TitaniumButterfly
No bio...
User ID: 2854
TitaniumButterfly
5mo ago
Given that two mods read your original post as saying "Blacks are animals," it's fine if you want to walk that back a little
FWIW I do -- I still call it husbandry, and mainly used the term 'animal husbandry' because people have no idea what the hell I mean by the former without gesturing at the latter. It's the same kind of husbandry men have for women, children, and domestic animals. My error was in recklessly implying that less-human hominids fit squarely into that last category when, as I say, I think they're somewhere in-between.
Obviously that is going to come off as insulting, though I think it's grounds for a really good conversation at some point if I can figure out how to present it appropriately.
TitaniumButterfly
5mo ago
So look my response here (the one I'm writing at the moment) is not intended as a petulant argument, but I feel a bit frustrated and I'm trusting you to interpret it in the spirit in which I mean it, and thanks in advance for taking the time.
First things first, I appreciate the ethos you're laying out here. As I understand it, this space functions based upon an axiom that anyone should be able to participate in good faith without having to suffer what amount to unnecessary indications of being unwelcome. If someone is of the opinion that entire classes of people are fundamentally incapable of participating in valid ways, that's a problem, because The Motte takes as axiomatic that people of all classes should be welcome to participate as they're able and those who disagree damage the capacity of the site to fulfill that function.
I think this is basically good and right. Not for reasons of niceness, but for reasons of epistemic humility, as you say. It's all too easy for any of us to be flatly wrong about something if for no other reason than because we've simply never encountered someone who could have corrected us if we'd bothered to discuss the matter with them. And, particularly when it comes to evaluating such matters as the one under discussion at the moment (to what degree long-divergent ancestral groups should be considered as belonging in the same class), it's intuitively very important that those of the ancestral groups in question have as much of a chance at participation as possible in order to maximize the chances of this happening.
So far, so good.
"Blacks are animals" - not okay.
Arguendo that was my position (it wasn't; see below), how about "I think blacks are animals"? It's a useful test case because we get to the heart of whether the issue is with the opinion or the phrasing. Though FWIW, again, I think the term 'animals' here was a poor choice which generates vastly more heat than light, at least without defining it in detail and in ways that would probably trigger a lot of disagreement per se.
It's about... at least pretending that you believe those people are people who have a right to disagree with you.
I just don't think I ran afoul of this, is the thing. If I say that I don't think eight year olds (and those who are mentally at that level regardless of their adult bodies) generally don't have the capacity to function as responsible adults, I doubt anyone would react with horror and disgust, and I also think the difference is entirely political. Similar opinions about women and, er, genetically-less-mentally-developed ancestral groups were nothing if not mainstream and considered prima facie obvious not too long ago and for most of human history.
Yeah, saying that is gonna upset some eight year olds, who are a lot less likely to participate precisely because they are juvenile and react accordingly. And I'll even allow that somewhere out there are a few who would make better citizens than many existing citizens. But it would be crazy to object to the observation on those grounds. And the "I think" in the claim is qualifier enough, in my opinion, or in the case of my OP, "I call it". Hedging my statements like that is a practice I picked up here, actually, for exactly the reason that signaling epistemic humility by doing so is useful for the tone of the space and even as a little reminder to myself. I've gotten lazy about it, so again, I concede that you had grounds for correcting me.
If you said the first thing - "I question whether blacks are capable of building a fully functional civilization on their own" - a black poster here, assuming they were willing to engage, has something to engage with. They can disagree with your premise, they can offer counter-evidence, they can ask you why you think that...
All good and well.
But what is a black person supposed to say to "You're an animal"?
They can disagree with my premise, they can offer counter-evidence, they can ask me why I think that...
In short, they can behave exactly as I'd expect myself to behave. Or, if they can't, well?
Finally, and I realize this is likely to come off as splitting hairs but I wasn't talking about 'black people', and frankly I sincerely doubt that any of the people I was talking about would ever show up here in the first place for the same reason that eight year olds don't. (Perfectly-lovely and intelligent black people do show up here from time to time and I consider a couple of them friends and hang out in other spaces and even occasionally go to one for advice on medical issues.) I'm talking about comparatively-genetically-mentally-incapable people. In this particular case, heavy overlap with black, yes. But slavery is not a uniquely black issue and neither is being what amounts to a feral savage who will behave as such regardless of attempts at forcible civilization. In any event there's enough admixture at this point that blanket statements about SSH-descended inhabitants of the US are a lot less appropriate than they were two hundred years ago.
