Guldrelokk
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User ID: 2669
Guldrelokk
11mo ago
As an individual, he was world-historically brilliant. The human condition, however, is not exhausted by exceptional individuals. The fact that France has repeatedly taken the wrong side of European history makes me glad he lost. Compare Germany, which was a consistent force for good (BRD GmbH being of course less German than Vichy France was French).
Basically, my litmus test is if someone is allowed to be mentioned in a neutral or positive context by the mainstream, he’s not the hero my people needs – not the Man against Time.
IMO it's futile to try and pronounce a definitive judgement of the man and his deeds when, as you noted, he's so distorted by controversy and propaganda.
He may have been controversial 200 years ago, but these days very few people care enough about those events to pass value judgements. Not even in France:
When it comes to how France should remember Napoleon, the most common response is “he should be marked as a notable historical figure in a neutral or balanced fashion”, at 49%. One in eight (13%) say he should be celebrated, while only 2% say he should be condemned – although a further 8% say he should not be remembered at all.
This is, of course, the natural course of historiography both popular and academic. Few care enough to pass strong value judgements even on more recent figures like Wilhelm II. It is only those events that have developed into Manichean foundation myths, such as the Civil War and World War II, which grow more black and white over time, and each generation is regarded as reprobate by the next one for being too nuanced.
Guldrelokk
11mo ago
Surely most of that (in the paper, I mean) is selection effects?
You are right. The interesting part is the difference between male-attracted vs. female-attracted TIMs. If you assume the former are about average, the AGPs would be like 1 SD above the mean, which would neatly explain their extreme overrepresentation in g-loaded activities.
Guldrelokk
11mo ago
Not just recently, but also hundreds of years ago.
Note that things quickly get murky in the past. People were not free to express their sexuality in those restrictive societies. Pederasty was extremely widespread in many parts of the world – most Persian love poetry is dedicated to boys – for the same reason it is common in Afghanistan. The overlap between Afghan boy lovers and would-be homosexuals is probably not that large.
Guldrelokk
11mo ago
Just like there is reason to believe that some ethnic groups are more intelligent than others on average, is it possible that some sexual orientations are more intelligent than others on average?
The elephant in the room is AGP intelligence. This is not exactly a sexual orientation, but may be somewhat related. One paper famously put the median at 122, which is actually completely believable.
This leads me to one of two conclusions:
- Representation doesn’t really matter. “Representation Matters” is something we hear quite often, but the revealed preference of advertisers for not casting white men in their ads shows they know it to be untrue. While they’re happy to parrot “Representation Matters,” they have all the actual data at their fingertips. White men buy trucks and big macs and technology, so if representation actually mattered, advertisers would include them in their ads.
- Representation does matter, but those making the decisions are so ideologically committed that they’re willing to hurt their own bottom line in order to “do the right thing.” They’re so committed to their ideals that they’re willing to depress their own effectiveness by more than 30%. And they do so with no guarantee that their rival agency is going to follow the same set of rules, potentially putting them out of business.
This assumes different groups are the same. White men have consistently demonstrated a willingness to put themselves in others’ shoes, to respect their interests and to make concessions to their weaknesses. They tend to dismiss kinship as a basis for solidarity outside of the immediate family, and if they are offended, it is often on behalf of Republicans, Christians or some other universalist identity and not Whites. They are certainly aware of the fact that women want and need to be coddled in a way men would find insulting towards themselves. They are not going to lose sleep over commercials pandering to the fairer sex.
It is simply very hard for White men to see themselves as victims and vice versa. The fact that this division survived the reevaluation of all values it strong evidence of its validity. There are dominant, hyperagent identities confident in their own strength and whimsical, narcissistic ones that derive power from victimhood. ‘Equality’ is a polite fiction that is neither possible nor appealing to any large group of people.
