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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 23, 2024

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See the Arab world for how this pans out when you take it to the logical conclusion.

Because it's Friday night... I think you should trust your closest relatives, not actually breed with them.

But yeah, in all seriousness, I think that living in a high trust society is fucking awesome and I lament its loss. I tend to err on the side of more trust, rather than less. But trusting strangers the same amount as relatives is pathological pro-outgroup bias.

I think you should trust your closest relatives, not actually breed with them.

One implies the other. Cousin marriage is a driver of low social trust- that’s the upfront reason it’s so destructive(the genetic issues usually take multiple generations to manifest). And low social trust drives towards marrying in the circle, which eventually means cousins.

Living in a high trust society is awesome precisely because you can trust people who aren't related to you by blood.

Who's at the top of trust rankings? It's not the Arab world. The highest ranked Arab country is Morocco at 17% of people saying that people can generally be trusted. The US is at 37% and the top spot is Denmark at 74% (inb4 Denmark is an Arab country).

Structuring society around kinship networks is a coping mechanism to deal with the fact that your countrymen are bastards and is correlated with living in an impoverished country. It's certainly not how you get and stay rich.