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HBD blogger JayMan has recently made a blog post critiquing me for my “Hajnal denialism.”
Anatoly Karlin recently wrote a post criticizing my and HBD Chick’s attribution of socio-cultural-economic differences across Europe to our old friend the Hajnal line…
Anatoly’s arguments on this matter often rests on his inability to fit some social pattern or another perfectly to the geographic extent of the Hajnal line, as he’s wont to do. This is very much his M.O. on these things, he seems to expect perfect geographic correspondence with every social variable to the Hajnal line.
I really don’t know where the criticism comes from. A quick perusal of my website and Twitter reveals that I do think ancestral family systems, as explored in the works of Hajnal and Emmanuel Todd, has significant explanatory power. Heck, just ask Niccolo Salo.
What I do object to is JayMan’s unremitting attempts to hammer in, Procrustes-like, every social phenomenon under the Sun to fit the Hajnal Line.
1. JayMan claims that East Europeans have a biological propensity towards Communism.
This is true only insofar as Eastern Europe tended to have more exagamous community family systems, which in turn do have a strong relationship with indigenous support for Communism 50-100 years ago.
[Note that this is according to work by Emmanuel Todd, which has nothing to do with the Hajnal Line, except insofar as exogamous communitarian family systems are almost all located outside it. Incidentally, I find JayMan's constant conflation of the Hajnal Line with Todd's family systems in general to be questionable.]
Russian Constituent Assembly election, 1917: Bolshevik share of the vote.
However, when one gets down the historical details, it emerges that there were plenty of exceptions and even reversals to the general trend. The most enthusiastic supporters of the Bolsheviks in 1917 were the Latvians, who are half in and half out of the Hajnal Line (though Todd does say they had an exogamous community family system). More of them voted for the Bolsheviks than any other province of the former Russian Empire, and the Red Latvian Riflemen played a critical and indispensable role in consolidating Bolshevik power over the Russian heartlands in spring-summer 1918. Meanwhile, the core of White resistance to the Bolsheviks was in decidedly non-Hajnal southern Russia and Siberia. In the Finnish Civil War, in the exact inverse of the geography of family types, the Reds started off by seizing power in the south, while the resistance was concentrated in the north.
Within the Hajnal Line, there was a series of Communist uprisings and pseudo-states in the aftermath of WW1, such as the Bavarian Soviet Republic (Hajnal, stem family), the Spartacist uprising (mostly Hajnal, stem family), and the Hungarian Soviet Republic (half Hajnal, exogamous community family) – none of which could have appeared without some significant underlying level of support. The Czechs (mostly Hajnal, stem family) voted the Communists into power in mostly free elections in 1946. Throughout the 1950s-70s, greater percentages of French (fully Hajnal) and Italians (half Hajnal) voted for Communists than Russians did in 1917. Indeed, Italy would have probably gone Communist in the late 1940s if not for the CIA interfering in their elections.
Note that JayMan goes so far as to seriously cite HBD differences in Korea to explain the “propensity for Communism” in the northern part. Leaving aside minor and irrelevant details such as Chinese and Soviet military involvement, it’s worth noting that the North had traditionally been more Christian and more collaborationist with the Japanese, while the South had been more nationalistic and xenophobic (according to B.R. Myers in The Cleanest Race). It’s therefore the South that should have sooner gone Communist by this muddled logic.
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2. JayMan claims the Iron Curtain can no longer explain anything since it hasn’t existed for 30 years. East Europeans who do that are like Blacks still whining about slavery.
Communism: is there anything it can’t do? It’s like the legacy of slavery for American Blacks. Its effects are felt long after its gone. And in both cases, the legacy is felt before it even existed.
Obviously, the range of things for which Communism can be credibly blamed for is limited, and declining over time. But this presupposes that Eastern Europe was always as backwards in relative terms as in the 1980s.
This is incorrect. In the early 20th century, Eastern Europe was not as developed as the leading North-West European nations, but it was about as developed as the Mediterranean. According to data gathered by Angus Maddison, economic product per capita in the Russian Empire c.1913 – which included backwards areas such as Central Asia and the Caucasus – was higher than that of Portugal and Japan, and similar to that of Greece, though below Spain and Italy; up to the 1930s, Czechia and Hungary were about as advanced as Northern Italy. There was no major category in which they were huge negative outliers. Homicide rates in the Russian Empire, for instance, were similar to those in Italy or Japan, though 5x higher than in the most developed nations such as the UK and Germany (I have a post on this ready to publish).
By the end of the transition from Communism, even Russia – the richest component of the USSR along with the Baltics – could only dream of “catching up” to Portugal’s level (as Putin promised in 2000 at the start of his first term). This was more or less achieved by the early 2010s. Poland is now at least on the level of Portugal, Romania is not that far behind, and Czechia is catching up with Spain and Italy. Institutions, corruption, living standards are much better than in the 1990s almost everywhere in Eastern Europe in not just absolute but relative terms.
So clearly Communism had a negative effect, though one that is being gradually exorcised. (Of course, some things are very difficult to do away with entirely, and will continue draining resources for decades if not centuries. For instance, the USSR built a large number of non-viable towns in the Russian Far North, which would have never appeared under market conditions and which require heavy subsidies to this day, as discussed in The Siberian Curse). If Communism had nothing to do with poor East European economic performance, they would not have started to gain on the developed world in relative terms after abandoning it. This is not say that they will converge all the way up to Switzerland’s level. The most reasonable long-term expectation is that they will regain their relative positions of a century ago, and with few exceptions, that is exactly what is happening. But they might well do even better, thanks to Western Europe’s decision to import masses of unproductive migrants from the Third World (here the East Europeans can thank the Soviet Freezer).
It is good that JayMan mentioned Blacks and slavery in the US because that sooner reinforces my point. Because the true equivalence would have been if Liberians or Haitians blamed their failures on slavery. Blacks in the US got to benefit from living under world-class institutions, which they would have otherwise had to learn, adapt, and master themselves (something that post-Communist East Europeans are doing successfully, if slowly and imperfectly; something that Blacks have at best been able to only maintain, as in South Africa or Jamaica). US Blacks also get to benefit from far higher living standards and education than would have been the case if they had been left to create their own societies. Now if a century hence East Europeans were to still live like they did under late Communism, JayMan would have a point. But he’s already been invalidated on that score.
This doesn’t invalidate JayMan’s point that many East Europeans expressly dismiss the Hajnal Line for emotional reasons. That is true, but I don’t fall into that category – having even made the comparison myself on a number of occasions. However, if military force ratios on the Eastern Front in 1944 are also supposed to ultimately boil down to the Hajnal Line, then I suppose I’m a Hajnal Denier.
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3. JayMan claims I expect “perfect geographic correspondence with every social variable” to the Hajnal Line.
This is almost completely incorrect. Now just to be clear, I do think that the Hajnal Line has substantial explanatory power on some indicators, most notably corruption.
[However, while living in non-corrupt countries is generally nicer, it doesn't seem to make much of a difference to either wealth or scientific productivity (adjusting for IQ + Communism/resource windfalls!!). Indeed, to the extent that there are possibly biologically-determined negative outliers there, it's with respect to Mongoloids, whose countries are poorer and less creative than might be deduced from their (high) average IQs alone.]
But the problem is that there are so many exceptions that they overwhelm the otherwise relative faint outline traced by the Hajnal Line.
One example that JayMan and Co. keep citing is support for LGBT and gay marriage, which is – Czechia and Greece aside – essentially a map of the East/West division during the Cold War. Meanwhile, despite being half in half out of the Hajnal Line, Spain is as gay friendly as “Sweden Yes”; while the general liberalism of Iberia even by West European standards is somewhat of a puzzle, virtually all the Spaniards and Portuguese I have talked to converge on the opinion that it is a prolonged reaction to their mid-20th century reactionary dictators (i.e. local factors). Now I am not arguing that there are zero “Hajnal influences” – Portugal is less homophile than Spain; Finland less so than Sweden; Greece less so than the rest of Western Europe; Estonia less so than Russia. But the overall picture is obviously dominated by the East/West divide from the Cold War: Estonia is much more homophobic than Finland; the Balkans are more homophobic than Greece.
This should not be so surprising, because social attitudes are very much malleable things. In perhaps the most striking example, even modern East European nationalists can only dream of being as racist and bigoted as mid-century (Hajnal) Americans. The Americans who stormed the beaches of Normandy to “punch Nazis” were themselves hardcore fascists (by modern standards).
Closer to our own time, in Estonia, elderly Estonians and Russians have similarly skeptical views on gay marriage; young Russians and Estonians diverge, spending their time in largely separate information spaces. As late as the mid-2000s, Utahns (fully Hajnal), Poles (half-Hajnal), and Russians (not Hajnal) had similarly skeptical opinions on gay marriage; since then, the West began to strongly normalize and even sacralize homosexuality, while Russia went into the opposite direction, with the result that today they have diverged into almost completely non-intersecting worldviews on this issue. This has gone so far that “Putin’s Russia” is now regularly demonized in the Western media for having 1980′s American-style views on homosexuality.
Support for nationalism and nationalist parties is another factor cited by JayMan in his Hajnal obsession. He often cites the Nazi share of the vote in support of that, and compares it to AfD performance today. But look at it in greater detail and the whole structure comes apart. In 1933, Naziphilia was a fuzzy gradient as you went east, and one significantly confounded by Bavarian Catholics voting for non-Nazi conservative nationalists; it was also notably undermined by Saxony, a proletarian region where support for Social Democrats and Communists was high instead. But today, you have extremely marked demarcation lines, even at the district level. With the exception of Berlin – where the AfD still gets almost as much as in Bavaria! – all the former GDR states give at least 50% as many votes to the AfD as the most pro-AfD West German state, conservative Bavaria. Moreover, the AfD does best precisely in Saxony!
In summary, the more credible explanation for most of these issues is that whatever role the Hajnal Line might play, its effects are very much secondary to that of the Soviet Freezer. Though obviously, now that the Freezer is broken, we may expect its effects to fade away in the next few decades. In that case, patterns may begin to hew closer to that of the Hajnal Line come mid-century. But that is speculative.
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If the above comes across as too critical, I will append that I am friendly with JayMan and appreciate the great bulk of his work. So I would ask commenters to refrain from any personal attacks. Nonetheless, I can’t escape the impression that JayMan has taken away one admittedly big and reasonably important idea and ran amok with it, extending it to ever more incredible and even deranged (North Korea!?) directions. This is not adaptive – “fox” thinkers tend to outperform “hedgehogs” at predictive success. I would urge JayMan to take a temporary break from the HBD literature and read up on topics such as economic history and the Russian Revolution.
These Hajnal line people do get carried away. Your point about changes in homophilia proves it. Humans can be made to accept almost any values set, provided the consensus building infrastructure is sufficient and the corresponding feedback from said values’ consequences is sufficiently delayed or opaque. Poles will soon match the Irish in their globohomoism. Infect themselves with spiritual AIDS, to own the Russians. Sad.
I agree with the article, including on JayMan, who is probably a nice fellow.
Five years, I tell you. Five years ago on hbdchick blog and on his own Jayman was saying same things and was ignoring same arguments.
Did he leave Unz?
Also North Korea is a bit of a stretch. As far as I can see, there are two HBD points there:
1) Koreans are a bit of a hive people, so unsurprisingly their version of communism is what it is.
2) Those Koreans who were smarter or valued freedom were more likely to end up in the South, while the most collectivist ones were more likely to end up in the North. I don’t know if it’s a big effect or not.
Another problem with JayMans argument is that the _direct_ negative effects of Communism aren’t 30 years removed – not if you include the post-Communist depression (and the resulting social disintegration). This process, which is an inevitable result of moving away from a planned economy, only abated in the late 90s. So Eastern Europe has scarcely been converging for more then 20 years to its pre-Communist (relative) level of development. Seen in that light they’re doing pretty well (Ukraine excluded), though Russia could probably do better.
Anatoly, thanks for the response. I appreciate the maps and data in the post.
The problem however is that you’ve doubled-down on every criticism I’ve made in my post.
Let’s start with Occam’s Razor:
Let’s be clear with one thing: when I (or HBD Chick) talk about the Hajnal line, we don’t mean that that one line is the be-all, end-all demarcation of all things Europe (I specifically explained otherwise in my post). We’re, ultimately, talking about biological differences between different groups of people. The Hajnal line is just a neat little way of visualizing those differences. Indeed, it (age of marriage across Europe) isn’t even ultimately the cause.
Hence this:
Is ultimately nonsensical.
The trouble with your premise is that you’re proposing that there are additional factors that explain the contemporary group-level differences on top of biology, without, in my view, justifying the necessity of those additional factors. Why do we need the “Soviet Freezer” when biology alone can do?
On to this one:
And yet you do that all through this post. Remember, the Hajnal line is shorthand for biological differences between different European ethnicities. Yet you make these statements:
(On the last one, remember the correspondence to Todd’s family systems in France and Italy).
There’s not going to be a perfect-every-time pattern. As I said in my post:
Moving on:
No, that’s not quite what I said. I said that there are (likely biological) differences between North and South Koreans, hence the differences between the two Koreas can’t be boiled completely down to their differing current regimes.
But this brings me to a key point that’s missing in your analysis: once you establish that biology is involved in group differences, you need to eliminate it as a factor when trying to explain (extended) phenotypic differences with non-biological factors, like history or government. You generally don’t do this, hence the problem with your analysis.
No, you contradict yourself above:
That’s pretty much it.
Occam’s Razor is the key here. As I asked, why do we need the Soviet Freezer?
Occam’s Razor indeed. In case of communism: the Occam’s Razor would dictate that the simplest explanation (Red Army) should be taken as explanation why communism took over the Poland.
There is also another thing which I told you quite a some time ago: even if population genetics influence the range of possible cultures it could create or maintain (and those are two different things!), culture is environment and environment creates a pressure which then shapes population genetics. Similarly, a culture imposed from outside WILL influence population genetics (e.g. communism).
It should be obvious. Otherwise, the marriage patterns would have no chance to have influence at all.
I am surprised you even dignified him with a response.
Jayman is an absolute disgrace, a fucking joke, a total FOOL.
I get second hand embarrassment simply reading his hot takes.
Remember that this utter dope believes that obesity is “genetic” and even tries to make his absurd case to Dennis Mangan.
You win, all arguments. Now to weight the interchange, how un-intellectual are layers of prepositions when unz.com is a vehicle of mind shaping to be used as experiment and laboratory, Eventually to be used for pertinent goals.
How un-intellectual is the endeavor when unz.com is manned by Jew strategy and individuals who diminute their affiliation or are opaque about it. Is the thinking secondary to being and fully front their belonging.
Occam’s Razor, why do Gentiles need Jews layering the matter of the what and how?
We were censored making a similar comment involving the necessary afterthought (the intellectual a matter as to his idea), so we do not expect this comment surviving.
My first response was “You are (likely biologically) retarded” but I didn’t post it as it would ruin the polite tone of this intellectual discussion you and Karlin are having.
Whatever happened to Occam’s Razor if you have to use such ridiculous hypotheses to support your theory? Even you feel how ridiculous this sounds, that’s why you put it in parentheses for some casual deniability, as if your whole thesis wasn’t about biology in the first place.
Because the other type of differences would be historic circumstances creating cultural differences, something that you dismiss in favor of explaining everything with biology wrt the “Soviet Freezer”.
This is the opposite side of the narrow view of modern liberals, who explain all differences between peoples with historic circumstances, denying biology.
But in this case Jayman was not saying that (a) the biological differences between North and South Koreans were a cause why North Korea went communism. He actually only said that (b) there could likely be genetical differences between North and South Koreans.
