them together out-analyzed the entire Soviet Union in the opening preparation and adjournments), and he was also Bobby’s only significant teacher (he trained him from 1954 to 1957). During the last year of Bill’s life (he died last October) I was very close to him and I learned a lot about Bobby that I didn’t know. Fischer’s outstanding quality as a chess professional was his systematic and scientific approach to absorbing all existing knowledge coupled with being harder-working than anyone else at the board and away from it. Kasparov and Carlsen match him in chess knowledge and intuition; Carlsen might be superior to the other two in pure talent but he has not been pushed to his maximum yet.
For English soldiers in the famous slaughterhouse of Battle of the Somme, there could have been included both famous athletes with incredible lung capacity, and guys who could have difficulty running 1 kilometer. The machine guns ate them both and turned them into meat without discrimination of heroic athletic ability or its opposite. What distinguished life and death – a kind of lottery of small factory manufactured pieces of steel pushed to over 1000 kph.
A physical requirement exists – but for practical purposes is not necessarily very high.
During the Second World War, a lot of the time the soldiers were very weak (because of being underfed/underslept, etc), and yet still winning battles.
The distinguishing traits (on the soldier level) were to an extent psychological.
And the psychological traits that distinguished the soldiers were often deeply maladaptive ones from the perspective of civilian life (not caring about your own life, being able to ignore pain/discomfort, and having extreme obedience – even agreeing to many missions which were certain to kill you).
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If you can’t “test” the soldiers in battle, the difficult part will be know if they have the psychological traits to perform obediently during a deadly situation. And this is where the technological situation will improve, as the physically observable correlates of psychological traits will be understood.
Interestingly, quite strange mentally people, like poets such as Lermontov have been unusually brave in war.
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This story seems relevant.
https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4285705,00.html
One female soldier has performed successfully and attacked/killed the opponent, while another has been “hiding” inside a tree for hours.
Aside from gender (or the strange case of these being women soldiers), the issue for recruitment technology will be to know in advance, who is the former and who is the latter.
It would have looked different though if they had reached the German trenches and engaged in close quarters fighting. Or think of the house to house combat in Stalingrad which involved actions like skull-crushing with spades and similar forms of close, personal killing. More athletic soldiers clearly have an advantage under such conditions.
Offtopic, but from historical interest.
There really exists video footage of the Women’s Battalion of Death receiving its blessing in Moscow before the Kerensky Offensive.
Also in parade
Please stop spreading the ugly lie that women have value apart from their traditional roles as sex objects and birth machines. It is offensive and this board is supposed to be better than that.
Rule of thumb to live by:
Never, ever say anything about females that, were your mother to be in the same room at the time, she would kick the living snot out of you.
Otherwise you’re just posturing because your mother ain’t around. Not respectable.
Peace.
my mom doesn’t count
The greatest strategy is having an idiot for an enemy, is a saying that I’ve heard, and relevant to using formations to charge machine gun nests.
Ultimately, I think what is important to explain is just this: soldiers are human assets in order to accomplish a goal in a physical realm, and their physical capabilities indicate what is reasonable and possible. To a more significant extent, modern warfare is really determined more by knowledge and strategy, to which physical abilities form a bedrock for, but cannot compensate for inadequate decision-making from commanders or for massive disparities in resources. This is true even of ancient warfare, for that matter, thus the commentary of Romans and Germanics.
But the end of the day, a commander is always better off with higher quality assets, all other things equal: if he needed to charge a machine gun nests, its better for his goals to have all high cardio people because maybe then they can reach it first; if he needed to fight a long attrition of a firefight, its better to have high cardio people who can last longer; in just about any situation, having people who can potentially do more matters and helps – even if it won’t save them(or him) from bad decision making or larger macro factors. Heck, if you just ran a team of vehicle mechanics, having stronger mechanics would help get more vehicles get fixed and you would be able to run more overtime with them.
The psychological factors do matter, but the most significant ones are really just the ability to make meaningful decisions under fire(or general high pressure). The notion that soldiers are ideally unthinking automatons to execute orders at fatal risk is something I believe even Prussians avoided early on. Combat by definition is a highly unstable environment; it doesn’t take a lot of reading(or any personal experience at all) to see how high stress drives people to act in all manners of genuine, hilarious stupidity. I have seen no evidence to see that women do better than men at this, and usually much worse; for that matter, most men do not do well at this anyway.
Stability is really the most important aspect there, when things don’t go according to plan(which is never).
And she’d kick the crap out of you for that statement too, if she didn’t know the full context.
May your mother live long and prosper – and may you never disappoint her.
Peace.
The Flynn effect for strength is an interesting thing that wasn’t brought up here before. Here’s a piece of archeological excavation report from a 17th century Russian graveyard. The villagers would certainly have their strength impaired, not unlike today’s Nigerians.
The blog title is “Dedicated to the lovers of the natural way of life” 🙂
Superior logictic = no logistics. Horses graze steppe, soldiers survive off pillage. No supply train necessary.
Sure, I trust the Soviet Communist party is telling the truth about about wartime exploits of hero(ine)ism.
Florida man > all other men around the world
We are living in the clown world of the 21st century. Florida man rules. The rest bends the knee.
what’s the average height for a properly nourished, ethnic Russian today? About 6’1?
Nice horror story, but unfortunately unsourced and evidence-free.
The observable and undeniable fact is that our ancestors managed to reproduce and build functioning, virile civilizations. We are dying out and surviving only by the scraps of what our ancestors built.
A couple year ago I read an article about a US journalist embedded with a US infantry platoon during Iraq 2003. She had run marathons, and considered herself reasonably fit. But on her first march during the war, she couldn’t handle the backpack and maybe some body armor and helmet. She didn’t have to carry weapons, so had a lighter load than the soldiers. After some time (maybe an hour; I’m writing off the top of my head and I’m lazy to look it up), she felt totally exhausted. A soldier noticed and politely asked her if she minded if he would carry her backpack. She barely had the strength to say a thank you…
Obviously you don’t need to be anywhere near professional powerlifter strength levels (it would be beneficial, if it weren’t for the negative tradeoffs), but you need to be reasonably strong for a guy. Now a woman can reach that level, but for a woman it already comes at a price, because for the same strength level she’d be much closer to the (female) powerlifter level than a guy.
The problem is that endurance at lower levels isn’t totally antithetical to strength, by improving strength you can initially easily improve your endurance as well. Initially. For women, the “initially” means much lower levels than for guys.
I guess the child soldiers didn’t have a lot of body armor or even ammunition or whatever. They were disposable. But a well-trained soldier is worth way more than an untrained child soldier, and then not having the strength will be a problem, because a well-trained soldier without carrying ammo will be worth much less than one with a lot of ammo. Similarly, having a well-trained soldier wear body armor will be way more worthy than one without body armor, due to his higher life expectancy on the battlefield.
I guess physical strength might mean less in the future, once we have things like robot infantry or very strong exoskeletons. But I think the discussion was originally about warfare in the past and present.
Even that requires a lot of organization, because the army needed to be moved around inhabited areas for pillage to be even possible. But for a long time, they didn’t even need this.
Now the second had something to do with the individual qualities of the soldiers (their ability to fight under conditions of starvation, when all other soldiers from other cultures would’ve been incapable of fighting).
It must also be noted that their bows needed considerable strength levels to shoot. So even their strength was a factor.
the average height of a man 178 centimeters, and the average height of a woman is 167 centimeters (though it’s entire population, ethnic Russians possibly slightly higher)
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The average height of soldiers of the Russian army in the 18th and early 19th centuries 160-165 cm This height equalled the average height of the Europeans (men) in that era.
This might have been true for some overpopulated Malthusian areas, but the trend is less clear. For example I have seen sacks used to store and transport wheat or flour in a Hungarian mill. The sacks could only be grabbed at their mouths, and the peasants threw them on their carts. They would’ve weighed something like 50-60 kilos, which is very close to their estimated body weights. They needed to be extremely strong (especially for their sizes, but even for bigger people today) to be able to grab those sacks and then throw them onto their carts. Present day populations would be unable to operate those carts, we’d need basically Olympic lifters or powerlifters to be able to do that.
I read somewhere that in England during the industrial revolution, in a foundry there was a huge metal ladle, which for some distance had to be carried in hand by four people. More people couldn’t access it, and there were handles for exactly four people. Those people had to be extremely strong by today’s standards, I can’t recall the weight of it, but it was very heavy, and today probably only groups of powerlifters and similar people could even attempt to lift it. The issue was, it was also extremely hot. So, English iron workers (probably only the very strongest of those were employed for this job) had to be extremely strong by today’s standards.
That’s actually to answer the points raised about child labor in English factories in the early 19th century: where I read it (I can find the book if requested) it was mentioned that people working in these jobs started at the factory floor at a very early age as small children, and while initially given physically easier tasks, their workloads progressively increased. Since they were paid well, they could easily afford quality food (including meats and vegetables) and even feed their families, and their bodies adapted.
It must be noted that many late 19th century strongmen started out as child workers in factories. So working at an early age might not have been so unhealthy as some people here seem to believe. Sitting at the school or in front of computers might produce less healthy humans. (Fortunately we have antibiotics and even better treatments for cancer, and so we live longer nevertheless.)
that includes elderly who may have shrunk and also young men who may not have finished growing. It also includes white trash Russians who may not have been properly nourished during growth. 178 centimeters is 5’10. There is no way the average ethnic Russian male is that short. That would make fully grown Russians slightly shorter than fully grown white Americans, which is impossible.
A middle class and upper class Russian man of 25 who has been properly fed, how tall will he be on average?
In Denmark the average is about 6’1. Russians would presumably be about the same.
I don’t know what it is like in Hungary, but in America our high school boys are often shockingly frail looking. Look up anti gun douchebag David Hogg. Have you ever seen a Hungarian boy that frail?
On the other hand, our pro athletes keep getting bigger and stronger. And even our frail, girly man, kids seem to be growing ever taller.
Why would that be strange?
This is indeed the average Russian height. I am 175cm myself and seem to be within the normal range of my cohort, including in historically better fed Moscow.
Because everybody knows that Russians are tall.
I’ve been around plenty of Russians. Are you seriously going to tell me that Russians aren’t any taller than American whites?
“The Samoans are the strongest outliers of all. They have the highest bone and muscle density”
Do they? They seem to be huge, but I am not sure about bone and muscle density
West African blacks clearly excel in sprinting but there is no evidence they excel in strength.
Yeah there seems to be something wrong with the Pakistani sample. Genetically they ought to pattern close to Indians. Yes, Pakistan is poorer than India and might be more malnourished, but I don’t see how that could cause them to be so many SDs weaker than Indians.
Seems like something worth looking into. They do seem like Bronze Age specimens.
We actually have studies to support this:
Today’s men are not nearly as strong as their dads were, researchers say
Surely to the delight of leftists everywhere.
Aside from the generational issue (younger generation is getting taller), it obviously depends who you compare to.
Some nationalities like Spain are a lot shorter – to the extent you notice on the street. I don’t know if you been a lot of times in Spain? My emotion walking around where there are native Spanish, is like you are in a country of dwarfs.
