Two days ago I I wrote about tribalism and said tribalism always loses to the Western association by affinity (no, this is not tribalism.) and allegiance to nation states. There was the usual skepticism in response because tribalism confers advantages if not punished, in an otherwise civilized society. Note the begs.
I didn’t have time to unpack it in that post which was already overlong and besides it was close to two am when I was writing it, so I shall unpack now.
The reason for that great demon of the left “Western Colonization” is… tribalism. No, not tribalism on the part of westerners. Tribalism on the part of the various barbaric civilizations subjugated by the west.
To explain: we’re usually given a picture of westerners descending on poor unarmed savages, sometimes sweet and peaceful ones (ah!) and just being evil and warlike and subjugating them that way.
To unpack both the myth of the noble savage and the myth of “there was no war before civilization” would take far longer than I have on this post, though I will allude to the second, because it’s still a favorite of (of course) leftist anthropologists. Also, painfully, horribly wrong.
The truth is that at the time the Europeans didn’t have a great advantage in weapons over the savages. Oh, they had muskets but seriously, those things had a tendency to misfire and weren’t particularly accurate. And in their homelands the tribal cultures had by far an advantage of numbers. If you read some of the early battles, you see how close it all was.
It wasn’t — technologically — civilized meaning poor innocent barbarian. No, it was humans at nearly the same technological method and the ones who won — consistently — did so due to the superiority of the software-in-head.
So, let’s get into this as fast as possible. The tribe in the sense of the tribalism I’m talking of is a natural consequence of us being Great Apes (yes, yes, I know. At best moderately good apes.) All great apes live in bands, though what the bands are like, how organized and who gets to get Jiggy with whom in the band varies greatly among the ape species.
The bands are an outgrowth of “family group” of course, and all bands are at least in theory and perception related. (Perception? Well, at least in chimps as in humans perception doesn’t always match what’s on the can, since at least some observers claimed chimps have an issue with female infidelity also known as “randy chimp chicks sneaking out to get jiggy with boys from the other band” in my totally scientific summary of the studies.)
For humans, the oldest, most isolated stuff we’ve found from the dawn of civilization does seem to bear (keep in mind there are very few remains actually found and even fewer that can be dna-tested) the idea of family groups sometimes very large family groups living together. And some of it is horrifying, though completely in keeping with “these things go on in ape bands” like the settlement where there was only one adult male, several adult females, several children. And some of the adult females were the daughters of the male, and some of the children were both his children and grandchildren in one.
Note my caveat about the paucity of finds. The fact is we don’t know if these were typical things or if we stumbled on the home of the Neolithic Jim Jones equivalent. (But we do know that sort of mating was considered sacred by several near east cultures, including the civilized (by living standards) Egyptians. So, you know, there is every possibility is is the enshrining as better and pure of an old and widespread practice as “the one true way to live, because our ancestors did so.” (And a good reason to at a minimum be skeptical of all such appeals.))
Sometime during the long road to civilization, probably during the hunter-gatherer period — least of all because if it had continued in tiny highly incestuous groups we’d each have more than three eyes and countless toes. Also possibly tentacles — the bands coalesced into tribes.
The way to do this usually was to claim or obtain kinship. Obtain? Well, when your band conquered the other band and killed their great inseminator and any boys likely to look like they’d like to inseminate someone, you then impregnated their women, creating real kinship. For another the boys kicked out of the band by the great inseminator obviously at some point formed a band of bachelors and swore brotherhood (or were all brothers, which is highly likely) and in the dark of night descended on another band, killed their great inseminator and divided his women between themselves. This also formed tribes of kinship. Which had a great advantage over the one-man-band (you knew I was going to make that joke!) because there were brothers to hunt with you. So more mammoths, more happily fed women and way more babies. The idea of the tribe/large kinship group/more loosely associated than the family was a survival enhancing innovation and would therefore grow.
Just so stories? Likely, and not the only route. OTOH we have lots of fossilized myths (in primitive wedding ceremonies, for one) of bands of young men kidnapping the bride(s). They are as recent as the legend of the founding of Rome.