OTOH, why he would say (b) if he did not meant to imply (a) is beyond me.
One more thing:
In general yes, but there are exceptions. In general when we want to determine why Abel is fast runner and Kain is not, we should use genetic explanation. But, OTOH, if we know already that Kain in his childhood fell from the stairs, had three operations and still seems not to recover fully, then you don’t need to eliminate the genetic factors in determining why Kain still hobbles his way while Abel bounces merrily.
OT
Since you are an expert in all things Bulgarian, and I just read about how very different Macedonians are from Bulgarians (spoiler: they are basically the same), you might shed some light on the Nikola Gruevski affair. I only know that Orbán seems to be an idiot (maybe he has some reasons?), but I have no idea why he was saved by Orbán, and what could be the repercussions.
I’m a fan of the Hajnal idea but i think the best starting point is to look at the two extremes: Hajnal Europe (enforced out breeding) vs Arabia (multi-generational close cousin arranged marriage) and work from there.
From my experience i would say a big difference between those two extreme types of population is in balance of empathy. Say all populations have 10 points of total empathy and those points can be split among three categories: kin, strangers and animals then i’d say the empathy split would go something like
1) Arabia: 9, 1, 0
and
2) Hajnal 5, 3, 2
i.e. Hajnal has lower kin-empathy but more for outsiders – shallower but wider – whereas close-cousin marriage populations have extreme kin-empathy but very little (or none) for outsiders.
This leads to two questions 1) what mechanism could achieve this and 2) if correct how could this explain the various correlations we see with the hajnal line?
Maybe it’s a question of trust?
For example I think the “communist” thing is a bit backwards. The idea sometimes comes across as some populations prefer authoritarian rule cos serf mentality or whatever whereas I think low trust populations prefer autocratic strong man rule cos they don’t trust non-kin and so want a strong man to enforce common rules – whereas high trust populations trust more so they don’t feel the need for an enforcer.
(Other non-communist examples of low trust populations wanting a strong man to force everyone to play fair might be Singapore or the middle east – or maybe north Korea.)
So imo the “communist” thing is actually kind of the opposite way round – I think Hajnal populations are more inclined to socialistic ideals of the common good but less inclined to autocracy – hence liberalism – whereas low trust populations are the opposite; they don’t care about the common good and are more inclined to support autocracy because they know their neighbors don’t care about the common good either.
#
Korea
If close marriage leads to low trust populations and low trust populations tend to want (need?) autocratic rule then the Korean connection might be due to the north being more mountainous as mountain people end up more inbred simply due to being piled up into hundreds of little valleys.
so maybe
Hajnal != magic dirt
Hajnal = extreme example of relative out breeding
North vs South Korea = separate example of relative in/out breeding?
#
for people who don’t see how relative out breeding might lead to high trust when diversity causes low trust if you start with a homogenous population (e.g. Denmark 1000 years ago) and then practice exogamous marriage for a 1000 years or so then you get a population who are *all* closely related – as near to clones as you can get by accident.
btw i accept both the hajnal line and the soviet freezer ideas when it comes to globohomo.
1) hajnal media got hijacked by globohomo while Western media didn’t (soviet freezer)
and
2) hajnal high trust + hijacked poisonous media = pozzed faster (hajnal)
if/when non Hajnal media gets hijacked the speed of pozzing will be in proportion to how low/high trust the respective populations are (e.g. mountain populations will be slower)
nb all populations have evolved to conform to the group so this is partly a question of who people see as their group.
I don’t understand this argument. You seem to be arguing with a writer called JayMan that economic level of “Eastern European countries” is something inherent to different nationalities? He thinks it’s lower (and thinks these countries are similar to each other?), and you higher. He thinks it’s not related to communism, and you think it is?
The determining factor for economic level for any smaller countries, are who your neighbours are, what trade relationship you have with them, what natural resources you have, and how much your government (or enemy governments) can fuck everything up.
You are talking about a category that includes some EU countries (like Latvia, Poland, Hungary) which are a part of transfer union with Western Europe. Obviously all these poorer EU members will converge towards a EU average, as they are part of a transfer union, whose aim is to transfer money and investment to them, until they converge and integrate into a single economy. Above all, they are dependent and converging with the German economy.
While Ukraine is not part of the EU and doesn’t have oil, and doesn’t have political stability. Their economic position is reflection of this. Likewise Moldova, Georgia and Armenia.
Russia, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan – the economies supercharged since 2000, as a result to oil and other natural resources (2000 commodities boom). If Ukraine had oil, they would have developed, and likewise if they had joined the EU. Most of this is not related to the people of the country or their inherent character.
Generally this is all known since the 18th century.
Nowadays there are more possible avenues for economic growth than then, some with nothing related to intellectual level of the population (e.g. oil, gas and natural resources, or belonging to wealth transfer blocs like EU, where wealthier countries have to pay for your development until you attain their level), some requiring particular historical stability (British legal system which attracts investment and legal work; or Swiss banking system), some requiring geographically safe position offshore to major economies (Switzerland, Singapore), and some requiring intelligent political programs (plan to become tax haven for multinational corporations to base inside the EU, which Republic of Ireland achieved). Some avenues for development – e.g. development through high-tech exports – are dependent on educational level and human capital (although Republic of Ireland bypassed their lack of human capital through the political path, which then attracted foreign skilled workers).
JayMan’s arguments are nothing but special pleading and just-so storytelling—HBD in a nutshell.
“But why the lack of perfect correspondence then, across different social variables? Given the above, this too should be obvious. The reason is that the selective pressures each specific population experienced were unique. Every society is different from every other society. However, there were patterns in this selection that varied in part due to geography that helped to produce the geographic patterns we see.”
Special pleading.
Personally, I think JayMan should be the official face of HBD. No one represents better what HBD is about than JayMan.
If there is any kind of voting process whereby we can elect an official representative of HBD, cast my vote for JayMan.
Jayman is a hereditarian extremist.
Somehow everything always boils down to genes for him, even minute differences that he can’t prove exists among very similar peoples. He’s like the equalist’s strawman HBDer who thinks its 99% nature and 1% nurture.
I’ve long suspected he’s a troll trying to discredit HBD by taking an outlandish position.
It’s obvious that the enemies of HBD want JayMan to be their opponent.
LOL, I didn’t read your comment before writing mine.
The net contribution of the EU to Poorland is 2,42 percent of GDP. That’s obviously not enough to explain why their GDP per capita (ppp) is 300 percent that of the Ukraine. I’m sorry, but Europeans gibs won’t make you rich.
The reason your country sucks is that you create nothing that other people value.
Putting it below a “More” tag since it’s offtopic: [AK: Removing it since it's a good comment]
I don’t like Gruevski, he is one of the main architects of the “We Wuz Ancient Macedonians” insanity – which, besides the obvious objections to falsifying history, is also painful to me to watch how people (who are after all ethnic Bulgarians) make laughing stock of themselves before the world.
That being said, the accusations against him are obviously bullshit (making a big deal out of a government Mercedes purchase, really) and I very much respect Orban for giving him asylum.
The EU shills and the current government really discredit themselves by supporting this. It’s another subversion of democracy, just like all the probes against Trump in the US. “Corruption” has become a meaningless buzzword, anybody not playing to the tune of the globohomo mafia is accused of corruption as a pretext to remove him from power.
Gruevski was supposed to be a dictator, and there really was a scandal about wiretaps he ordered – but Gruevski never tried to imprison the opposition, and he did lose elections while he was in power. Now the EU-friendly albo-tolerating socialist Zaev tries to imprison the leader of the biggest opposition party and claims that the disastrous referendum about the new name (“North Macedonia”) and NATO membership was a success. Gruevski certainly had a more independent foreign policy instead of being a blind EU/NATO shill (though he was somewhat of a Serbian shill tbh)
It’s especially frustrating to watch all this as a Bulgarian, because under Zaev the divide between Bulgaria and Macedonia has finally started to heal – a friendship treaty, steps to fix the absurdities in the Macedonian history textbooks, common commemoration of certain events (Ilinden–Preobrazhenie Uprising) and figures (like Tsar Samuil, or “Samuel of Bulgaria” as he is known in English and Macedonians used to claim he was their tsar and completely unrelated to Bulgarians).
But all this is done for the wrong reasons – mainly for euroatlantic integration. Hating Bulgarians is no longer hip with Zaev’s voters, but not because we are the same people or at least very closely related or something, but because “nationalism is primitive” – I’ve actually heard that line from a couple of Macedonians in Sofia and facepalmed in real life (really, you feel comfortable in Sofia because it’s cosmopolitan and fits with a cosmopolitan guy such as yourself, not because you can actually feel at home here?).
It’s all very sad. As retarded as many of Gruevski’s voters are, I don’t want them to be suppressed and I fear this will all backfire. On the other hand, most Macedonians do seem to want to be in the EU, being the stupid Bulgarians that they are, just like the ones on the other side of the border.
Anyway, kudos to Orban. A manly thing to do indeed.
1. I’m not from Ukraine.
But in different historical configurations, a lot of value was produced in Ukraine.
I’m quite ignorant in history overall, but I recall reading in late 19th and early 20th century, that some of the fastest economically growing regions of all Europe, were in the Russian and Austro-Hungarian regions of what is now Ukraine.
And in the USSR, Ukraine included some of the more important industries.
2. Poland is now increasingly coupled to the awesome German economy, and transfer payments are just a part of that.
It was a terrible misfortune for Poland, in the 20th century, that they lived next to Germany. But in the 21st century, it will be their fortune.
You didn’t answer the main point.
To give one example I’m familiar with, Hungary was already somewhat corrupt before 1945, certainly by Western European standards. There was widespread nepotism. However, if you look at the prime ministers (and the 1921-44 head of state, Admiral Horthy) between 1867-1945, you cannot find one who got significantly richer than he had been before taking office. There are some examples of probable corruption, like Prime Minister Kállay (1942-44) paying off most of his debts during his stint as prime minister, but he was already a landowner nobleman before and he didn’t move much higher.
Compare that to Orbán, the current prime minister, who had nothing in 1990 when he became an MP, and was still only moderately wealthy in 2010, and now his son-in-law (at age 32) is an UHNWI. (Which makes Orbán’s daughter one, too.) His sole special business talent consists of getting fat government contracts.
Orbán’s former elementary school buddy (a gas fitter) was middle class in 2010, when Orbán became prime minister. He’s now one of the richest people in the country (again, his only identifiable talent seems to be getting fat government contracts), and because he doesn’t appear to be smart at all, he is suspected to be a front man for Orbán’s personal wealth. Orbán has a number of associates who got very wealthy out of nowhere (the gas fitter is the most extreme example).
So why did Hungarians get so much more corrupt since 1945, if communism had no impact?
Thanks!
correlation = an interesting and potentially useful line of inquiry
Maybe corruption “works”.
18th century Whig Britain was “corrupt”, but that was precisely when the Anglo-Saxon people rose to greatness.
Alexander Hamilton seriously argued that America needed to become more corrupt, on the British model, in order to become as great as Britain.
Tolerated corruption can be the bribe the common people offer to a segment of the elite to act in a reliably patriotic manner.
Did those honest 1867-1945 Hungarian leaders make any decisive positive difference for the good of the Hungarian nation and European Christian civilization? Or did they go with the flow, with disastrous results?
For all of his alleged corruption, Orban is taking a different path from the disastrous Western elite consensus. Perhaps it wouldn’t be possible without the loyal support of a bribed elite – just as William Pitt couldn’t lift the Anglo-Saxon people to greatness without the support of the Duke of Newcastle’s corrupt Whig political machine.
I wonder if there’s any good way to measure historical corruption without resorting to anecdotes like these.
But that certainly matches my historical gut feeling about Russia as well.
For instance, a Russian newspaper in Kazan in 1898 found a fraud case of 500 rubles (600,000 rubles in today’s money = $10,000) notable enough to write about. This sum wouldn’t even be noticed in today’s Russia where $50 million apartments are a standard gift for Ministerial level bureaucrats from the Presidential Administration. I, who don’t exactly rotate in dodgy circles, have second-hand knowledge of a monetarily significantly bigger case that involved police and judicial officials that wasn’t discovered or prosecuted.
if everywhere else at the time was as or more corrupt. then
- if they were all *as* corrupt then at most corruption is neutral.
- if they were all *more* corrupt then maybe being slightly less corrupt than the average gave England an advantage.
he worked for the banking mafia.
One of the most intelligent comments I’ve seen on this site in a while, for its appreciation of the non-obvious and the non-linear.
Fittingly ironic that it occurred in a thread about one of the stupidest intellectual movements in history, that exemplifies linear thinking and obvious explanations.
I find it difficult to measure, not firstly because of lack of data, but because of the vagueness of the noun “corruption” itself. In English (and French too BTW, where the word is identical), it unambiguously elicits negative connotations, as a result of its etymology: corruptus, this is the property of what is dirty, tainted, and not only in a physical but also moral sense.
Therefore, every decent person will agree that “corruption” is bad, as no one but perverts could have sympathy for the tainted, the perverted, the morally reprehensible.
The problem however with that argument is that “corruption” has come to include, under its vast umbrella, a whole range of practices, many of which are certainly not absolutely morally reprehensible — and it fact were highly commendable under different climes and times. For instance, clientelism is perceived as one modality of corruption in über-transparent, protestant polities (such as the germanophone cantons of CH) ; whereas clientelism was perceived as an obligatory civic virtue for the rich in imperial Rome.
I therefore have a hard time making broad-ranging conclusions on such ill-defined concepts. I think we need to restrict the object of the study to a narrower, well-defined category.
Hajnal line is a dependent variable. It’s downstream of economy, which, in turn, in Medieval times and earlier, was downstream of geography (e.g. what grows in this place, how fertile the land here is, etc.)
How do we know that Hajnal line is downstream of economy? Simple. When the means of production evolved in the past century or two, family structures, ages of marriage, and so on, changed beyond recognition after a couple of generations.
This is totally different from the American politicians, who grow super wealthy not during their time in office but after.
Remember, after is not corruption.
Similarly, if I hire my crony it’s corruption. But if (as they do in America) I get you to hire my crony and in exchange I hire yours – that’s not corruption!
Robert Plomin, who knows infinitely more about genetics than you do, confirms as much. As always, genetic influence isn’t a 0% or a 100% matter. Personal choices still have weight(pun unintended!), but genetics make it far harder for some than others to stay slim.
The same is true with other vices, such as smoking. Dalton Conley – who also knows far more about genetics than you will ever know – points out that as the percentage of smokers decline, it is getting harder to remove the remaining ones because they are much more genetically predisposed to it than the general population.
Dr. Mengele’s all attempts to detect appreciable heritability for obesity using twins at Auschwitz failed.
Sooo what’s your position? Are you the blank slatist (i.e. the nurture position) or you admit genes play some non-zero role within population (i.e. the nature position)? DO you think genes play absolutely no role in creating visible difference between populations, or maybe they only play absolutely no role for characteristics above the neck?
Your “Hajnal line” is utter bullshit founded on poor data.
For one, southern Russia was very different from northern Russia before the 20th century w.r.t. social and sexual mores. Any “line” that lumps them together is bullshit and obviously the “researcher” didn’t bother to even look at what’s going on behind the Russian border.
Your “Hajnal line” theory differs from that of JayMan and hbdchick.
Your theory is an environmental one: an external force does the “hijacking” and causes the “pozzing”.