But then other nationalities like Hollanders/Netherlanders, will obviously be taller compared to Russian average. This might be true of some particular nationalities like Danish which are unusually tall.
I get the impression there are a lot of giants in England, but then statistical data says average is only 178 cm.
So categorize Russia in a European average category, similar to England or France, and this is supported by the data.
I would also be very interested in HBD-information on Australien Aborigines, Khoisans and Melanesians. Do they have maybe have some genetic advantage in any sport which hasn’t been discovered because there so few of them and they live in such remote areas?
They are elite professional soldiers, who spend years training and exercising and see this as a professional career, have probably an excellent diet. These soldiers might have the same health level of athletes.
The average soldiers in the Second World War, were not necessarily having long training periods before combat, and often very badly fed and physically feeling very weak, and their favorite hobby was smoking cigarettes (if they were lucky enough to encounter them).
Their health was not necessarily very important in the result. Generally if you read about the war, the determining factor is equipment, experience, tactics of the leadership, and all kind of ability to survive painful/stressful situations, living for days rolling in freezing mud, and even having sometimes suicidal obedience (psychology).
You seem hellbent on missing my point. I wonder why.
Look, we are dying out and the boundaries of our civilization are receding.
It doesn’t matter how tall they were. They built the civilization that we now don’t even have the strength to maintain.
Whatever it is they were doing, it was something right, and whatever it is we are doing now is something wrong
wtf, now I love malnutrition, infant mortality and dying of an infected scratch
Villagers of 17th century Russia, for example, would surely be far tougher in many areas (as a result of psychological brutalization), compared to modern men with a gym membership, and even able to do physical tasks you would not expect.
At the same time, they were a lot smaller, less healthy and underfed, compared to modern men – expressed in all kinds of data like height, bone density, life-expectancy.
So there are contradictions. If you leave the villagers alone in a difficult countryside environment, without food or water or buildings – we would surely predict the small and underfed villagers would survive better than the healthy, more physically developed modern people.
You can argue that the outcome of WWII was already determined once the coalition against Germany included the United States, Britain and Russia with overwhelming industrial production and manpower advantages, but actually that just makes the case for quality of soldiers – Germany was able to get so far against overwhelming odds while the USSR suffered enormous casualties despite its strategic and material advantages.
Despite the eventual loss, the German performance in World War II was awe inspiring and the Soviet performance was awful. If any general today was offered a time machine to recruit a division from the past, he would definitely consider WWII Germans and definitely not WWII Russians. The ideology and values that Germany had adopted under Hitler were actually good for fighting wars while the ideology and values adopted by Russia were not very good and Russia would have done better if it had national socialism instead of an ideology of throwing away men’s lives in human waves while writing puff pieces about the exploits of female supersoldiers.
Most of the world is still clearly under the same impression. Everybody wants their neighbor to adopt international socialism. Nobody wants their neighbor to adopt national socialism. Not many here would freak out if Russia adopted communism again – we might get another chance to make Greater Finland if Russia wrecks itself again. But everyone would freak out if Russia adopted national socialism.
(Of course I will admit that extreme nationalism has some serious disadvantages, most notably the difficulty of making allies and finding agents and sympathizers in other nations, something that the communists were good at.)
Sure it does but grip strength does not equal overall strength.
No, but normally you cannot use your overall strength if you don’t have grip strength. I mean, outside a gym, you need to grip something in order to be able to move it. So it’s actually a kind of basic strength, without which all other muscles are mostly useless.
I partly disagree about Soviet performance. The Soviets had a very hastily expanded and so largely untrained peasant army with inexperienced and uneducated officers. Even what they had was destroyed within a few months.
After that, they managed to build a new and relatively high quality army (it was probably higher quality than for example what Hungary had at the time). Though of course they partially embraced nationalism, too.
That’s an oversimplification. Russians/Soviets of course well understood the possibility of bypassing enemy strongpoints, but they deliberately chose not to, because their early experience taught them that the Germans were masters of mobile warfare, and they simply cut off advancing Soviet forces from the strongpoints. For example this is what happened at Kharkov in May 1942.
So they started to attack strongpoints frontally, which, costly as it was in terms of losses, at least denied the Germans to use their superb mobile warfare capabilities.
Of course it was always understood as not ideal.
It depends very much on the stage of the war.
In 1941, Red Army was indeed totally incompetent.
By summer of 1944 (Operation Bagration), Red Army was probably the strongest land army that has ever been observed in world history (in any historical era).
The transformation (also perhaps the most brutal any army has encountered, and certainly in terms of number of deaths) occurs in these intervening 4 years (1941-1944).
3 years (my mathematical skills).
That’s just 3 years, not 4.
But qualitatively speaking, the Red Army was still worse than the German army.
In 1941.
Grip strength correlates with overall strength, since gripping is an accessory to most strength movements. Generally, you don’t need to train grip strength separately; it improves along with overall strength as you do other strength movements.
Having said this, I don’t think greater grip strength in the past necessarily meant greater overall strength, or much greater overall strength, than in the present. In the past, most people did manual labor constantly, which usually involved farming or craftsmanship. These activities involved specialized use of hands, wrists, and forearms, which are the components of grip strength. A farmer or blacksmith would use tools repetitively for long periods daily. These tools generally cannot be too heavy to tax the major muscle groups, otherwise they’re not effective tools. But they do work the hands and forearms extensively, and thus improve grip strength.
Regarding Indian weakness, a large proportion of Indian children are physically stunted due to chronic undernutrition. Stunting is irreversible and also impairs brain development, which probably plays a role in Indian IQ levels. Anemia is also high in India.
http://unicef.in/Whatwedo/10/Stunting
Oops I misread your comment as saying Hungarian army was superior in some sense.
In 1941, the Hungarian army was probably superior. By the end of 1942 – they were having a fatal time in Russia.
And your comment was not disputing this.
Oh give me a break. I didn’t know you were such an extreme Russian nationalist.
The summer 1941 Wehrmacht stops Bagration cold.
I’m not into the Wehrmacht worship and any superiority the Wehrmacht had was due to technology, tactics and generals; not some mythical superiority of the German soldier, but it outperformed the Red Army until well into 1945. The problem was that they had been bled white.
edit: And their fuel shortage was making it impossible for them to respond to Soviet breakthroughs.
Let a bunch of limp-wristed, Hindoo, disembodied, intellectual brains into your country to write the programming for girly-gossip devices that preoccupy the attention of our young people and you end up with a generation of confused geldings–who’da thunk it?
This is what I was talking about last week. We AmeroEuros are a nation of strong people. That wedded to our superior intellect was the recipe for success. Lynn’s IQ of Nations and many thinkers here are confused. They believe that high IQ creates great societies. Since Flynn, Lynn, et al. are only looking at cross sections and not long-term historical longitudinal studies, they have confused cause with effect.
High IQ societies arise out of strong societies because only strong societies can guarantee the security and stability which are prerequisites for the peaceful pursuit of purely intellectual and artistic ends.
A weak society, such as ours is today, dominated as it is by limp-wristed Jews and Hindoos cannot safeguard the borders, cannot maintain hegemony over institutions through which higher culture is disseminated such as elite universities and media, cannot protect women, cannot guard against assault by bullying minorities, in short, leave all civilized institutions open to attack and invasion by the barbarians at the gates.
We have put the cart before the horse. To be sure, high IQ is a leading determinate of progressive, advanced, technical societies, but that is a necessary not a sufficient cause. Strength and Unity matter just as much if not more.
Let’s flex some muscle and take back what is rightfully ours and in the process restore ourselves to our rightful position. We don’t need Hindoo programmers to program us. That they can do so solely in their characteristically weak-gripped way and that we should become weak-gripped ourselves in the process should come as no surprise.
What does it have to do with nationalism (I am certainly not an “extreme nationalist” – I think you have confused with another user).
There’s no need to argue about Wehrmacht vs Red Army. They resolved this debate between each other – it ended in Berlin, 73 years ago.
Wehrmacht are masters of defensive warfare by 1944, with no little help from the genius of Walter Model – and they had many defensive tactic they developed by 1944, that they had not had in 1941.
They certainly had all kinds of shortages, and questions how to distribute their forces. Wehrmacht has largescale reinforcements arriving in Summer 1944 – but they are sent to Ukraine before the beginning of the offensive – and this is not an accident, but a result of Red Army military science (masking of the operation prior to the operation beginning)
The Germans responded well to the best of their ability, but their positions were rapidly indefensible after the initial breakthroughs (e.g. 4th army was destroyed in the first two weeks of the operation).
That explains why the Renaissance happened in Iceland
nope. Here is your exact quote:
If you aren’t just trolling and seriously don’t see how that statement is extremely nationalistic, then I really don’t know what to tell you. Maybe that is just how everybody talks in Russia, I don’t know. But in most parts of the world that would be considered an ultra jingoistic statement.
“were shocked at how the more muscular-looking black guys seemed a lot weaker than themselves [whites]”
which is exactly what was stated in the article Anatoly cited. The authors said the the exact reason for this contradiction is a mystery and speculated that there was a difference in muscle “quality” between the more heavily, lean-muscle massed blacks and the overall higher functioning whites.
South Italians, for their part, have Moorish blood.
I thought they have Greek blood since Syracuse and the lower parts or Italy were Greek colonies in the times of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle.
Lol.
I feared the lack of video evidence, to make the claims more persuasive to a general audience.
Wanted to press LOL. Maybe later I’ll come back to fix it.
I don’t disagree. A good example is the deadlift. My grip gives out long before my whole body gives out (don’t think I use straps or chalk—I don’t). Grip is very important, especially due to the relationship with all-cause mortality.
Nevertheless, I can have a weak grip but be strong. I’ve worked with people like that (though of course I got their grip stronger).
But aren’t such people (strong, but with weak grip) the products of modern training methods (straps, machines, etc.)? I’d think it cannot have been typical before.
Of course grip strength improves as you do all other movements but as you start to get up there in weight you need to do accessories to strengthen your wrists/grip to move more weight.
I’m well aware that grip strength correlates highly with overall strength—so what? If you know someone’s grip strength you don’t know someone’s overall strength—until they actually do strength movements.
For large samples you can probably get a good idea of average strength level from grip strength. Most people aren’t serious weight lifters.
You’ve set a rather low bar for yourself. You’ve cited an example of a nation which while strong (in a limited, literal sense) has not produced spectacular cultural results (though that may not be true when considered per capita) but your real task, if you wish to refute me, is to produce an example of a nation which is both weak and in disarray and which is a font of cultural and technocratic creativity.
Kharkiv battle in early 1943 showed that the Germans still could have won the war by bleeding the Soviets dry using elastic defense:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Battle_of_Kharkov
About 8 Soviet casualties to 1 German casualty.
But Hitler interfered and overruled the generals – he wanted the Germans to stand their ground. This resulted in the Battle of Kursk, which really ended any chance of Germany winning the war (even though, in that battle, ratio of KIA was about 4 Soviets for every German).
If the German military weren’t better “pound for pound” it would not have been in a position to win a battle such as Kharkiv.