Guldrelokk
1yr ago
This seems to be an apples to oranges comparison. Feminism is not an ideology in the sense anarcho-capitalism, Stalinism or National Socialism is; it is a branch of identity politics which seeks to empower women relative to men. You don’t get radicalized into feminism, rather you always support the current form of feminism, which has indeed gotten progressively more radical as women’s emancipation marches forward. Some, such as Muslim women who support wife-beating, oppose feminism to the extent that they have internalized male authority, which has historically constrained women’s will to power. As for actual political ideologies, let alone radical ones, the common wisdom is that women have zero interest in them, which I see no reason to doubt.
By contrast, Christianity and other monotheistic religions push us forward to some sort of Progress, which as we have seen... can have its own issues.
I don’t understand how this interpretation can exist. Christianity is life-denying to the core: man is fallen, the world profane and corrupt, and the only refuge is the kingdom of heaven which only God can bring about. Accumulating wealth is frowned upon (you are supposed to give it to the Jews instead), celibacy is strongly encouraged (demanded in Luke, a Marcionite text), authority is not to be questioned. The Jewish God leads his people out of slavery, the Christian one tells them to be obedient and promises to rescue their souls after they work themselves to death. There is simply no way you can square this with the idea of progress, unless progress simply means converting people to Christianity, which is supposed to be the only thing that matters, and even then we are heading towards the Great Apostasy.
Accordingly, the traditional Christian view of history is that of decline, perhaps interspersed with divine interventions here and there. Muslims, likewise, are obligated to believe that each generation of mankind is worse than the previous one: the notion that one can know better than the Prophet is unthinkable.
A genealogical continuity between certain ideas in no way implies a logical connection, because logical consequence is not what they were selected for. Liberalism has shown itself to be self-sufficient, it doesn’t rely on dusky old religions to penetrate foreign populations. If you want a memeplex centered around progress, you should be completely satisfied with it.
Guldrelokk
1yr ago
The idea that Christianity is over was popular way back in antiquity with the Manichaeans, and as recently as the late 19th century with the beginning of modern science.
There were many forms of ‘Christianity’ in antiquity which were often diametrically opposed to each other in the most fundamental respects (as in monism vs. dualism, not later pilpul over the natures of Christ). Out of this multitude only one sect survived, whose claim to being the original is in no way supported by evidence, and it was by no means necessarily what ancient critics had in mind. Islam and liberalism are both closer to orthodox Christianity than Marcionism or Valentianism was, so that even if the professing Christian faith somehow vanished, you could use them to ‘prove’ its supposed tenacity.
The fact is that most modern churches would likely be judged heretical by people from just a few centuries ago, and vice versa to some extent. So it’s a ship of Theseus kind of thing.
Even Russia isn't claiming they want to exterminate Ukrainians (and indeed, that isn't their goal).
Russia is led by boomers who heavily promote (and probably earnestly believe in) something called druzhba narodov. This is a kind of lame civnat narrative similar to GOP’s fawning over baste blacks and LEGAL immigrants, i.e. people who are content with not totally disempowering the majority population. The Ukrainians/Kleinrussen are a brother people being liberated from ebil Banderite Nazis who hate puppies and sunshine. The enemy is ideological, he has, strictly speaking, no nationality, just like crime has no color. Like America, Russia too is an idea defined by a vague adherence to Eastern Orthodoxy, but also baste traditional Islam and who knows what else, loving Stalin and hating homosexuals. This is, for example, why the Ukrainian language remains official in Crimea and the new oblasts (not that this has any real consequences, but it does show the kind of picture Russia’s leadership is trying to paint).
By contrast, Ukrainians are much more realistic and an order of magnitude more bloodthirsty, to the point where mocking the idea that not all Russians deserve death has become a national pastime akin to mocking #notallmen. Their enemy is not Putinism, Tsarism or neo-Bolshevism or cleptocracy or authoritarianism or whatever; it is Russia, the ancestral enemy of Rus-Ukrainians. It is almost unimaginable that Russian will be allowed in any state capacity should Ukraine ever retake Crimea. There is nothing surprising about this: the slaves of Haiti were more bloodthirsty than their French masters, so were the Indians in North America, and so too are Palestinians. What master in his right mind wishes to kill off his slaves?