JayMan and hbdchick seem to argue that there is never any external force or cause. Any and every thing that happens, ever, is due solely to biological causes internal to the organism expressing the effect. Thus if you’re inside the Hajnal line, your biology makes you either gay or really into globohomo. They never explain how or why this would be the case, however.
Experimental reproducibility is the gold standard of science. Not making dogmatic assertions based on theory.
Anyone can run this simple experiment and obtain the same result: throw obese people into concentration camps. Their genes won’t change, but those obese people will no longer be obese. If you can obtain the opposite result, fame and fortune await you, as you will have discovered the remarkable phenomenon of individuals maintaining excess body weight under conditions of extreme duress and deprivation.
If JayMan wants to say that people differ biologically in their self-discipline and that this in turn impacts their body weight, which would be a rather banal point that nobody would disagree with, then he should go ahead and say so. But he never carefully qualifies his claims. He just makes blanket assertions.
Funny shit.
Hungary had many prime ministers and one non-Habsburg head of state 1867-1945. Is this an anecdote to compare them to prime minister we have now?
The Hungarian prime ministers 1867-1944 didn’t grow wealthy after their time in office either.
The issue is performance. You can starve the obese person, but his performance will fall off a cliff. Also, spending all your energy on disciplining yourself will leave you without much energy for anything else. Some people have more inclination to eat bad food than others. Even assuming the same amount of willpower, they will have to use more of it on eating less, so then they will have less for anything else.
So it’s not merely self-discipline. Anyone reducing it to willpower knows nothing of the subject.
What methods did he use? Maybe he wasn’t a great researcher.
Hungarian prime ministers 1867-1944 had clients. But not one of the prime ministers or their clients grew to be one of the richest people in the country. I don’t think it’s a good development that now they are so expensive.
Where such information? The population of southern and Northern Russia is completely different genetically, but there are no big differences in the way of life between the North and the South.
It wouldn’t be completely non-obvious to anybody who has read Darymple’s famous 2001 essay on the uses of corruption:
https://www.city-journal.org/html/uses-corruption-12180.html
Many commenters (including yours truly) have brought up before that anti-NWO leaders need to pay their clients more, because they cannot offer them international careers.
But it’s not what we’re talking about. Hungarian politicians had clients before 1944, too, but they became way more expensive.
Did they ever face such a simple and clear-cut problem? They screwed up, as more or less all elites screwed up in Europe. But the problems they faced were difficult ones.
Yes, it’s more complicated and requires more details and qualifications. But that’s exactly what JayMan doesn’t do.
What is the purpose of this debate? I don’t really have problem with egg heads having “how man angels on a pin” debates, but whoever is right in this debate, how does this help white interests and get people on board to try stop things like mass immigration from Africa?
We’re interested in this part of reality.
That is self-evidently true: eastern Europeans are biologically different from Western Europeans, and each from Mediterranean, and there are noticeable bio differences within East, West and South. Swedes are different from Danes, or Finns.
Hajnal is just one variable, and it had a multitude of reasons, biology was only one of them. The Western relative geographic isolation (and safety) made a more individualistic, property-centric society possible. West throughout its history enthusiastically sacrificed its eastern neighbours for economic and political gain (e.g. Ottomans). That encouraged a more communitarian society in the east and after a few Western genocide attempts (Napoleon, WWII) helped trigger an outright communism.
Today the chickens are finally coming home to roost for the West. Western isolation has been pierced by modern technology. Its hypocritical ‘virtuous’ ideology that worked well in protected isolation is being brutally destroyed by outsiders who are taking it apart in the most self-serving ways possible. And West is uncapable of coherent self-defense having absorbed the ideological clap-trap of ‘equality, progress, humanism’ since it had worked so well in the past. West is demographically done and the Hajnal line will be forgotten – overrun by the new migrating masses who live by a more tribal code.
I am still optimistic about the east: we avoided the disaster because we were too busy living through the mixed blessings of the communitarian isolation. And they were mixed: there were good things, including an incredible demographic growth, in the 50 years of post-WWII communism (Poland went from close to extinction to a self-confident demographically powerful nation of close to 40 million). But for that we might have to cut off the slowly collapsing West. There is a kind of a historical Hajnal justice in it all…
The rare case when anonymous coward is correct.
This is just scratching the surface of North/South differences: http://www.unz.com/akarlin/maps-russia/
Wrt sexual mores:
Pattern persists a century on:
Google it. (Maybe start with demoscope.ru)
North and South Russia had very different norms for average age of marriage, average size of family, number of sexual partners, etc. For example, Southern Russia might have 16 as the average age of marriage while in the extreme outliers in the North it might be 24 or 25.
The finnic minority populations were even more different; for example, cohabitation without marriage was practiced.
One thing that was true for all Russians, though (as far as I know), is the lack of a concept of a ‘nuclear family’. Russians had multi-generational, multi-family households with a patriarch (or sometimes matriarch) as the head.
The two world wars and a civil war in quick succession destroyed pretty much all our knowledge of the traditional way of life, and the commies had no interest whatsoever in preserving it.
I am always right. It’s just that unlike other people who are always right, I don’t speak down to your level and make concessions.
The boundaries of social/sexual / etc differences on the given maps never coincide with the” genetic ” border between Northern and southern Russians. These social/sexual / etc differences (rather weak) can be explained by different shares of urban population (in the North agriculture is unprofitable and the share of urban population is larger)
Without reference to relevant scientific research, this is an unsubstantiated claim. Of course differences between South and North existed (as they were in France, Germany, or England ) but how I know they were not significant.
traditional way of life – is it when most of the year it is forbidden to work (because of religious taboos), the money is primarily spent on the purchase of vodka, and the school for children is considered a harmful whim of the authorities (children have to work for purpose purchasing vodka for father)?
It’s still only special pleading and just-so storytelling. That’s all JayMan can muster. He cannot provide the independent verifiers to independently verify the hypotheses because it’s a just-so story.
Nature vs nurture is a false dichotomy. Plomin’s argument is invalid; DNA is not a blueprint and genes don’t cause behavior.
“blank slatist”?
“they only play absolutely no role for characteristics above the neck?”
A slew of a priori arguments establish the claim that genes can’t cause psychological traits. The mind is not the brain. Physicalism is false.
When most say “genes … play no role for characteristics above the neck?” they’re appealing to claims that genes do indeed cause/influence psychological traits. But psychophysical reductionism is false. See Nagel (What Is It Like to be a Bat?; Mind and Cosmos); Davidson (argument against the existence of psychophysical and psychological laws); Ross (Immaterial Aspects of Thought); Noe (Out of Our Heads).
Plomin is a reductionist. Those arguments refute reductionism. Genes don’t cause, nor even influence, psychological traits because there are no psychophysical or psychological laws.
JayMan and hbdchick are implicit genetic determinists.
Jayman will do anything and everything to rail against exercise. He truly believes that there are those who “respond negatively” to exercise. But this proves two things: (1) that he’s never worked with people in his life and (2) he doesn’t know what the inside of a gym looks like himself. Read my response to him re exercise is “negative” for some people.
https://notpoliticallycorrect.me/2018/10/15/on-individual-variation-in-response-to-exercise/
Don’t take AaronB so seriously, he’s a mysticist and more likely to simply chide you for trying to be so serious and not-under-the-influence-of-narcotics-sounding.
Quick/obvious counterexample: Binge vodka drinking is more prevalent in the countryside than the cities, but mortality from alcoholism (and heavily correlated causes such as suicide and murder) is considerably lower in the south than in the north.
I agree with you: there clearly needs to be a cost/benefit analysis.
It is exactly as when we make gifts to our children: those gifts must be reasonable given the child’s age, be proportionate, and not spoil the child.
More or less the same principles should apply to our politicians… those grown-up kids
If you have time, please watch this documentary about the Japanese prison system:
(in French but with English subtitles). Let me know how many obese inmates you counted.
If you eat 1650 calories a day, whatever your genes, you will never become obese.
You are wrong. We discussed that before. You ignored all the arguments and continue to repeating yours ad nauseum.
Once it becomes deeply entrenched as it has become in the West, is there still a way to pry it loose from the culture, without resorting to the Final Solution solution? But then the US did perform very well in WW2 when its population was only half of what it is now. But then if being honored or supporting globohomo is really down to genetic determinism, then just killing all the liberals may be a better solution.
You only said “that we don’t know the laws doesn’t mean they don’t exist” but Davidson in Mental Events shows why there can be no such laws. Ross, Nagel, Noe et al further refute the claim that the mental is irreducible to the physical.
So is physicalism true?
I believe it is meant to be a joke. There not being a lot of food in that environment.
As the other commenter mentioned, the mere fact that there are chemical substances (including modern drugs AND premodern such as, well, alcohol in vodka or beer) which influence mood or can be used to alleviate effect of mental illness proves that mental states are influenced by physical substances, and physical substances can only affect physical structures.
I have not read Davidson, but you have not presented anything which could convince me to reconsider my position. Moreover, during my philosophy exam I’ve read already the arguments by medieval and early modern philosphers trying to prove that “the soul” cannot be affected by the physical. They also noticed, however, the other thing: if physical cannot affect the soul, then the soul cannot affect the physical, which was explained by one merry French monk by the idea that it was God himself whic listens to every soul and then affects the physical world. It seems to me from our limited interactions (truth, I have poor memory and we have not discussed that in depth) that you have not considered this paradox.
In fact, I am deeply disturbed by the fact that someone who has such a keen understanding of evolution, at the same time can believe something so obviously based on magical thinking.
Mengele’s subjects obviously were well fed for the duration of his experiments.
By the way, obviously not all people reacted in the same way to food deprivation. Some got very thin. Others died. Some got very ill long before they got really thin, while others survived despite getting extremely thin. Also, it didn’t happen perfectly in sync. Some lost weight faster than others.
The assertion that it had no genetic component stretches credulity.
Why? People are wrong in many different ways.
So the joke flew over my head, but I didn’t lose much anyway.
East Asians have genes predisposing them to being thin. Even when they eat too much carbs, they tend to develop visceral fat tissue long before they get fat.
Sure, but understanding the evolution implies, to me, certain beliefs: in rationality, physicalism etc.
I am not even sure that RR wants to say. For example, what it means “love cannot be described by physical laws”?
Imagine we will have a 100% certain method to make someone to fall in love with someone. We would describe exactly which brain structures would have to be changed and how, what chemical substances would be used etc. Assume we could draw diagrams, explain every interaction of the every last chemical molecule. Under this assumption, would we agree “love was described by physical laws”? In one sense, yes. In second, no. That is: despite there being physical laws meaning state of “love” is purely dependent on physical structures/whatever which could be changed at whim of a scientist, we still would say that love is irreducible to this physical laws. So in that sense, yes, mental states are irreducible to physical. But this is trivial observation – and it does not and cannot mean that “love” is not dependent on laws of physics/chemistry/whatever.
So after all, the population in the North is younger than in the South (this young northerners drink more, commit more crimes, give birth to more children, etc.).
An additional factor – in the South more Muslims (as well as low-drinking Armenians, Georgians, Greeks)
I agree, there are obvious differences in metabolism, observable in innumerable ways and some which are even readily understandable in theory.
Samoans have a tendency to corpulence, probably as the result of a selection event, when they made the long journey to their current home, and undoubtedly there have been other such bottlenecks and varying availability of food according to the differing environments, as well as recurrent famines in places of relative plenty which might mean differing strategies can exist in the same place. Not to mention the importance of temperature differences and body heat generation in different climates.
There’s some mutation which induces greater muscle mass. People are talking about inserting it into the genome of space-faring people to help compensate for the muscle loss of low gravity environments.
1. If there are no laws connecting psychological and physical states, we cannot have evidence that physical states exist
2. There are no laws connecting psychological and physical states [your premise]
3. We cannot have evidence that physical states exist [reductio]
Yes, but people are not logical beings anyway. We can only hope our mistakes are less silly or less important to our worldview.
What I think Jayman fails to understand is that states have their own heritabilities, and the state version of reproduction has enormous disconnect from the biological version.
Politicians are often in power a long time. Ted Kennedy was 77, when he died, and still had enormous power. He had been in the Senate for almost 47 years, and was part of a political dynasty that continues, though not through his direct line.
A better example is women. Nancy Pelosi is about 78. Merkel is 64 – like many female politicians in the West she never had any children. She is arguably not fit to reproduce, but she is still influencing the way Germany reproduces.
States have a unique biology of their own. Their selective forces are entirely different from Darwin’s. There is a parasitism that tends to be conserved and to grow, and there has been more of a carryover in the West. You can think of Russia as being about 27, with a certain parentage or genetic legacy. The US is about 230, with its own parentage. Of course, the actual difference is less because “time” advances more quickly in the modern age due to the power of technology to bring about rapid change.
Doesn’t Frank Salter’s biological nationalism make all problems simple and clear cut?
Some issues are always important, others are always trivial.
Important issues include fight, flight, feed, and breed – war, migration, economics, and culture.
Fight – avoid unnecessary wars; win necessary wars.
Flight – control migration for the benefit of the nation and the race.
Feed – provide adequate prosperity to ensure affordable family formation, and to support the military.
Breed – nurture cultural conservatism to support the family, thus ensuring a healthy birthrate.
From this perspective, post-1867 Hungarian interests are clear.
Like post-1871 Germany, Hungary was a satiated power.
A satiated power has an interest in preventing upheaval, and a duty assist (or at least not sabotage) brother-nations.
A three-way alliance between Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary to preserve the status quo within the European Christian family of nations, to avoid destructive wars between brother peoples, but also to support the liberation of the brother nations of the Balkans from the hostile alien Ottomans, was the obvious best policy.
The Hapsburgs foolishly did the opposite, supporting the Ottomans and convincing the Germans to do the same, forcing the Russians to seek an alliance with France, setting the stage for WW1.
To be blunt: that is an incredibly stupid argument to make. Your example is a very controlled environment. Genetic disposition towards obesity doesn’t matter in such an environment because the inmates have no choice in what they are eating.
One could easily turn your nonsensical argument around and take the same environment but posit that the prisoners would get 3500 calories per day instead by giving them food which has a lot of calories but doesn’t sate very well. How many of them would be thin?
Plomin’s argument is well worth quoting in extensio:
People should learn from the masters in the field and not make up their own BS. Genetics isn’t a 0% or a 100% thing. One is not doomed to a certain outcome but genetics make it far harder to be slim for some than for others. To deny that is to reveal yourself as an ignoramus.
Does liberation of Polish nation from abusive Russian and Prussian politics would be included in the deal?
This is true. But that prison is especially interesting is that it is the one where all foreign inmates (sentenced ones — not in temporary custody) are detained. Several 100s of them out of about a total prison population of about 2400. None of them gets fat.
But yes, genetic predisposition results in different outcomes, I will certainly not deny that. I was using this example in a semi-sarcastic way, as I have heard many times fat people making all sorts of excuses as to why they are fat. The bottom line is that they should stop whining and start eating less. I view obesity and excess body fat as revealing the general weakness of the person: lack of will, lack of self-control, etc. Fat people are repulsive.
Not a blank statist, we all have innate predispositions and are not infinitely malleable.
The situation has so many variables that nature and nurture don’t begin to exhaust them – for instance, recent history may impact if members of a particular group are motivated or not, familial arrangements may have an impact on creativity, etc.
This is what makes history and anthropology so fascinating, that so many interesting variables combine to produce complex results and can be explored and investigated at length.
To say it’s just IQ or genes is the stupid man’s argument – HBD may be 100% correct, but it provides no scope for the exercise of the intellect or our powers of perception and investigation.
So only stupid people can find it interesting – if it was proven true, an intelligent man might be compelled to accept that but then he would turn his attention to more interesting aspects of the world.
