TitaniumButterfly
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User ID: 2854
I have a huge amount of experience working with animals (both wild and domesticated). Slaughtered quite a few head of livestock by hand in my back yard today, as it happens, which I do about once a week. So I have a lot of thoughts here -- but the main thing I want to suggest to you is that cruelty toward animals is irreverent toward the Creator.
Yes, the chain of being is real and man's place is that of dominion over all other animals and more besides. How then shall we conduct ourselves?
FWIW I completely endorse your perspective on the rat and the kitten, though I don't expect most others to get it. Regardless of intentions, learning to kill animals well requires botching the process rather a lot of times.
Even so, not giving a crap is contraindicated. I doubt you've had much occasion for (or inclination toward) abuse but it never hurts to bear in mind that one will someday stand before the dread judgment seat of Christ.
It might be, which has no bearing on its reality.
Lost the source but I recall reading that in fact Irish immigrants were ruthlessly genetically culled for generations in the era before the welfare state. Apparently most of them have few or no surviving descendants. Those who do, have been selected for traits more in line with modern society.
My understanding is that the modern narrative of "See Irish were originally thought of as different but now we know better" is deeply unfounded.
ETA: Quick searching indicates that the majority of Irish immigrants to the US died without forming families. Mainly this seems to have to do with hard working conditions, poor access to nutrition, and disease in overcrowded slums, but if those aren't effective mechanisms of selection I don't know what is. The ones who escaped or overcame those filters reproduced and here we are today.
So yeah, take the top couple deciles of Irish immigrants and fast forward to the present and I'm not surprised that they're about average. Especially given the inevitable admixture over that time frame.
TitaniumButterfly
3d ago
FWIW I don't have a position on European genetic tendencies to hygiene, though I'd guess orderliness does come in when the subject expands to such things as keeping one's house clean. Who can say?
Don't recall where but I remember being flabbergasted by descriptions of pre-industrial European cities where all the roads, yards, etc. were just constantly covered in human and animal dung. Sometimes even indoors! The French in particular were noted for their penchant for pissing on staircases, also even indoors. Germans meanwhile were noted for fastidiously keeping interiors spotless. How much selection has taken place in the last couple hundred years, I cannot guess.
TitaniumButterfly
3d ago
As I suggested elsewhere in the thread, I think the burden of proof should be on the person who would argue that it works this way for every single animal except humans.
The real question is how strong the proclivities are and how effectively culture can enhance or curb them. That's a great question and I wish anyone were looking into it.
TitaniumButterfly
3d ago
Did I argue otherwise?
TitaniumButterfly
3d ago
This whole post relies upon an extremely facile (and uncharitable) conception of HBD. I find myself entirely uninterested in the points being made here.
"White people" is a bad category when discussing HBD. I'm not sure if it's quite as bad as 'Hispanic' but it's gotta be close. Skin color matters much less than ancestry even if they usually correlate. Consider Obama, or almost any other high-achieving 'black person' who happens to be heavily or even mostly Hajnali genetically.
Is that really what you want your political ideology to be?
I expect non-Hajnali 'whites' to basically end up as an underclass, so it is what it is I guess.
The solution here is more and better HBD, not less.
The American conflation of race with class is bizarre.
Yes. The 'white' people of appalachia are not the same race as the 'white' people of New England, c.f. Albion's Seed or for that matter the Hajnal Line. Or for blacks we could easily distinguish between, say, Bantu and Igbo.
And even after distinguishing race at a more granular level, yes, there are classes within races.
TitaniumButterfly
3d ago
As I said, it doesn't make sense.
TitaniumButterfly
3d ago
Well, I think the burden of proof is much higher for the person who wants to argue that it works this way for every single animal except humans.
To your actual point though adoption studies seem useful.
TitaniumButterfly
3d ago
Well, that perspective makes no sense and I've never seen it advocated; only implied by those who don't seem to know what they're talking about.
Really just said ~ "Only white people have a high enough IQ to form democracies".
This is somewhat tangential but it really bugs me that people seem to have decided that HBD is primarily about IQ. It's not. That just happens to be one of the easiest differences to measure.
HBD is also about:
- Hygiene
- Aggression
- Sexual fidelity
- Industriousness
- Impulse control
- Courtship behavior
- Parental investment
- Aesthetic perception
- Tendency to addiction
And pretty much everything else. Personality, instincts, and so on are rooted in the genes. Consider tribalism/clannishness, propensity to corruption, likelihood of ignoring traffic regulations... it just goes on and on.
While I'm at it, I'll note that the founding fathers never intended a universal franchise like we have today. They understood that democracy can only function with a good electorate, which is why they restricted the franchise not just by ethnicity and sex, but also class. This too is HBD.
TitaniumButterfly
6d ago
Whatever you think of porn on an individual level, it has ruinous effects on society.
Don't disagree but I'm curious as to how you'd make that case.
TitaniumButterfly
8d ago
Oh yeah, edited to be clear I meant Obama.
TitaniumButterfly
8d ago
Has more to do with ancestry, not parentage. High-quality parents put out low-quality children from time to time. Degradation actually happens pretty quickly. Much less often, but still sometimes, two low-quality parents whose own parents were higher-quality put out a higher-quality child. Better to evaluate someone's grandparents than his parents if predictive power is what's desired.
When Obama was elected I met an older white woman who wept tears of joy and said he'd come to do the work of Christ.
TitaniumButterfly
10d ago
That doesn't follow whatsoever. It presupposes that we're always capable of evaluating deep consequences, which is plainly not the case. It also presupposes a ton of wisdom on the part of the person being persuaded.