The greatest strength of European nations and peoples derives from the synergistic unity of their superior mental acumen, physical strength, stamina, curiosity and quest for adventure.
Enemies of Europeans strive mightily to destroy this integrity. Thus, Karl Marx agitated for years aggravating the divide between the workers, (muscle) and the (mental) Capitalists and financiers. He knew that if he could pit them against one another then our society would collapse, an event he anticipated with glee.
Today this mission is carried forth by his disciples and all the other vultures who anticipate a free lunch on our carcass.
Our strength lies not in any one quality such as intellect, but in the harmonic unity of all our great virtues. Emphasis on Intellect alone makes us priestly geldings. We must erect a new Ideal, a new statue of the God we wish to become and he must be “in the flesh”.
the Soviets were totally overextended in Kharkov III. The Germans were using a version of elastic defense in Bagration but their fuel situation and the partisans made it difficult, plus they now had to deal with a legit 2nd front in the west and the Luftwaffe was much weaker in the summer of 44 than in the winter of 43.
As for Kursk, yeah it was stupid and Hitler even admitted it was stupid but the alternative of just standing still while Germany’s enemies got stronger wasn’t a very appealing option. If the Germans had pulled off Kursk, they’d have maybe bought themselves some time on the Eastern Front. And who knows, maybe the Soviets decide that they’ve had enough and forge a separate peace with Germany.
Of course, with hindsight we know that Germany’s petrol and aircraft situation would be critical by summer 44 regardless, due to Allied strategic bombing. But Germany could not have know that then.
How can this POSSIBLY be the case? A 1944 army was the strongest in ANY era?
Don’t you mean for THAT era?
The strongest land force ever seen in ANY era, so far, has to be the Soviet Army of 1989-1990, just before the Soviet collapse.
It had what, 3,800,000 soldiers in the land forces, and of course, since it was 45 years later, much better weapons and technology, than any WW2 army. (Of course, all funded by spending about 15% of Soviet GDP on the military – but that’s a different topic.)
Basically, it’s all just saying that as the ages roll onward, the armies get potentially materially more powerful.
Yes, Greek blood also. As I understand it, they have both Greek and Moorish, as of the present.
well i wrote what i thought was a decent reply but the text either disappeared into thin electrons or my comment got blocked. either way just testing now to see if i can post anything at all.
AK, please cover America’s new “space force” in one of your next posts, what it means for Russia (and China) etc.
Will America enforce the POZ from fkn space now.
BTW, Russia has a “space force” but I’m not sure what its duties are.
I disagree. The Soviets became overconfident in the wake of the Battle of Stalingrad. It’s unlikely that such results could have continued indefinitely. The Germans might have hoped for a stalemate, but the result of Kursk was a similarly lopsided loss ratio as at Kharkov. It’s only that the Germans couldn’t replace them, and they also had to send some of their troops to Italy. The main German problem was not the battle itself, but the Soviet offensive started afterwards. The Soviets would probably have waited longer if the Germans hadn’t attacked, but time was on their side, since they were able to build up their forces than the Germans. In fact, one of the main weakness of Hitler’s conduct during Zitadelle was his endless delays. But eventually the Soviets would’ve started the offensive anyway, and I fail to see how the Germans would’ve been any more successful against it than they were in August, since they had a better chance earlier.
So while it’s true that Hitler’s meddling was unfortunate for the Germans, his generals couldn’t have changed the overall force ratios or the increasing Allied involvement in the war. I also don’t like the “genius generals vs. evil, stupid Hitler” dichotomy. Hitler made many mistakes, but he couldn’t have won the war in 1943 even with the wisest leadership. (Maybe in 1941? Perhaps still in 1942?)
… because they shot the experienced ones.
Initial point still stands, time-machine general isn’t going to pick Russians. If your society persecutes competent officers for political reasons, your society isn’t going to perform well in war.
killed parents…judge…mercy…orphan
A cursory look at AK’s strength rankings should show you that physical strength has very little relation to ‘strong societies’ or accomplishment
Those of us who follow college wrestling know that old American farm boys are the strongest men pound for pound.
I’m not sure. 8:1 casualty ratio as at Kharkiv was much better than 4:1 as at Kursk. This would have been sustainable for Germany. Several more such battles, or if this tactic were expanded across the entire front, and likely there would have been a stalemate or even retreat. Of course, Soviets could have adapted and found an answer – we don’t know.
Twinkie is probably the most knowledgeable military historian who posts here (he is a veteran himself, and he taught the subject).
He wrote, while demolishing Martyanov’s claims:
http://www.unz.com/akarlin/top-10-militaries-2015/?highlight=elastic#comment-1205938
and
http://www.unz.com/akarlin/top-10-militaries-2015/?highlight=elastic#comment-1202004
“By the late 1944, both the Western Allied and the Soviet combat-craft improved somewhat as many in the respective armies were combat veterans with significant experience, but not enough to overtake the Germans man-for-man. But given the strategic situation and the enormous manpower/materiel advantages they enjoyed, they didn’t have to be equal to the Germans one-on-one in order to beat them.
And once Hitler forbade theater-wide elastic defense on the East as both von Manstein and Guderian advocated, the war was lost irrevocably for the Germans, as was bound to happen to snipers who are ordered to engage in knife fights, to use another metaphor. What von Manstein wanted to do was to repeat continually and theater-wide the Third Battle of Kharkov in 1943 (when the severely understrength Germans conducted a masterful elastic defense and destroyed some 50+ Soviet divisions and recaptured Kharkov). Happily for the Allies, Hitler instead threw away the last large reserve of the operationally mobile forces at Kursk (“Zitadelle”) and sealed his fate.”
Of course most people aren’t serious weight lifters. But I still disagree with your contention. I train average people. Trust me when I tell you that grip strength is not too good of a measure of overall strength.
Yes that is one cause (one reason why I don’t use straps or chalk when I deadlift).
…didn’t even have broad shoulders.
https://sportshub.cbsistatic.com/i/r/2016/06/10/8aa84a67-6376-4f1c-b97e-7b641890db0b/thumbnail/770×433/f9bdafd692c9f390dcd2dea60f0d7ed9/bronsson061016.jpg
BTW, I think the quote about Romans and Gauls was originally Napoleon’s concerning the “Marmalukes.”
…And the Icelandic Crossfit Queens are early eunuchs.
My problem is that the Soviets had been learning a lot before. For example, the Germans envisioned mass encirclements for Operation Barbarossa, and they largely succeeded. Hence, several millions of Soviet POWs in 1941 (who were criminally starved to death within months). However, in 1942 the Germans tried to replicate their successes from the previous years, and they didn’t manage to do so. The only large encirclement to succeed in 1942 was at Kharkov, where the Soviets attempted an offensive in May 1942. It must be noted that in late 1942 during Operation Mars (largely the same time as Stalingrad, an attempted Soviet offensive near Moscow), the Soviets failed, but Soviet losses were nowhere near their losses during the Second Battle of Kharkov, despite using similar forces. While German losses were higher (though still much lower than Soviet losses).
In 1943 around Kharkov the Soviets overextended themselves: they were fighting almost a thousand kilometers from their starting point at Stalingrad. They were also dizzy with success, due to their previously unprecedented successful encirclement operations. It’s highly unlikely that such conditions would’ve continued. On the other hand, it’s highly likely that the ratio of forces would’ve become worse and worse for Germany.
So, you (and Twinkie, and some others) are assuming that the German qualitative advantage would’ve remained the same. That’s highly unlikely: it had already diminished much by the summer of 1943. The German qualitative advantage was based on its highly trained officers and NCOs (and even ordinary soldiers). However, their losses could never be fully replenished, because wartime training was always of lower quality than peacetime training (there was no time to train them, while in peacetime officers had four years of training, during wartime it diminished to two, and then to just one year), and so replacements were bound to be of lower quality. As opposed to the Soviets, who had lower quality troops (in terms of training) to begin with, and so replacing them was less of a problem: you can easily replace a poorly trained officer with another poorly trained officer. Couple that with Soviet improvement of their tactics in light of wartime experience, and you can understand why Soviet troop quality was actually improving (albeit from a very low basis) throughout the war. Quality of German troops, on the other hand, was bound to decline as losses proved to be basically impossible to replace.
Tl;dr
I don’t think the Germans could’ve won the war without Zitadelle in summer 1943, or even fought it to a standstill. My best guess is they might have inflicted somewhat higher casualties on the Soviets, and held on a little longer to Kiev or Warsaw. Eventually, Berlin was to fall.
Leading to the issue of how to measure overall strength.
A strength related example concerns being able to physically beat someone smaller with both arms in arms in arm wrestling (involves a right handed person beating a left handed individual) and the bench press.
I know of such an instance when the aforementioned seemingly stronger person (ten years younger than his opponent) had his ass physically handed to him on the basketball court.
Comparatively speaking, that defeated individual lacked leg and abdominal strength, in addition to not being so physically strong in side to side motions that exercises like the bench press and arm wrestling don’t accurately gauge.
No, that’s a myth peddled by people who like to portray Italians as somehow not European or colloquially, “not really white.” Italians on the mainland, even the south, rarely have any substantial North African genes. They often have no North African genes at all, and almost never have sub-Saharan African genes.
My mother, who always considered herself “all Italian”, took a genetic test and came out about 80-plus percent southern Italian and ZERO percent North African or any other kind of African.
My genetic test reported nearly 50% Italian, specifically pinpointed to regions in central-to-southern Italy (Lazio and Campania), and again, ZERO percent North African or any kind of African.
Do not confuse the typical genetics of southern mainland Italians with those of people in Sicily and Malta — utterly different.
Southern Italians are much likelier to have appreciable Greek or Balkan genes than North African. Both my mother and I likely have “Balkan” ancestry, say the reports. Likewise, numerous cousins on the Italian side of the family (in two generations) have done genetic tests recently; most found Greek genes, more than ten percent in a couple cases. One cousin found one-point-something % North African genes at the most “speculative” level available for the report, and the others found zero African of any variety.
I’m sure that stats are available that comport with our personal experience, I’ll look for ’em. In other words, I don’t think that our family is atypical, i.e. “unusually white/European” for southern Italians.
Now the folks in Spain, I’m reading that they DO often have more substantial North African or Arab genes. Not mainland Italy.
Sorry for the misspelling. I’m not so sure that Fischer couldn’t beat Carlsen, given a whole year to study modern developments. I mean Carlsen is beatable, especially at the more rapid speed tournaments, and was even beaten by an aging (ancient?) Ivanchuk last year. And it’s not like he puts his guard down or is uninterested in rapid speed chess. Full blown, I don’t, know, but I suspect somebody out there beats him on occasion? You must be pretty good? My only claim to fame, is that I lasted for over 20 (30?) moves with a rated player of around 2000. I’m not really very good, and he must have been nice to me and I got a little bit lucky. 🙂
Gurkhas are not considered the most elite NATO soldiers at all, at least by anyone in the know. They don’t even test as the best standard infantry regiment in the British Army. Indeed, sort of specialists like Royal Marines are certainly more effective. They are good, professional and intelligent blokes though; possibly as a result of their extremely low ratio of acceptance and IQ based acceptance exams.