HBD is designed to stop you from thinking – its just IQ and genes!
But I find it fascinating to peek under the hood and ask – how can we be sure everyone is equally motivated when taking the test? And the answer is you really can’t. But no one wants to hear that and just brushes it aside. It’s a non-solveable problem that’s absolutely devastating to their position. And then I might ask, what might impact motivation? And it can be things like recent history – a humiliated people might produce more motivated people needing to prove themselves and so on. Or it might be family arrangements.
But people don’t seem to have that engineering mindset any more or find reality fascinating. The answers wer’e given are designed to stop you thinking rather than encourage you exploring.
You are obviously not genetically predisposed to understand humor, are you?
Of course what you said about the 0% vs 100% is simply re-stating the obvious, and I know this just as well as you. But I also happen to know a lot of people who make all sorts of genetically-based excuses for their own general lameness, whereas a controlled environment as you said would rapidly solve those problems.
Don’t get carried away too easily. It is not a proof of intelligence.
And while I take it as given that we all arrive in this world with some sort of innate disposition, I am not prepared to say that genes are the mechanism for that, (isn’t it a fact that the exact same genes are associated with different aspects of functioning in different people or species?), or that innate predispositions remain stable across generations as s kind of “essence” of a people.
The English in the 16th century were known as highly emotional and expressive, in the 18th century onwards it was all stiff upper lip. What is the essence of the English?
A Steve Sailer of the 16th century would be going about how the English were just a highly expressive people and it was all innate and that’s just that..
Eeee who told you that? This is the most ignorant statement I’ve heard in a while. Seems to me you are fighting the strawman. HBD is studying the biological differences between the human populations. Concentrating on biology does not mean it’s just the genes, just as literature studies does not mean there is nothing more to the culture except the literature.
You know, “Genes Hold Culture on a Leash” and all that (with corollary about dog being quite fierce).
Good. What about the different populations? Is it possible that amongst many factors responsible for visible average statistical characteristics, including psychological ones, differences between different frequencies of the genes can play a role? Note I do not postulate the existence for the races, because that’s orthogonal question.
I would also want to note that HBD does not postulate some magical “essence” of people – moreover, most HBD people would accept that it’s wrong to assume the English in 16th century are genetically the same as modern English.
Finally, even in this thread you can see that quite a lot of HBD fans are quite against genetic determinism represented here by Jayman
Not a good or useful advice. Someone predisposed to obesity will have stronger hunger and so his performance will fall off a cliff. He will need lots of willpower (a lot more than you or I), as his hunger will grow unbearable.
The idea behind low carb diets is that you need to find a way to satiate your hunger without consuming too many calories. Eating a ketogenic diet is a way to do that for people predisposed to obesity.
Basically you need to tell the obese person what to eat and what not to eat. Unless you give that specific advice it won’t be very helpful.
This sounds suspiciously like the party-line argument against a genetic basis for intelligence: if children are nutritionally deprived their intelligence will suffer, thus intelligence has no hereditary basis. Take that, racists! We don’t live in concentration camps.
Your last paragraph is just hair-splitting pedantry.
As with any movement, there is always a more moderate and reasonable wing.
Merely studying biological differences without claiming they are the only or even the most important factors would be a reasonably moderate stance, but the HBD movement is distinguished by its radical claims that genes are pretty nearly explain everything.
Sure, other factors are sometimes reluctantly admitted, like with Anatoly and communism, but these other factors are always exceptional and few in number and are seen as side issues that shouldn’t be allowed to distract us from the main story, which is always about genes.
I do think there is room for a pared down HBD movement with moderate claims that can make a contribution to anthropology and related questions, but it shouldn’t be allowed to steal the limelight as biological factors can only make a limited contribution to understanding human affairs.
But yes, it can certainly contribute.
It’s true that many HBD people accept that populations change over time, but the time spans are usually very long. Modern day Europeans are supposed to be pathologically altruistic today because of marriage practices affecting genetic selection millenia ago, for instance.
(This is one of the silliest theories to emerge from the HBD movement for a variety of reasons, not least of which is that it completely misdiagnoses the issue, as Europeans today suffer from actual self- hatred and what might be called leapfrogging ethnic loyalty, and not mere misplaced altruism)
While this does not quite constitute an “essence”, it functions very similar to one. A group’s identity is held to be fairly stable and resistant to change across long spans of time. For instance, if Chinese are incredibly driven and ambitious today, this must have been the case 200 years ago and must have a genetic explanation, according to most HBD people.
In fact, we know that 200 years ago Europeans were contrasting their own tremendous energy and purpose with supposedly apathetic Chinese, etc.
But this kind of “untidy” reality is ignored in favor of a simple conceptual net which sweeps up everything into one neat bundle.
Yes, many here seem opposed to Jayman, but he is just an caricature of their own position so it makes them uncomfortable to see that in such clear form – few here would be willing to ascribe to biological differences a suitably modest position in the scheme of explanation.
1. Differences in average age are marginal, as is clear from your own map.
2. Alcohol mortality peaks amongst the middle aged (35-70 y/o), not youth.
3. Muslim/ethnic minority factor is negligible outside the ethnic minority republics.
And also, there is the physical bias in HBD – human beings are mostly explained through physical mechanisms. Psychological factors are given almost no attention and the human being is modeled as a machine.
For instance, above Reiner tor attempts to explain obesity entirely through mechanical action, and completely discounts psychological factors.
This unwillingness to see the psychological or mental aspect of human beings has been disastrous in our ability to understand ourselves, and always accounts for much of the alienation the West feels.
It is not too much of an exaggeration to say that HBD with its mechanical model of man directly ties into the alienation that has directly led to things like mass immigration and gender fluidity, as unusual as this may sound at first.
The second map matches the borders of pre-war (1939) Poland almost exactly:
This may in fact be the true purpose and ultimate significance of HBD, and not a bad thing at all. Our society analyzes and investigates too much and consequently we feel alienated from life.
Our scientific institutions are increasingly providing us with a simple faith that relieves us of the need to think – thus fulfilling their true religious role. In other words, science is finally fulfilling its role as replacement for the Church.
So you’re saying that an environmental factor, namely caloric surplus, causes obesity. Calories aren’t internally generated by genes. They necessarily come from the environment, ultimately from the Sun.
Actually no, because the intelligence of nutritionally deprived children is not affected much.
As far as education goes, we do live in concentration camps. Children are forced to go to school and are force fed education diets with little to no impact on intelligence. We’ve been running this experiment for a century now and we have enough experimental evidence. This is in contrast to concentration camps in which caloric inputs do affect obesity.
Qualifying claims, specifying hypotheses, distinguishing among variables is not “hair splitting pedantry” but basic and essential scientific practice. Otherwise you’re engaging in obfuscation.
I was also thinking about Poland.
There is definitely a lot more going on than just the Hajnal Line.
This map superimposes the border of the German Empire (1871-1918) on the electoral results of the 2007 Parliamentary elections in Poland.
Orange/red = PO, centre right
Blue = PIS, right (currently in power)
Differences in number of alcohol poisoning (South-Nort) also are marginal, as is clear from map
I think that Utu has pointed out that the blue parts are those with a settled, stable Polish population while the orange parts involved population displacement (settlers from the East moving into vacated German houses).
Just as Warsaw – the majority of the population moved there within a few generations, so is basically rootless.
> muh humor
Nobody is buying your excuses. You even admit in a later comment.
While some fat people are certainly guilty of that, many more are genetically predisposed to gaining weight. This even extends to races. For instance, Indians are much more likely to be fat than East Asians in the West (where the malnourishment is no longer a factor, unlike in India).
Does this doom them? No, as I said, it’s not a 0% or a 100% thing. But as Plomin points out, it says nothing about free will given that many of those who are skinny simply have different metabolism and don’t have better discipline. This was the point Plomin hammered home and which you’re too stupid/ignorant to understand.
The fact that you still cling to your muh free will narrative just shows that your brain is incapable of absorbing new information that doesn’t conform to your own (ignorant) stereotypes. So, I was not wrong in calling you an ignoramus.
It is simpler than you think. Szopen and Reiner tor are machines. They managed to pass the Turing test. Szopen is an interesting case because its software gives it a sense of “self-awarness” that it is a machine. Its software had an interesting conversation with me about it not so long ago about how it is without a free will. Interestingly it expressed a hope that its replicants would be Catholic. I still can’t wrap my head around the idea of Catholic little machines and what “hope” really means for a machine.
As you can see the Turing test is no longer a challenge. Now the real challenge is to do it in reverse. We need to develop the Gnirut Test that could identify humans from among machines, i.e., finding humans who indeed are not machines. Could Karlin pass the Gnirut test? Also I am not sure about you.
That’s an excellent counterexample to Jayman’s Hajnalism. Not that we need a counter example to disprove blatant nonsense. His nonsense does not deserve any attention.
Genetics doesn’t explain at all the interesting difference between nationalities though, it just explains the trivial parts.
So I admit I don’t know anything about level of genetic difference between populations.
But I know from real life Polish people, and I know from my experience they have a very distinctive and very different “Polish personality”.
At the same time, I assume genetic distance of Poland from Russia will be quite small, and much less than from different nationalities within Russia (Tatars, Jews, etc, before intermarriage).
So what explains the very idiosyncratic Polish personality (or Italian personality, Irish personality, Japanese personality, German personality etc)? It has to be the historical/linguistic/cultural/economic configuration of the people (since genetically, Polish are not so distant from Russia, or perhaps even from Germany).
However, all the interesting and spiritual differences of the nationality, is a result of the cultural difference.
If you look at Japanese and Koreans.
Genetically they will be very similar. Yet Japan has a high civilization, and Korea doesn’t. This isn’t a result of genetics.
Likewise, if you relocated them in America – after a couple of generations they will be indistinguishable, and Japanese American will become as uncivilized as Korean American, Italian American (who have also lost their civilization leaving Italy), or German American.
You are right. There is no room for free will in HBDism. All machines running the software of HBDism like yourself are bound to repeat the same mantra. You realize you do not repeat your arguments out of your free will. Because you do not have a free will. You are compelled by the software that runs you. Actually you are not you. You are it.
It, how is it today? Did it run the daily self check on its molecular balance?
Is that actually true? I know there are some myths about Korean migration to pre-literate Japan, but my impression is that most theories assume that Japanese ethnogenesis was due to a mixture of different strains (Polynesians? Austronesians? In any case not just proto-Koreans).
Also seems a bit strange to claim that Korea has no “high civilization”…or that Americans are “uncivilized” (?).
Anyway, I have to agree with utu and even with AaronB on this, much of “HBD” as it currently is seems idiotic to me.
I am not the right person to ask on this topic (genetic distance between nationalities) overall – but I was reading a little about Japan. Japanese are descended from multiple races, it is true, although common ancestors with Koreans are the largest component.
Offtopic, there is some debate about if regional variation within Japan on various factors is a result of this (although I read a paper saying it was a result of recent factors, and that Japan became homogenous mix).
Karlin could probably investigate this topic…
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It goes without saying, Japanese and Korean share common ancestry nonetheless, to a high degree – Koreans are the closest race to Japanese, outside Japan (although Japanese are not the closest race to Koreans outside Korea).
Lack of really unique modern civilization and higher culture, but not as a result of their own culpability. Probably the primary reason, is Korea hasn’t had the fortune of being geographically isolated to the extent of Japan.
Surely, my comment was an exaggeration. There is some higher civilization in America as well. But after a few generations, the immigrants to America (from countries with great civilizations), have a pattern of amalgamating to the “lowest common denominator”.
In cases of nationalities like Italian Americans, many had been partly illiterate and not exactly absorbed the “high culture” of Italian before they left Italy. And perhaps this will also be true of Japanese American immigrants.
But you can see if you read discussions of Russian-speaking immigrants in America (who emigrated as highly literate people, not so long ago), that they say their children usually lose connection to Russian-speaking civilization within 1 generation.
For the argument, it’s irrelevant if America has its own civilization or not. The civilization of your ancestors is not carried along with your genetics. And yet, that (culture/civilization), is the actually interesting differentiation between nationalities, and what needs to be preserved, and might be even in unfortunate times worth sacrificing your blood for.
Wasn’t it pretty isolated for a few centuries though? It wasn’t called the “hermit kingdom” for nothing, I’d suppose.
I agree with your larger point, the extreme biological reductionism of some “HBD” bloggers don’t seem convincing to me…their theories about Germany, about some deep biological reason for the differences between West and East Germany seem absurd to me (e.g. they totally ignore the massive movement to West Germany by millions of expellees from the lost eastern territories and GDR citizens both before 1961 and after 1989…if it all comes down to biology, shouldn’t that have led to convergence?).
“all the interesting and spiritual differences of the nationality, is a result of the cultural difference”
Agree.
Hallelujah! Praise the Lord. You saw the light.
I understand they believe they have discovered an “explanatory secret” for history, much as Marxists before them.
My argument is not so much about “explanatory power” of their theory, but that it also misses the larger point, which actually ordinary people all recognize.
Polish are genetically very similar people. Yet meeting any Polish people, they seem very different, and “Polish”. The Polish difference is all happening on the software level, but it’s the important difference even (if you forgive me for speaking like AaronB) “spiritually”.
Americans with German ancestry can be genetically the same as Germans from Heidelberg. But meet them in real life – and it’s very different people.
The valuable and interesting differentiation between nationalities, occurs at the civilizational level. Maybe you need as certain hardware, as a necessary condition – a certain genetic configuration, (you couldn’t run very well, “Japanese civilization software” on “Latino hardware”). And moreoever, maybe there are causal interactions between the two levels (so “Japanese civilization software” was influenced by genetically determined higher ratio of introverts in their population, while “Italian civilization software” influenced by the genetically determined higher ratio of extroverts in Italian population).
But that hardware issue is trivial, and not where the interesting “magic” (or if we see it in Germanic terminology – “sublimation”) occurs, which is the civilizational differences (product primarily of sometimes arbitrary historical/economic/cultural configuration), which is best understood by historians, due to their synoptic.
To some extent this is even obscured by genetic similarity, as a parallel effect of a common cause. (As before the New World was discovered, main determination of genetic similarity was geographical distance, while geographical distance was also (in a parallel track) main determination of level of cultural transmission between population).
I think that goes too far, the dominant blank slate, “antiracist” position isn’t very convincing either imo.
Concepts like gene-culture coevolution, and more generally a evolutionary perspective on human affairs, could actually be a very interesting topic and contribute real insights to the study of history. It’s just that much of “HBD” blogging seems amateurish and touchingly naive in its belief to have found a master theory for the explanation of all of history.
Funny, I was just thinking recently about how strange it is that Korea hasn’t produced an interesting high culture like Japan or China despite seemingly having many high quality people. In fact you never hear anything about Korean poetry or secular or religious literature whereas Japan has produced masterpieces in all three areas.
Does Korea even have a classical literature? A superficial net search yielded scant into.
“the HBD movement is distinguished by its radical claims that genes are pretty nearly explain everything.”
I wouldn’t call it a movement. It began as an email discussion group in the late 1990s. I was one of the founding members, as were Phil Rushton, Henry Harpending, and Vince Sarich. (The last three are dead, so I guess I’m free to mention their names). Steve Sailer organized it, but there was no attempt by him or by anyone else to lay down a party line.
Most of us were academics who simply wanted to talk about human races and the possibility that they differ not only in physical traits but also in mental traits, e.g., intelligence, personality types, predisposition to monogamy vs. polygyny, monotony tolerance, anger and violence thresholds, individualism vs. collectivism, etc. This was before the Internet as we know it today. We wanted to discuss these things, and there was literally no other place.
