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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

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For example, black men are generally taller and more muscular and better at sports than other races- see NFL roster stats if you don’t believe me.

I don't believe you. Last time I checked black men are generally shorter and weaker*. Do you have any data here?

Re: NFL rosters there's a simple reason for that. A white man who could maybe go pro in football also probably has a lot of more-sane options compared to a black man of the same general physical capabilities. Getting into the NFL is astronomically unlikely even for very good players, careers are often short, and the physical punishment can easily haunt the player through the rest of his -- often short -- life. Someone who has better options is likely to take them. A class of people who can't do much else is more likely to angle for a position in the NFL to begin with, especially if they don't actually grasp how unlikely they are to succeed.

Similarly, I'd guess that whites who make it into the NFL disproportionately tend to come from lower-income backgrounds.

Put another way, my offhand guess is that black men are also disproportionately-represented among lottery winners.

EDIT: Checked, and,

According to the Lottery Advertising Association for Consumer Research or Cash 3, a staggering 63.9 percent of Blacks reported the highest rate of “ever playing” the lottery, significantly surpassing both Hispanics (43.8 percent) and whites (41.2 percent). The numbers speak volumes about the strong affinity that Black Americans have for the lottery, highlighting its unique appeal in these communities.

Source

Couldn't find sources on race of winners, but in the case of the lottery I'd be willing to bet that it probably tracks pretty closely with the race of the general player-base.

* I recall looking up average height and finding that whites are a bit taller on average but also that a lot of the numbers are skewed by groups like latinos and middle easterners being counted as 'white'. Also, re: strength, I once found a grip strength study which indicated this but haven't been able to find it since.

I remember ilforte of all people pushing back on the blacks vs whites argument that I tried putting forward a year or two ago. I don't know how to even respond to it really because in my experience black men are so obviously stronger and more dominant/aggressive than white men that I don't know what kind of evidence I could point to that would change your mind.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1167935/racial-diversity-nfl-players/

The stats are that 53% of NFL players are black while making up 15% of the American public. White men are only 24% of the players. Asians are 0.1% of NFL but 7.3% of the US population. This is all the evidence I need to reassert what anecdotally seems true in my experiences, maybe someone else can chime in.

Besides that I think white men were fine with the enslavement of black men because they perceived black men as physically dominant/superior in some way. They didn't enslave Asians or natives to any significant degree because enslaving someone smaller than you makes you look bad and doesn't jive as well with Christian theology (see David and Goliath, Nietzschean slave morality etc)

Besides that I think white men were fine with the enslavement of black men because they perceived black men as physically dominant/superior in some way. They didn't enslave Asians or natives to any significant degree because enslaving someone smaller than you makes you look bad and doesn't jive as well with Christian theology (see David and Goliath, Nietzschean slave morality etc)

Yeah, no. The nascent latifundia used unfree labor from white people (usually called "serfs" or, in the U.S., "indentured servants", or later "sharecroppers" or company-town folk), native americans (in latin america just look up the "encomienda" system and shudder in horror), and, when they started coming over, chinese immigrants (check out labor conditions on railway gangs in the 19th century) as long as they could; black people were just evolutionarily less likely to keel over dead of malaria (thanks to the sickle-cell mutation) and other tropical diseases than white people in the caribbean and/or US south, couldn't run away back to their tribes like indians, and in the 17th and 18th centuries were flooding the market thanks to very rich and aggressive slave-trading kingdoms on the west African coast. Notably, the places where there were a lot of native americans to enslave, like Mexico and points south in Spanish (as opposed to Portuguese) Central and South America tended to not see a big importation of black slaves and tend not to have large african-descended populations today; there was no need to go to the expense of shipping them in when other unfree labor sources were right there.

