Why China isn't our hope
Seeing that the Cathedral has led the West into hopeless decadence, where women work while men clean, kids order while parents obey, foreigners rule while natives submit, deviancy is cherished while normalcy is derided. Yes, we are in deep shit.
But wait!, some say. Nature abhors a vacuum. The West is fucked, but someone will take our place and set things right. That's what evolution does. While the West is busy giving billions to gangsta rappers, fag designers and bastards on welfare, the Chinese are working hard, stoically building their industry, thriftily saving their money to invest in the long term. Oh Yes, the Chinese are the real deal. They've been for long, right? 5000 years. Their thrift and industry will bury us, and inherit the earth.
Well, hold your horses. I know the pictures of all those dark, muscular peasants building those awesome skyscrapers climbing bamboo scaffolds without helmets makes for an impressive picture. Way more wholesome than the white working class fatsoes parading their 200lbs bags of blub in Walmart to buy some more light beer. But that's not the whole story.
You can understand a lot of a country by looking at their celebrities. They represent what a country values in their people, what the nation regards as the people to respect and imitate. This is particularly true in China, where the media is state-owned and strictly controlled in a top-down fashion, not a loose coordination like the West. The celebrities that make it in China are there because the party wants them there. Period.
Well allow me to introduce one of the most famous singers in China. Han Hong 韩红.
Now I strongly recommend:
\[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-k-\_jzcp7c\]
Listen at the female voice. Isn't it lovely? What a voice. Perhaps you're imagining a sweet, lovely Chinese maiden.
Now look at the video.
And look at some pictures.
Edmond Honda?
Yes, that's a woman. Well it's a gross, beastly lesbian ogre. Probably the ugliest lesbian this side of Michael Moore. And yes, she's big in China. Huge. She's on TV every other day, and she's been for more than a decade. She is a towering presence in Chinese show-biz, and is known for her insatiable appetite towards hot startlets. She used to fuck Vicky Zhao. Ugh.
Funny thing is she's Tibetan. Now Tibetans are known in the West for having achieved the incredible feat of transforming Buddhism into a savage slave-owning theocracy. But in China they're just one of many (55 to be exact) backward tribes. Now Chinese tribes are very literally backward; they have been inside China for centuries, and most of the more enterprising tribesmen simply took a Chinese name, took up farming or commerce and integrated easily into Han society, which never really cared much about race (Cantonese look indistinguishable from Vietnamese, while people in the Northeast resemble their neighbouring Koreans and Mongols). The tribes that exist are made of those tribesmen who were too dumb or just too stubborn to assimilate to civilisation.
As such they are a pretty useless bunch, but China is very much Soviet in their generous treatment of minorities. They upkeep their identity, and try to give them some national exposure. But on what? Minorities aren't very good at building rockets, or managing businesses, or making research. But they surely must be good at something! Well, they can sing. In the same way that blacks are superior singers and dancers, minorities in China are pretty good singers. They might as well be; it's all they do most of the time while the Han build skyscrapers. So China has made it public policy to promote minority singers and give them some spotlight on national TV. Of course they sing in Mandarin; they thus join their native cultural talent and blend it in vibrant harmony with the nation in the common language.
Hence the Tibetan Han Hong. But surely they could have found a better looking Tibetan girl? Somebody less taxing to the eyes? And someone who is not obviously a sexual deviant? Perhaps the most jarring thing about Western Progressivism is their public promotion of homosexuality. Reproduction being the most basic function of living organisms, it is also a major incentive focus of behaviour. Society depends in men being men, women being women, and in them achieving a division of labor and character that makes them desire each other and form families. Men work so as to get women they like, and women work so as to have children by men they like. If you disassociate sex from family formation, you get men that aren't men, women that aren't women, sex being something you do at home while staring at a screen, and the genders despising each other, creating vast amounts of depression, misery, PUAs and feminist blogs.
Well, China isn't replacing their people with lower IQ foreigners, but they allow minorities to outbreed the Han. They also don't allow fags to marry, but they give high status and influence on national TV. I'm sorry but I don't see these people saving mankind.
