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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

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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).