In that case, why am I (and I’d imagine, your average American citizen) not familiar with these terrible slave trades and exploitations of labor while I’m reminded of American black slavery nearly every day? If this was football, and your weak team had a miracle one year and beat the strong team in the next county, I imagine you’d be happier to recount the glories of beating the strong team while ignoring the glories of beating all the weaker teams. Similarly white Americans have had a history of making their enemies out to be strong, portraying the native Americans they conquered as powerful because if they portrayed them as weak it would make them look unchristian and evil and sadistic. My historic understanding of the facts in my other comment may have been incorrect but I think the broad philosophy behind it is sound

In that case, why am I (and I’d imagine, your average American citizen) not familiar with these terrible slave trades and exploitations of labor while I’m reminded of American black slavery nearly every day?

In part because we have a substantial black population that conceives of itself as needing to guilt benefits and sinecures from the hands of whites, while the hispanic and chinese populations do not do so, and the native americans were functionally destroyed aside from a few remnants. Thus, black slavery is politically useful in a way the rest is not, and most politics is whig history in service of contemporary political ends. And the rest is because we have terrible memories of our high school history curricula (or grew up in states without a significant history as part of spanish america. In California we learned all about the encomienda system as part of the Colombian exchange, and conditions in railroad gangs and early-industrial factories as part of early-20th century labor history. For the more advanced stuff you'd actually have to read some college-level scholarship (or just Scott's review of Albion's Seed), but it's not exactly hidden. This is all bog-standard 20th century progressive historiography that the elite are happy to teach to kids; it's hardly forbidden, red-pilled secrets.

If this was football, and your weak team had a miracle one year and beat the strong team in the next county, I imagine you’d be happier to recount the glories of beating the strong team while ignoring the glories of beating all the weaker teams.

Yes, but this is not football, and even if you were right and the metaphor holds, this rationale wouldn't have anything to do with why the actual slavery-supporting Americans imported black slaves because they were convinced that the black people, specifically, were physically superior. You've given a just-so reason for why such mythologies of physical dominance might spring up after the fact - i.e., for your own assumption.

Similarly white Americans have had a history of making their enemies out to be strong, portraying the native Americans they conquered as powerful because if they portrayed them as weak it would make them look unchristian and evil and sadistic.

A lot of the natives were very strong and impressive, for nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes. The white generals who fought them (Sherman, Sheridan, etc.) were quite open about the fact that yes, these impressive people were going to get steamrollered by industrial modernity, and that was sad, but such was the march of civilization. Not all christians believed that power = evil.

In that case, why am I (and I’d imagine, your average American citizen) not familiar with these terrible slave trades and exploitations of labor while I’m reminded of American black slavery nearly every day?

Because leftists in the press and academia remind you of American black slavery every day. Remember that the root of "slave" is the same as the root of "Slav". Serfdom was extremely common in Europe. Indians in what became the US tended to make lousy slaves because it was too easy for them to escape, but that the conquistadores enslaved the South American Indians is indisputable.

In that case, why am I (and I’d imagine, your average American citizen) not familiar with these terrible slave trades and exploitations of labor while I’m reminded of American black slavery nearly every day?

Because Chinese median income exceeds the white median income, and the black median income does not. Simple as.

My historic understanding of the facts in my other comment may have been incorrect but I think the broad philosophy behind it is sound

The philosophy is based on the facts, right? Otherwise you wouldn't need to mention them.

You're getting a lot of pushback, but frankly those people are gaslighting you.

NFL defenses are nearly 100% black for a reason. On average black men have higher testosterone, more fast twitch muscle, less body fat, larger hands, longer arms, thicker skin, and higher propensity for violence.

My guess is that a lot of people here have never played sports.

That may be so but it's also true that whites are taller and stronger, only those things do not matter as much (on their own anyway) for many popular sports.

What should be said is that fast twitch muscles are very important and west Africans have more fast twitch muscles.

I think is a miss reading of history. Africans where enslaved because they where the most convenient population available that European powers could enslave. Native populations where often enslaved first, but this wasn’t sustainable because there weren’t very many of them and they died very quickly from exposure to diseases from the old world. Asians where not enslaved because there wasn’t any short route to Asia and Asian polities where powerful enough to resist Europeans until the ~1850s.