33 comments
Well, there is a "lot of ruin in a nation", and all they have to do is be a little bit better than us. A low bar, indeed, but they may have the skill to get under it.
Most white people that say they admire Asians really mean, "my lazy kid won't study or do chores." It's not any deeper then that. They know nothing about Asia.
I don't know if "admire" is the proper word, but there are definitely things I like about Japanese culture that I find to be superior to the way things have gone in most parts of the US. For example, let me talk a little about customer service, both commercial and in various government offices - and I encourage you to keep in mind just how much of out public social interaction these "customer service" moments comprise. The near-universal level of courtesy, honesty, politeness, pleasantness, efficiency, work-ethic, competence, intelligence, self-motivation, willingness to, "go above and beyond the call of duty," and genuine consideration for the customer, even for a foreigner to whom they show considerable patience, has been an extremely agreeable experience for me. They'll profusely apologize to you for even the most minor delay or inconvenience. Even their appearance and demeanor tends to be satisfying - with most being slender, well groomed, and stylishly dressed. I don't have any attraction to Asian girls at all (who knows why), but I can still appreciate a general focus on maintaining a professional elegance. Now, compare this to your monstrous urban American functionary - hideous, surly, lazy, dull, bitter, corrupt, inattentive, apathetic, bothered, entitled, treating you like shit, looking for any reason whatsoever to get out of doing the job they're paid to do. You may say, "Well, that's because you can't fire those Americans," but the Japanese typically have just as much job security - many stay in the same job or office for life. In this respect, the Japanese remind of the culture that used to exist in the American Midwest of my youth, and still does somewhat in some places, but is rapidly disappearing. But that's what it is - culture. It's the acculturation and socialization that can happen in a homogenous setting where those things are taught from birth and reenforced by everyone in every circumstance without constant undermining and contradiction or "contamination" by crass anti-cultural influences. Conversely, no amount of career pressure short of absolute terror is going to be able to persuade the average Newark DMV worker to be a better worker or person. So, do I "admire" the Japanese? I certainly envy them this.
Agreed, but that's something specifically Japanese. God knows customer service in China isn't that good. And functionaries, hah. Oh my. I should make a post in how Japan acculturates its people, I've had in mind for quite some time.
Didn't you already do that. They destroy the individuality of their elite in order to create a better prole.
That's got nothing to do with my comment, but thanks for taking it personally.
Between Han Hong on one side and Lady Gaga, Nicki Minaj, Madonna on the other, I would still think that the former is a healthier role model. For one thing, she is really good at her job which is singing (and not looking "sexy" or "provocative"). In the West, music these days is less about singing and more about shocking.
Point taken on Gaga, but Han Hong shocks me plenty. And of course she doesn't dress sexy, because she doesn't dress like a woman at all. She's just some dyke. Not very healthy.
I'm guessing you've seen this: http://www.edge.org/response-detail/23838 (linked by Sailer) Highly relevant (from the other side)
Yes, I have. The BGI is awesome, and surely there are people inside China who are working hard for eugenics. But to say that "There is unusually close cooperation in China between government, academia, medicine, education, media, parents, and consumerism in promoting a utopian Han ethno-state." is patently false. He's just trying to scare people in the US towards researching on eugenics. Which is a great idea of course. Still if Deng intended for urban people to engage in eugenic assortative mating, they're doing it wrong. The fertility rate in Shanghai is 0.8. The peasants in Guizhou are still pumping out kids though. I wonder what will happen when the BGI research shows that the smartest people in China are in the Jiangnan area, while the north and west are lagging. The Han ethnicity is a fragile thing.
Solid objections to be sure (echoed over at GLP), but you're also right that the BGI project is an eye-opener: "Potentially, the results would allow all Chinese couples to maximize the intelligence of their offspring by selecting among their own fertilized eggs for the one or two that include the highest likelihood of the highest intelligence. Given the Mendelian genetic lottery, the kids produced by any one couple typically differ by 5 to 15 IQ points. So this method of 'preimplantation embryo selection' might allow IQ within every Chinese family to increase by 5 to 15 IQ points per generation. After a couple of generations, it would be game over for Western global competitiveness."