Even for a large sample size, most of which consists of people who have never weight trained?
Traditionally, the standing overhead press was used as the standard measure of strength. More recently, it’s been the bench press. Both probably correlate pretty well with grip strength.
Do you believe grip’s relationship with mortality is independent of grip’s relationship with overall strength and muscle mass, and that there is something particular about grip strength which governs its relationship with mortality?
The forearm is a lot smaller than other muscle groups in the body. So when you do deadlifts for reps, you quickly exhaust the muscle fibers in the forearms and run out of additional muscle fibers to recruit to finish the reps. It’s less of an issue if you’re just doing deadlift singles, doubles, and triples.
At a certain point, doing deadlifts for reps just trains grip strength and endurance, because you can’t put enough weight on the bar to challenge the other muscle groups without putting too much for the grip to handle.
Huh?
A more than cursory look discloses the very opposite; e.g. Germans are strong physically, culturally and mentally.
Do you think that Steppe East Asians have accomplished more than ordinary East Asians? Or West Africans more than Meds?
Power-fetishism goes hand in hand with Germano-fetishism, what a surprise
No, there has never been any DNA taken from actual iron age romans of his kind. The Italians were unaffected by migrations from Arab countries, that is a fact. However, Italians may be descended from different tribes than the Romans, who are likely to have more northerly and ultimately intrusive origins as compared with the pre-indo european population (etruscans).
This is true but those with the lighter hair or eyes ultimately trace those features to more northerly origins (invasions of Etruscan and other pre-IE territories by IE speakers).
You have a twisted and perverted mind, lusting for sex with women of other races. What is wrong with your own women? And why do you perpetually need to see porn – not up to the real thing? What you guys should be doing is working out in gyms to solve some of the physical weakness problems that you have. Perhaps, one day, your large country may even manage to earn a few gold medals in international sports. Are you not ashamed for your country of a billion that is unable to win even a single gold medal in international sports?
Your whole goddamned country needs its ass kicked to rouse it out of its ancient slumber and to shake off all the filth and grime that it has accumulated from lack of physical, mental, ethical hygiene and lack of common sense.
Now go away, start doing some push-ups, and try to turn into a real man from a gutter rat. Who knows, maybe your brain functioning might normalize as well from the improved circulation.
Grip strength is definitely a marker of overall vigor and strength in the body. Medical studies also show it to correlate with life expectancy.
Speaking from personal experience, as I aged and got arthritis in the fingers and wrist, I could clearly feel the decline in my overall stamina and strength. The decline in hand strength preceded the decline in overall strength by some years, so it was a good indicator and predictor of what lay ahead, even though I continued my workouts throughout. Others of my age and roughly at par with me in explosive push-ups, bench press, leg press etc. but without suffering from decline in hand strength fared better than me and maintained their overall strength better.
Grip strength, glowing skin, a spring in the walk – these are all very good indicators of overall health and vigor. One can be light and lean, lacking bulging muscles, but as long as these three are there, the person will very likely be adequately strong and healthy.
Steppe East Asians such as Mongols and Manchus are very close genetically to the “classical” Han. Almost anyone, I’ve read, living today from the Yangtze river northward has very significant Mongolian and Manchurian ancestry. And the vast majority from south of the Yangtze are descended from settlers who migrated in massive waves from the Han homelands in historical times (from the time of the Warring States onward).
The big difference, is in the cultural split between sedentary and nomadic.
Interestingly, the Han retain quite a few cultural throwbacks to their steppe and siberian origins. They have this practice (whose name I can’t recall at the moment), of shaking a tubular container with marked sticks vigorously. When they’ve shaken the tube enough, they then purposely let the sticks spill onto the ground, and then those with traditional knowledge among them attempt to divine answers and predictions based on how the sticks fell.
It was explained to me by a “jiaoshou”, or professor, of history that the practice ultimately comes from the very distant past, probably predating farming in the region. Asian nomads would shake quivers full of arrows vigorously, and then let the arrows inside spill onto the ground, attempting to divine the will of heaven from the patterns formed by the arrows.
Agree with much of what you have posted here except that I think the quibble about causation is possibly a waste of time. Does physical strength lead to high IQs or is it the other way around? Hard to answer that, IMHO.
But what is very apparent is that physically strong societies have tended to be high IQ societies. The correlation seems to be strong, regardless of what is cause and what the effect. Possibly there are other root factors here and there seem to be numerous to-and-fro linkages as well: Physically strong and healthy populations arise in healthy but at the same time challenging climates where hard work is necessary for survival; which in turn provide necessary diet, nutrition, physical effort, and mental effort for both the mind and the body to develop. Healthy bodies produce keen and inquiring minds, and strong minds in turn take better care of health, diet and life-style, thereby remaining physically strong generation after generation.
Where the climate and nature have been too easy or too harsh, the result has been physically and mentally undeveloped societies. The tropical climates with bountiful nature have produced lazy, easy-going, and undeveloped peoples, capable of neither mental nor physical effort. The very harsh climes have produced people who had to be physically strong, but those societies never really managed to accomplish anything beyond survival.
It is interesting that the scatter of physical strength (as estimated by grip strength here) correlates fairly well with high IQ and successful societies. Physical strength of population groups then becomes a matter not just of sporting contests but seems to lead to the very heart of measuring the success of races and civilizations.
I’m going to guess that Dagestan’s dominance in MMA is similar to the Dominican Republic’s excellence in baseball. Not physical, but the result of high interest in the sports.
“Further studies have shown that at heavy weapons with high recoil, there are aggregate statistics when trained women have only as much accuracy as an untrained male. Strength does still matter.”
Here is a young lady from Norway, I believe she’s only 17 years old in this video, shooting a ridiculously powerful rifle and doing so very, very well. If the average adult man without extensive firearms training tried to shoot this rifle he’d end up flat on his rear end with a bruised or even dislocated shoulder.
Surely you jest.
Like anything, there is a trade-off: more strength usually means diminishing quickness. In the video above, the smaller guy seemed quicker, so he was able to land the roundhouse. There is a reason defensive lineman are not usually quite as big as their offensive counter-parts; they need the extra quickness to get around them (and chase down QBs and running backs). Even if the strong men competitors can outlift football players, they may not be able to outfight them. Because of this strength/quickness trade off, you will not got an “all else being equal.” At some point, there is the optimal balance.
#CabbageLivesMatter
#ExtinguisherLivesMatter
#PaintLivesMatter
No I’m not jesting. As a general rule, people who don’t have at least a couple thousand rounds of shooting experience should limit themselves to rifles and cartridges which generate no more than 15 foot-pounds of recoil energy, 20 as an absolute limit. In most rifles the 458 Win Mag has over 60 foot-pounds.
Here is a video of a sturdily built man, a firearms professional, shooting a 458. You can see how much trouble he is having with it.
I recall Jefferson’s quote when, as ambassador to France, he, upon looking around the room could tell those who were Americans because they stood a head taller than their European counterparts.
The high-quality protein diet of the Americans made them physically more imposing human beings.
Could America’s 19th century genius have come from the more intense selective pressure of competition between and amongst our really well fed people? Is our nutritional-wasteland diet today partly responsible for the decline in our intelligence and genius?
Mark Twain spends a paragraph or two describing the fresh wild game, fish and oysters available at good restaurants in Baltimore, New Orleans and NYCity; food we can only dream about today.
The class of Overlords has always reserved for itself exclusive access to meat. Vegetables and grains for the peons, who, consequently, as dullards, were deemed incapable of self rule.
The diet for the masses in the future will be color-coded bricks of soy, pulped chard, cornstarch and vegetable oil; green for vegetable, red for protein and yellow for starch. Consumers of such will be dopes, maybe literally since a la Huxley, the bricks will be doped with drugs to lull and sooth.
Anyway, this is the trend visible even today.
Where was the trouble, my friend? I had a friend’s 90 lb., 13 year old daughter shoot my Mosin-Nagant, 7.62×54, she had more problems lifting it than firing it 5 or 6 times. She did say “oooh ‘Truth’ it really kicks” afterwards.
Samoans are Polynesians:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/304572609_Polynesian_Bones
Polynesian people have an instantly recognizable phenotype characterized by a large bone and muscle mass.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1340554/pdf/bmjcred00238-0007.pdf
Bone mineral content was significantly higher in Polynesian women than in Europeans,whether tested bv parametric or non-parametric analysis of covariance with age as the covariable (p<0O0001; see figure). The mean values were about 20% higher inPolynesians.
Africans also have higher bone density:
https://depts.washington.edu/bonebio/bonAbout/race.html
The bone density is quite a bit higher in the African Americans. It is also higher in men than in women. Asian persons tend to have bone density that is as low or even lower than Caucasians. Hispanic people have bone density that is about the same or a little bit higher than Caucasians.
https://depts.washington.edu/bonebio/bonAbout/ethnicBMD.gif
“…Even worse is that the strategic initiative lies with the Steppe…”
I agree with this somewhat but with agriculture you can get more people than with herding. I read, I can’t remember where, maybe a William Hardy McNeill book????, that the way the Russians eventually controlled the people of the steppes was to carry pre-fab walls in wagons to throw up forts. The problem is no one really pursued the Mongols like the Americans did to the Indians on the plains. They used their agricultural surplus to constantly harass them never letting them rest until they ran them down. The same could have been done to the Mongols especially with the movable forts providing cover.
The average “American” of Sicilian or Jewish origin like Pacino or Hoffman does not stand a head taller than a Dutchman!
I once asked a German why, for example, German-Americans are taller on average than Germans and he told me that this was because most of the Germans who immigrated to America were of peasant stock.
A Frenchman told me the same thing about the Quebecois, who are more sturdy on average than a Parisian. They derive from strapping Breton country stock.
This is akin to what Jimmy the Greek stated about blacks. White Americans of Anglo-Celtic descent, for example, will tend to be from peasant labor stock and so taller and more muscular than the average Brit because in the US the white peasants bred with white peasants.
Remember that most Europeans came to America because the factories and farms needed strong backs. The white women willing to ride on boats for 4 weeks were the sturdier lasses.
I’m willing to lay odds that the average New Jersey Italian-American is much shorter than the average Dutchman or Norwegian, regardless of diet!
In Eurasia, the high strength peoples seem to be from the same area as those with most Yamnaya ancestry. (Similar pattern with lactose persistence?). And the oft-mentioned Klitschkos are from the homeland of the Yamnaya. So I’m guessing that the Yamnaya (like Mongols of their time) gave strength to the populations that they overran and mixed with.
Peasants were typically shorter and weaker than the ruling classes. They ate low-quality food and lived in harsher and unsanitary environments, which reduces height. The primary reason British Americans are taller than people in the British Isles is due to the racial differences between Protestants and Catholics. The former are taller than the latter (Hooton and Dupertuis, 1955, Coon, 1939), and the founding stock of America was Protestant.