In general, we wanted to make a break with older ways of thinking that saw human races as very old and slowly changing. In contrast, we saw human races as being relatively recent, with most arising in the Holocene or just before. We also saw them as “work in progress” because of gene-culture evolution. In fact, we saw adaptation to different cultural environments as much more important in human evolution than adaptation to different natural environments.
Other than that there was no party line, and no desire to create one. We simply wanted to talk, and we were reticent to do so in public because most of us had university positions that could be jeopardized. So we got together in private.
Karlin might not appreciate my lowering of serious topics and YouTube, so please feel free to add more tag.
But the situation in pop music is interesting, and nobody writes this fact.
American pop has a unique “sound”.
Russian/Ukrainian pop has its own unique sound (different melodies and taste).
Jpop has another unique sound. Even in their most Westernized pop songs, the melodies in Jpop are usually different, and I often hear they are using higher intervals (higher intervals of chords, with influence of Jazz harmonies) than is acceptable in American pop.
While Kpop and pop music of Europe (Sweden, France, Italy, etc), just uses American pop sound. And pop music of Spain is a combination of American and Latin American pop sound (e.g. Enrique Iglesias is sounding Puerto Rican now).
So we can laugh a lot about Russian/Ukrainian pop, and how kitsch and unexported it is compared to Kpop – but at least we kept a distinctive sound, unlike European pop and Kpop.
Contribution of Kpop is just having much hotter girls and more militarized dancing than American pop, but sound is usually not unique on a musical level.
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Maybe slightly unfair sample, but in Kpop bands can perfectly integrate American pop singers now, the style is so similar.
While in Japan, even integrating heavy metal drumming, can have final results like:
No-one is saying “there isn’t hardware issue”. Different populations have different distributions of potential traits – not just height, skin colour, etc, but also ratios of people with predisposition for academic ability, and even things like ratio of introverts to extroverts (e.g. newborn Japanese children have been shown to be on average more introverted).
But it’s not the interesting and important differentiation between nationalities, and it’s not the predominant causal one, except as necessary conditions for developing certain higher forms of civilization – e.g. having a certain ratio of people with partly genetically determined ability in academic areas, is necessary for producing great literature (although this is far from a sufficient condition – we don’t produce much great literature now despite having no reduction in intellectual capability in our populations compared to the 19th century).*
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* It’s better understood as necessary, but not sufficient conditions (which is why I used the “hardware” analogy). You can have a higher ratio of people with academic ability in a population, and still not develop an interesting civilization, for all kinds of historical reasons – which was the situation for most peoples, for most of history. Proto(?)-Germanic tribes did not have less “intellectual hardware” (in terms of genetically determined distribution of people capable of intellectual achievement) than their Ancient Athenian coevals.
At the same time, if Ancient Athens did not have the high enough genetically determined ratio of people with potential academic ability in their population, they would not have created their great civilization.
But the differentiating thing about Ancient Athens, is the particular civilization they created (fact they had a certain ratio of smart people is just trivial, and was present in many peoples).
Deaf people do no hear either but they do not use it as and argument that there is no sound. This wiki entry shows that they have plenty of literature and of long history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_literature
The reason we do not hear about them is because they were either dominated by China or Japan. They did not speak for themselves when West discovered Asia. Chinese and Japanese were telling us that we can safely ignore them or that they even did not exist. The same crap you can hear about Ukrainians form Russians or Poles.
They invented their own alphabet in 16 century.
Your maps show no such thing. First one gives a narrow middle range, then has most regions either below or above it. Doesn’t say much.
(Though north/south gradient there is clear nonetheless).
http://www.gks.ru/free_doc/2018/demo/edn09-18.htm
Alcohol poisoning mortality rate in the (Russian) south and chernozem is rather low now – typically around 1-2/100,000.
In the north, it’s around 5-10/100,000, sometimes even higher (e.g. 12 in Kostroma, 11 in Novgorod, 17 in Arkhangelsk).
Lots of people are saying that, the dominant view among “educated” people in Germany is that on average all human groups are exactly the same…I’ve even seen statements by people that there is no hereditary basis at all (!) to intelligence (which just seems bizarre to me…wouldn’t that mean that under ideal conditions everybody would have the same talents and abilities? Who can believe that?). Maybe such views are especially pronounced in Germany due to the history of Nazi eugenics and racism, but it seems to be common among many Westerners today, with lots of undesirable consequences.
That’s an interesting observation, and I’ve wondered about the reasons for it myself…why does nobody write an epic poem celebrating the discovery of DNA (an amazing achievement if one thinks about it), like Lucretius did about the atomic theories of the Epicureans? Our civilization seems so strangely tired and stagnant, despite its great material advances.
Only explanation I could think of is the rise of mass culture and the influence of modern technologies.
We can’t know that with any certainty though, since we know so very little about their culture, and that only through the eyes of others.
I tend to agree though about the importance of ideas and ideologies, not everything can be reduced solely to biology.
Also printing, even before Gutenberg’s (independent) invention of it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_literature#Classical_poetry
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_invasions_of_Korea_(1592%E2%80%931598)#Losses_and_gains
Well you know more about history than I. But I recall when Tacitus wrote about German tribes, he was curious about such primitive tribesmen, only to the extent they were like how 18th century French writers wrote about “noble savagery” of American Indians. (It’s retrospectively hilarious to realize, his comments about the ancestors of Beethoven, Kant, Schopenhauer and Gauss).
Maybe I say the analogy too often (and it is a boring or trivial analogy), but my point is just to remember that interesting and important differentiation between peoples (nationalities today) is not exactly the “hardware” – much more the “software”.
So today, we have various positive stereotypes of Germans: “mentally unstable geniuses”; “land of poets and thinkers”; “world’s deepest philosophers”; “world greatest composers”; “trains never late”; and “world’s most organized engineers”.
When Romans encountered the “bare hardware” that still today underlies Germans, they could perceive nothing of this (as “German soul” doesn’t exist at the hardware level, and history needed a couple of thousand years of software engineering to produce it).
When we talk about “Russian soul”, “German soul”, “Polish soul”, etc – I think we view it as something which “underlies” the cultural differentiation.
It goes without statement, that history shows it is the other way round. Most interesting and valuable qualities of peoples, are emerging late in history, in the “top layer”, as a result of unintentional decisions of, and external constraints and shocks on, the nationalities “coders”.
In relation to genetic argument. Of course Polish and Russian, must be genetically almost identical. And yet most Polish usually have their very distinctive personality, whenever you meet them. But (and this is the main point) all the interesting and valuable stuff of Polish nationality, is in whatever (and it’s not genetic distance) makes them so distinct from us.
The Germanic tribes at the times of Tacitus were undoubtedly quite primitive (though they proved eventually able to improve their weapons technology and military tactics enough to become a serious threat to Rome). My argument was more that we can’t know if they weren’t in some important ways genetically different from later Germans; e.g. there’s this argument that European populations were “genetically pacified” during the middle ages, due to the removal of violent individuals from the community, restriction of their reproductive potential etc.
I agree that peoples, nations etc. often change…e.g. Germany today is rather different from the 1933-1945 era in some obvious ways (lol). But there also might be some deeper characteristics and continuities (e.g. certain patterns of behaviour) that remain unaffected by surface changes.
Of course. Germans have centuries of cultural development, and now are one of the most distinct nationalities and civilizations.
But the issue in relation to this topic, we just know in real world. Just look at the “American integration model”, which is effective at washing off the immigrants’ native culture.
Are Americans of German descent (whose family has eliminated their memories of German culture and language), still German in any interesting way after a few generations? Do they have “German souls”, “German spirituality”, and all the distinct and weird traits we know in Germans today?
I would assume not. In other words, that “German soul” requires culture of Germany, while the “hardware” aspect is just trivial.
Sure, German population will genetically (and this state was existing latently even in Tacitus’ time) have potential for developing a high ratio of intelligent people relative to certain other populations, and we can say that was a necessary condition for certain aspects of the German culture which developed.
But the “hardware” didn’t determine much of the direction the culture developed, and the strange destination the Germans eventually reached – that was largely historically/geographically/economically mediated, as well as with a significant human randomness factor (for example, expressed in the cultural contribution of certain “great men” who can push an cultural development path to different destinations).
Yet what is interesting and valuable between different nationalities, is where they get to after all those centuries of development.
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So maybe another very loose and non-literal analogy, a group of drivers (as analogy for different nationalities/ethnicities) can decide to explore an area of hills, with the objective to discover the best views on the landscape below, and build their life in the most habitable and beautiful scenery. Each has a car (proposing variance in the design of our cars for this journey, as being variance in distribution of genetic traits in different populations).
Obviously, some car designs are very similar (let’s say Russian and Polish genetics), others can be different but able to achieve the same high performance (Japanese and Germans). Some people have to share a car for part of the journey (Russians and Ukrainians), or to take onboard eccentric hitchikers (like Jews and Tatars, the former known for trying to take control of the wheel), and others still will have a car with a weak engine that makes it very difficult to climb simple hills, and which breakdown after a few hundred meters (I don’t know who to insult – maybe Somalians?).
The path of the journey in this analogy, you could call “cultural development”. Now the interesting thing isn’t car design, but where peoples managed to get to at the end of the journey, and the view and scenery they attained.
Germans are interesting and distinct because after however many centuries, they ended inhabiting some unusual and distinct place above the clouds, quite different from the rest, very high up, with unique views on the landscape below, but perhaps some intoxicating altitude sickness causing psychotic episodes.
Obviously Polish and Russian car design did not vary much in specifications, and they often even shared a driving path, but Polish cultural path has become lost along the way in a forest somewhere, where their viewpoint becomes quite dissimilar.
Analysis of car design might be quite useful if you want to explain why poor Somalians didn’t drive more than 100 metres. But it is limited in discussing any interesting matters – such as why (beyond specifying vague necessary conditions) Polish are so “Polish”.
????? Koreans have had a civilization is not worse than in neighboring countries: for example the Koreans first in the world to have mastered the printing of books by movable metal font
And this example of Korean ceramics from the 13th century
This issue can be solved in a purely scientific way – it is enough to study the DNA of the bones of the ancient Germans. Technically it is real (and probably such studies will be conducted in the near future)
No better discipine, yes (it’s mostly habitual and automatic behavior); different metabolism is a myth. This documentary I saw has been taken off Youtube but here’s a summary:
On Reddit’s loseit and fatlogic subs, it was brought up many times. The most recent one:
https://www.reddit.com/r/loseit/comments/9zfpro/reflection_on_yesterdays_skinny_friends_habits/
I am that skinny friend lol, my BMI is 19.34 and used to be as low as 18 sometimes. No diets. I have completely ordinary genetics except for being tall, with fat and slim people on both sides of my family tree. The film, from the “inside” point of view, is accurate.
Calling Germanics (or Britons, or Gauls) “primitive” compared to the Romans is misleading as it naturally conjures up an analogy to 19th century Europe vs. pre-colonial Africa. The reality was probably closer to, say, Western vs. Eastern Europe in the early 20th century (OK, maybe not exactly, but those conquered tribes were still formidable opponents and the Romans both respected and feared them).
I doubt it. Even if samples were good and complete you do not have enough of them to get good statistical estimate of SNP’s frequencies.
I do nothing we should worry about hurting feeling of the primitive Germanic (or Britons, or Gauls) tribes 2000 years ago. They were primitive comparing to Romans or Greeks.
You are arguing a good point which is hard to argue. I wish I could help you but I can’t come up with any good analogy.
I do not think the issue of gene-culture coevolution as argued by Peter Frost and the dilettantes like Jayman and HBDchick can’t be proven. First of all it would be much harder than IQ to test, which by itself is questionable, to come up with objective culture independent measures of personality traits that then one would want to correlate with polygenic scores of say Germans, Swedes, French and Italians vs. Poles, Russians, Serbians, Greeks.
Here is Peter Frost’s paper:
The Hajnal Line and Gene-Culture Coevolution in Northwest Europe
https://file.scirp.org/pdf/AA_2017082915090955.pdf
It is just hand waving and all kinds of typical for evolutionist just-so stories. Perhaps it is a good paper, I do not know, but still it is an exercise in futility. Masturbation. Lack of awareness of own biases typical in this field.
Thank you for the link, it is very informative. Using the data of this link we can easily check the “genetic” theory of Russian drunkenness. As you know, ethnic Russians are divided into two sharply different genetic clusters: southern Russians are genetically almost indistinguishable from Poles, Belarusians and Ukrainians. Northern Russians are genetically very distant from all Slavs (and from the southern Russians), but genetically close to the Balts, the Finno-Ugric peoples, and Scandinavians.
If the level of drunkenness is genetically determined, there must be a clear difference between the Northern and Southern Russians. Let’s check this assumption:
Conclusion: the assumption of genetic determined drunkenness in Russia has not been confirmed. The North Russian Arkhangelsk have mortality rates from alcoholism 16.7, but in the neighboring Karelia Republic, Northern Russians have a death rate from alcoholism 1.9.
In Belgorod the southern Russian have a death rate from alcoholism 1.1, but in Penza southern Russian have a death rate from alcoholism 10.7.
In Adygea, Southern Russian probably even surpassed the Arkhangelsk in drunkenness.
The same table of normal contrast
Dumb
In the pre-firearms era, the most important factors were physical strength, bravery, and cohesion (but not intelligence).
The Zulus (under the command of king Shaka), probably in the military was not worse than he Cimbri and the Teutones or cherusci of Arminius (if the Romans had faced the Zulus – the Romans would have respected the Zulus).
Another thing is that the Germanic tribes were able to borrow the alphabet, and even (as far as I know) independently invented a watermill. How capable on similar achievements Zulu – is unknown.
“So why did Hungarians get so much more corrupt since 1945, if communism had no impact?”
Can’t answer specifically for Hungary, but increasing levels of corruption seems to be a world wide phenomenon. Why ? I’d sheet a lot of the blame back to neoliberalism. This ideology has made a virtue of greed, deified & enabled a ravenous lust for money & power & poisoned the cultural/moral foundations of society.
“Corruption” here is symptomatic of across the board degeneracy.
Fyi, that comes from author Stephen Turnbull, and is mostly drawn from select legends that are popular in some parts of Japan. Much of this is disputed by historians, especially the claim about Arita porcelain, for which there is no evidence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yi_Sam-pyeong
When all you have is a HBD hammer…
I suppose that every theoretical concept must be driven to the point where it fails. But I would not have thought that anyone would explain “propensivity for Communism” by genetical factors.
From a German point of view it sounds extremely strange. The whole of Germany would have become Communist after 1918, by conviction or by submission, if not the proto-fascist militias had prevented it (authorized by the Social Democrat Government). But standing alone, neither the Social Democrats nor the proto-fascists were immune against joining the Communists. So: who exactly at that time had a “propensivity for Communism”?
I recall being told in German class that there were German-speaking communities in the US, consisting of altogether hundreds of thousands of people who had been here multiple generations. I always thought it was a myth that German teachers told, but I later learned it was true, at least on a small scale. But they are very nearly all dead, or very elderly now, except for some religious groups like the Amish.
I have heard the same thing about Germans in South America. I wonder if it could still be true there because there is the issue of race added to the mix.
In Siberia, there are villages where old people speak their German dialect (young people speak Russian and learn literary German).
Here’s the video: German journalist of modern anthropological type communicates with a relic of the old Germanic type in Siberia
https://ok.ru/video/725775159565
I would agree that sometimes corruption is functional – that it “works”.