"I wonder what will happen when the BGI research shows that the smartest people in China are in the Jiangnan area, while the north and west are lagging." -- Hardly a secret already, surely? Worth adding that the Miller projection of cumulative 5-15 point generational IQ augmentation is obviously exaggerated (the Mendelian raw material for that simply doesn't exist), but a 10 point IQ jump across a large, smart society would suffice to change everything.
Well the connoisseurs can see the pattern, but I don't think the people in the heartland would be amused if there were hard data on their inferiority. 10 points would be awesome of course, but who's to say it would be a Chinese exclusive? Once the data is out there you can offer some boss a Californian villa just across Steve Hsu's, and apply the findings. I'd think that if China were to really make a massive program of embryo selection (taking n eggs of ALL women in the country and analysing every single one of them. It's madness), brows would be raised in the West. You can't just go Brave New World secretly in a weekend.
Would we like it though? Even Mustapha Mond knew a society of alpha means civil war.
Smart doesn't mean alpha. In fact it might mean the opposite. And there would still be variance, it's just raising the average.
eh, he wasn't using it in the game sense. i find it really doubtful you haven't read the book
Is there any difference? The Alphas in BNW got laid plenty, and were social and outgoing. High IQ in real life is correlated with geekiness. If we find the genes for high IQ and design kids to get them all we are quite likely to produce shy and dorky geniuses, which aren't known for aggresiveness.
> the Miller projection of cumulative 5-15 point generational IQ augmentation is obviously exaggerated (the Mendelian raw material for that simply doesn’t exist), wrong. avg sib-sib difference is maybe 8, ignoring gender (same for other 1* relatives). now take 20 'sibs' (if you are going to sequence five fertilized eggs, just sequence 20): their range should be perhaps a bit over /-sigma from the biparental mean. if you can only afford 10, well then
Sorry, lack of clarity on my side. Key word is 'cumulative' i.e. reiterated improvements of the 5-15% range over successive generations. Mendelian selection can only work on the material available, so whilst it's no problem agreeing to a first generation effect, the idea that this could be reiterated indefinitely in sheer magic (actually, a kind of statistical hypnosis). Unless the alleles are available to select, they can't be conjured into existence by a selection process.
Think of the Clydesdale, big enormous horses, How did we get to the Clydesdale? long ago, we started with horses the size of the Mongolian Ponies. In fact if you scour the living samples of all the Mongolian ponies, you will never find one the size of the Clydesdale. The Clydesdale was bred in many generations, each generation gets bigger. So I don't think that we know what is the upper limit to IQ just yet. The smartest guy walking today might be a drooling idiot compared to what we might create in the future.
Ugh! Last was candidate for worst sentence ever. Meaning: selection doesn't do genetic engineering (it simply tends to optimize from available material).
Better to think of it as stupidity culling -- the limits are more obvious.
the variance isnt going to decline that much in the second or third generations. 4th, 5th, you might be having more of an issue but it might only cut rate of progress in half or so. but quite soon you are talking about a ~150 society. further changes would be much slower, and not necessarily indefinite (certainly not on the basis of existing alleles alone), but the impact by that point would already be revolutionary. The issue is more whether you really can in fact get an ~60-80% prediction on the IQs of the ova.
"... but quite soon you are talking about a ~150 society." -- pulling Uebermensch out of the gene pool in three generations? That's got to be irresistible to somebody.
By the way you didn't state your aesthetic opinion on Han Hong.
Hideously marred by the lack of venomous face tentacles
You mean I'd have to deal with genius uppity know-it-all grandsons? Poor kids.