This is highly doubtful. Northern Europeans only have some Yamnaya-like autosomal ancestry, they have little-to-no paternal ancestry from the Yamnaya (R1b-L23 — most Northern Euros are different clades of R1b/R1a + other stuff). The Proto Indo Europeans were less physically rugged and powerful than the pre-Indo Europeans of the northwest. The people from Klitschko’s area derive their ancestry mostly from the Andronovo-Sintashta Aryans.
It has already been determined that at least some of the physical performance genes in Northern Europeans came from the pre-Indo European populations.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/07/30/164400
GUY
The average Irish-American Catholic is probably taller than the average Protestant Brit, sorry to differ with you there.
I don’t dispute that malnutrition had something to do-one English chronicler noted that Australians also grew much bigger and healthier than their convict transport parents.
For that matter, we are seeing the same thing with Indians and Asians today.
Greater intelligence of Roman’s per se ? I don’t know.
But in terms of military organisation, technology, engineering, political -military culture (& imagination) you could say the Romans had “intelligence”.
Their military also had very high physical standards. Legionaries went through a lengthy & tough training regime. Long full pack marches, sword practice with double weight swords (grip strength) , swimming, fatigues & any specialised employment ( ie blacksmith in get etc)
Once trained a legionarie was expected to march (in full kit, inc armor) a 20 (?) mile day, then construct a full field camp (ie deep ditch, watchtowers, stakes etc) or indeed (if unavoidable) , stop & fight a battle.
They weren’t called Marius’s mules for nothing.
Every Roman soldier had on him, weapons and armor, in money terms, the equivalent of a complete village.
The empire existed on slaves, as we on oil, gas and coal, the slave consumption is estimated as high as ten million a year.
Pompeï villa’s now have been excavated underground, 3D images show how the above ground level luxury was possible, some 50 slaves in the basement.
Historians very long let themselves be fooled by Roman propaganda, such as what Ceasar wrote about his fights against the barbarians.
The fights in the arena’s of Roman gladiators against barbarians with inferior weapons had a double function, showing Rome’s superiority, making the common folk afraid of the barbarians.
Archeology debunked Roman propaganda, as anyone can see who visits the Celt’s museum in Halle, Austria.
Who is interested in what the Roman empire was, I can recommend
Otto J. Maenchen-Helfen, ‘ The world of the Huns’, 1973 Berkeley
E. A. Freeman, ‘Western Europe, In the fifth century, An Aftermath’, London 1904
The first book in fact describes the period around 400.
The second one, mainly intrigues and lust for power.
How nevertheless thriving cities such as Trier, Arles, could exist, alas, historians dod not seem interested in these things.
An exception is
Howard Zinn, ‘A People’s History of the United States 1492 – Present’, New York, 1980 1995
Agree too.
Just to add: their bone reinforced bows were probably the best missile weapon prior to fire arms.
Don’t forget the Norman ‘settlements’ in Sicily, as well as the Greek.
BTW, I enjoyed your brief disquisition on the Mongols here.
Like reading a very good textbook in synopsis form.
Then the little Vietnamese sent the Uber massive American war machine packing.
India could contain several Iceland-sized subpopulations, each physically stronger than the Icelanders, and still be the weakest nation.
For India contains multitudes. 1.3 billion people divided into 4500 non-intermarrying subpopulations,
Pakistanis are quite tall and strong by subcontinental standards especially those from the mountainous regions near Afghanistan. More people in cricket playing countries like Australia and England would be aware of this because of Pakistani cricket players like Wasim Akram and Imran Khan. However, those outside the UK Commonwealth would probably assume Pakistanis are the same size as Indians.
Aha! Explains why Lagertha, the Viking shield maiden and later queen, could so easily personally slaughter so many Frankish soldiers in hand-to-hand combat during Ragnar’s sack of Paris. Nordic women were individually stronger than Mediterranean men.
I won’t take that bet. I’m 6’2″ and I’ve stood, dwarfed, by the big strapping lads in the public square of a Dutch town. I’d hadn’t had to crane my neck to look up to talk to people since I was a kid. Gave me a dose of what it must feel like to be short. Uncomfortable.
how ironic, that this strengh-fest acticle completely ignores the actual importance of strenght across class, race, gender, in real life. As always with HBD types, all of this statistical measuring amounts to actual crap where real life is concerned. It’s the plight of those who live life vicariously (suburban virtual life model).
someone should explain, how just as with IQ, which never seems to coordinate with actual social dominance (whining Whites who bend over to minority interest or just whining whites?) and smart Asians who have zero political influence, so with strength.
the super strong Northerners are cowering where immigrants are concerned. Even tall big ones are scared of a single southerner.
In the last 700 years in what instant has northern strength actually led to conquest of any southern area? All Northern conquest preceded from technological strength after 1200.
Anyone with any personal experience can vouch for the undisputed toughness of Turks, Caucasians (mountain area/region), Afghanis, Gurkhas, Brazilians, mixed-race Columbians, Venezuelans…no one with any living experience has yet to find a blond tough guy in real life with the balls to challenge any one of them except of course Emelionenko (Russians clearly exemplify that motivation and not predetermined characteristics are determinant)
Klichkos genetically closer to populations of Caucasus than Northern Whites.
So we can go back to virtual make-believe that this article panders to, or we can say that comparing south east Asians with the rest of the world tends to skew the picture in favor of Northerners (i.e. obesity amongst African-Americans virtually assures lower results than expected. Good measure would be athletic level men). What a joke!!
the stronger men in the world are the afroamericans.
No contest.
Its also way more explosive ,even the bigger ones.
Al Pacino is a scary guy even though he is 5’6 because when the intent to cause bodily harm is present it causes fear-Southern Europeans have a different socialization due to machismo/braggadocio.
Danny Trejo is another example-the sort of Mestizo who looks like he would throw knives at you.
Mediterraneans and Latinos are scary because the intent to inflict injury or death is there.
As always with anti-HBD types, facts are rejected because they conflict with primitivist fetishism
But … the quality of life in Japan is much, much higher. Low crime, high cohesion.
Here’s an everyday story of an upper-middle-class mother in North London, where terraced houses start at £1 million. But she’s frightened to take her child to the local park.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/2017/04/the-gang-in-our-park-have-united-us-in-impotence/
Dutch and Scandinavians are tall but what makes Italians and Hispanics scary is their machismo and intent to inflict harm.
If you see a Dutch tourist in Florida who is 6’5 with the typical lanky Nordic build you are not scared, if you see Al Pacino the way he looked in SCARFACE you think “this guy is going to stomp me”.
Who says I’m weaker than Ahrnold??? Angry picture of Lou Faringno in green paint here, lol
I’m 5′ 10″ and in Saratov I am taller than most, not so much as in Wales but noticeably so. However, there is a sub group in the Russian population who are distinctly taller than others. But between 5′ 8″ and 5′ 11″ where I sit, there is a distinct gap. The same goes for the women. Saratov was originally populated by Mordovins who incline to height, so I am told. Don Cossacks and Germans were also early settlers. Muscovites and Ukrainians, the bulk of the population these days, arrived in the 19th and especially 20th C, the earliest settling on the Chernozerm from which the Germans were excluded. (Making German relative prosperity even more remarkable). There are lots of “Tatars” from those times too. Add Caucasians and Central Asians more recently. My guess is the the isolated rather tall group have Mordovin descent even if they are now naturalized Russians.
In Eastern England, unlike Wales, I am no more than average height.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_N%C3%B6rdlingen_(1634)
Battle of Nördlingen , 1634 , when the Spanish ” tercios ” with catholic germanic friends beat the hell out of the swedes and protestant germanic friends .
It is very poor to just measure hand grip , you know rapidity , good reflexes , agility , will , sight , ear , motivation , inteligence play a role too …….
Culture should of course be taken into account here. Never been particularly interested in basketball, but the greatest basketball nations outside of America seems to be countries like Serbia, Spain and Turkey. Serbs are a tall bunch, Spaniards and Turks aren’t. They have the proper sports culture and tradition, though. Another tall population, the Dutch, are nothing special in basketball, whereas they have a very long tradition in football, where height is often a disadvantage. Brazilians are nowhere near as dominant in football as they were. Did their footballing genes change?
As for strength, I live in Scandinavia, but am of Balkan background. Northern Europeans put a lot more emphasis on athletics than other Europeans. There’s strong emphasis on sports culture here. And Icelanders from what I know are really obsessive about athletics, which is why they have such success in a lot of different sports. My generation of millennials are really upping the ante by using steroids. I’ve known kids who’ve used steroids since they were 15, some of them are professional athletes today.
Really, though, the real strong guys come from Eastern Europe. It’s easy to tell the different bone structure and musculature between native Scandinavians and Eastern European immigrants (from South and Center/North). Former generally are ectomorphic, latter generally mesomorphic. Important difference is the former keep themselves active for as long as they can while the latter prefer the Al Bundy lifestyle.
Now, what about war? Obviously it’s about a lot more than size. How do Northern Europeans compare to Chechens in terms of size and strength? The latter aren’t small, but not famed for their size either, but fame deceives. I do know, though, that Soviet anthropology classified the “Caucaso-Balkan” race as the most masculine and muscular. No matter, I’m confident to say that putting Scandinavians up against Chechens would be like putting up boys against men.
To make my point using another example, Afghanis aren’t particularly big, and they are dirt poor and emaciated, but it hasn’t set them back against any of the empires who’ve tried to conquer them ever since their conquest by Mongolo-Turkic tribes.
Speaking of Roman wars against the Germans, they “struggled” with them for the same reason they struggled with the Persians, who are strangely never mentioned in this context although they were the real problem of the Romans, not the Germans. Germany was all forest and swamps, so it was a difficult terrain for a professional army. Arminius was trusted as a Roman lieutenant, and so was used as the guide into German territory, but used the Roman army’s trust to trap them. Even the weather was against them: the Romans couldn’t use their bows because of the heavy downpour.
Teutoburg is a historical event heavily mythologized by the German national romantics—the German Thermopylae that never was. That’s why it’s so heavily acknowledged so much at the expense of Germanicus’ successful invasion of Germany, which included the defeat of Arminius. Or the many other times the Romans obliterated German armies, such as the Battle of the Aquae Sextiae, lead by Gaius Marcus, the man who paved the way for Julius Caesar, where the Romans faced an army three times their size, yet lost only a thousand or so men to the 110k lost by the Germans.
The Romans later returned with vengeance in their mind. This time, even though they were ambushed by the Germans again, they soundly defeated them. The Germans had no chance—were it not for Tiberius’ paranoid and niggardly nature, in addition to his jealousy towards Germanicus, the Romans would have kept on subduing the Germans. The Romans would have settled for most of Germany instead of just the Rhineland.
They had similar issues when it came to the Persians, so they used Armenia as a buffer zone. The Romans learned the lesson that the Americans won’t: some territories, no matter the wealth and prestige of their conquest, are just not conquerable or worth conquering, not for reasons of mere strength, but because of the impossibility of administrating territories when there are issues like a large and difficult terrain, lack of urban development and a nomadic existence. Halfred Mackinder discusses this issue in his Geographical Pivot of History, which is an aspect of his work the Eurasianists don’t seem to mention a lot.
