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To be clear, I am not talking about Covid at all here; I’m as vociferously anti-mask as any right-wing poster here and was from pretty much the second I saw the early IFR estimates for Covid. I’ve never felt more in-sync with the Red Tribe than I did during Covid. However, all that is contingent on the fact that Covid was not remotely as dangerous as it was advertised to be. I do think there is a persuasive case that if it had been the kind of super-pandemic it was initially purported to be, there probably would have been untold millions of working-class white people who would have died like flies from not taking precautionary measures, due to apathy or generalized (justified) distrust of the government or pig-headed “if I want to get sick and die that’s my God-given right”. It happened in this case that those traits were adaptive to the reality of the actual disease, which was a nothingburger; there’s no guarantee that the next pandemic will be as fake and gay, and in that scenario it may very well make sense to talk about whites as reckless.
No, what I actually had in mind were things like the massive disparities in tragic fatalities, firearm accidents, concussions from bar fights, and all the other sorts of mayhem you can encounter in the ER at any major hospital in the U.S., versus what you’ll find at an equivalent hospital in Asia. Yes, I’m aware that the 13% are contributing far more than their fair share to these phenomena, but if all the ADOS got teleported to Jupiter tomorrow, U.S. numbers, and European numbers more generally, would still differ markedly from Asia’s.
I do agree with you that China seems qualitatively different from other East Asian countries in some really interesting and unflattering ways. It almost seems to be simultaneously very communitarian - in the sense of high conformity, willingness of the population to follow orders and to not make trouble, and a general low-agency environment - and also low-trust and low-altruism. The worst of both worlds, in a way; all the bad parts of communitarianism without any of the good parts.
However, your post wasn’t just about China; your argument is that this battle is racial; that there’s something about the Asian race generally that makes it fundamentally incompatible with the European race. And what I’m pointing out is that many of the failure modes you’re pointing to appear pretty much specific to China and not generalizable among East Asians as a whole, or even Han Chinese as a whole, given that I don’t think we see some of these problems in Taiwan or in Singapore or in the communities of overseas Chinese in places like Indonesia and the Philippines. So, while I agree that there are points of profound difference that present significant potential for conflict between European-derived civilization and Chinese civilization as currently constituted, I disagree that this conflict is properly a racial conflict.
And, perhaps as relevantly, US numbers would be much higher than most of Europe's, which would be higher than China's, which would be higher than Japan's.
I mean, yes, obviously there's overlap between the US murder rate and Europe's, but the white homicide rate, firearms death rate, etc is still noticeably higher than, say, France or England or Germany.
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