Question is: does the corruption remedy somekind of social failure, or inadequacy (& thus, is ultimately positive) or is it parasitical, symptomatic of social atomisation & loss of “corporate” loyalty ?
(This is not black & white, more often shades of grey.)
Often “corruption” can be a response to fluid periods of transition & instability. The example of Whig corruption, of the whole “rotten borough” business was a part of a great wave of social (economic) transition from autocratic
(aristocratic, constitutional Monarchy) government to democratic (oligarchic) government. The monarchical model saw government “jobs” as sinecures: jobs to be sold by the Crown for upfront profit & loyalty (including most Officer positions in the army). The purchaser would naturally exploit his position for profit & status.
Interestingly, you could argue that the privatisation of so many formally governmental functions in today’s world is a kind of return to yesterday’s “corruption”….
You are absolutely correct that “corruption ” is a slippery concept. Hard, indeed, to narrow down.
Incidentally ?
“Therefore, every decent person will agree that “corruption” is bad, as no one but perverts could have sympathy for the tainted, the perverted, the morally reprehensible.” Sounds like any 24 hours of the MSM .
Deportees? That’s interesting. I had heard recently that the Bactrian Greeks had a large, local Greek base for their military because Persians had deported a lot of Greeks to the region, prior to its original conquest by Alexander the Great’s troops.
It is thought that their artistic traditions may have, in time, even influenced the Chinese.
In Hungary there was an indigenous communist government in 1919, after the collapse of the previous (liberal revolutionary) government. A few points.
1) they had no support outside of big cities, or what little support they had was because half the (ethnically Hungarian part of the) country was occupied by foreigners, and the population had to choose between a nominally Hungarian Red Army and foreign occupiers intent on looting
2) their support even within the big cities and even in Budapest was probably more a loud minority than a majority (difficult to know in the absence of an election)
3) any support they had was mostly the result of protest rather than ingenious support, because both the nationalist and conservative right were discredited by their support and leadership of the failed war effort which squandered millions of lives and lost two thirds of the country (including vast ethnically Hungarian areas), and the liberals were also discredited by their inability to halt the political disintegration and they lost plenty of further ethnically Hungarian areas, so only the Marxist left was left
4) the communist takeover was the result of a coup: the liberal government resigned in favor of the Social Democrats, and then there was a coup inside that party which resulted in their merger with the communists. It was quickly decided by a small group of social democratic leaders, and it’s far from clear if it’d have any wider support. (Those who supported the communists had already joined them.) The Social Democrats simply feared the responsibility of starting a war alone, with the liberals leaving the government. They should have opted for the nationalists instead.
5) the proximate reason was the Allied ultimatum which demanded giving up further territories, and would have left almost half of the ethnically Hungarian areas outside of the control of the Hungarian government. So this led to a country with no army in a situation where it needed to start a war just after it has squandered millions of young lives on a senseless war fighting for an empire
6) the leaders of the communists were predominantly Jewish. Even the combined communist/social democratic government was majority Jewish. The rest were mostly ethnically German. So where’s the Hungarian propensity for communism?
7) the big cities (especially Budapest) had a very large minority population (Jews, Germans, even Slovaks and similar). And precisely this is where any support for the communist government was concentrated. Any ethnic Hungarians supporting it supported for nationalist reasons (“finally we have a government which, however disgusting, at least fights the invaders”), and it disintegrated immediately in July 1919, after the government made clear it had no intention of fighting for at least the core Hungarian areas.
So I don’t really see any special Hungarian propensity for communism. Of course, after 1919 until 1944/45 there was a broad political consensus in Hungary that communism was the most horrible political system possible.
If the abstraction is created by the physical, how is it possible to change the abstraction with something other than a change in the physical? We are not identical physically, so how could our abstractions be identical and how could we make identical changes to those abstractions?
Can you define free will?
At best – sophistry. The intent is to exploit the system for direct & indirect personal gain – at whatever cost to that system. If not “corruption”, then pretty close.
As I understand it this village Solntsevka, founded in 1902 by colonists from the Volga Germans. These Germans were not deported
In St. Petersburg University, one student (Classical Philologist) defended thesis, which proved that the far Eastern martial arts originated from the Greek fist fight. It is a pity that this text (in Russian) here a few would understand – a very interesting reading.
HBD has two main problems in my view.
Primary one: books on HBD are absolutely dripping with squid ink – disclaimers ad nauseam to just make the books publishable. They don’t really protect the authors at all – it is more the publishing companies and maybe it allows the books to get more press, where otherwise they would be more hidden. But it makes the more mainstream books unpleasant to read. They should be cut out of the main text, and put somewhere else.
Secondary: the more amateurish bloggers like Jayan and HBD Chick. I came across that interesting video, showing behavioral differences in newborns because of HBD Chick, but when people try to be provocative they can easily become ridiculous. Like one claim I heard one or the other make: the Normans created county-level differences in Ireland. Not even the Protestant Ascendancy or the plantation settlers, but the Normans! That one just makes me laugh.
I hope I recall accurately a story about General Robert E. Lee. After the war he was approached by an — insurance Co ??Anyway , a “respectable” –company to lend his name or talent to their mutual profit. The General declined. He was a gentleman.
You have a poor understanding of the theory of evolution. The idea is that this is the only theory to explain even theoretically the appearance of complex organisms without resorting to assuming an even more complex Intelligent Designer. The function of the just-so stories is to find an explanation which could work. Once you’ve provided a simple enough explanation which could at least theoretically work based on the available data and mathematical models, then the onus is on the anti-evolutionist to either disprove it or to provide an even simpler explanation. Both are possible, but until either happens, we will tentatively accept the “just-so” story.
That is one striking thing about the American prison system today: it has an enormous cost, but I’m not sure it is eugenic. There are conjugal visits. Many women in prison become pregnant. Not that I am saying abolish it, and let everyone out. But maybe it would be better to use the money to bribe people rather than hire guards. Move to ___ island, and don’t have any children, or only one.
One of the interesting theories about human self-domestication is that certain Y-chromosomal haplotypes were selected by virtue of behavioral differences. In theory, this might explain why there are large groups with certain ones, like R1b or R1a. Supposedly, the effect is seen in horses.
Global corruption has plummeted since 2000, the heyday of neoliberalism.
http://www.unz.com/akarlin/pinkerian-effect-in-corruption/
Moreover, it has improved especially rapidly in the post-Communist world.
The expression: “I am always right.” is either used ironically or is symptompatic of gross egoism & sad delusion.
As humans we are lucky if we are sometimes right.
“but mortality from alcoholism (and heavily correlated causes such as suicide and murder) is considerably lower in the south than in the north.”
Don’t know, but wonder whether variations in the length & severity of winter is a factor.
Yes – sounds too simple /obvious to be “true”.
I’d really like to agree, but….
Can’t speak about the obese, but I’ve known a couple of people who could eat ridiculous quantities of (not “good”) food & remain
(enviably) thin.
Of course, they may have exercised more/ate less at other times, thus better balancing out their intake-output.
You are typical humorless evolutionist. Hopefully once when you grow up you will grow out of it and gain some distance to it. You are not it. The belief in it does not define you. You will be able to be more relaxed.
The function of the just-so stories is to find an explanation which could work. Once you’ve provided a simple enough explanation which could at least theoretically work based on the available data and mathematical models
Try to come up with data and mathematical models for the just-so stories in the following comment:
“Dualism” – the view that humans are made up of two different substances, the material & the mental/spiritual is a difficult argument to advance. At some point, the dualism must explain how 2 radically different substances interact (ie: material, exists in 3-dimensions, is finite etc & mind – the opposite, exists outside of time/space etc)
Easier, more consistent to claim mind is also material, but is simply (so far) impossible to a give 100% material description of it.
Wow, that’s great. That GFC bizo really was a storm in a tea cup. Those bastard bankers etc ? None of ‘em went to jail, because none of em did a lick of harm.
(And those inflation & unemployment stat’s ? They’re great too.) Thanks, I feel so much better.
There is a small township in Poland established by Flemish settlers in circa 1250. Their identity and language survived for 750 years though after WWII communists treated them harshly for alleged collaboration with Germans and suppressed their language
Arkhangelsk 16.7 alcohol poisoning per 100 000 people, Murmansk (500 km North of Arkhangelsk) 0.2 alcohol poisoning per 100 000 people.
I don’t think that he is arguing for dualism.
Although, it is not clear to me how he can say that the “state of love” is physical, but cannot be reduced to the physical.
If it is all molecules and molecular intereactions, what else exists to provide an explanation?
If the sum is greater than the parts, what is the composition of the difference and where does it reside?
Things generally develop beyond their modest beginnings and can become monsters if people are not careful.
Genetic adaptation to cultural environments again misses the point – not that it doesn’t happen, but it isn’t the significant factor.
Dmitry has been doing a pretty good job showing that groups with near identical genetic makeup in broadly similar environments can produce cultures with very distinct profiles. The Pole/Russian pair, or the Japan/Korean pair, are good examples.
And my example of the “changes” in the Chinese personality in the past 200 years in response to historical contingencies like humiliation and the trauma of conquest shows a seismic and utterly transformational character development that cannot be traced to any kind of genetic shift whatsoever.
A similar transformation occurred in Germany, where the country of “poets and thinkers” that was object of mockery by Mme de Stahl for its unmasculine qualities became a few decades later synonymous with militarism.
Reality is far more complex and fascinating than reducing it to a single variable allows – and adaptation to culture does not really introduced a second variable.
Japanese songs can have this quality of wistful yearning – sensucht in German or yugen in Japanese – that is not common in Anglo music, which generally does not know this emotional register and has a straightforward masculine assertiveness even in its sad songs. And this does not come at the expense of a certain vigorous energy. And then there is all sorts of quirky and phantasmagoric music, which has no real analog elsewhere.
Korean music seems like they are just trying to be standard American cool, with a heavy influence from rap music and fashion and lifestyle associated with that.
It’s probably due to unreliable data in Murmansk.
I’m sure they were technically no less advanced than their neighbors, but they seem to lag in the creative or imaginative arts, and to not have created a distinct style.
The wiki page on Japanese literature has a section on notable writers with a long list – this section is conspicuously absent in the Korea page.
Okay, AaronB, you fooled us all that long. But you couldn’t help outing yourself. Great practical joke you played on us with this “utu” character. Was it difficult impersonating this combative online persona constantly attacking yourself?
Melanf posted some charts on genetic distance between groups earlier. Here are some more.
I presume ‘Russian’ is Southern Russian, given that Northern Russian is a separate group in the chart.
Here’s another, but with some Asian groups mixed in.
Source
The Germanic peoples at the time of the early/middle empire were quite primitive, iirc it’s supposed that many of Arminius’ men didn’t even have metal weapons, but used fire-hardened wooden spears. They had no towns, no writing (apart from the under-developed runes system), and their material culture wasn’t impressive (much less so than that of Celts)…compared with the Greco-Roman world they were primitive.
In late antiquity this changed somewhat, especially in regards to weapons technology which eventually became equal or even superior to that of the Romans. There still wasn’t much of an intellectual culture though, no concept of history or any greater goal than acquiring the riches of the empire.
Living next to a relatively impoverished, increasingly unsafe, majority-Muslim, majority-nonwhite Germany will NOT be a blessing for Poland.
Germany’s path to that destination is, at the moment, clear. They continue to admit at least 100,000 nonEuropean Muslims every year, often many more, and actual Germans in Germany continue to have a pathetically low fertitilty rate.
It’s just dumb, and as I’ve written before, the territory of the GDR didn’t have deep historical roots as a common state…the kingdom of Saxony and the Thuringian states weren’t just the same as Prussia.
And in 1945 Thuringia and Saxony were occupied at first by the Americans who only left after 100 days, in exchange for their zone of West Berlin. If that hadn’t happened, there’s no reason imo to believe Saxony and Thuringia would have become communist, it was just due to historical contingency.
I have long admitted it – I said on another thread that utu is a dark emanation from my unconscious. It should be common knowledge by now.
Poles for some strange reason are almost never included in such brotherly schemes for European peace. It is as if peace required us to disappear.
iirc the territory under English control (“The pale”) even contracted during the later middle ages, and there was at least some cultural hybridization and Hibernization of the settlers. The developments of the 17th century, with the mass settlement of Protestants, were indeed much more important (and destructive).
I agree, one of the main problems with HBD bloggers like Jayman and HBDchick is that they simply don’t know enough history.
Well Arkhangelsk 16.7 alcohol poisoning per 100 000 people, Karelia (neighbour of Arkhangelsk) 1.9 alcohol poisoning per 100 000 people. Meanwhile in subtropical Adygea 10 alcohol poisoning per 100 000 people. But in Adygea only 64% Slavs – other low drinking Circassians and Armenians (ie Russian in Adygea possible surpassed drunkenness of Arkhangelsk.). Gloomy nature and bad climate in this case can not be an explanation.
if adaptation to grains is a thing and if obesity is at least partly related to how adapted populations are to grains then Jews may not be a good test population as i’d have thought Jews are likely to be one of the most grain adapted populations (as they’ve been farmer-diet people for a very long time).
what is the rate of alcoholism among Jews?
if there’s a grain connection i’d imagine the best populations to check for genetic obesity would be those who also have a lot of alcoholism.
Russians and Poles are identical genetically, but live in very different (geographically and climatically) conditions. Koreans and Japanese live in different conditions and are very different genetically-perhaps as French and Swedish.
could be – i accept the correlation they found ages ago so i’ve been more interested in what physical mechanism *might* cause it.
my current guess is the core mechanism of the Hajnal thing is out-breeding within an initially small homogenous population who were previously more clannish which over time made the whole population more related
(i.e. instead of people living in small pools of 2nd cousins surrounded by a larger pool of 6th cousins they end up as 4th cousins to everybody)
which is what urbanization does unless towns/cities are a population sink (which they were for most of history) or the out-breeding effect is specifically culturally resisted (e.g. rural Pakistanis maintaining arranged cousin marriages across continents).
so imo the Hajnal line isn’t fixed in time – most populations in the industrial world have been becoming more Hajnal especially the urban populations since cities stopped being population sinks.
(the urban-rural split seen throughout the world are mini hajnal lines imo)
the big difference is the people within the Hajnal line have been doing it longer as the cousin marriage ban (where it was enforced) created an artificial rural version of urbanization.
also it’s worth considering if the process may go too far
- too in-bred -> too clannish -> low social cohesion
- too out-bred -> too individualistic -> low social cohesion
- just right -> high social cohesion
i think this is part of the explanation for how these things came about i.e. late marriage as a northern adaptation to limited food – with the western part of that northern culture moving south after the fall of Rome i.e. an adaptation which developed in one environment moving into a different environment.
i wonder if this is connected to slash and burn farming (or equivalent)where land is “owned” by the clan and the population move settlement within that territory so no need to worry about inheritance.
sheep dogs
Exactly. I am sure that the alcohol poisoning rate in Sakhalin is not 0/100,000.
It’s better to look at the federal district averages.
Southern: 1.0/100,000. North-west: 6 something/100,000.
right but…
if the body reacts to high blood sugar by turning some of it into belly fat then if certain foods spike blood sugar more in some people then those people will get fatter on those foods.
so say you have two people who both need 2000 calories a day
- person A eats 2000 calories of diet X and is fine
- person B eats 2000 calories of diet X which spikes their blood sugar much more (cos gees) so they store 500 calories as belly fat and only digest 1500 calories so they’re still hungry and yes if that’s all they eat they won’t get obese but they’re still hungry so they will probably end up eating say 2500 calories to get the 2000 they need.
however if diet y doesn’t spike person B’s blood sugar then maybe they’d only eat 2000 calories of diet Y.