One last thing about the Romans, their infantry tactics revolved around outlasting the enemy. The extreme resilience of the Romans and their logistical and engineering genius was what made them conquer most things worth conquering as well as create the blueprint for European civilization.
Quoted a person by mistake, this was solely meant to comment on the topic generally as brought up by the OP.
Moslem Indians do rape in packs quite often, just like other Moslems around women and boys who are not Moslem.
Color of Crime
Black and Muslim thuggery is restricted to public places. This is why London and the United States are dangerous.
The Germans in the form of the Vandals and Goths and Visgoths eventually sacked Rome and destroyed it.
Now the folks in Spain, I’m reading that they DO often have more substantial North African or Arab genes. Not mainland Italy.
The darkest people of the European continent are probably from southern Portugal (look at Ronaldo) and southern Spain just because of the Moorish influence and geography but yes it’s silly for some to label them white or non white. They are European and distinctly different from most Moroccans that live right across the straights of Gibraltar.
BTW, the English/Welsh* have a strong Mediterranean strain in them. See Madison Grant and the Encyclopedia Britannica.
I worked with this guy Wallace, yes Wallace lol, and he was dark haired and dark eyed and I used to bust his chops and ask if he was Italian. He was married to one and I used to say ‘oh you turn into your spouse if you’re married long enough’, lol.
AP , sorry but I do not believe any ww2 casualty figures given by the nazis . just German lies
Everytime the germans lose , they have just 1 casualty for every 8 , 20 , 1000 , 1.000. 000 soviet casualties , hahahhahahaha , ahhh the Übermenschen do not bleed …….. if they like to console themselves that way , fine …..they have such exquisite ,heroic defeats …….
I do not trust germans any longer , germans always lie , as we see in the EU .
This is just a myth trying to (unecessarily) explain the fact that black curly hair (although not dark skin) was/is common among native Britons
Long term, Germans did ruin the Western Roman Empire, thereby giving us the Dark Ages. It wasn’t by Germans conquering Romans; it was from Roman hubris that led to complacency, including a blind faith that Germans would never bite, much less devour, the hand that fed it.
A lot of lessons there for today’s West.
It began to try to link the island to the Trojan War epic material.
Z-man ,
Well , in Spain we have a varied mix of genes .
Prehistoric ???
Celtic genes , like most western europeans
Iberian genes , probably the iberians were the same thing than the etruscans and ligurians . Probably the iberians came fron the midle east and emigrated to all europe , even north europe , maybe ? about 1,500 years BC , but mainly to southwestern Europe ( best climate ) , Some people think that basque language is the remmnat of iberian language .
The spanish traditions say that the iberians and celts mixed creating the ethnical base of Spain and portugal , the celtiberians .
Then came the greeks , who founded a few cities .
The romans colonized Spain , imposed latin language and culture , mixed with the celtiberian population . Spain was the best province of Rome , in which Emperors like Trajan , Adrian and Teodosio were born
The Cartaginese ( Fenicians ) from the midle east , the were ennemies with Rome who ended up defeating them , founded cities in Iberia .
German barbarian invasions , at the fall of the Roman Empire , goths , visigohts …..
Jews , present in Spain since the Roman Empire , many converted to Christianism along the centuries .
Arab, Moor invasions started in 711 , the elites were from present Siria , lebanon , the foot soldiers from present marrocco , algeria . The Christians pushed them litle by little till in 1492 they were expelled fron their last occupied province Granada . Along the Reconquista many moors were expelled to Africa .
Plus the prehispanic guanches of the Canary Islands , probably of moorish heritage .
Plus some blood fron Hispanic America and the Philipines , were the Spanish mixed with the natives .
Nice mix, don´t you think so ? I do not agree that southern Spain and Portugal have the darkest people in Europe , just go to beautiful Andalucia and see for yourself .
The genetics of the Insular Celts show an affinity with Portugal and northern Spain and seperately the Basques, incidentally a group with a reputation for great strength.
Anatoly perhaps your next article should feature the equally important physical attributes concerning penis lengths and girths? Round off matters, in a manner of speaking?
Maltese are the darkest people in Europe. They’re a mixture of Sicilian and Arabic. In fact their language is Arabic.
You notice this difference in Cubans as oppose to Mexican elite. The Cubans look like Martin Sheen because they are from Northwest Spain or Ricky Martin while the Mexican ruling elite look like Javier Bardem or Antonio Banderas.
Bardem played a Mestizo in No Country For Old Men and it is difficult to distinguish between a Spaniard and a Mestizos.
The Celts were IN Northern Spain BEFORE they reached Briton.
If Karlin is so unhappy with Russia and being surrounded by the 90 percent Sovok untermensch why doesn’t he just like, leave? Nobody is forcing him to stay there or holding a gun to his head if his stay there is as tortuous as he says it is? I mean if yoi can not do as the Romans do and despise 95 percent of Romans why not just leave Rome is instead of carping all day in this forum? I am sure that there are more 200 nations that would accept his August presence, just leave do not let the door hit you on your way out.
Like a few others, my first thought was Samoans (and perhaps other PI subgroups). I believe they’re more overrepresented in the NFL than Kenyans are in distance running. Keep in mind, there are relatively few Samoans on the planet. Sure, with a world-wide population in the hundreds of millions, Norther Europeans may produce more strongmen. But imagine if there were 200 million Samoans on the planet.
My unique upbringing brought me in close contact with the Samoan community in South Seattle. Around the same time, I also spent a year at an all-White high school in a small town that was predominantly Scandinavian. If you compare the median Samoan to the median Scandinavian there is simply no doubt that the Samoans are much bigger (accounting for girth/bone size), stronger and faster. Height is pretty equivalent, but that’s it. I remember staring at their knees, wrists, and fingers. I couldn’t believe how thick their bones were! Their downfall, of course, is obesity and diabetes. But get them back to their natural diet and bring them up in a developed country, and I don’t see a physically stronger race anywhere. It’s not even close.
Go travel a little bit, to La Habana , Mexico , Spain , at least go to Miami , San Antonio , Los Angeles …….. one learns a lot travelling ….. and watch less Hollywood and TV .
( Hollywood can make Banderas black, mestizo , apache , nordic , chinese or in stripes )
Interesting. The current view is that Ashkenazis are roughly 35-40% ancient Roman, with the mixing between the Levantine and Roman founding populations occurring soon after the Roman exile (70 AD). For being about 40% Levantine, Askenazis produce a suprising amount of people with blonde hair and/or blue eyes. (My full Ashkenazi wife has very Levantine features, dark hair but blue eyes).
2,000 years ago the entire Mediterranean probably looked different, racially, than it does today. Many indigenous Levantine groups are quite fair (Google image “Sofi Tsedaka”). We even know from DNA studies of mummies that the ancient Egyptians were less Black than the modern Egyptians and were basically a Semitic people.
The Mongols were probably just drinking their fermented mares milk.
I live overseas and have for nearly 20 years.
I’ve never been to Mexico since living in Arizona and being exposed to Cholos there. I despise Mestizos.
I’ve been to the “dry Spain”. Madrid and Al Hambra.
You could not PAY me to spend time in Latin America. Thx.
ANONYMOUS
Grew up around German-American Jews and agree about the Italian-Winkler, Caan made their name playing Italian Guidos.
But there is something vaguely Eurasian about Lithuanian and Russian Jews like Barr and Nimoy.
In my opinion Polish Jews like Keitel look the most Slavic.
What’s wrong with Costa Rica or Panama? Beautiful countries with nice friendly ‘Mestisoz’. There they’re called ‘Ticos’, a nice mixture of the races. Mexicans are good people too, I’m a ‘white’ who lives and works with many of them in Arizona. I miss Gustavo Arellano’s blog ‘Ask a Mexican’ at this site. It was quite funny and enlightening too.
Your experience in Phoenix is unique, then.
Not every Hispanic is a bad person, of course.
But I had enough experiences with Cholos to want to avoid Latin America.
As I understand it, 23andMe (and similar tests) only try to determine where your ancestors were about 500 years ago. For example, 23andMe doesn’t break down the component parts that make up Askenazi Jews (Ancient Roman, Levantine, and Central/Eastern European).
Several years ago I saw a study that claimed that Southern Europeans, including Spanish, Italians, and Askenazi Jews, have a very small proportion (2-4%?) of African admixture that isn’t present in Northern Europeans. The highest admixture was in Portugal (6-8%?). I also saw another source that claimed that, in Spain, the admixture was only in the southern and western regions and wasn’t present elsewhere. I’m no expert in this field, so please chime in if you have any up-to-date or accurate sources.
Even assuming a tiny bit of Moorish admixture, I would still consider Southern Italians to be “White” and also European. People obviously disagree on who’s White, but pretty much everyone includes Italians (I didn’t read the Daily Stormer). I think the Caucasus and Asia Minor is where it starts to get blurry for most, which is why many don’t consider Jews to be really “White”. Despite being half Ashkenazi I just don’t care if we’re White or not. There’re more pressing matters than dwelling on the gray areas of “White”. Like the fact that Western Civilization is being invaded (by people who are very far from White) and will likely be destroyed within a few generations…but I digress.
Sometimes, the old wisdom, that many of our parents taught us when growing up seems to be lost by commenters (and writers too) at the UNZ Review. It went something like this:
I still think that it holds true today.
MR HACK
Sir
Why would you be on this site if this is your position?
The current thinking has Ashkenazis at 35-40% Roman, 35-40% Levantine and the rest Central or Eastern European though recent studies I’ve come across has the remaining admixture as primarily Eastern European (numbers vary widely by researcher). So your observations make perfect sense. I just Google imaged a young Harvey Keitel and he looks like one of my Jewish cousins. Nimoy actually looked somewhat Levantine. In the first photo below he could almost pass for a light-skinned Palestinian:
https://monstermoviekid.wordpress.com/2015/03/25/a-tribute-to-leonard-nimoy-baffled-1973/
“this assessment wasn’t backed up by statistical evidence”
Turchin definitely didn’t originate this meme, I recall reading the exact same words many years ago – I think in ‘I, Claudius’. I had the impression Tacitus had said it, but perhaps it’s a modern trope.
Many parts of the Latin American world, including Mexico, are extremely unsafe, at least judging by homicide rates. Other parts (generally fewer and farther between) are the reverse.
Hispano-Americans on the other hand seem to be not much more criminal than non-hispanic whites, except for things like drunk driving, so I would guess much of the problem in Latin America is with a dysfunctional and corrupt political culture. But if you’ve run into Mexican gangs I can see how that would give one a very dim view of Mexicans in general.
Napoleon famously said it of Mamelukes and Frenchmen.
