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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   33252 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

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You aren’t really doing a good job of making the Chinese all that alien. They don’t have Michael Angelo but what Civilization outside Europe in a certain era does? Certainly not the US. They do have the terracotta warriors, and while not fond of eating dogs Rome had crucifixion.

Footbinding, as a universally engaged in practice among the Chinese upper class for hundreds of years basically the entirety of my point, in that it represents a qualitative deviation from anything the Europeans ever did; in that it represents extreme entirely unprovoked cruelty carried out personally again close innocent kin. As the treatment of close kin is the most basic area where base moral instincts could be expected to operate in, one could expect those who are qualitatively depraved in this area to exceed others in their quantitative depravity elsewhwere. Everything else is just window-dressing to show that the same soulless genes has not dramatically altered it's nature.

Most civilizations outside of Europe have populations of considerably lower IQs. No one has ever suggested that the problem with the Chinese was mere stupidity, with eugenicists like EA Ross (who campaigned to keep them out of the US, nonetheless agreeing that they were our intellectual equals. Thus, where people of equal or higher capacity to do something, do not in fact do that thing, inferring an absence of interest is more than reasonable.

The dog issue is only relevant in that they are still up to it - today. I'm fully aware that both European and non-european civilizations have been extremely cruel to animals in the past. Find me evidence of Brits or Germans cooking dogs alive when they had similar material conditions to modern China (beginning of 1900s) and you'll have a strong point.

I don't have a lot of sympathy for Chinamen, but you're aware that Euros sold their children into slavery for centuries?

Find me evidence of Brits or Germans cooking dogs alive when they had similar material conditions to modern China (beginning of 1900s) and you'll have a strong point.

Dire conditions spawn traditions that take a long time to die off.

The Swiss dog and cat eating in remote valleys doesn't mean the people there are nutritionally deprived. Merely some almost certainly old people keeping a dying tradition barely alive.

Footbinding, as a universally engaged in practice among the Chinese upper class for hundreds of years basically the entirety of my point, in that it represents a qualitative deviation from anything the Europeans ever did; in that it represents extreme entirely unprovoked cruelty carried out personally again close innocent kin

Ah, cruelty carried out on the innocent. My favorite topic. There was the castration of church choir boys, that went on for a couple hundred years. And circumcision of infants, americans still do it. People in sicily sold their children into slavery to miners as late as the turn of the century (the last one, not this one). Corporal punishment in school was common in some places until the 70s, what's 7*6? I don't know. Hands slapped with a wood stick.

The dog issue is only relevant in that they are still up to it - today. I'm fully aware that both European and non-european civilizations have been extremely cruel to animals in the past. Find me evidence of Brits or Germans cooking dogs alive when they had similar material conditions to modern China (beginning of 1900s) and you'll have a strong point.

China today is not comparable to any place in europe in the last century. Some place are very rich but some places are extremely poor. How many places in europe can you find where people resort to eating rats? None, but it still happens in china.

That said, depending on how you feel about horses, I may have bad news for you.

Ah, cruelty carried out on the innocent. My favorite topic.

Go further back in time to Anglo-Saxon England and you'll find my favorite (read: most disturbing) example.

One Anglo-Saxon custom suggests the level of thought about children in earliest times. Thrupp says: “It was customary when it was wished to retain legal testimony of any ceremony, to have it witnessed by children, who then and there were flogged with unusual severity; which it was sup-posed would give additional weight to any evidence of the proceedings.

And this was in a literate society. I get that parchment wasn't cheap back then, but Christ...

Wait, you're telling me they whipped the shit out of children as a primitive form of court stenography???

I know it sounds like a Monty Python skit, but there it is...

it represents extreme entirely unprovoked cruelty carried out personally again close innocent kin. As the treatment of close kin is the most basic area where base moral instincts could be expected to operate in, one could expect those who are qualitatively depraved in this area to exceed others in their quantitative depravity elsewhere.

Agamemnon, leading the great expedition to Troy, had to sacrifice his own daughter for favorable winds.

Herodotus tells us of an Egyptian pharaoh who, finding himself trapped in a burning room by his enemies:

took counsel at once with his wife, whom (it was said) he was bringing with him; and she counselled him to lay two of his six sons on the fire and to make a bridge over the burning whereby they might pass over the bodies of the two and escape. This Sesostris did; two of his sons were thus burnt, but the rest were saved alive with their father.

The great bulwarks of Christendom in Constantinople were fond of blinding or castrating political rivals and brothers in order to render them nonthreatening. Their successors in Constantinople would take it a step further, Mehmed II would legalize fratricide:

"Of any of my sons that ascends the throne, it is acceptable for him to kill his brothers for the common benefit of the people (nizam-i alem). The majority of the ulama (Muslim scholars) have approved this; let action be taken accordingly."

Later, Mehmed III would murder 19(!) of his brothers upon ascending the throne.

Meanwhile in the Americas, To quote my man Douglass on the plight of the slave children fathered by slaveowners:

I know of such cases; and it is worthy of remark that such slaves invariably suffer greater hardships, and have more to contend with, than others. They are, in the first place, a constant offence to their mistress. She is ever disposed to find fault with them; they can seldom do any thing to please her; she is never better pleased than when she sees them under the lash, especially when she suspects her husband of showing to his mulatto children favors which he withholds from his black slaves. The master is frequently compelled to sell this class of his slaves, out of deference to the feelings of his white wife; and, cruel as the deed may strike any one to be, for a man to sell his own children to human flesh-mongers, it is often the dictate of humanity for him to do so; for, unless he does this, he must not only whip them himself, but must stand by and see one white son tie up his brother, of but few shades darker complexion than himself, and ply the gory lash to his naked back; and if he lisp one word of disapproval, it is set down to his parental partiality, and only makes a bad matter worse, both for himself and the slave whom he would protect and defend.

So either America should accept that the Chinese are people, or we should accept that Southerners weren't.

unprovoked cruelty carried out personally again close innocent kin

Do you realise what European childrearing was like before the 1950s-or-so turn against corporeal punishment? Either way, you've singled out one particular type of cruelty that your culture happened to not engage in. On the other hand, while China did have some form of slavery, to my best knowledge it has no recent history of anything resembling the Atlantic slave trade and the institutionalised slavery that waited at the end of it, or the Holocaust. Are you sure the Germanic peoples of Europe are not the ones with the "soulless genes", considering especially how the almost same memes played out conspicuously more humanely in Fascist Italy and the Hispanic Americas?

The dog issue is only relevant in that they are still up to it - today. I'm fully aware that both European and non-european civilizations have been extremely cruel to animals in the past. Find me evidence of Brits or Germans cooking dogs alive when they had similar material conditions to modern China (beginning of 1900s) and you'll have a strong point.

Why do you single out dogs, except because your culture just happened to put them in the "fur babies" category? Liveleak is unfortunately gone, but a few years ago it carried a number of videos from a pig slaughterhouse in Northern Europe that hinted at a completely normalised culture of wanton cruelty towards animals that are generally considerd to be more intelligent than dogs. Fox hunts and safaris also didn't exactly emerge and persist under conditions of scarcity, and I hear kosher slaughter is not the nicest thing either.

No one has ever suggested that the problem with the Chinese was mere stupidity, with eugenicists like EA Ross (who campaigned to keep them out of the US, nonetheless agreeing that they were our intellectual equals.

The use of "equals", rather than "superiors", in this context to me seems to hint at plain old motivated reasoning, seeking to rationalise prior disdain in the face of inconvenient absence of the most common criterion to do so (average IQ).

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