Two points:
a) “Simplicity” is not a valid scientific metric for judging theories.
b) “Invent a theory and pretend it’s true until someone disproves it” is not a valid scientific method. (For one, some theories are not falsifiable at all, like the ‘theory’ of darwinian evolution.)
Your conception of science is ridiculous, like something a caveman or an illiterate peasant might come up with.
.
Southern federal district: Kalmykia -0, Astrakhan region-0, Rostov region -0.1, Adygea-9.2.
if we consider the original data (for which the calculation was made) falsified, what is the point in such calculations?
if conforming to a socially constructed “common good” is a function of genetic determinism
but that social construction has been pozzed by the media/academia (cos reasons)
then if you change the social construction to something healthy the *same* people will conform to that instead.
if the TV beamed memes at women defining the common good as them getting involved with their local church to do good deeds in their local community then that’s what they’d do.
the engine of the behavior is genetically determined (imo) but the actual behavior that results is determined by the data fed into the engine (which is why the media has to lie about everything).
i’d say humans have the ultimate in free will – they can use genetic selection (over time) to turn themselves into whatever they want.
over a long enough timeline human populations can turn themselves into good Christians or good soldiers or good Martians or whatever they want.
Before I will answer, what do you mean by “abstraction”, by “abstraction created by physical”, and about “identical abstractions”? Because otherwise we talk on too abstract level for me
Interesting. I’ve read similar hypothesis made by some American martial art master, though he was saying it was pankration which went east with Alexander the Great.
I mean we are part of the system. We exist within the system. We cannot say love is physical, because we _feel_ the physical state does not capture what we really feel. An intelligent entity which would not exist within the system, but outside of that, probably would not notice the difference and would laugh at our notion that there is something more.
The music can be perfectly described in physical terms. You can describe the sounds by set of physical properties, you can describe exactly what happens when sound hit our ears, in theory you could even describe exactly the electrical impulses. And yet when you would look at those description, you most likely would say that music is something more. But this “something more” is only impression created by our minds. Would you say that since music is something more that set of physical characteristics, then it means physical world, the instruments etc cannot affect music?
Hans Delbrück thought it was a fiction, and it is difficult to disagree with him (it is impossible to imagine that the Germans did not have enough metal on the tip of the spear). I do not know how true this is, but in the Russian school history textbook argues that archaeological excavations have clearly shown that Caesar and Tacitus (which followed the ancient cliché in the description of the barbarians) greatly exaggerated the backwardness of the Germans
iirc I read about the fire-hardened wooden spears of Arminius’ men in a book about late antiquity by German ancient historian Alexander Demandt which was originally published in the late 1980s. I don’t know what’s the current state of research on the subject, but Demandt at least regarded it as plausible. It doesn’t seem totally absurd to me, since the battle of Teutoburg forest doesn’t seem to have been an open field battle, but more like a series of guerrilla attacks in a wooded area where the Romans couldn’t draw up a proper battleline, but were instead decimated in ambushes on isolated parts of their marching column. Such conditions could well have negated their advantages in weapons technology.
In any case, by the 4th century this had changed, there is ample evidence for high-quality metal weapons among Germanic peoples then; they had evidently caught up (or even surpassed?) with Roman standards.
Global corruption has plummeted since 2000, the heyday of neoliberalism.
“Conventional” corruption — having to pay bribes for services — may well have declined. But what has increased dramatically over the past few decades is a different sort of corruption — think Tony Blair, the Clintons, the whole revolving door system where legislators and high government officials obscenely enrich themselves after government (or military) service. So indices of corruption as conventionally measured may decline, but the overall system is certainly no less corrupt than before.
one of the comments Tacitus makes is German tribes burning all the forest around their settlements and leaving a very wide space between settlements which he thought was defensive in some way but i think it was Romans not knowing what slash and burn agriculture was.
if correct and that was the only farming viable in Germania at the time then as civilization requires minimum population density, permanent settlements, enough surplus to feed specialists etc then i don’t think it would be that surprising if Fermans were backward technologically – maybe this changed between Tacitus and Caesar’s time?
(one possible explanation might be that as coniferous forests make soil acidic then cutting down northern forests for farming might have produce lower crop yields until strains were developed which suited the soil better – hence semi-nomadic slash and burn)
Supposedly there are physical changes that can be measured when a person is “in love,” not to mention changed behaviors that can be catalogued and compared. Does this mean that if a man tells the woman that he loves her, it is simply for her to ask for a mouth swap as confirmation? I don’t think so. Love is the abstraction but it germinates and is created in the physical. What the “in love” means varies with the culture, the person and time. For me, I might recall the story of how grandpa and grandma met, married, had 16 children and lived as a couple for 55 years. I might recall particular movies, books, poems, stories, individuals and couples and their behaviors, in short, a thousand and one thoughts and ideas, and some would coincide with yours and some not. Falling “in love” is a phenomenon that encapsulates many concepts, ideas, anecdotes and behaviors. Some people don’t believe it exists. Some believe it only happens once with one particular person. Some lounge lizards fall in love with someone new almost every weekend.
My thoughts connect me to this “in love” abstraction that is part of the social memory; the world of ideas; the virtual world. If I suffered a severe brain injury, I could lose my ability to “connect” to this abstraction. My connection to the abstraction is the molecular and electrical processes in my brain which also determine my perception and interpretation of what “in love” means. If I lose the physical, I lose the abstraction.
But this “something more” is only impression created by our minds.
Yes, and if you “lose” your mind you lose the something more.
A) number of assumptions employed in the theory. Observations can have an infinite number of explanations, so you have to choose.
B) you cannot prove a scientific theory, only corroborate while trying to falsify it. So it’s really AaronB’s assertion that the theory of evolution is unfalsifiable which you need to prove, while you need to accept that the accepted (and really, only) explanation is what needs to be falsified if you want it discarded.
Here from a Russian school textbook about the Germanic tribes and the failure of the Roman descriptions of the life of the Germans:
Conquering Gaius Julius Caesar, a Roman General and politician, in the middle of the 1st century BC came into a clash with the Germanic tribes: the Germans also wanted to seize the lands of the Gauls. After persistent fighting Caesar managed to push the Germans and move to the East Bank of the Rhine. In his essay “Notes on the Gallic war” Caesar tells about these hostilities and at the same time gives a description of the life and customs of the Germans. Later, at the end of I century. ad, the Roman historian Publius Cornelius Tacitus wrote several works in which he, using the stories of the Romans who visited Germany, also paints a picture of their lives.
Reading these works, it must be remembered that Caesar tried to portray the Germans as almost invincible militant people and to inspire the Roman government, which he sent his messages that only one military genius of Caesar could achieve victory over the Germans. Tacitus also brought to the fore those features of life and life of the Germans, who distinguished them from the inhabitants of Italy….
What do the Roman authors tell about the Germans? The country inhabited by them, according to Tacitus, is covered with dense forests and disgusting swamps. Warriors of the Germans are hiding in the woods, where they suddenly attack the Roman legions. The Germans, according to Caesar, eat mostly meat, not bread, because “do not zealous in agriculture.” Those who still cultivate the fields, soon they are thrown and move to other places. It turns out that the Germans were nomadic pastoralists with rudiments of agriculture, which explains their belligerence.
And, we must admit, until recently, historians trusted these descriptions — because science had no other data, in addition to the messages of Roman authors. Now the situation has changed. Archaeologists have learned better and in more detail, with the help of precise methods, to explore not only dug out of the ground things, but also to restore, layer by layer, relating to different time remains of buildings and villages, and even to discover traces of ancient fields — furrows left by plow or plow.
What was it? Here is one example. Roman writer Pliny the Elder-a contemporary of Tacitus draws the life of the German tribe Chauci, who lived near the “Ocean” (i.e. the North sea). During high tides the waves are flooding the entire area, says Pliny, so “this miserable tribe of” forced to huddle in huts on the hills or sprinkled them hills. They do not have the ability to cultivate the land, graze cattle, even hunt. They eat fish, which is collected in the waters of low tide. Sad picture…
But let us compare these scenes painted by Pliny of the disastrous existence of the unfortunate hawks with the fact that in the 60s of our century archaeologists dug up just in the same area. There really were mounds of earthen hills, but they were not built pathetic “huts”, and strong wooden houses, and these villages continued to exist for several centuries, from the I century BC and up to the V century BC Pliny the Elder claimed that the havkas are not engaged in agriculture, while archaeologists have found traces of ancient fields surrounded by stone and earthen fences.
Such same ancient field existed in different countries Europe, not only on the continent, but and in Britain and Scandinavia. The Germans who lived in these areas were not nomadic pastoralists, but settled farmers.
Roman writers correctly noticed the belligerence of the Germans. But they had wrong ideas about the nature of ancient Germany. Along with the mighty forests, which in ancient times in Europe was
much more than later (in the Middle ages people started clearing forests for arable land), there were forest-steppe and space, it is suitable for sedentary agriculture. Contrary to the claims of Tacitus, archaeologists have found that the Germans mined iron ore and forged iron weapons and tools. They also had other crafts.
The Germans did not build or inhabit cities. They settled apart from one another families, because the land was a lot, and the population in that era in Europe was rare.
From vague expressions of Caesar and Tacitus, which can be differently interpreted, many historians of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries drew the conclusion like the ancient Germanic tribes owned the land collectively and the right of ownership to arable land belonged to the community. In fact, the neighbors who inhabited their small villages grazed herds together and, perhaps, jointly managed forests and meadows. But there is no evidence that arable land was collectively owned by the entire village. On the contrary, the study of traces of ancient fields showed that some areas of land were constantly surrounded by earth and stone ramparts-these areas belonged to independent owners and inherited by individual families.
Where did the historians of the last century come up with the idea of an ancient German community, which allegedly owned the property on arable plots? The fact is that rural communities were spread in much later times — in medieval Europe. At that time, isolated villages were mostly replaced by large villages. That’s when the neighbors inevitably the question arose: how to use rural land? Here the community organization was necessary both to peasants, and the landowner to whom they submitted.
Seeing that in the medieval village there were communal regulations, historians of the last century decided that the medieval community was
inherited from ancient German times. In fact, there was no “primitive communism” among the Germans.
Mouth swab, not swap. Although I think a mouth swap is commonly used.
The thing about chemical changes and being ‘in love’ is not about the relationship between the abstraction and the particular instance so much as being about the nature of the relationship between the phenomenology of being in love and the chemical changes (i.e. that the former is, conceptually at least, not reducible to the latter and, as a separate issue, is also only imperfectly correlated with it)
But the argument by RR was different: he postulates that physical cannot affect the spiritual; that not only there are no physical laws which affect psychical traits, but, indeed, there cannot be such laws. (a digression: I am not sure I understand his position, because it so absurd it makes me think maybe I missing something in his intended meaning. Does RR means that someone being “sad” cannot be affected by physical world? Or does he mean that “a propensity, an inclination to being
sad” – i.e. character – cannot be affected by physical world?)
As for the existence of “virtual world”, I think this is a confusion. The virtual world exists in our minds.
I can draw three straight lines in a certain way and this becomes “A”, an abstraction for a sound. But this does not mean that “A” somehow exists independently in some kind of virtual world.
The table has a shape. A concept of “shape” is an abstraction, a description of real world – OUR description, OUR abstraction. But the mental states are not mere abstractions and descriptions. By proving that “shape” abstraction is independent of real world, by proving that “love” is an abstraction you do not prove that there is no connection between real world and someone being in love.
I can’t follow most of RR’s postulates these days, so I don’t try anymore.
I can usually follow what you have to say so I am having a difficult time with these comments.
You say:
But this “something more” is only impression created by our minds.
But I say that the “impression” is physical and in our mind.
Where does the “something more” reside if not in our mind?
Are impressions not physical thought processes?
Perhaps I am using abstraction incorrectly.
The measureable and observable physiological (and psychological) changes of “being in love,” are (in theory) indicators. Suppose all measureable and observable indicators are discovered and elaborated. Would we look at the profile and say: “Yes, he is in love.”
I am unsure of the validity of the idea, much less its uniformity across time and populations. It was just something that I remember reading.
Being “in love” is an emotional and mental state or phenomenon. There is physicality in mind and body. There is also a physical mental phenomenon that connects one with the communal vision of being “in love.”
Where is the non-physical part?
Things generally develop beyond their modest beginnings and can become monsters if people are not careful.
Yes, indeed! I was a member of an antiracist group in the late 1980s and even sat on the board of directors. Not long before I left, in 1992, I noticed a change in our educational literature. It became slicker and glossier. Also, there was no longer any talk about the working class or the struggle against capitalism, only a crude “anti-white-ism.”
I felt disturbed reading the new material, and I wish I had spoken out at the time. But I didn’t.
Reality is far more complex and fascinating than reducing it to a single variable allows – and adaptation to culture does not really introduced a second variable.
It’s possible you don’t understand the concept of gene-culture coevolution. When humans adapt to a new cultural environment, they initially do not adapt by means of genetic change. They simply push the envelope of their phenotype. Then, over successive generations of selection, the mean genotype of that human population will shift to match the new phenotype. This shift happens gradually, but it does happen.
Some 10,000 years ago, human genetic evolution accelerated over a hundred-fold. At that time our ancestors had colonized all of the natural environments from the equator to the Arctic. So this acceleration was due to adaptation to new cultural environments. We humans have biologically adapted to culture in the same way that we have biologically adapted to temperature and diet. And even temperature and diet have become human cultural creations. The loss of haplogroup U in early Europeans, for instance, closely corresponds to the shift from hunting and gathering to farming — from sleeping in temporary shelters to sleeping in homes.
Please, I’m not arguing that differences between human groups are 100% genetic. That’s a typical bait-and-switch strategy, i.e., describe your opponent as a hardline 100% genetic determinist, while defending a position that leaves hardly any room at all for genetic determinism.
I was a member of an antiracist group
Do you still consider yourself to be an antiracist?
In your earlier comment you said that HBD was not a movement. I think that you should elaborate upon that idea. I am not an academic, but it seems to me that it should be described as a school of thought within disicplines. It is obvious to me that racists have latched on to HBD type scholarship and findings, but they were thinking the way they think long before HBD.
I may be some sort of dummie, but I don’t have any unsurmountable conflicts between HBD, as I understand it, and being opposed to racism.
When Darwin and his followers postulated that mankind and the great apes had a common ancestor, they knew nothing of DNA. It was discovered almost a century after Darwin published his theory. They didn’t know about the noncoding (a.k.a. junk) DNA, which is not subject to selection pressure and so randomly changes over time. This could be used to measure the genetic distance of organisms, for example Africans and Europeans, or humans and chimpanzees, or chimpanzees and horses, mammals and crocodiles, vertebrates and insects, etc.
It just so happens that if the junk DNA was random, so gorilla junk DNA resembled crocodile junk DNA more than that of humans, while chimpanzee junk DNA was similar to the black house ant (but not the fire ant, whose junk DNA would resemble the junk DNA of the ash tree), then that would pose a significant problem for the theory of evolution. Because the theory of evolution predicts that since they are not subject to selection and are random, they should be similar to related species, with the similarity dropping roughly proportionally to the distance the last common ancestor lived.
I would say a random distribution of junk DNA would have falsified the theory of evolution already. But it was not so. The junk DNA happens to follow the distribution which follows from the theory of evolution, despite neither Darwin nor any of his followers knowing anything about it.
So much for AaronB’s theory that the theory of evolution is merely a tautology which predicts nothing.