Samoans and other Pacific Islanders are a varying mixture of the early Austronesian expansion (Filipinos/Malays et al) and the indigenous Austroloid populations (think black-skinned Australian Aborigines). Some populations look more Malay while others look more Austroloid. Australoids are, of course, much darker, have curly hair, large brow ridges, and facial hair. Malays/Filipinos are a subgroup of Southeast Asians and look more or less like other SE Asians (straight hair, no facial hair, etc). (Note their language family is Austronesian – same as Malays, Filipinos et al)
There are a lot of theories for why they got so big and strong. Mixing two distant populations (Malays and Australoids) added some genetic variation to aid evolutionary change. One theory is that sailing across the Pacific required immense upper body strength. It’s also interesting that animals confined to Islands often exhibit either gigantism or dwarfism. If I recall correctly, there are natives on Islands around the Philippines that are pygmy-like. So human populations in the Pacific have gone in both directions, size wise. Their stocky build could also be a partial adaption to cold since you’d be very exposed sailing thousands of miles across the Pacific Ocean in those little boats. When you’re soaking wet and sailing you can get pretty cold, even in the tropics.
There’s a certain type of Russian/Lithuanian Jew like Barr or Seagal or Bronson that looks Eurasian.
Keitel and other Polish Jews look 100% Slavic to me and I suspect that when the King of Poland invited the Jews there were conversions among the local populace to some degree. Like Keitel they tend to have snub noses, Slavic wide cheekbones, muscular builds.
As for German-Jews, this makes sense. They look Italian and play Italians in films. Winkler, Caan etc.
Why shouldn’t I be? Is there a requirement that everybody needs to think alike and respond accordingly? I enjoy a lot of the topics discussed here, especially those that touch on my ancestral homeland. BTW, I follow several blogs at the UNZ review, not just Karlin’s.
Is there something about parental common wisdom that you don’t ascribe to?
I worked in Central Philippines-Cebu-and you’d be surprised at the degree of Sephardic in the upper-class Mestizo Filipino families from the Spanish colonial era. Many settled there.
Average Filipino is something like 8% Hispanic via galleon trade. Mexican is common as well.
Also, more Filipinos are likely to be Chinese-blooded.
If you have ever been to Malaysia and then go to Philippines (I did on a visa run) you’ll observe the difference that this admixture makes.
There is a streak of cruelty in Aztec Mestizos and a lack of moral sense a mile wide.
You’re generalizing. Compare Costa Rica with Mexico? BTW, I was in Mexico city a couple of years ago, and had some time to kill and was ‘brave’ enough to take the subway from the central airport (several blocks away to the entrance of the subway) to the fabulous Museo Nacional de Antropología, and had a wonderful experience. This side trip involved a lot of walking around, and I ‘m not fluent in Spanish, I had a great time and only wished that I could have stayed a few extra days. This is not to say that I would have made the same trip at night, or to other rougher neighborhoods. As in all things, you need to use your head and be careful. What about all of the hundreds of white vacationers visiting mostly white Las Vegas last year? When your number’s up, it’s up – make sure your at peace with the Lord and you’ll do fine, no matter what’s in store for you (living like Howard Hughes doesn’t interest me).
Hispano-Americans are not Indians. They are Canary Islanders or Andalusian in the main. If you saw one in New Jersey, you’d just assume they were Sicilian-Americans.
The Mestizos you want to watch out for are the Aztecs.
They are mean bastards.
Yes, of course I’m generalizing, that’s something people do.
Mexico City can be great if you’re careful, you’re much more likely as a tourist to get sick than murdered.
Btw, Las Vegas is now less than half non-hispanic white.
We know you are an expert on this because you go to the movies and see how strong black guys are. They always win the fight, don’t they1
Contrary to popular belief, Charles Bronson wasn’t jewish. http://www.jewornotjew.com/profile.jsp?ID=461
I don’t doubt for one moment the ‘browning’ patterns of Las Vegas. The fact remains that the perpetrator of the massacre and a large percentage of the fallen were whites. The type of music festival that was used as the staging grounds for this horrendous crime was a ‘country music’ one, that tends to draw more of a white crowd.
White women being stronger than Indian men… in which world? Are we talking about motorcycle riding, beer guzzling by the barrel, picking fights in the dive bars, pot bellied pig like, should have been born a man but stuck with too big tits to be of any good use to a real man, always wanted to be a veterinarian when grew up, butchy dykes? Get the fuck outta here!
A negro always has an advantage over any other race (except maybe australian aboriginals) in skull thickness. His smaller brain and thicker skull can take more punishment than any other race. If a white boxer is going to beat negroes, he needs to know their weak points and take full advantage of them.
We Sikhs will always win in wrestling over anyone else because we don’t bathe for months before a fight and always win because our opponents usually die from olifactory overload.
Interesting. Obviously there’re some things you just can’t glean from Wikipedia. As I understand there’s a strong Chinese presence in both countries, especially among the elites.
Correct, there are weight groups in boxing because a good, big guy will always dominate a good, small guy. So to make fights more even there are weight groups, this is the case even with MMA / UFC. The Klitschko’s were always just average, very big guys who were able to better the good, smaller guys and they made boxing boring in the process.
Heavy weight boxing should also have weigh limits to prevent the useless, skill-less giants from dominating the smaller guys. Mike Tyson was best at 95kg, he always struggled against the bigger blokes. Should have heavy weight, super heavy weight, super super heavy weight categories, etc.
If you take 100 average blacks guys and train them up and take 100 average white guys and train them up the 100 blacks guys would always win in adverse conditions due to superior genetics (more explosive, higher bone density, etc). Icelanders might be strong but I haven’t seen a white guy in the hundred meter Olympic final for a long time.
In the video the smaller guy with weaker grip strength murdered the bigger guy with stronger grip strength. Its just down to training and conditioning. If the bigger guy had just 1 month’s MMA training he would have broken the smaller guy in half. Conditioning can make small guys hard and strong, just like those Dagestan MMA fighters, it helps to be Muslim and not to drink and just train all the time, but anyone can be trained up in a few months to be able to give a good account of themselves.
I recall reading that the Roman gladiators invariably carried some extra weight around the stomach region because a skilled, heavier gladiator was a better gladiator.
In the Central Philippines there are a few old Sephardic families notable for the oldest businesses in the country. Legapsi, Pilias.
If you go to Cebu City, the NAMES of the streets are Sephardic Jewish. They migrated there under the Spanish Crown.
The Chinese are new-money elites.
23 and me analyze spit and send you back some boilerplate generalizations about your ancestry. They aren’t an authority on anything!
Italian-Americans have given them a run for their money in boxing and field sports like baseball.
Truth is, pleasure’s all mine, Mishra.
Too bad we can’t start topics here, only threadja . . . er, redirect existing ones. I would have liked to get into cool discussions with others interested in related subjects. Oh well.
Just please, no hackneyed stereotypes about this or that “fact” or whatnot. Man, stereotyping’s GOT to be one of the more exasperating aspects of online discourse.
Kind of looks like Boris Johnson.
I don’t believe anyone knows whether it had crossed Paddock’s mind that most of his victims would be white. He left behind no manifesto or other writings and there’s no evidence that he had any interest in racial matters.
The Africans have had no influence on the development of anything in the anglo world except destroying anything of value.
I am not a Russian neither, but I really, really! Admire Mr. Putin,
“The great Putin, Kicking ass, and taking names since 2000 A.D.”
No wonder He does not like Sodomites, i.e. Ukrainians!
I have seeing videos of Ukrainians fighting the New Russians, and got their rear kicked hard. So don’t give me this Ukrainian toughness.
Shake hands with an Amish dairy farmer who milks 8 to 10 cows morning and night seven days a week 365 days a year. Then you will experience grip strength.
The (Physical) Strength of Nations
Basically anybody can increase their physical strength and mental ability independent of age and race.
Try using a good quality Cross Machine at higher resistance for 2km each day, and check the effect after 1 month. There’s a mental and physical improvement guaranteed especially eating anti-oxidant fruit in the next 15 minutes (e.g. 3-4 oranges).
MMA attracts lowbrow viewers with limited mental faculties and should not be spoken about on intelligent forums.
Actually not. Vietnamese routed American civilians and politicians. US Army crushed everything North sent to battlefield.
If Italians means mainland Italians, it’s largely correct to say that they didn’t get much in the way of Arab genes.
But as I’m sure you know, that’s not the case in Sicily (pop. 5 million) and Malta (pop. under 400,000), where most people have substantial Arab genetic contribution.
Very interesting, except that it doesn’t make sense to treat “Hispanics” as a separate group from “Caucasians.” Hispanics come in different races and every skin color, including white European.
A typical Hispanic in the USA is half or more non-white, as is a typical Hispanic in the entire world outside Spain (small population).
I’m inclined to agree.
You need not just strength, but moral strength (which we don’t have). And not just political unity (which we don’t have) but unity of purpose (which we also don’t have).
High IQ in moderation is a strength. A society needs a very small number of high IQ highly educated people. Maybe one or two percent of the population.
But for most people high IQ is a weakness, and for a society a large number of high IQ highly educated people is a very major weakness.
A university education is necessary for a tiny proportion of the male population. It’s not necessary for any of the female population. If you want to Make America (or any other nation) Great Again the first step is to start shutting down universities.
No myth, fact. Again see Madison Grant.
Germanics also sacked Rome under a Hunnic multiculture, extracting much tribute from the Romans.
“US Army crushed everything North sent to battlefield.”
Well … maybe not so much… here’s a tally of U.S. battles lost…
http://www.g2mil.com/lost_vietnam.htm
He did not have any victims since he was shot in the head with a .38spl. Someone fired for multiple minutes on end with an M240 firing at 600rpm though. No bump stock outfitted AR15 can do that. There were no empty 30rd. magazines on the floor in the photographs. But, in US-made movies with gun fights, no one ever has to change magazines. The overwhelming majority of Americans don’t know the difference anyway.
I recall learning from Gurkha officers that Nepalese recruits, to be accepted into British Gurkha regiments, had to walk 200 miles and pass physical tests that native British recruits would pass after 18 months training. Possibly not such high standards for the Indian Gurkha regiments where the pay was less.
Why did the US not have anything to show for their crushing victories after 10 years?
They only held the ground they had surrounded with razor wire and machine gun nests and nothing more.
Pre-genetics and so esentially worthless
Karlin is at his controversial entertaining best as usual.
Winning martial and athletic wars are just questions of which had the superior technical training systems.
A billion indians focused with the moneyed training and diet of michael phelps can certainly produce a thousand athletes who can beat the shit out of him. Indians cant beat phelps because less than a thousand indians, mostly non athletes, are ever interested in olympic swimming.
Icelanders love strength competitions and football, so they are good at it. Karlin should have watched super athletic africans like nigerians easily demolish the icemen. If einstein was more interested in blowjobs like clinton, he would have gone nowhere in physics, and would have serviced half a billion indians instead. Interest and discipline are far more essential than strength as initial conditions.
Karlin foists a lot of useless factoids that, nonetheless are as entertaining as brewed coffee in the morning. His travel notes are very good. His occasional goofy and illogical treatises like this is still better to monitor than the american and israeli efforts to ruin and rule the world.
I have never been in Scandinavia, however I visited Hamburg some years ago. It was noticeable that the people there were tall and well-built. In particular I noticed quite a few tall strapping young women, a few approaching 6 feet tall.
Back In Heathrow, it was noticeable that native British people there were of smaller stature.