Suppose the damage only becomes clear generations later? I'm thinking here of the sexual revolution e.g.
Inability to convince someone that an act is damaging has no bearing on whether it is.
TitaniumButterfly
10d ago
It doesn't 'just' mean harmful, but it's always harmful.
TitaniumButterfly
11d ago
Yeah, sorry, on my phone so I can't really give this the nuance it deserves.
We should distinguish between three different items here:
- Taking God's name in vain
- Swearing oaths
- Using impolite language ('swear words')
The first and second require way more foundation than I can lay right now. The third I just answered elsewhere in this thread, probably pretty close to this post.
TitaniumButterfly
11d ago
People have been asking about my political ideology and this pretty much sums it up: the first-world is better than the third-world. It's a good thing that we're not burning witches anymore. But you all are so concerned with "third-world immigrants" you can't see the third-worlding occurring right in front of your faces.
I never understood how you could be so good at caricaturing this obnoxious persona until I saw the page where you explicitly catalogue your history of trolling people on reddit.
This is tiresome and it'll be a nice day when the mods finally get around to banning you.
Since when is ('merely') signaling bad character harmless?
Propriety is a useful concept, as is reverence. Every minor decision we make, and word we use, directionally warps our character. It changes our own conception of ourselves. Offhand I can point to TracingWoodgrains as an atheist who recognizes the pattern and so refrains from foul language. (Though of course use-mention distinction applies to all of this.)
It is not good to regard ourselves as oppositional to order, propriety, or reverence. Instances where disruptiveness, impropriety, or irreverence are correct are exceptional and should always be engaged with deliberately. Never mind the value of cultivating verbal continence; of regarding oneself as holding to a standard other than the vulgar.
These arguments touch on Christian understanding but don't rely upon it. And they are only inward-facing. There's a whole additional side when it comes to the impressions we make upon others and how that can harm them and us.
TitaniumButterfly
11d ago
I'm a bit confused as to your thesis. My intent here was to demonstrate that the argument was made over 60 years ago and hasn't required updating. And even Lewis was only riffing on much older material that also still stands to this day.
To be sure in that time period people have massively fallen away from God and lost fluency with the language in which the arguments are made. I think the disconnect you're talking about has more to do with ignorant moderns needing lots of extra hand holding to be able to understand what we're even talking about, after generations of educational bankruptcy and training by hostile media.
But re: the rest, your words do not match my experience. The Western tradition has been very active in that time (though mostly in the wrong direction imo) and the Eastern tradition has been exploding in both vigor and popularity. Surely Solzhenitsyn made a mark? And a lot else has been going on. Only, few are listening.
This sort of thing would seem to be cyclical for mankind. People honor God, prosper, become prideful, turn away, suffer terribly, and only once the same old lessons have been relearned the hard way do the survivors pick up the pieces and start the process again.
Usually, the word "sinful" is taken to mean an appeal to abstract, unfalsifiable moral commandments dependent on faith in some religious nonsense for even the slightest form of coherency
I think you have been well trained by enemies of Christianity.
not "here is the solid statistical evidence that consumption of this media will make your life objectively worse by your own values."
Solid statistical evidence is a pretty recent invention, and its accessibility to the public even more recent. The ability of the public to competently evaluate such evidence we can, heh, call a work in progress. In the meantime humans live human lives and require human guidance.
It seems to me that the population is moving from seeing porn consumption less like saying "fuck" and more like smoking cigarettes, and that this is because porn consumption is in fact more like smoking cigarettes than it is like swearing. There are significant observable costs to consumption and the industry that supports it, even from within the Materialist frame.
I was raised evangelical and converted to Orthodoxy and have never heard it suggested that swearing is somehow implicitly sinful. An argument sure can be made that it is in most particular instances, but that would be according to logic that would, as you'd have it, be coherent to materialists.
Apart from failing to cultivate a relationship with Christ I'm unable to think of any behavior typically described as sinful that doesn't have observable material costs. And even that one is arguable given mental health and life outcomes. The question is how aware one is of those costs, and how seriously one takes them, not whether they exist.
Yes, and trivially. The problem with 'sinful' is the same problem 'misogynistic' or 'hateful' has in that it's thought-terminating and usually invoked as "fuck you, stop doing what I don't like".
This reminds me of the guy I met who couldn't believe that I described something as heretical. "'Heresy' is, like, something fundamentalists scream while losing their minds!" His only experience with the concept was from media hostile to Christianity. Had no idea that within the tradition we use the word matter of factly; dispassionately.
Sin has only ever meant one thing and at least in my experience it's been used consistently. Via (hostile) media portrayals I have a vague caricature in my head of an ignorant Southern woman throwing the word around to suit her biases, but all such types I've met in real life have instead been progressives.
I am happy that the traditionalists have figured out they actually have to make the argument without the short-circuit. Which should be easy, because they're unimpeachably correct, which is why they were right to pick up the thought-terminating argument from aesthetics in the first place and it didn't take them 60 years to come up with a workable counterargument.
Where's that CS Lewis poaster when you need him?
There has never been a shortage of Christian intellectual tradition for those willing to engage with it. Except, I guess, in Protestant backwaters isolated from that tradition. But even they generally had access to Lewis.
the argument is less "this content is sinful", and more "this content is demonstrably poisoning the relations and sexual health of our children".
What did you think 'sinful' meant? Vibes? Papers? Essays?
Sin is definitionally injurious to individuals and societies.
All that's changed is that instead of warning people (and getting called crazy), we now get to say "I told you so" (and still mostly be ignored).
Great line. Reminds me of my travels there. Very lonely country.
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