Would you mind elaborating? I don't really remember doing that and this may be a case where I implied something accidentally. Related to the below?
The one that I had in mind when I wrote that is specifically this paragraph from chapter 6:
(Oh and hopefully, down the road, no one in the host society gets the bright idea of appropriating economic surplus from the honest, productive people to give extra resources to the dishonest ones such that they can have a lot more kids than they’d otherwise be able to support, thinking this might fix the problem. Can you imagine?)
I don't think you've demonstrated that the struggle of divergent prototribes to assimilate in IIRC the bronze age directly maps to what can't be read as anything other than a criticism of modern welfare states.
also,
Who has harder control of his women than the Emperor? Yet he's also the guy deploying eunuchs to manage them.
The Emperor can't be anywhere at once, and you can't uncuck yourself, only avenge the humiliation. I'd be willing to bet that in pre-Confucian Chinese states with both large Imperial harems and absolute proprietorial control of commoner women in monogamous marriages with their husbands, the commoners actually had much lower rates of infidelity simply because they could actually keep an eye on/meaningfully restrict their women, and also for the reason if anyone fucks any of your 5000 wives you're technically a cuckold but it's rather disingenuous to say it's exactly the same for obvious 'per capita' reasons
Garfielf
6d ago
Yes, yes, we're all snowy white big-brained men on here (except those of us who aren't).
I'm pretty much pure "Mediterranean man" according to the poetry you quoted above, and I neither claim to be a Nordic ubermensch nor prostrate myself to my Aryan betters (the current state of the Nordic lands is, I think, strong evidence against any claims of unblemished superiority). Nevertheless, I lost to the urge to sneer at your comment that was, itself, pretty much 100% sneering.
Swear to God, I never thought I'd be fighting for the conservative viewpoint of not being a total pain in the behind, yet here I am.
And what are you doing to uphold this standard in particular? Above, you actually challenged a factual assertion from the story about hearth-worship being patrifocal. That's fantastic! However, you also felt the need to leave a whole separate comment (and not your first on this series) just moralistically jeering.
As a matter of fact, I don't agree with all the factual assertions and implications of this series. Off the top of my head, two big problems I have with it are that while the author literally once said offhandedly something to the effect of "of course all women aren't cynical whores," he doesn't address at all societies which practice 'hard' arranged marriages, which would mean women have pretty much no say at all in their mates, and we would expect to lessen, or at least change the form male peacocking takes, as well as cease to force women through a hypergamous darwinian selection process. In addition, I find his insinuations his fairly convincing view of how stone-age tribes slugged it out explain modern racial politics pretty risible. By the time of the last serious elite-supported defense of pure hereditary elitism - De Gobineau's age - the claims European Elite Human Capital represented nearly pureblooded Aryans ruling over potato people peasants were completely false. Warfare had simply gotten too lethal by the Middle Ages, to the point nearly all European nobility represented former commoners raised to knighthood and eventually higher rank to replace some Aryan conqueror unceremoniously stuck through with an Ottoman crossbow bolt or whatever.
Nevertheless, you don't see me here in the comments doing a "dumb racist uncle at thanksgiving" impression.
Garfielf
7d ago
Of course, your insinuation, that the conclusions OP have drawn must be factually incorrect because you find them morally abhorrent, is spot on.
While in the past anthropologists were forced to wrestle with the hate fact that a few ethnic groups have completely dominated huge swaths of the planet's surface in its brief recorded history, with today's wisdom we now know this was purely due to economic and climatic factors - it is very fortunate and convenient that the varied economic and climatic conditions of the many countries the Indo-Aryans dominated, for example, simply happened to favor them every time. In fact, such outdated terminology is already giving way to more factual and less inflammatory terminology. Soon anthropologists will be able to speak of the Indo-Socioeconomic Migrations rather than uncouth "Aryan" conquests.
Garfielf
10d ago
Noahides are not "bad" from a Jewish perspective at all. Virtuous pagans were fundamentally good people (whose deaths should be mourned) unable to know the truth of Christ. They were not 'less bad'. (IDK about marxists though)
Garfielf
10d ago
Christians acknowledge there were "virtuous pagans", Jews acknowledge gentiles who lived righteously. Even Marxists developed the concept of someone in the past being "historically progressive."
Garfielf
10d ago
What an utterly fascinating worldview. If that's the case, perhaps you should use your eminently correct modern values to triangulate when the first good person in the world was born, so we can know the first funeral it was moral to shed tears at.
Garfielf
10d ago
So then you believe that, in round terms, 100% of Christians and Jews (and Europeans more generally) who lived before the 1860s, when buggery started being bumped down from being a capital crime, were bad people, and none of the deaths of anyone who fought in any European war, or was murdered in Christendom before then, was sad?
Garfielf
10d ago
I can't speak for Jews, but for observant Christians (such as Charlie Kirk), they believe Jesus Christ deliberately gave requirements for carrying out stoning that are impossible (anyone throwing a stone must be without sin) and therefore they are not supposed to stone anyone, homosexual or otherwise - though men having sex with men remains sexually immoral.