You have to take into consideration that the native Britons are more similar to Basque than to Germans.
That’s a fascinating fact about the mid-philippines, entirely new to me. About the Chinese, not for nothing have they been called “The Jews of Asia”.
You can add many names to that list — from Edward G Robinson (Emanuel Goldenberg) playing Italian gangsters all the way to Jason Alexander (Jay Greenspan) playing the slimy, nebbishy George Costanza.. And who played his parents?
Philippines has the curse of Latin America-a Mestizo landowning elite-AND Indonesia’s Chinese market dominant minority.
Worse yet, the Chinese decided to start making crystal meth in the Philippines in the early 80’s, leading to the drug war today. The manufacturers and distributors of Shabu are all Chinese.
Cebu was always heavily Spanish. This is why the Filipinos have Spanish names though they are more likely to have Mexican blood than Spanish. Some Aztec loan words found their way into the Cebuano dialect.
Italians often play Jews-De Niro, Pacino, Michael (He’s a N***er!) Richards from Seinfeld.
If you look at East Coast organized crime the families often have Jewish associates within Italian-American crime families.
Obviously the relationship between Italians and Jews goes back to ancient times.
But if look at how Germans and British and Swedes associate. We’re like cousins. So are the Greeks, Sicilians and Jews.
Seinfeld was the height of NY Jewishness. Costanza was a Jew playing an Italian acting like a Jew. He was as far from being ‘Italian’ as Kim Il Song.
Michael Richards is a JOO!
His father was Irish-American and his mother was an Italian immigrant.
You are right. But I think he married a Jew so he’s one by injection. lol
But going back to the show that was a Jew project all the way, from Seinfeld to Larry David to Alexander and the rest.
Most US television is a Jewish project but no Jew would scream “he’s a n>>>er!” to the audience.
Yes, that was a moment. (Grin)
Dirty muslim who only bathes before Friday prayers, Sikhi requires multiple baths per day
Some have questioned the importance of gtip strength.
It can be very important.
Imagine you’re a soldier on the march across the Steppe. You’re surrounded by hot,sweaty dirty men. You lay down at night under the stars and you’re thoughts turn naturally to home and your girlfriend, Suzy Slutnick.
You think about the things you did…and well lets just say grip strength comes in handy.
Sounds about right. South asians are the weakest by far especially northern indians.
“In particular, there is accumulating evidence that South Asians may have a ‘low fitness’ phenotype which contributes to their elevated cardio-metabolic risk, and thus may particularly benefit from undertaking higher levels of physical activity [14]”
Should Physical Activity Recommendations for South Asian Adults Be Ethnicity-Specific? Evidence from a Cross-Sectional Study of South Asian and White European Men and Women
Stamatina Iliodromiti, Nazim Ghouri, Carlos A. Celis-Morales, Naveed Sattar, Mary Ann Lumsden, and Jason M. R. Gill1
“In South Asians, a unique obesity phenotype of high abdominal fat is associated with increased cardiovascular risk”
The association between cardiorespiratory fitness and abdominal adiposity in postmenopausal, physically inactive South Asian women.
Lesser, Dick, Guenette, Hoogbruin , Mackey , Singer, Lear.
At any given body fat mass value, South Asians had significantly less lean mass than each of the three other groups after adjustment for age, height, humerus breadth, smoking status, physical activity, and diet. Aboriginal, Chinese, and European men had 3.42 kg [95% confidence interval (CI) = 1.55–5.29], 3.01 kg (95% CI = 1.33–4.70), and 3.57 kg (95% CI = 1.82–5.33) more lean mass than South Asian men at a given total fat mass, respectively”
Ethnic Variation in Fat and Lean Body Mass and the Association with Insulin Resistance
Scott A. Lear Simi Kohli Gregory P. Bondy André Tchernof Allan D. Sniderman
The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, Volume 94, Issue 12, 1 December 2009, Pages 4696–4702
The russians would kalashnikov the parasit uncivilized and treacherous dagestanis
Jaakko Raipala
the finns never amounted to anything in the history of mankind , too few people in a cold remote part of the world , speaking a very strange and useless language who have always been servants of their neighbours , of the swedes , of the russians …. and of the nazis , nazi finns participated under the swastika in the genocidal siege of Leningrad , shame on you .
And you dream with the ” great finland ” ? hahahahha , wanker ,beware of you imperialistic fantasies so that you don´t end up blown up by the russian missiles ,
I have never seen anything so stupid like these small , irrelevant good for nothing little pseudonations such as finland and the baltics possesed by delusions of grandeur . Ridiculous .
And then there were the Romans…
One problem:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2933725/
here, the sample for African Americans is taken from Boston Metropolitan Area. But it could be wrong to extrapolate these results to all Sub-Saharan African race, since African Americans have ~20% of white European ancestry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_Americans#Genetics
And yet at the end they destroyed Viet Cong as an effective force (also as a local Southern Vietnam initiative) and send Northern Vietnamese packing during Tet Offensive.
And linked list is full of padding, serious battles and minor skirmishes together?
I will be magnanimous and say that is my fault for using the word “everything”. Lets say the US Army dominated strategically and tactically (for the most part).
I still have working Nokia in a drawer somewhere. I wonder if I could start throwing it in trolls?
And you believe this?
Hitting the guy when he’s already unconscious on the ground was vile. Fuck that guy.
More than vile. More like deliberate murder it seems to me.
Yep, and the North Vietnamese still won the war. I don’t think Americans will ever figure out how that happened.
Absolutely. A Jew would never have had an outburst onstage like that.
Also, the black heckler referred to him as a “cracker”. This is not the insult that blacks assign Jews.
It is not unknown for non-Jews to play Jews in Hollywood films. Especially Italians or half-Italians like Richards, De Niro, Pacino etc.
Bronson was Lipka Tatar, hence Eurasian appearance:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lipka_Tatars
It helps if you think about this way: US Army was victorious. It was regular, TV-watching Americans that were defeated. Naturally civilians didn’t like this, blamed the Army and went insane.
Contemporary America is the result.
Armed Forces don’t make war, ultimately. Tribal raiders, gangs, insurgents, warriors, soldiers, armies – these all FIGHT wars, they don’t WAGE war as a whole.
WAGING WAR is all about entire groups – whether whole clans, tribes, kingdoms – or modern nation-states. It’s about MUCH more than combat and violence – it involves will, wealth, and intellect, or in modern terms civilian morale, economic power and national leadership.
“War is an affair of the STATE” – a quote from an ancient commander.
Your army can lose on the battlefield, but still fulfill its real purpose, which is serving your country, by helping your country to get what it wants. And if your country gets what it wants and frustrates the enemy, you WIN. Simple as that.
America won on the battlefields – more territory taken, more kills, more military “success”. But the much weaker Vietnamese Army helped their people win the war itself.
Yep Truth brings out a good point, as much as I like wikipedia, who knows what’s true or bogus in that site.
Really? Roseanne Barr did it on the internet, but she did it. That Jeff is a ‘bigoted’ remark. lol
Pacino is Italian, all Sicilian I believe.
It’s interesting to observe his career path and how doubting people like me can be critical or sarcastic, and I was a big Pacino rooter when I was young. But it’s curious that he wins a Tony award for an obscure play with a sexy title ‘The Tiger Wears a Neck Tie’ as ‘The Godfather’s’ groundwork is being laid for it being made into a motion picture (w/Brando). Things don’t just happen…just sayin‘. (Grin)
“The first rule of fight club…”
A Jewish “actor” would, because, well, that’s his job.
Don’t believe it. That was a spur of the moment outburst and Seinfeld and the rest of them dropped him like a hot potato. Wasn’t in the script.
Barr is different. She probably pulled that as a publicity stint.
Indian athletes win big at World Dwarf Games, bag 37 medals
https://www.hindustantimes.com/rf/image_size_960x540/HT/p2/2017/08/16/Pictures/_4a7f45c0-826a-11e7-929c-3545fa1ac73c.jpg
#it’salltheatre.
Any info on Native Americans? Anecdotally they would seem to be higher than Europeans. They’re the only race with higher proportion representation in the US Special Forces than whites. They’re also known for producing some incredible athletes, like Jim Thorpe.
I don’t have a dog in this fight, but I will note that the one athletic quality where women outperform men is in “fatigue resistance”. It appears that at ultra-long distance running, the average women probably has higher capacity than the average man. Whether that translates into having better psychological resolve as a soldier is an open question.
https://www.unm.edu/~lkravitz/Article%20folder/fatigueUNM.html
That’s adorable – good for them!
Had no idea there were a dwarf olympics!
Peace.
Endurance without some minimal strength is useless for soldiers, because they have to carry their weapons and ammunition. Only the very strongest of women are capable of that, whereas it’s possible for the average guy. So for males you only need to cut off the leftmost part of the bell curve, while for women it’ll be the rightmost side of their bell. This means that while the majority of guys will be comfortably above the minimum, the majority of female soldiers will be just barely above the minimum requirements. I.e. not only will be there less women, but even they will be on average worse than guys.
Then female psychology will be the absolute deal breaker.
True story…back when I was an engineering undergrad there was this guy who was always walking around campus with this huge briefcase…he seemed definitely ‘older’ than average and seemed friendly enough, often engaging in discussions with random students lolling about on the leafy grounds…
I learned that he was supposedly a doctoral candidate in some field related to medicine…I found him to be rather talkative and friendly…but little of what he said about his ‘research’ made any sense…everyone I knew who had talked to him had the same impression…and everyone was very curious about what was actually in that huge briefcase [more like suitcase size]
As luck would have it…one day he told me that he was looking for a new place to stay…I told him to drop by the apartment I was sharing with two other fellows, as we were actually looking for a fourth roommate…
Well…he moved in and all three of us were just bursting with curiosity about finally getting a look at the contents of that briefcase…one evening we were all sitting around and we talked him into letting us have a look at his secretive ‘data’…
Each of us got a handful of pages and started looking through it, while the ‘wizard’ [as he was informally known on campus] talked us through the ‘research’ we were looking at…
It was amazing…the ‘data’ we were staring at was just a complete mishmash of completely random tables, charts, graphs and figures that had no rhyme or reason…and certainly no connection with one another…I mean it was just insane…this man was clearly bonkers…living in a world of his own…
The questions from the three of us started flying fast and furious and his ‘explanations’ were just complete gibberish…finally one guy just exploded in uncontrollable laughter…which was the trigger for me and the other guy…both of us exploding a split second later…
I never laughed like that in my life, before or since…it was actually starting to hurt…I wanted to stop because the look on this poor guy’s face made me feel so sorry, but I just couldn’t stop…neither could the other two…
We learned later that this guy wasn’t actually enrolled in any course and had nothing to do with any PhD…in fact he was an outpatient at the university hospital mental health center…
Now I know what happened to this guy…he has turned into a blogger going by the name Anatoly Karlin…
Hey Wiz…glad to see you are still kicking…hope the ‘research’ is coming along well…
The Byzantine and Sassanian empires had been ravaged by plague and warfare. The Arabs ca. 650 found two demographically drained empires and filled the vacuum.