Were there other ways to do it? Sure. The myths of the world give us hints of this other way. See all the tiresome infidelities of Zeus/Jupiter. You could claim that your god is the child of our god, and therefore you’re our cousins, and why don’t you join our hunt.
There is at least one theory of the spread of Indo European culture that leans heavily on “They told the BEST stories.” I leave it as a reader exercise why I adore this theory while being agnostic on its veracity or even plausibility.
At a more advanced level there was probably peaceful woman-exchanging. “We give you our daughters, you give us your daughters. We are now cousins.” Perhaps anticipating the blood kinship a little.
Now knowing our species, bloody in thought and deed, I would tend to assume barring the occasional miracle most of those exchanges took place after an endless war had made both bands so exhausted they were on the verge of extinction/disbanding or at least seriously hungry.
Which brings us to that war thing. It might be true (though it depends on the numbers and time period, since the neolithic covers an AWFUL long time) that primitives don’t war in ranks, with discipline, meeting the enemy on the battlefield. In fact, we know they mostly don’t both from legends as widespread as the Americas and Ireland.
It takes a relatively civilized state to field “soldiers” even if only temporarily and the places that first managed it for their places became very successful and fearsome. (Aztecs, anyone? Civilization is relative.)
But war? War was with us. What it was was what we’d call “raids”. We find the results of such massacres, mostly women and children killed in horrible ways. And we know them from the colonization of the Americas and Africa at a relative recent remove.
From reading the history of those, it seems clear that the reaction of a primitive tribal culture to another tribe intruding on their territory is to go all out and commit atrocities.
The atrocities are of such level that at one time it was wondered if Amerindians and various African tribes (notably the Zulus, themselves already a super-tribe and relatively civilized) were even human or had souls. This was not because as the sappy left thinks “they were darker and people were racist.” That’s bullshit. It was because they would descend on isolated family groups and small settlements, kill everything male, rape everything female (and take them away, though sometimes killing them if they resisted too hard), splatter blood and body parts all over in grotesque and horrible ways, sometimes mutilating the captives or killing the youngest and most helpless in the most horrific ways.
For the tribe this was perfectly licit. In every tribe it is understood “we’re humans, the others aren’t.” And they killed animals all the time, sometimes for fun. (Chimps do too.)
So, you know? That’s what they did. And they’d continue doing it until the other band was subjugated (their males all killed) or ran away.
Sometimes this went the other way. If your band of braves was intruding on a tribe’s territory and you wanted them to be subjugated or run away, you committed atrocities. LOTS.
The atrocity had to be very atrocious because the more bizarre outlandish and out there the attack was, the more likely the other tribe would withdraw rather than fight back.
How atrocious did things get? Well…. a modern day example would be the events in Israel on 10/7 when Palestinians, a willfully re-barbarized people partly due to living from grift from civilized people, which is a very tribal strategy of survival, unleashed their neolithic savage. This btw is the reason they thought they were doing great and glorious deeds and that it would lead to immediate victory. Because once you run howling back into the ancient beast in your brain, you fall back into its ways.
And the reaction of the world over the next week (yes, we’ve lost that since then, and more on it later because it’s the crux of our problem and why the solution is not “do a tribalism.”) was what the reaction of the civilized usually is.
And the reason tribal cultures always lose. Always. Not even a little.
It’s like this, at some point in the long march of civilization, codified by Rome, solidified by Judeo Christianity whose philosophical underpinnings say all children of Adam are humans, the idea of tribe faded. No, it didn’t go away. It’s a very old part of the human brain and the beast keeps rearing its head and being exploited by those who want power. But it receded.
Eventually normal, well brought up people in England, could — say — look at the picture of a Dutch, French or Spanish child and see… a child, not a prey animal. (Again see not always, but most of the time.)
The problem, then, that the barbarians did what they always did and killed an isolated group, and didn’t realize the news spread across the world (okay, the printing press helped) and they were suddenly called into question as humans, and people decided to stop them by all means necessary. And they had the advantage of fielding organized and well trained armies. (Though the Zulus and the Aztecs had that too, honestly.)
