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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 3, 2025

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Would you subscribe to the implied general principle, though? If a few million Africans snuck into one of the more deserted parts of Wyoming and built a thriving colony there, do you recognise their claim to sovereignty?

Yeah, I think people who have lived on a land since 1652 have some rights. If some Africans snuck into Wyoming and lived there for 370 years, I think I'd feel pretty strongly they have a right to be there.

Turnabout...

Would you subscribe to the implied principle that the people who deserve land are the original settlers of that land? In this case, in South Africa it would be the Khoisan, not the Bantus who invaded later than the Dutch even. Will you demand the Bantus go back to the jungle so that South Africa can be rightfully inhabited by hunter gatherers again?

In this case, in South Africa it would be the Khoisan, not the Bantus who invaded later than the Dutch even.

The Bantus were in Eastern South Africa (the bit where most of the modern population live) in 500 AD, the first Boers arrived in the 1650s. They were there for a good thousand years before the Dutch turned up. The Khoisan (or rather, their partial descendents the Coloreds) are still there in the West.

Yes. Thank you for the clarification. The Dutch beat the Bantus to the Cape but there was a small Bantu population in other parts of South Africa before they arrived.

Would you subscribe to the implied principle that the people who deserve land are the original settlers of that land? In this case, in South Africa it would be the Khoisan, not the Bantus who invaded later than the Dutch even. Will you demand the Bantus go back to the jungle so that South Africa can be rightfully inhabited by hunter gatherers again?

No, I think I stand by the rules I outlined here - the Bushmen have no claim against the Bantu except where their lands were directly taken by the latter. That being said, I think a lot of people instinctively subscribe to some sort of notion where sovereignty can be passed more easily the more similar conquerors and conquered are, so for example intra-European border shifts are accepted in ways in which Ottoman conquests in Europe were not.

Ready to have your mind blown?

Bantus and whites are more closely related than Bantus and Khoisan!

Unwilling to answer?

Here(it's Fst) https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/01/Full_Fst_Average.png/2048px-Full_Fst_Average.png shows San-Bantu 0.01 and distances between Bantus and various European groups from 0.15 (Greek, Basque) to 0.28 (Sardinian)

Here (euclidean distance) Bantu-San is painted with 45% relative similarity and Bantu-Europeans are about 10%. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Genetic_similarities_between_51_worldwide_human_populations_(Euclidean_genetic_distance_using_289,160_SNPs).png

/images/17417614397249808.webp

How on earth is the fst page still on Wikipedia? One of the major contributors has been permabanned, but the page itself hasn't been targeted.

This also implies that if a human from a given ancestral population has a mixed half-sibling, that human is closer genetically to an unrelated individual of their ancestral population than to their mixed half-sibling

What does your comment have to do with Bantu-San-European genetic distance?

You disagree with quoted part? Why?

What? No, I'm shocked the quoted part has survived on Wikipedia without getting removed, problematized, denounced, or "recontextualized" with some Scientific American opinion piece.

This is rationalist(adjacent) forum. The fact that you were shocked by something has no bearing on subject.

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On a branching tree model? Doesn't count. There isn't really a branching tree inside species.

I'm aware of the genetic distance thing. I used the vague "similar" on purpose.

I found only data on that genetic distance eur-bantu > bantu-san (see sibling comments)