Garfielf
10d ago
For the purposes of this argument, let's define observant as being, at minimum, people who believe the Old Testament is the revealed word of God, and that God, being perfect, has not made mistakes. Do you think anyone unwilling to say that God made a mistake in the Book of Leviticus is a bad person, undeserving of sympathy if they are murdered? And as I asked above, do you think such Jews and Christians therefore and necessarily want to go out and stone homosexuals?
Garfielf
10d ago
Do you think that all observant Christians and Jews in the world (the latter, unlike Christians, I remind you, think the entire Law of Moses remains binding) believe in going out and stoning homosexuals right now, and are therefore terrible people?
Garfielf
16d ago
Simple: all the pseudoscientific and pseudoreligious reasons for a society based on the sexual revolution have been shown to be even faker.
Garfielf
16d ago
The principal difference between the 1890s woman and the 21st century man is that the 1890s woman was legally defenseless against abuse from her husband, while the more fortunate 21st century man is merely legally defenseless against career criminals, mentally ill violent strangers on public transportation, police officers, his boss, every woman who works in his HR department, his wife, and rioters who have the correct politics.
Garfielf
1mo ago
Progressives already do that, and have loudly proclaimed for years it is OK to do. So I will not be upset because it is expected behavior from them.
Garfielf
5mo ago
or Satan
There's a famous bit in "A Man For All Seasons" where the main character explains why he wouldn't engage in lawless violence against the Devil, so there are well-articulated perspectives where calling someone Satan isn't endorsing violence.
Garfielf
7mo ago
Incredibly, just after I read this I saw a tweet with 200 likes chastising fellow left-genre-fiction-tuber ManCarryingThing for his apology just... saying this out loud.
Garfielf
1yr ago
He said "my church refers to God as the Heavenly Father most times", which is both a factually accurate statement and hardly hiding the fact that he's mormon to anyone who's moderately familiar with it. That is not "hiding" his mormonism, unless you think online mormons should preface discussion of their religion with "My church (THE KOOKY HERETICAL MORMON CULT, WE'RE NOT NORMAL CHRISTIANS) calls God Heavenly Father"
Garfielf
1yr ago
I don't think by 2300 we'll all be Amish. I do think that by 2300 there will be practically no seventh-generation secular humanists, though.
Garfielf
1yr ago
That the groups that dropped religion are in the process of dying out, through hilariously low birthrates.
Garfielf
1yr ago
I hate to oppose a good blackpill, but as far as I can tell, the Rule of St. Benefict remains the entirety of SQLite's Code of Ethics. https://sqlite.org/codeofethics.html
Garfielf
1yr ago
if Christianity will continue bleeding to death.
A bit parochial - Christianity is in decline in affluent countries but continues to expand in Africa and Asia, often accompanied by what most in those affluent countries would consider bizarre superstition far more fantastical than motivated reasoning against carbon dating.
Garfielf
1yr ago
Can you tell me more about this? Googling it just brings up links to legalese on government websites.
Garfielf
1yr ago
Does this mean eventually Ukraine will elect a Nayyiyyb Bukyyeyyle, who will rocket their safety and standards of living upwards through a revolutionary policy of incarcerating criminals?
Garfielf
1yr ago
The FBI? Who work for the president? Whose director is appointed by the president? Who's going to order them to do that?
This gets into the coordination problem again - even if every bureaucrat to a man was a diehard technocrat, if all the bigwigs who give orders according to their technocratic rules are not organizing resistance to the President because those same bigwigs are appointed by him, there's no one with the authority to actually kick off the great #Resistance Coup, even if they'd like to.
Even if they're all fanatics, Joe TrustTheScience, non-ranking FBI agent, can't just declare "I am now the Anti-President, all Experts rally to me!" and then the two million other fanatics who have never heard of him swear feudal homage to him on the spot.
Compare how the Soviet coup attempt in 1991 fell apart. The new junta tried to establish themselves as the new authority on the strength of their communist bona fides, but because communism was all about Party Discipline and Obeying the Great Comrade, military units in Leningrad didn't listen to them because nowhere in the Communist Party Bylaws does it say a coalition of losers and has-beens can become the new dictatorship if they feel like it.
To put it another way, maybe the two million experts can all agree they hate [Republican President], but I doubt they'd all agree on who should be [Unelected Democrat President].
Garfielf
1yr ago
You don't think Trump could find one Republican ICE supervisor willing to march on the EPA? One?
It seems like your big mental hurdle is this dogmatic assertion that a Republican president couldn't find even one DC cop to escort an uncooperative bureaucrat out of the office. It's true, if all federal employees are under a magickal gaesa which prevents them from percieving the President, his influence will be limited. But if (as I suspect is more true) the President could convince some dudes with guns from the most red agency he can find that Uncooperative Agency X are disobeying legitimate orders, then somebody is "coming", and now the near-minimum wage contractor mall cops at EPA headquarters have to decide whether they believe in the Invisible Dictatorship of the Experts enough to die for it, or if it might just be better to go home because men with bulletproof vests are shouting at them very angrily.
I think you're now selectively and dishonestly embracing the same kind of eugenic arguments you decry in the Mountain. The fact (many) Muslims' violent cultural rejection of some dysgenic aspects of modernity may help them thrive in our future does not have any bearing one way or the other on whether races that practiced barbarian warrior pastoralism dominated because of that in the past.
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