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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   28295 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 23, 2024

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Reading the actual history of the Meiji restoration, it seems to have been dependent on the samurai class producing vast numbers of geniuses engaged in pointless bureaucracy they could be pulled off of without anyone noticing. It would be like the Hasidim deciding collectively, overnight, that they need to build an industrial economy and so their best and brightest have to be moved off of torah study to learn chip design or whatever.

Most colonized societies didn't have anywhere near the ability to do this. If we assume the samurai class had the same IQ advantage over the commoners that college graduates do over the hoi polloi in the USA(probably an underestimate) we're looking at a class of people with an average IQ similar to Ashkenazi Jews, who had quite literally nothing to do so they were given sinecures commanding vast resources with enforcing social conservatism as their only responsibility, and a single point of authority to rally around when it was apparent times needed to change, and a pre-existing tradition of employing literal geniuses in copying western technology. Those ingredients were rare in isolation; together they existed only in Japan.

Most colonized societies didn't have anywhere near the ability to do this.

There are more modest achievements that make the point.

If I wanted to pick a topical example it'd be El Salvador. You also hear people blaming deported US gangs (like that makes it the US' responsibility) but a solution was not only imposed by local elites, following well-meaning Western liberals likely would have made things worse.

Most colonized societies didn't have anywhere near the ability to do this.

And now you see the difference between them and the colonizers.

Well yeah, but Euro societies mostly didn't have the ability to do this quickly either- it took hundreds of years for England to go from the mid-sixteenth century to the mid-nineteenth. Japan did it fast, and I don't think Holland or England or France or wherever could've done the same thing.

Why do you assume an Iq advantage for samurai? It seems more likely to be reversed in class terms of we assume the class system existed long enough to have a breeding effect.

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