Guldrelokk
1yr ago
Ann Coulter infamously spoke for many Americans when she said after 9/11
Yet the meme from that era that survives to this day is the ‘religion of peace’ one. It seems it would be better to describe this as an emergency belief, a temporary unprincipled exception to the general notion of virtuous victimhood that reasserts itself as soon as passions die down.
Note also the WWII analogy: the myth she invokes is absolutely central to the current incarnation of slave morality. Hitler was an avatar of absolute evil precisely because of his blatant disregard of human rights and universalism. He oppressed the weak and powerless more than anyone ever had. This was so unspeakably, cosmologically evil that it easily excuses the unprecedented suffering inflicted upon the German population, the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of young Americans, becoming an accomplice in Stalin’s crimes etc. When Americans start comparing themselves to Hadrian instead, I’ll believe they’re getting uncucked.
The problem is that in this case, slave morality has been adopted and is being promoted by the dominant and technologically superior civilization. Wouldn’t that make it the pinnacle of human progress? Does your parochial tribe have any right not to embrace diversity and tolerance; does it even have the power for much longer? Especially since it was so intimately involved in the birth of these values (at the very least you acted as midwives).
It’s no coincidence that taking Churchill’s stance here on anything other than Palestine is unthinkable nowadays, nor is it really a good sign of things to come. Given enough time, generational loss of hypocrisy may well prevail over Holocaust guilt-mongering.
Guldrelokk
1yr ago
Yes, this will probably end with mass civilian casualties among the Palestinians of Gaza. Hamas maybe shouldn’t have started a genocidal war they were guaranteed to lose.
Love the passive voice.
Personal pet peeve: there is no passive voice in that sentence (guaranteed is clearly an adjective).
Guldrelokk
1yr ago
I think you underestimate the degree of hypocrisy religion involved traditionally. Not that there aren’t exceptions, there are always cults and monasteries for people with extreme propensity to self-sacrifice, but generally, wholeheartedly believing something is wrong and then doing it anyway it very easy and natural. Christianity even explicitly accounts for this with its concept of universal sin. The Christian utopia is not the shining city on a hill but the kingdom of heaven. And since the kingdom of heaven is supernatural and salvation is a gift of God, it’s even possible to be a complete antinomian without compromising on any of the metaphysical beliefs.
Moreover, is modern society less restrictive because it’s less supernaturalist or is it the other way around, or are the two developments unrelated? Seemingly anyone’s guess.
This didn't seem to be true until the modern era.
Before the modern era, Westerners had a utopian vision provided to them by their religion, and most of their intellectual life centered around that. Today’s leftism has a utopian vision that’s even better because it requires less suspension of disbelief, whereas conservatism has nothing. Maybe if the right fully embraced something like National Socialism, they would be more competitive.
Striving after a sublime ideal may not be a fundamental human trait, but it may be an upper-crust European trait. I shouldn’t need to explain the concept of different selection pressures here.
Guldrelokk
1yr ago
Such videos should (but we all know they won't) convince everyone that the side of peace and kindness and treating other human beings well and general "stuff westerners say they like" here is Israel, not Palestine. If you want peace in the Middle East, they are the ones you should be supporting. Sure they are discriminatory etc., but the alternative is not Nordic style welfare democracy, it's literal Hamas, and compared to them, Israel are the good guys.
Now apply this reasoning to Rhodesia, South Africa, Algeria, Chechnya… Could it be that your idea of what Westerners (certainly their rulers) like is wrong?
The moral superiority of non-Whites is a foundational principle of Western civilization at this point. The only reason Israel even gets away with thus much is because it’s only partially European.
Guldrelokk
1yr ago
Do you sanction Israel for what Azerbaijan just violently did with no provocation and at no cost, after naked Jewish women have been paraded, raped and murdered in the streets by savages?
I strongly doubt people actually follow this moralistic approach to war, or it is always profoundly hypocritical. No sane person ever took sides in the Karabakh conflict aside from the respective diasporas, simply because the people involved are both identical and irrelevant (and equally unpleasant) from our perspective; with Israel-Palestine there is a much stronger ingroup-outgroup dynamic, so it’s more comparable to Russia-Ukraine, in which I don’t believe any atrocity, real or imagined, would force any kind of self-reflection.