So -- I guess I just want to get the above off my chest. This isn't really an objection to anything you said in particular, I again acknowledge your correction, and (hopefully obviously) I don't intend any kind of gotcha argument. It's just a difficult situation. I'm glad to be in a place where we're at least trying to navigate such a thicket together in good faith.
TitaniumButterfly
5mo ago
Well, firstly, thanks, because now I feel like we're having a good, interesting, and productive conversation.
What do you think about Alex the parrot, who (allegedly, and feel free to object) combined words to make neologisms?
And what's your take on humans with nasty FOXP2 mutations such that, uh, let me grab a quote,
FOXP2 came to light through the discovery by Jane Flurst, an English geneticist, of an unusual London family whose existence she reported in 1990. The family consists of three generations. Of the 37 members old enough to be tested, 15 have a severe language deficit. Their speech is hard to understand, and they themselves have difficulty comprehending the speech of others. If asked to repeat a phrase like "pattaca pattaca pattaca," they will stumble over each word as if it were entirely new. They have difficulty with a standard test of the ability to form past tenses of verbs ("Every day I wash my clothes, yesterday I ___ my clothes"; four-year-olds will say "washed" as soon as they get the idea). They have problems in writing as well as speaking. The affected members of the family have been given intensive speech training but mostly hold jobs where not much talking is required. "Their speech is difficult to understand, particularly over the telephone, or if the context is not known. In a group of family members it is hard for you to pick up the pieces of the conversation, which is difficult to follow because many of the words are not correctly pronounced," says Faraneh Vargha-Khadem of the Institute of Child Health in London.55
Some of the first linguists to study the affected family members believed [Page 48] their problem was specific to grammar but Vargha-Khadem has shown that it is considerably wider. Affected members have trouble in articulation, and the muscles of their lower face, particularly the upper lip, are relatively immobile.
It could be argued that their defect stemmed from some general malfunction in the brain, which was not specific to language. But the IQ scores of the affected members, though low, fell in a range (59 to 91) that overlapped with that of the unaffected members (84 to 119).56 The core deficit, Vargha-Khadem concluded, is "one that affects the rapid and precise coordination of orofacial [mouth and face] movements, including those required for the sequential articulation of speech sounds."57
The affected members of the KE family, as it is known, have each inherited a single defective gene from their grandmother. They provide the results of an experiment that no one would even contemplate doing in humans, but which nature has performed nonetheless — what happens if you disable a critical speech gene? And the one disabled in the KE family seems to operate at such a sophisticated level that it looks as if it were one of the last genes to be put in place as the faculty of language was perfected.
In 1998 a team of geneticists at Oxford University in England set out to identify the defective gene by analyzing the genome of KE family members. Their method was to look for segments of DNA that the affected members shared and the unaffected lacked. The Oxford team soon narrowed the cause of the problem to a region on chromosome 7, the seventh of the 23 pairs of chromosomes in which the human genome is packaged. Within this region lay more than 70 genes, and it seemed that it would take several years to study each gene and see which one was responsible. But Hurst then turned up a new patient with the same rare set of symptoms. The patient, a boy, had a break in his chromosome 7 that disrupted one of the genes in the section the Oxford team was studying. It was an easy task to identify which of the new patient's genes had been broken. It was a gene known as forkhead box P2, or FOXP2 for short.58
The Oxford geneticists, Cecilia Lai, Simon Fisher and Anthony Monaco, then analyzed all 267,000 DNA units in the FOXP2 genes of the KE family members. In all the affected members, and in none of the normal members, just one of these letters was changed from a G to an A (the four different kinds of chemical units in DNA are known for short as A, T, G and C). The [Page 49] switch to an A at this site in the gene meant that in the protein molecule specified by the gene, a unit that should have been an arginine was changed to a histidine (proteins are made up of 20 different kinds of units, known as amino acids, of which arginine, and histidine are two).59
How could a single mutation in a gene cause such a wide range of effects? The FOX family of genes makes agents known as transcription factors, which operate at a high level of the cell's control system. The agents bind to DNA and in doing so control the activity, or transcription, of many other genes. FOXP2 is active during fetal development in specific parts of the brain, and the protein transcription factor it makes probably helps wire up these brain regions correctly for language. Brain scans of affected KE family members seemed normal at first glance but a more sophisticated type of scan has shown they have considerably fewer neurons than usual in Broca's area, one of the two brain regions known to be involved in language, and more neurons than usual in the other region, known as Wernicke's area.60
I don't think capacity for language is magic and I don't think it's a good yardstick for humanity. And I don't think awareness, sense-of-self, or volition are uniquely human either. As it happens I work with animals and have a lot of time to consider this. Their internal experiences are indeed very different from ours, but not, I think, in the ways you're proposing.