Apparently Cochran now thinks a good deal of IQ's variance may be determined by common, tradeoff alleles. I'm pretty sure their effect size is gonna be pretty limited, on the basis of empirical work so far. So there will be a bunch of them to wrangle. Doesn't really matter, though, as long as their effect size is big enough that you can spot em in the first place. Once they are identified, and found more or less clean of problematic epistasis (I think they generally will be), it hardly matters whether a computer has 0.02 or 0.0009 seconds of work to do in toting them up for a given embryo. As I have explored in the past, when it comes to rare alleles -- and it may! -- you are /potentially/ going to have insurmountable problems, as far as I know. I think rare alleles probably dominate, otherwise I think the mean sib-sib difference would be smaller. (This argument is not due to me, I heard it someplace.) Of course, IQ does not have formal scale or dimension to my knowledge ; it's just a rank ordering. We can formally or informally prove me much slower than Cochran or Szabo, but we cannot really measure by how much, strictly speaking. (We might conceivably quantitate roughly, by imaging the brain, the intactness-medianness of its myelin structure, etc -- but function interests us far more). So if the sib-sib difference is 8 points, I'm not sure that has much of a strict formal meaning -- yet in commonsense practice it is fairly meaningful and comprehensible. If you accept that it's a large difference, then you should accept by the law of large numbers that it is mostly controlled by rather few alleles of large effect. You should also accept the same about human looks, comeliness. The variance within sibships is obviously large compared to the total pop variance ; conclusion: something like a couple dozen large-effect alleles are doing most of the affectin'. Again see law of large numbers for the reason.
If China had not preemptively terminated its age of exploration -- burning their impressive fleet of merchant ships -- the Sassoon opium steam ships would have looked like kine pox compared to the small pox that would have been visited upon them.. This time around, they are in for the full force of a much more highly evolved pathogen and they have very little resistance. Indeed, with their high male to female ratio, the conditions are nearly perfect for producing the vestigial male syndrome in China which has been an important ingredient in the recent extremes of centralization of wealth in the West. Their only hope is that Chinese leadership is heavy on engineering and they may just be able to see some of this before their brains are turned to soup, as happened to the leadership in the West during the 20th century. Indeed, it may be that the opium trade indeed may have provided some limited cross-immunity to what is now in store for them. I am not familiar enough with contemporary Chinese culture to see how much a part of their culture memory of that era is. However, it almost certainly isn't enough. The problem is, as can already be seen in recent social dynamics in China, the high male to female ratio is resulting in “empowered women”—and the Chinese don’t have the cultural resources to deal with this unless they quickly do an about face and start preferentially aborting male fetuses. Moreover, they are increasing their interactions with both Jews and India to the point that I expect it won’t be long before the combination of “empowered women” and invasion of parasitic cultures will undo them.
I don't see China allowing foreigners to develop a society in its soil any time soon. Chinese politics have always been about control. That's why they burned those ships; lest Chinese got used to go abroad and escape the government. Later some Chinese did get to leave, and they all radically changed all societies in SEA for their convenience. Today, Chinese can leave again, and 420 billion dollars are leaving the country every year, while Chinese communities have developed in every country on earth. I'm sure someone in the government would like to burn those ships again. The Opium war is still pretty much part of the memory of the country. It's the beginning of the "century of humiliation" that great China suffered until the Commies saved the day. They haven't forgotten it. Also China used to have Jews. But they called them Muslims. Couldn't tell the difference about some tribe of merchants who refuse to eat pork. Thing is the sex ratio is a purely economical problem of countryside peasants who need a male to take over the farm and take care of the old people. People in the city don't select for males, in fact they are starting to select for females. Women today are strong, and girls are more affective towards their parents, so they might visit more often than boys (who are dominated by their wives in turn). I wouldn't read too much in the sex ratio, it's not that big of a deal. The explosion in homosexuals is, though. They're fucking everywhere. And it is my impression there are relatively more lesbians.
"The explosion in homosexuals is, though. They’re fucking everywhere. And it is my impression there are relatively more lesbians." That may turn out to be part of the point he was making - a parasite unknowingly carrying another even more virulent parasite.
If you talk to a lot of Chinese people it might be worth mentioning cochran's germ theory to them as it would be interesting to find out if he's right and no-one in the west is likely to research it?
I think the germ is likely metaphorical - I predict that gays cause gays via sexual imprinting.