OneBillionLions
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User ID: 872
OneBillionLions
1yr ago
I also think copyright law hinders Western culture, but for different reasons. I don't think copyright law crushes creativity that much, or hinders creative output. It's pretty simple to make minor changes to an existing story and be protected, for example. Despite the odious nature of some recent lawsuits over hit songs, any person creative enough to make meaningful works is probably able to get around existing laws easily. Instead, I think what is essentially permanent ownership of creative works has warped how society looks at and interacts with culture more broadly. Specifically, the existence of copyrights that outlast human lifespans causes people to view other pieces of culture that can't be copyrighted through a similar lens.
The common complaints of 'appropriation' and the massive support such concepts have gained from most of the American Left are a symptom of this changing viewpoint. The person who claims that cooking Chinese food when you aren't Chinese is a hostile act against the Chinese is applying the logic of copyrights more expansively. It's quite insidious because the same people that make these claims are often some of the individuals most likely to describe themselves as anti-corporate, anti-capitalist, and against the commodification of culture. They simultaneously protest against American culture while openly reinforcing one of its norms unwittingly.
As someone who is broadly opposed to long-term copyrights(I'd prefer copyrights that expire after a decade!) on the basis they are non-productive economic rents, the trend is alarming. Of the people predisposed to oppose the current state of things on this topic, a significant portion are serving the interest of institutional copyright holders. While woke politics are losing steam, the idea of cultural appropriation has long set in throughout the current American leftward coalition. Outside of the black sheep in the stupidpol set, is there any part of the left where the concept of cultural appropriation hasn't simply become an accepted truth?
While a legal expansion of copyright into more nebulous territory is unlikely, if the cultural norms render it untenable to engage with and more importantly synthesize elements of other cultures, as is increasingly becoming the case, that would be a huge loss indeed. I can see that happening, as a large chunk of the conservative coalition simply won't care about this at all, so there will be little stopping this from metastasizing into something oppressive.
OneBillionLions
1yr ago
I think the second half of your first paragraph has a bunch of issues.
I don't think it logically follows that the smartest would be the ones to leave first, especially in the context of simple, pre-agrarian hunter-gatherer societies. It could very easily be that the ones who left first were the least aggressive, and thus least likely to defend their territory. Inuit folklore mention the Dorset and state that their response to outsiders was simply to flee. I don't see why that wouldn't have been the case during the first human migration from Africa. I'd judge the argument that leaving Africa in the first place is a sign of intelligence to be false. Indeed, I think the low aggression hypothesis is actually more likely, given that there are experts who argue that drought in Africa is what first spurred the out-of-Africa migrations. That's a point in favour of aggressiveness/docility being the distinction between stayers and leavers, as conflict over increasingly scarce resources would have been inevitable.
Also, the first migrations out of Africa were fundamentally different than any that came after, as the original out of Africa population was traveling through areas where there were no Sapiens Sapiens, only Denisovans and Neanderthal. Once the first group leaves and is in the way, it becomes significantly less simple to push them out and then migrate, as you have to go through potentially(probably) hostile societies to do so. The first group to leave was incredibly lucky, and if they had been the second group due to minor changes in inter-tribe politics or random chance, they might never have made it out.
Finally, some parts of Africa are close to the Middle East and some are not. Any group that ended up in Southern Africa simply wasn't going to leave, and that is entirely circumstance and has nothing to do with any of their group characteristics. There's no reason the smartest humans 70,000 years ago couldn't have been denied the opportunity to colonize the world due to their location.
The Sahara was unlikely to have been a barrier to the first humans leaving, either. It has cyclical wet/dry periods, and it seems that a wet period ended ~70,000 years ago, which is right in line with the out-of-Africa migration that led humans into Eurasia and beyond. I find it more intuitive, given this fact, to suggest that the drought and desertification of the Sahara region was the impetus, and that it only became a hurdle for migration after the humans had already left Africa. On top of that, the Sans of Southern Africa have been successfully living in the Kalahari desert for 20,000+ years, despite scoring even lower on IQ tests(55 on average!) than other African groups.
With all that in mind, I find it very unlikely(I'd posit 95% confidence that this is the case) that the intellectual differences between Sub-Saharan Africans and non-African populations are the result of genetic differences that existed before humans migrated out of Africa. Any such differences are probably the result of selection pressures after the fact.
OneBillionLions
2yr ago
And the hedonist would argue that you are simply seeking a feeling of superiority. Your desire for knowledge and learning is why you see those things as valuable, not the other way around. Your innate preferences are not mature or immature.
Why do I do difficult things? Because I feel better accomplishing them than not. Why don't I drink? Because I dont want to. Any further rationalization is just delusion.
My theory has always been that, putting aside motivation, the primary factor in Europe's success was being the first adopters of firearms, as firearms are what decisively gave more sophisticated, urbanized civilizations the edge over simpler, nomadic ones. Up until firearms, it didn't matter how awesome your empire was, it could still get ransacked by nomads with much more limited technologies.
When the Portuguese went after India; they had a decisive military advantage. The Muslim trading ships were, at the time, unarmed(!) and Pedro Alves Cabral was able to seize a ship and loot it. When there were riots in Calicut in response and a bunch of missionaries and other Portuguese were killed he bombarded the city into ruins, apparently without reprisal. When Ethiopia was at risk of falling to Muslim invaders, they famously beseeched the Portuguese for aid and convinced them to send a small force of riflemen, who turned the tide of the war.
Rifles and Cannons were game-changing.
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