In that example you cannot 100% measure homicide-guilt, so proxies, as listed in the quote, are fine.
Except there is no such thing as 100% accurate measurement. People cheat, people bribe their way up, people luck out. Any measurement you use will have a certain margin of error. Within that margin prior probabilities reign supreme. Put simply, most Africans with an IQ of 130 are less intelligent than Europeans with the same score. Because the percentage of the latter with scores ≥ 130 is much higher (2.28% vs. 0.13% for African-Americans, one of the smartest African populations), you are simply more likely to encounter a genuine one vs. a cheat or a one-off compared to the former. You must adjust high African scores down to increase their accuracy, and you must adjust low European scores up. Ditto for men and women etc. This is the only way to do justice to truth and fairness. This applies even more so to immigration policy — because intelligence is not 100% heritable, the genotypic intelligence of high-IQ individuals from low-IQ populations (resp. their descendants) is always going to be lower than the already adjusted scores.
Yet if most people caught you correcting scores in this way they’d be fuming with righteous indignation. This is the result of ideological indoctrination that does not aim for truth or fairness and declares Bayesian reasoning (or more precisely, certain priors) taboo. The idea of ‘not judging people by the color of their skin’ is simply a fallacy, part of deceitful activist propaganda.
Guldrelokk
1yr ago
If I can measure an individual's combustibility, then discrimination against redheads is pointless and nefarious.
This is an example of the base rate fallacy. The only way priors could cease to matter is if you had perfectly accurate information, which is obviously unrealistic. To borrow an example from Neven Sesardić:
In order to facilitate the calculation of relevant probabilities we need to introduce the only part of the equation that is still missing, namely the information about specific evidence. For that purpose imagine there is a piece of evidence (E) which is much more often present among those who are guilty of murder or non-negligible homicide (M) than among others (∼M).
To be specific, suppose that, among both whites and blacks, the probability of E, given M, i.e. p(E|M), is 0.3, whereas the probability of E, given not M, i.e. p(E|∼M), is 0.0003. Now since E is much more frequent among Ms. than among ~Ms., the presence of E in a person will markedly increase the probability that the person has M. <…>
The probability p(M|E) is obtained by dividing the frequency of E&M by the frequency of all E, i.e. E&M + E&∼M. So the probability that a randomly selected black person with characteristic E is also M is 0.6. Figure 5 gives the same graph for whites.
The difference is striking. The probability of a person with suspicious characteristic E being a murderer is 0.6 if he is black, but 0.09 if he is white. And this difference is exclusively the result of different prior probabilities of M among blacks and whites.
Guldrelokk
1yr ago
if you are such a person though, feel free to speak up and explain your position
I believe you are strawmanning my position. It would be absolutely fine to always prefer non-brown-haired candidates, other things being equal. They might still win by virtue of other characteristics.
This kind of strawmanning seems necessary to me in order to demonize basic Bayesian reasoning. Otherwise everyone would see this as eminently rational behavior.
Nations are rational agents, but also memetic ecosystems. Few memes have caused as much damage to European civilization (of which North America is an indelible part) as those of equality, civic nationalism, radical individualism, class struggle and plutocratic free market capitalism. France often pioneered and served as a platform for such ideas, which is how it became an inspiration for many generations of subversives, though of course it wasn’t alone in this. Already in the days of Napoleon this led to disastrous consequences, such as granting citizenship to non-European aliens who had been selected for contempt towards the majority population. Today, of course, no one from that era would register as an egalitarian – indeed they would be considered fascists, i.e. non-persons. But so would American WWII vets. This doesn’t change the fact that in retrospect, we know exactly what they fought and died for.
The story of European wars and alliances is a sad one characterized by misadventure, greed and shortsightedness. I do not wish to imply they were directly driven by ideology like the American Civil War was, only that my race would most likely be better off if they played out differently. As things stand, and as of course you know, we are going to become a minority in our own homelands in a few generations, and most of us are so demoralized they don’t see any problem with that, so forgive me for perhaps being a bit melancholic.
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