The routing of the tribal cultures was so complete that they were pretty much eliminated in their original form. Oh, yes, I do know the tribes technically exist. One of my friends is a tribal member. But they wear clothes, they use computers, they communicate partly (at least) in Western languages and they live Westernized lives.
The software in the head, though, is often still the old tribal beast. As is the software in the heads of a lot of the rebarbarized west.
For the west the tribalism crept back in with Marxism. And it’s hilarious because you can see its waves. It started with that angry ink-blot’s, Marx’s belief that “classes” were tribes. This was not only laughable, but World War I showed that nation-states (which succeeded and absorbed the concept of kingship. Again, not enough room to unpack here) trumped “classes.” And no, the “Class” thing was not going to unite workers across the world. So Marxism was reconnected to please the old beast more. Instead of classes, the groups Marxists (be they the international or national variety) decided to pit against each other were “races” (and also sexes.) Oh, they also tried professional associations and all, but not being a physical thing it didn’t hold as much.
The other one went straight into a kernel in the very old brain. The more cosmopolite and mixed populations (we all ARE. Compared to the neolithic.) didn’t recognize “family features” as accurately as the old savages, but they understood skin color, language, and “they done us wrong.”
To some extent this also failed spectacularly, to another it succeeded beyond all expectations.
Look, it didn’t succeed at creating solidarity within races. Partly because most races involved AREN’T and have nothing to do with genetics. As someone pointed out in comments here two days ago, there is more genetic variety in 100 square miles of Africa than anywhere else in the world. And, look you, the rest of the world is far from uniform when compared to a single family.
What it did succeed was in creating organized exploits using the mask of race to destroy the culture.
Mask of race? Sarah, what are you talking about?
Look, people, it’s not even the made-up races like “Latin” (Yes, they are. Yesterday I had the opportunity to read some comments loudly declaiming that Portuguese could be Latin, while Spaniards, Spaniards absolutely were. This can only be claimed by people who have never visited the Iberian peninsula or know its history, where often whether a village was Portuguese or Spanish was a matter of dispute, and where Portugal is such a narrow band between the sea and Spain it’s laughable to imagine those genes didn’t spread. (In fact since one of dad’s branches comes from that region, 23 and me assures me I have more Spanish blood than Portuguese. (Heresy.)) In the end this requires believing “race” hangs on the spelling of words. No matter how much idiots pronounce my middle name Marquez, it’s in fact Marques. (kssss not Kez) Which according to these idiots means I’m not Latin, but the cousins who spell it with z are. It makes a mockery of the concept of race. Which IS TBF right and just.) It’s also “black”. Oh, let’s not go into the fact that black, like white covers such a wide multitude as to be meaningless. It’s the fact — you won’t be upset right? — that most American blacks are whiter than most of my cousins — both in features and skin color — who would be shocked to hear themselves called anything but white. (Or if you prefer, find me at a con sometimes and get me to explain that any culture in which Megan Markle is considered “black” has its head so far up its ass about race that its opinions are invalid. Though, hey, my peeps, we DID consider the rest of the world of our insanity. Ain’t that glorious?)
HOWEVER they’ve managed to convince large groups of people that they are a race, and also that everyone discriminates against them because of race and also “capitalism” is responsible for this.
I’m not sure they managed to convince anyone they’re all the same race. Look, I have black friends both born here and not, and what they’ll say about each other and about other blacks… well!
But they have very successfully through the art education news media dissemination complex, as long as they controlled it, managed to convince the dominant culture that these were races/tribes and must be catered to.
To the point that nation states and cultural groups (Indians and Chinese are not races. They are however motivated cultures and nation states) are using this as an exploit and using nepotism and the West’s own stupidity to replace vast working parts of the society.
It has also worked to get sympathy to rebarbarized neolithic savages like the so called Palestinians, the dregs of the Arab world fed on hatred and a sense of grievance while subsisting on grift.