TitaniumButterfly
5mo ago
I don't really understand what you think animals are or why they wouldn't have awareness, will, and volition. It seems pretty clear to me that they do.
You argue that they are animals, and yet you are unwilling to treat them like animals. Why?
Compassion, which I have for plenty of other animals as well.
Your "guidance" didn't work before and won't work now.
It didn't? I think it did.
My care leads me to wish to leave them alone.
I think that would be incredibly cruel.
Your care demands domination, and has led to this disaster every step of the way.
I just have no idea what you're talking about.
Yes, I think you're generally correct to flag me here as 'just being honest' isn't a great excuse for being so transgressive, though most of the rest of what you wrote doesn't apply in this case I think. This isn't an instance of me wanting to say mean things about a group.
Nor is my issue with 'black people' so much as... look, I'm having sincere trouble finding terminology that gets the idea across without being legitimately interpreted as 'antagonistic'. There's a continuum problem. "Human" is a fuzzy category and largely in the eye of the beholder. Is a gorilla which speaks sign language human? What about Lucy (A. afarensis)? Primitive Tanzanians who discovered fire, then lost the secret and apparently reverted to the lifestyle of other hominids generally not recognized as human?
Skin color is not especially interesting to me. But I agree that the language about human/non-human is inflammatory and doesn't really get the point across, so I'll try to refrain from it in the future. My sincere apologies.
There is a quality which is something along the lines of 'capacity for moral responsibility' that generally (but not perfectly) correlates with IQ and which I think is localized entirely within select groups of ancestries and almost entirely men. These embody and sustain priceless phenomena ranging from how they experience and perceive the world to cultural inheritances. This heritage is inestimably valuable, fragile, and, increasingly, endangered.
My take on 'humans' outside of those groups is that they're something more like children than like non-humans. The trouble, of course, is that they generally don't have the capacity to grow into members of those groups. So they're something else, a third category between children and animals. Something more like permanently disabled children which are helpful dependents at best and, if they get strong and numerous enough, serious existential threats to the system and individuals within it. Their existences are often improved by domestication (honest question: is that word okay? I feel like it's exactly the one I want, no shade) and in the process they can participate in the grand project and enjoy in many of its fruits.
Meanwhile, inability to see this picture clearly or even discuss it intelligibly is one of the greatest threats to the Good and I'm at great pains to figure out how to articulate it.
So that's the perspective, more or less.
TitaniumButterfly
5mo ago
Humans aren't animals.
I know you know you're arguing by defining things in a way I wouldn't agree with, so what's the point?
I do not believe Abolitionism won because its supporters expected to reap new voters. All evidence I've seen indicates that it won because its supporters considered chattel slavery an intolerable evil, and were willing to make considerable sacrifices to eradicate it.
That was the popular justification, yes, and for the same reason that people become vegetarians or vegans or join PETA and try to ban pet ownership: we're incredibly prone to anthropomorphizing animals.
The power politics behind the war were rather different. Regardless, my point has less to do with why the war was fought and more to do with what happened afterward. "Send them back to their native habitat" was a great idea with plenty of support and should have happened, though FWIW I think we owed it to them to administrate for their sakes. Whatever they are, they're close enough to us that I don't like the thought of leaving them to their own wretched devices. Perhaps in time, and with guidance...
But even people who cared very much for them often understood that treating them as equals, let alone giving them the franchise, would be insane. But it happened. So with women &c.
TitaniumButterfly
5mo ago
You call it slavery, I call it animal husbandry. It worked just fine and while cruelty to animals sucks, domestication is not evil. Often it's a pretty great deal for the animals. Nature is harsh and wild animals are generally worse to each other than their human masters.
My ancestors are at fault inasmuch as they failed to adequately anticipate the fatal flaw in voting-based government, which is the incentive to expand the franchise to those who should never have had it in exchange for political support and dominance over the responsible opponents who refuse to stoop so low.
