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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   35891 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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I just can't rationalize the idea of people being wiped out when their line will continue for generations to come. I don't understand what's being 'lost' if my kids were mixed race instead of white. They're still mine and isn't that what's important?

Then I suppose you don't believe in significant biological differences between races?

I don't think vitamin D production differences are significant in the modern world with all year round availability of vitamin D containing foods plus most foods already come fortified with vitamin and supplements are cheap.

Significant differences would be in the different tolerance of environment, psychological aspects to thrive in society or make career and succeed. Maybe there are some differences in these things too but I don't think they are significant either because currently most social differences can be explained by culture and traditions rather than race or ethnicity.

It seems human intuition considers diversity for the sake of diversity to be an end.

Say I thought Hitler was bad for merely murdering so many people. That doesn't account for his attempted genocide which was to wipe a population away. The fact that his attempt at genocide involved killing is rather tangential. Charitably, his implementation of killing at such scale is the reason why he's the western example of evil.

We see this in non-political contexts with the designation of endangered species. Killing authorized game for food or sport is of course OK; but killing a member of an endangered species is not OK. Because these aren't human, and of course this isn't done at scale, this isn't anything like genocide, but why even bother saving species like this? Diversity is an end to us.

The U.N. considers it genocide to destroy a people group (even in part). So someone could implement genocide without actual killing, which would involve restricting births or whatever. You're fine to consider this nowhere near as bad as Hitler's mass-murder.

But, if (and maybe you don't) one considers Hitler's genocide made mass murder worse, then implementing genocide using non-murderous means is still genocide.

It's not that it's diversity, at least with endangered species, it's the finality of it. If you wipe out the last one (or nearly the last one), the entire species can be gone forever. If you kill an extra deer, there's lots more elsewhere. In some sense, deer are fungible (a sentence I didn't think I'd ever write).

It's less clear to me, but I'd also say Hitler was extra bad because he targeted innocent people for something they had no say in, AND he was trying to wipe out entire groups (that hadn't done anything to him). There's something hateful about that, and I think it's more about the finality and arbitrariness than a desire to maintain diversity.

I daresay a subset of western policy-makers don't count as "human intuition".

I heard someone claim once that sooner or later, given current trends, we're not going to have any more redheads. I like redheads, and think that would be a shame.

There's a lot of different varieties of human. If you blended them all suddenly and thoroughly, and everyone afterward were tallish, tanned semi-asians of a roughly-equivalent type, that would also be a shame.

I freely admit that this is an aesthetic preference with limited to no implications for actual policy, and probably genetic engineering will make these issues irrelevant in the relatively near future.

They wouldn't blend, because inheritance is Mendelian and discrete. Just look at the Uighurs and other Turks who still evidence the blonde hair and blue eyes of their Aryan ancestors, even red hair on occasion.

Though, recessive genes follow a power law in expression; so, they would be much less likely to be found in mixed populations. Northern Indians have 10% the blue eyes allele variant; so, they are only 1% likely to have blue eyes, and it is considered something rare among them.

Not everything is discrete. Height, skin color, facial features, body proportions are not. Isolated populations will continue getting unusual phenotypes due to recessive alleles taking root, but urban blended humans will all probably look like Tiger Woods or Charles Mingus or Kamala Harris.

In the long run? What's being lost is diversity. Whether that matters depends on your values, priorities, etc....and maybe how much you appreciate irony.

That depends on whether or not you are permitted to raise your children on your terms, with your own values, way of life, etc. In a strictly genetic sense, the Mongols may be one of the most successful people groups in history; in terms of their culture, society, and way of life, they are largely extinct. You can argue that was always going to happen over a sufficiently long enough time horizon, and that's correct. But it can happen on much shorter timelines, even within a single generation, and often does.

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