Both of these are a clear problem. But they are a problem because of Marxist propaganda and ersatz tribalism. I.e. the attempt to revive tribalism so they can rule over the warring tribes.
The fact that tribalism, even this kind of made up super-tribalism (uniting several tribes) is not compatible with a technological civilization (Hiring for any reason but competence will ALWAYS degrade competence till over time it is completely gone. And competence is needed in a complex civilization with sophisticated systems and tools.) doesn’t bother the Marxists. Not at all. Because they have a bizarre idea that once “capitalism” (Human trading ability. Literally one of our oldest abilities) collapses, paradise will emerge.
It should bother us. At least those of us who like eating, having a roof over our heads, not being massacred over some weird tribal disputed.
No. The solution is not more tribalism.
We are dying of tribalism.
Some utter idiot came in here to say that I was a “liberal” and wanted egalitarianism and said everyone is alike.
The levels of dumb in that comment would take one of those deep sea probes to plumb.
Not only am I not egalitarian but I don’t believe that people with the same rough skin color or the same rough features, or the same general geographic origin are interchangeable.
I’m not a tribalist. I’m not a barbarian.
And I’m only a liberal like the founding fathers were liberal. I believe in the individual rights of every human.
I believe while we should all be equal before the law — punished for the same crimes, afforded the same opportunity to TRY — we are not equal, nor will our results be equal. Not only will they not be equal among these made up broad racial groups, they won’t be equal within groups. Hell, they won’t be equal within families. (Though that has a higher chance, however, ferocious reader, think on your siblings and cousins, if you have any. Are you all the same? Even if the other is your identical twin!)
And I believe that civilization requires the best for each position. (Granted, yes, mine could be fulfilled by a monkey who can strike the keyboard semi-accurately. But think how many monkey hours it would take to recreate my posts. I have at least a slight edge there.)
The tribalism we’ve allowed — note allowed. As with toxic feminism, it was allowed by those who should not have given it leeway, no matter how much they were told they were guilty, no matter how scared they were of the barbarians — to flourish has given us COLLEGE graduates who can’t read fluently. It’s given us Engineers who don’t know math. It’s given us a vast population that can neither cypher nor think, and who takes its history from simplified or invented movies.
This can’t go on.
Trump has — give him credit — done more to cut back at this nonsense than any other president. (What you thought they hated him for being orange?) He’s done it by forbidding DEI (DIE) and by making it possible for governmental dependencies to hire by testing for competence. (Which means the rest of society will follow, in our wretched state of being dependent on the leviathan. This too shall pass.) This has both defanged the Universities that preach the new tribalism and destroyed the pay off of claiming tribes.
Yes, it will take time — Lord, give us a decade! Two! — but it means the poison is now coursing through the tribalist mindset, and it will die.
So the demand for a new tribalism with inverted colors is bullshit. Or, if you prefer, the last hope of those who have profited from tribalism: the demagogues, the statists, the tyrants.
I do believe we should fight back with all we have against tribablism, by testing everyone for competence and ensuring the competent get the job.
By the way this includes testing for nationalities and culture. Forget the neolithic nonsense of “We are tribe because we all have the same father.” Every nation state in the present day is the daughter of whores who roamed the dockside. Sure, it might only be the blonder (or darker) sailors that got in, but you probably have some sprinkles of the other, though you might not show it. (Even the tests can be odd.) The world has been too much linked by travel for almost a thousand years, and humans are randy as all get out.
Oh, the nations of Europe might need similarity in looks. They rest on that myth and it will take more than that to overcome it. At least looking somewhat like the people around you is a good idea.
But the US? if you think there is any unity of “race” in the US you’re out of your mind. Arguably there never was, simply because apparently any number of other European countries came over to colonize if not at the same time as the English, shortly after.