As for where all these black people came from, if I remember your family history correctly, I am afraid you will have to blame your ancestors.
Regrettably so. We were on the wrong side of both the revolution and the civil war. 'Won' both.
TitaniumButterfly
5mo ago
They weren't a problem when they were slaves. Your ancestors fighting to free them are why we're in this mess.
TitaniumButterfly
6mo ago
Those aren't wants, they're needs, from a genetic and generational standpoint. High-quality mates are positional goods and everyone is in competition with everyone else for those. It's not the bigger house or the nicer car that they want -- not enough to sacrifice all the amazing things only made possible by non-working women -- it's the status which will enable them and their offspring to outcompete others for high-quality mates and thus progeny which will outcompete others in turn. It is survival itself.
Competition for scarce resources is what defines almost every aspect of human reality. It's not somehow decadent for a person to pursue status symbols if that means ensuring a better future for their children, and as I said above, status symbols are positional. These needs cannot be satisfied without fundamentally altering human nature, turning us into something... else.
Within this hellscape, we can coordinate to make things better, c.f. Meditations on Moloch. People want other things, too, such as stable families, well-raised children, healthy food made with love, thriving communities, and so on. Women are the social fabric that enables all of these things, which they can't do if they're working full-time. Just like we coordinate to prevent children from being put to work too early or too rigorously, we could coordinate to protect women and safeguard all the many wonderful things which flow from recognizing that hammering women into masculine-style productivity is putting them to poor use.
TitaniumButterfly
6mo ago
We might further ask: why can't states do this? The answer here is also simple. Women's work outside the home generates a lot of economic value. The issue at the heart of raising fertility by having women work less is that society will be poorer, which people are generally opposed to.
If you take a plot of land with a healthy ecosystem and burn it all down, you'll create farmland that is incredibly productive for a few cycles, after which it becomes a barren wasteland in which nothing can grow.
Feminism is civilizational slash-and-burn.
TitaniumButterfly
6mo ago
To be fair, canthal tilt is a really big deal (and yes mine is that of a god).
TitaniumButterfly
6mo ago
Are we counting the downstream effects of Jewish-led organizations and the policies that have resulted from those?
I'm often a bit confused by people's understanding of segregation.
Suppose you have two populations living in the same area. Population A is clean, efficient, industrious, honest, largely non-aggressive, respectful, intelligent, and so on. Population B is the opposite of all of those things. But, both populations are Christians.
Pop A notices that when they let people from Pop B roam around their neighborhoods, things get damaged, things go missing, people get attacked, garbage is left everywhere, people get creeped out by weird and threatening behavior, etc.
Over time instead of living near each other they start to live side-by-side. In places where Pop B shows up in any significant numbers, everything falls apart very quickly. Schools become dangerous and dysfunctional because Pop B kids hit puberty sooner, are much more violent, much less intelligent, and generally vastly more disruptive. So Pop A families have to pull their kids out of school. Ugly and inconvenient security measures are suddenly installed in stores where Pop B types tend to shop. Suddenly none of the bathrooms have mirrors in them any more (because they get broken) and graffiti is everywhere. Litter is everywhere. Stores start shutting down. Rates of violent crime skyrocket. Home invasions, once nearly unheard of, become all too commonplace. Little boys are beaten to death for fun. Little girls are raped, sometimes to death. Elderly women tortured to death for sport inside their own homes in once-safe neighborhoods. Social safety nets become overburdened and then collapse because it turns out that, on average, Pop B people extract vastly more resources from the system than they ever put in, such that it takes several Pop A people's excess wealth to support them. Pop B people destroy the housing Pop A gave them out of generosity. They begin to strip and dismantle the local infrastructure to sell off for money for status symbols and cheap thrills. Pretty soon the only choice Pop A people have for the sake of their very lives and the futures of their children and community is to pack up and leave and try to settle somewhere new without as many Pop B people around. This is maybe okay for the wealthy, since they can afford to. The poor are now stuck in a dystopian hellscape which was once a beautiful, thriving, cohesive community, and rapidly find themselves outnumbered. I could go on in this vein for quite some time; there is much we have not touched upon.
Or.
Or Pop A can look at Pop B, say "We love you and we're happy to worship together, but our kinds are not configured to live together. We'll still help when we can -- but at a distance." (In this scenario, both are Christian, remember, and even act like it inasmuch as any of us can.)
