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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023

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Isn't, this, rather, an argument that Haiti is «HBD played straight»? This is how a democratic, or perhaps ochlocratic, nation with an average IQ of 67 functions: it doesn't.

It's those other nations which are deviations from the natural path, thanks to introgression of some elite material and its ability to withstand the pressure of the demos, which is not a given when eldritch powers side with the latter. And accordingly, African nations which have succeeded in humbling their elite castes – be those local Africans of another tribe, like with Tutsis, or Indians, or Arabs, or colonial remnants – are nations where the genetic factor is playing out in its purest form.

The obvious question for me as a libertarian republican is, how was free-market capitalism treated in the school lessons learned by the children who grew up into the gangsters now dividing up the island? Were they taught to respect others’ property? Were they taught to deny a single one of their emotionally-driven urges to have and thus to take?

I’m “friends” with an autistic woman with an IQ of less than 100. She was raised by a WEIRD progressive mother in a highly permissive home. She was thoroughly educated about her rights as a human, a citizen, and a person with disabilities, but not her responsibilities as an economic unit. She is now a want-monster who argues until she gets her way, because she believes the world owes her, and money is just an excuse for people to reject her. She treats her help-staff as garbage and complains when they quit.

Why would you be friends with such a person?

Before I learned about codependency, I thought I could be the friend people needed. That got me four bad friends in a row who could not reciprocate in any meaningful way. They drained me and I suffered immeasurably. She’s the only one I’m still in contact with because she’s the only one with my phone number.

Not OP but, I am friends with a lot of basketcases. Most of them got "grandfathered in" as friends from middle school and my childhood neighborhood.

They are not bad people, if you can dispense your desire to have "deep" conversations with literally everyone you know ( I have other people to do that with), then they are perfectly fine to associate with and do (limited) things with such as play sports, video games, goof about, hold a cookout with, etc.

Also, "bad" people are not always universally bad to everyone. In certain cultures, the more of an asshole one is to "outsiders" the more loyal he is to his "family". My grandfather was one such example, An absolute menace to service workers of all stripes, but a gentleman of the nth order with his family.

Uh, isn’t Rwanda improving rapidly while the rest of the Great Lakes region is perhaps not improving rapidly but still gradually getting better? S Africa is getting worse, true, but Botswana is getting much better.

Rwanda is ruled by Tutsis,no?

Could you explain the distinction between Tutsi and Hutu?

Previously I vaguely remembered colonial authorities basically made them up. So I looked into it a bit. Wiki e.g.:

They defined "Tutsi" as anyone owning more than ten cows (a sign of wealth) or with the physical features of a longer thin nose, high cheekbones, and being over six feet tall, all of which are common descriptions associated with the Tutsi.

which would add any successful people into this, as if making "kulak" an ethnicity.

Both the Tutsi and Hutu had been the traditional governing elite, but both colonial powers allowed only the Tutsi to be educated and to participate in the colonial government.

🤷‍♀️

Is it the case where a few disparate groups were sublimated into either Tutsi or Hutu? Or that the Tutsi were a coherent group? Are "official" takes as distorted as e.g. HBD? I'm more familiar with Central Asia, where Kazakhs, Uzbeks and such were basically invented in the 1920s, almost whole cloth.

Yeah, that's the standard excuse - Belgians did it because they elevated only one group. There was no trouble till whites came.

I don't really believe it in the slightest.

Or that the Tutsi were a coherent group?

They're probably largely descended from a coherent group that originated outside Rwanda.

E.g. from wikipedia:

The ability to digest lactose among African adults is widespread only among desert-dwelling nomadic groups that have depended upon milk for millennia. Three quarters of the adult Tutsi of Rwanda and Burundi have a high ability to digest lactose, while only 5% of the adults of the neighboring Shi people of eastern Congo can. Among Hutu, one in three adults has a high capacity for lactose digestion, a surprisingly high number for an agrarian people, which Mamdani suggests may be the result of centuries of intermarriage with Tutsi.[2]

EDIT:

Imo, the clearest reason why Rwanda went bugshit was, that even though it is an unusually fertile region, the population density was extremely high, resulting in privation:

Rwanda's population soared from 1,887,000 people in 1948 to more than 7,500,000 in 1992, making it the most densely populated country in Africa. Poor farmers were forced onto marginal land, where cultivation resulted in severe erosion. Reliance on firewood as a source of energy caused massive deforestation, and farmers were then forced to use straw and other crop residues for fuel, thereby damaging soil fertility. These factors led to a disastrous shortfall in food production, with two-thirds of the population unable to meet even the minimum food energy requirement of 2,100 calories per person per day.

which would add any successful people into this, as if making "kulak" an ethnicity.

From my understanding the categories are remarkably genetically coherent since they measured different cultural groups/ways of life, but it wouldn't shock me if there was also an element of 'everybody doing 8/10 or better at life is now a Tutsi' at the fringes.

There's been a bunch of revisionism on the topic that's very much of the 'ethnic strife didn't exist prior to colonialism whatsoever' brand of hilarity.

The Tutsis are mostly descended from East African Cushitic pastoralists. They have significant Bantu admixture, though. Hutus are almost all generic Bantus genetically. There has been no formal studies on this as the Rwandan government doesn’t allow it, but Razib Khan privately analyzed some samples he got from Rwanda years ago on his blog.

Huh I had no idea. I always bought into the party line of “Belgians invented them” I should’ve known better

I guess It's how Brits supposedly invented Brahmins to delegate them power over the oppressed proletarian masses. Turns out, made them genetically more Aryan too. And of course language families are spread by emancipated women who love traveling and acquainting themselves with fascinating diverse cultures – not with the edge of the battle axe.

Once you notice that those 20th century historians and anthropologists started from a very particular, very self-absorbed theoretical lens, you develop a certain... prior for every time you hear about some clearly hereditary group being a social construct.

That said, @veqq is correct that Soviets, who took that lens as both an explanatory framework for things that work and, logically enough, an instruction manual, did invent a bunch of peoples, or at the very least redefined their distinctions and populations –Tatars and Bashkirs are the most glaring example.

I was under the impression is was a lot less Tutsi dominated than it used to be, but admit that I’m not totally up on my Central African politics.

The opposite is true - although Tutsis were generally richer than Hutus and more important politically, the RPF (Tutsi exiles) takeover of Rwanda during the genocide has led to the creation of an authoritarian government friendly to Tutsis, so overall their position is likely more secure.

I doubt the concept of the Tutsis, like the Igbo, being outliers is Sub - Saharian Africa is common knowledge much less commonly accepted.