Probably it’s because I am thinking about that during this very discussion. My views are imprecise. My general idea is that we cannot step outside and perceive that “something more” is an illusion. I’m sorry, when I’m thinking aloud I can’t being precise.
But I am not religiously devoted to any of the ideas espoused. I mean, I am not sure.
I am convinced that under every thought, feeling etc there is underlying physical process and changing this physical process will influence the thoughts and feelings; but OTOH the ability to “perceive”, to “feel”, the feeling of being conscious is something which is hard to explain by just appealing to physical phenomena.
That is – and I am now just thinking aloud – how can I even say “feeling that something more is an illusion” without agreeing that there is something which is deceived? I mean, and I’m going probably too meta here, is saying ” >>there is something more to love<< is just an illusion" admission that indeed there is something more to the physical process?
It's like observing a computer. You can run a process and observe bits changing in registers, or even go lower and note electrical states changes, but will that say anything about process sense? So, there is something more to the process than just changing bits in memory. Or is it? Sure you can flip some bits and it will affect the process, so it would be absurd to claim "running process is not dependent on physical underlying hardware". And surely there is nothing more to process than just changing electrical states in electronic circuits.
It's almost midnight here, so I will stop at that.
By proving that “shape” abstraction is independent of real world
It is not independent of the real word. You and I would likely agree as to whether we are sitting at a round table or a square table or even if we are at a desk rather than a table. We have created these abstractions to facilitate our communication. Is the table square or round? Depends. The table exists and has properties, but we have defined the properties.
I do not think it is even too controversial to say yes. We make judgements about other people’s emotional states all the time. But even if we were reluctant to, it would only be because we do not have direct access to other people’s experiences.
So I guess we can say that any given phenotype can adapt to a wide range of environments before selection pressures become involved. This suggests that cultural differences are in significant part specific responses within that range. This dramatically complicates the issue of assessing cause.
For instance, blacks are commonly thought of by HBD types as innately violent – yet black violence in America can be seen as a reasonable response to an extremely competitive society and not inherently different than the predatory business practices of Jewish and white elites.
Yet you’ll rarely see a parallel drawn between the business practices of a Jeff Bezos and a black street thug – yet both can plausibly be seen as stemming from the sane root.
Instead, the usual narrative is that blacks just have the genes for violence – a single variable, catch-all explanation that reduces a complex interaction between phenotype and environment to a linear 1:1 relationship between gene and behavior.
Now, I’m not saying HBD has to do that or always will – I am saying that this is a characteristic example of the style of reasoning that people who are into HBD employ.
Of course they can paint a much more complex picture but there’s no fun in that, and that doesn’t make HBD look like such a powerful explanatory engine. So the bold claim is favored and the genetic element is emphasized out of proportion.
I also want to point out that even with accepting phenotypic range (pushing the envelope), we are still only still at the level of genes – a one variable catch-all explanation.
This is the mechanical model of human behavior. Yet much human behavior can have no relation to biological survival. But this cannot be accepted – or even seriously considered – by someone who has committed himself to viewing all human behavior through the prism of survival. Forcing all human behavior into this perspective has produced caricatures that prevent us from understanding ourselves and has directly fed into our Western sense of alienation, which is tied to our self-destructive behaviors.
However, I would accept that there is a legitimate place for a “weak” HBD movement that avoided overly bold claims, did not engage in line at thinking, and did not see HBD as the single most powerful explanatory engine ever devised by the mind of man.
Germanic tribes lacked quality and easily available iron ore – relying on bog-iron.
Archaeological finds of swords are very rare compared to spears, and many are foreign-made (obtained via trade or war loot).
Javelins with fire-hardened tips, spears, clubs, axes all require much less quality iron and are significantly cheaper to make in quantity.
Even in Gaul, vast majority of soldiers were armed with spears.
Contrast this with Iberia, where swords were commonplace.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_red_fox
You live in an alternate dimension.
black violence in America can be seen as a reasonable response to an extremely competitive society and not inherently different than the predatory business practices of Jewish and white elites.
You are taking things way too seriously AaronB; you need to relax and catch another batch of moonbeams.
Probability. Probability. Probability.
A street thug using violence is much more likely to be black (or Hispanic) than Jewish.
Why?
Hedge fund management is just too damn boring, bro.
ROFLMAO
Within DNA we just find something which we can interpret as a pattern (concept of “pattern” itself is a subjective viewpoint – there is no actual pattern in DNA itself, anymore than exists actual binary in a transistor state), and entry point inducing random changes at transition point between each generation.
One of the main entry points inducing randomness at the transition point, is reproduction through division into male/female and then sexual recombination – but there are also changes as a result of replication errors in production of gametes themselves.
Sexual recombination just increases the rate of change to DNA pattern across time (increases instability of patterns in DNA across time). It’s like an option to increase the tempo when playing back music, or to watch YouTube on 2x speed.
DNA of asexual organisms also changes across time (simply much more slowly, as it only has the entry point for random change through replication errors).
Across time, some patterns are increasing in frequency (we can even see this in terms of total quantity of DNA patterns in the world, ignoring the organisms which contain it). These themselves are a bit like positions on a chess board, as they create dispositions for future patterns, which are latent in earlier combinations.
Now where is the concept of “evolution”? It’s artifact of trying to combine different points of view.
At the same as patterns in DNA are changing across time, and some of these changes increasing in frequency in certain places. We can also observe the organisms which are containing the DNA patterns.
Observing organisms on the “ordinary level”, we can see all kinds of causal explanations (sometimes even empirically verifiable ones) for why changes in DNA pattern increase in frequency, and others do not.
In most cases, of course, these are underdetermined by evidence, and generally similar to mythological stories.
“Evolution” is artifact of our attempt to utilize our “ordinary point of view” (which is still animistically attributing “motives” – even though we try to see it as an impersonal and universal one – to what is, ontologically, just unmotivated physics), to explain changes in frequency in patterns of DNA across time.
This is not to insult “theories of evolution” – at our current level (where we don’t have bridge laws to reduce biology to physics), we need to use our ordinary level of observation, and can still reach quite far through it.
Well, close enough not to explain even tiniest fraction of cultural difference of Poles that we meet in real life.
Although (without knowing much about this topic), I read that closest genetically people (outside Russia) are Balts?
I don’t believe just geographical and climatic conditions can explain cultural difference of Poles. We need all the very many different – synoptic – factors which are studied by historians.
Yes, but with higher emphasis on physical beauty (only using beautiful girls), and better synchronized dancing.
In terms of musical level, Kpop is very similar to Swedish pop (which is a melodically “nice” sounding branch of American pop music)
International popularity of Kpop, very understandable – as Korean emphasis on physical beauty is something which is universally attractive, especially for teenagers. And their synchronized dancing is like watching competitive sport.
But what is the psychological effect for teenage girls, which are consuming this around the world? It is based on showing them only the top 1% most beautiful girls, from a different race where girls are thin and homogenized – it is probably undermining self-confidence of many teenagers.
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Jpop not only avoids obsession with physical beauty, and has its own unique, original “sound”. In addition, it is also often connected to works of art (anime), which can have spiritual value (even for people in their 20s now).There must be some German word for this (it is music which connects whole to a “Culture World”).
It’s only because of use in some awesome animes, that unsubtitled Radwimps videos like below now receiving 200 million views.
Do you still consider yourself to be an antiracist?
No, but that’s largely because antiracism has changed so much since then. In the 1980s, antiracism was subservient to leftist ideology. Today, the situation is the reverse.
I was a leading member of an antiracist organization, yet very few of our activities had anything to do with racism. We lobbied for a higher minimum wage, we helped people to unionize, we took part in the May Day parade, and we held conferences on things like the anniversary of Salvador Allende’s death, the U.S. intervention in Grenada, the situation in El Salvador, etc.
In short, antiracism was kept within the confines of leftist ideology. Then, around 1990, that ideology collapsed, and antiracism was released from its cage. It became free to redefine itself and do as it wished. It became a Golem without a master.
Alright, I’ll concede that. I still maintain that AaronB is wrong (like usual) when he maintains that Korea doesn’t have a classical culture.
I would for the most part agree with Dmitry’s statements here regarding HBD, but you are being stupid here.
Not all blacks are vicious, some places like Barbados would seem to confirm that, but overall blacks are very violent whether they are in USA, Latin America, Africa or Europe.
African blacks are not known for industriousness and are stereotypically focused on frivolity and lazy yet they still have very high rates of violence.
Do you mean Gesamtkunstwerk?
I quite like this band, Fairy Empire, which I think has an interesting interpretation of German dark romantic music.
” Also, there was no longer any talk about the working class or the struggle against capitalism, only a crude “anti-white-ism.”
Technological progress has stripped hungry people from “movement leaders” as a resource to mobilitate to get power.
Nobody’s gonna be angry any more. No grounds for communism/real socialism.
Now there are other reasons, other grounds, for envy.
The new movement leaders and social climbers — who with the coming of social media have become a veritable army — do exploit these new opportunities, and have abandoned the only accusations and “values” for new, more fitting ones.
Many times means grow until they are so relevant that they switch function with purposes: purposes become instruments, and former instruments become the purposes (to realize which the new instruments are employed).
Southern Russians are genetically almost identical to Poles and Slovaks. Northern Russians are genetically far from other Slavs (including southern Russians), but genetically close to Balts and Scandinavians. That is, the southern Russians are genetically much closer to the poles than to the Northern Russians.
Religion is probably the most important factor. This factor is almost irrelevant today (according to intermarriage statistics today’s Russian have fewer cultural differences with Western Christians than with the other Orthodox ethnic groups), but in the past religion played very important role
His psychological motivations are pretty obvious, whether they’re conscious or unconscious. He’s basically trying to demoralise Western men by convincing them that the West is irredeemably deracinated and atomised, with no possibility of nationalist renewal, reactionary politics, illiberalism, patriarchy, or social conservatism, thus inhibiting them from social and political mobilisation towards ends he regards as threatening.
That is inaccurate. While the northern part of Japanese-occupied Korea was more Christian, it was NOT more collaborationist. Among Korean elites, northern elites were disproportionately – in other words, highly – represented in the independence movement, even setting aside those who were communists.
By far the most collaborationist part of Korea was the southeastern part of the peninsula, especially around the major port city of Busan that had long been a commercial entrepot for and trading post with Japan and had had Japanese residents in relatively large numbers even before the occupation. Indeed, many of the elite military and industrial figures who came to dominate South Korea later came from the southeastern part of the country, and benefitted from education, training, and experience during the Japanese rule.
Also, the greatest geographic division in Korea is not north vs. south, which is a result of the Japanese economic policy (industrial in the north, agricultural in the south) and the later international political situation that led to Soviet-American division. There is much greater geographical and historical division that runs east-west, particularly in the southern part of the country where a mountain range long cut off communication between the southeast and the southwest (indeed, highways across the two regions were not built until recent decades, so that it was faster to travel from Busan to Seoul than from Busan to Gwangju).
The southwest was long “oppressed” by the elites in Seoul and Busan (recall that this enmity very runs deeply – the ancient kingdom of this region, Baekjae, was extinguished by the alliance of Chinese Tang and the Silla of the southeast very long ago). The southwest has always been “rebellious” since. Paradoxically, despite the fact that Baekjae had strong ties with Japan and contributed ancestry to much of Japanese royalty and aristocracy earlier, the people in the southwest – long despised by other Koreans – were the most resistant to Japanese occupation in both the Hideyoshi invasions of the late 16th century and the later modern encroachments of the early 20th.
This southwestern rebelliousness has persisted. There were numerous communist insurgencies in the area prior to the Korean War. In the post-war period, the infamous Gwangju Uprising and the subsequent, brutal military suppression during the military dictatorship of South Korea occurred in the southwest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwangju_Uprising
You might do some reading before opining on something about which you appear completely ignorant.
Koreans are stereotypically very clannish – literally. Until quite recently, clan gatherings, celebrations, and ancestor reverence ceremonies reinforced this tendency very strong (in the last 20 years or so, however, a massive wave of nuclearization of the family has hit South Korea and South Korean young people and married couples have become much more “independent”). Inbreeding within clans were also strictly barred by law (to the 7th or 9th degrees, I forget), so for example, if you were of the Andong Kim clan, you couldn’t marry your cousin 5th degrees removed, solely because you both were of the Andong Kim clan.
Indeed, much of Korean history is that of rival clans warring and fighting with each other rather than foreign invaders, making them somewhat easy to defeat, but very difficult to rule. It’s another reason why comparisons to the Irish are frequently made.
Although communism was somewhat popular with literate northern Koreans and southwestern peasants during the Japanese occupation, it was extremely alien to Korean culture and was only imposed at gunpoint by the Soviets in the chaotic period after the Japanese occupation (though, to be fair, communists also gained some legitimacy, because they were much more effective resistance fighters than non-communists were during the Japanese occupation).
Overwhelmingly, northern elites embraced outside innovations and modernization first. Southerners tended to be much more highly agrarian (and with rice agriculture at that) and were culturally more communitarian or collectivist. Korea’s northeastern border region was always its Wild West, and that’s where the “freedom-seeking” rebels, misfits, and condemned scholars ended up.
Whatever disparities that exist between North and South Korea today is almost entirely due to the separate politico-economic structures that were built in the 20th century.
That speculation is not borne out by genetic research. The proportion of Siberian hunter-gatherer vs. Southeast Asian rice farmer genes (roughly 1-to-2) is pretty much identical throughout the Korean Peninsula. Indeed, there is comparatively little genetic structure among Koreans, and what little structure there is runs east-west, not north-south. You can guess why if you know anything about Korean topography – the most significant mountain range in Korea runs north-south (and it forks in the south): http://en-us.topographic-map.com/places/South-Korea-4128004/
No, that’s just hyper-modern Kpop, a product of directed government subsidy and encouragement for export-purposes.
Traditional Korean pop music is more like Japanese Enka music:
And of course actual native Korean traditional music is very folksy and usually tell tales:
That’s wrong. Dog breeds are often extremely close to each other genetically, because their differences in appearance and behavior are usually caused by a few dozens of genes, but of course the differences between them are explained to a very large extent by genetics.
Why do you think it’s impossible with human groups? The effects of genes are not linear and proportional to genetic distance, in part because the latter is determined to a large extent by junk DNA. Coding DNA could be changed faster by strong selection pressures, and its effects can be larger still.
In the case of Russians/Рoles, the genetic explanation of the differences is clearly incredible, since Russians are divided into two completely different genetic clusters. Southern Russians are genetically identical to Рoles, but differ sharply (genetically) from Northern Russians. Meanwhile the Southern and Northern Russian indistinguishable from each other by lifestyle, culture, etc, but different from the Рoles.
effects of genes are not linear and proportional to genetic distance - rephrase it because proportional implies linear.
Not incredible. Russians might have some archaic human trait which got weeded out of Poles. For example lower inhibition and higher aggression, which was a human universal (i.e. true of both Russian groups as well as early Poles) until fairly recently. In which case genes could explain those differences – higher propensity to alcoholism, higher violent crime levels, lower trust, etc. All you need for that explanation to work is for these traits to be selected against in Poland but not in Russia. Or there to be a stronger selection against them in Poland, or for a longer time, than in Russia. I suspect the latter (i.e. the selection against these traits was stronger or longer in Poland than in Russia), so early medieval Russians were still more violent than 21st century Russians, but early medieval Poles were probably quite similar to these über-violent Russians.
It’s a likely explanation, but of course reality could be different.
effects of genes are not (linear and proportional to genetic distance)
or
effects of genes are not linear and not proportional to genetic distance