The key thing here is that segregation was not set up to maintain racial hierarchy; it was set up in recognition of existing and immutable racial hierarchy.
Pop A could step in and manage Pop B's reproduction, of course, so as to bring them up to approximate parity within a few generations. But this would mean preventing the overwhelming majority of them from reproducing, which is going to entail all kinds of hideous particulars which I hardly think will be more popular than the clean, simple, humane solution of just living apart.
Look at what integration did to integrated communities and cities. Look at the good things that were lost. Look at the lives and livelihoods destroyed. Look at the collapse of politics into a racial spoils system. Look at what happened.
So, three options:
-
Segregation -- tried and true, works pretty well, allows Pop A to thrive and Pop B to benefit from their largesse to a degree unimaginable in Pop B's homeland without Pop A intervention. Pop B is healthier, better-educated, better-fed, and safer than they ever could have managed on their own.
-
Get rid of Pop B by deportation or forced selective breeding. Sucks for almost all of Pop B but at least some of them will go on to join society as equals.
-
Watch as the entire system goes to pieces, there are fewer and fewer places for Pop A to run, integration ruins everything insidiously through innumerable subtle channels until Pop A's forgotten that things ever even used to be any better. Welcome to South Africa, and more and more Western countries all the time.
None of these options is good. But option 1 stands out to me as a clear winner. I can sympathize with people who prefer option 2 even if I'd rather do it more softly and gradually through market forces. I have zero respect for those who champion option 3 and treat anyone who disagrees with them as irredeemably evil or somehow non-Christian. As though anything else were unthinkable.
TitaniumButterfly
6mo ago
Stringy, gamey, wrong kind of greasy. Like it's got fish oil in its flesh.
You can try puffin in Iceland, which is similar in a lot of ways.
TitaniumButterfly
6mo ago
It's just as easy to repeal this law and ban real meat as it was before the ban.
No, there can be a huge amount of institutional inertia. Governments generally do not turn on a dime. And that's just looking at the legal side. Scaling up a fake-meat industry would take a huge amount of time and investment and it can't even get started if there's a ban.
To be clear I'm low-key enthusiastic about lab-grown meat (though I also don't trust food scientists farther than I can throw them). I just took issue with your statement that
if it's so much worse, there's no need to ban it.
TitaniumButterfly
6mo ago
It's gonna be California first.
TitaniumButterfly
6mo ago
Penguin steaks would be a terrible idea (don't ask me how I know) but I think you're on to something overall.
TitaniumButterfly
6mo ago
It's probably a lot more expensive than real meat in any reasonable scenario.
Makes a ton of sense once you're in space. Delivering cow chunks from the surface of the earth could be extremely expensive (not to mention time-consuming) while assembling cow chunk analogues on site from available raw materials could be quite cheap given the right technology.
TitaniumButterfly
6mo ago
It doesn't really make sense to say that the government banned something so that the government wouldn't mandate it.
Makes perfect sense to me. It's not like 'the government' is a person with a coherent agenda. Governments do things all the time with the intention of constraining their future iterations.
TitaniumButterfly
6mo ago
For that matter, if it's so much worse, there's no need to ban it.
Off the top of my head I can think of several things that were worse but ended up being mandated by the government. It's not hard to imagine this happening with lab-grown meat.
TitaniumButterfly
6mo ago
in many SF settings, the vat-grown stuff is considered inferior
It would have to be, or else people wouldn't be growing it the traditional way any more. I suppose there could be a pure status signaling element but most people aren't going to care enough to sustain that at scale.
TitaniumButterfly
6mo ago
The Bible has so many contradictions that it's worthless as a philosophical guiding light, yet it's served that purpose to basically the entire Western world for centuries.
Just a tangent here, but the Bible isn't designed to be a philosophical guiding light on its own. It even says not to do that, but to also hold to the traditions received extra-biblically, i.e. the Church, which is designed to be a philosophical guiding light.
Seems to me that when (much of) the Western world started trying to use the Bible in a way it specifically says not to use it, that's where we got into trouble.
TitaniumButterfly
6mo ago
This would at least make me reluctant to adopt any explicitly or intentionally racist policies.
The trouble is that 'racist' is such an overloaded operator that it's perhaps worse than useless at this point.
The value of the roundups is hard to casually overstate. Can't tell you how many times I thought I'd read every discussion on this site only to find half a dozen or more gems in the roundup that I'd somehow missed entirely.
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