Now? Well, my mom when she visited said we gave her a headache because she couldn’t tell WHAT we were. And no, she wasn’t talking black and white. I know exactly what she was talking about because growing up in Europe and seeing tourists, I used to be able to tell the French from the English, the Germans from both and from the Dutch (and I can tell you, though it’s not the majority of his genetics, my husband looks wholly Irish. I can tell you because I remember that from when I first met him.) I can no longer do that. We are too mixed, and it’s weird to see several nationalities in the same family group even if there are no different “races”.
So going back to tribalism is stupid and just sets it up for further nonsense and division.
And besides, remember the really important thing: HIRING FOR ANY REASON BUT COMPETENCE DEGRADES COMPETENCE.
America is the leading innovator, the leading culture of the world by the simple method of letting individuals compete as individuals.
To the extent we’ve been losing our edge it’s because we’ve been genuflecting to the Marxist mask of race.
It’s time to throw Marxism in the ash heap of history.
No, I don’t think “all races” are the same. I think the divide is far finer than you think, though, and sometimes the results will surprise you.
Of course I don’t think IQ is a valid way to choose anything — immigrants, scientists, writers — either. Yes, before this is over I’ll probably have limped up to explain once again, but for now suffice it to say that while it measures competency for some positions we need, the idea we ONLY need high IQ people is …. so early and stupid science fiction it makes my head hurt. Also the product of people who haven’t lived surrounded by geniuses. Trust me on this there are tasks — and not only menial ones — for which high IQ is a detriment. And those tasks often include “anything beyond a very narrow band where specialization and passion coexist for those with nose-bleed-level IQ.
What I have to say this: who should be an American? Those who are prepared to be Americans. We are such a (thanks mom) “miscigenated people” that practically any skin color or combination of features can pass — though some are outre enough to raise eyebrows — BUT we can still tell our own.
The most essential thing for any immigrants — besides coming in legally, which is needed because Americans get to choose, damn it! — is the golden rule: Fit in or Fuck off. And yes, that includes teaching your kids to be fluent in English and that America is the best country on Earth. Because if you teach them to pine for the old homeland, they should go back there.
For anyone else, anyone who doesn’t want to fit in, conform to our Constitution, our laws, wave the flag and be proud to bursting of being American? The door is that way. We don’t care where you go, but you can’t stay here.
And for positions? For positions, we should hire and fire in the most American of all ways: by competence, tested if needed.
So, Sarah, how would you like it if that means that some professions end up being all the same color or rough origin-group?
I don’t care, so long as it’s not assumed no one else gets a look in. AND SO LONG AS OTHER PEOPLE GET TO APPLY AND BE TESTED FOR IT. Some day I’ll tell you why I think chemists and microscope jockeys will end up being mostly of German ancestry, at least in part. (It harks back to a specific experience. And it’s funny.) And I don’t care. So long as the brilliant chemist whose ancestors all come from Papua New Guinea (as long as he speaks fluent English and tries to fit in with the habits of his colleagues, at least in public) gets consideration and a look in. And so long as any manager trying to hire only his cousins is defenestrated, at least metaphorically. (Some cousin-hiring happens in every human society. Can’t stop all of it. Can make sure it’s not all of it, though.)
No, I don’t expect “racial” (mostly made up) groups to be equally represented in exact proportion. Hell, I don’t expect real genetic groups to be exactly equally represented. There are affinities and some seem to be genetic and pass on even in people that have very little of the genetics, on paper.
I do expect people to be hired for competence.
We are the best nation in the world. We are the best culture bestriding civilization.
We need to throw off the Marxist virus, refuse counterfeits and accept only the best of the best. Whatever that is for the position in question.
In hiring, in advancement, in education, competence should matter. Nothing else, except ethics.
That’s it.
According To Hoyt 
IMO there’s a strong connection between “race” and “tribe”.
Tribe meant “those like us” and the other tribes were “not like us” (with the strong connotation of “not real people”).
Race (if it has any real meaning) is “those like us” and other races were “not like us”.
Races often didn’t have a thing to do with Skin Color.
In older works of literature, you can find things like the “English Race”, the “French Race”, etc.
Oh, elsewhere I’ve seen people talking about Cleopatra being “African-American” which is crazy. As the Americas hadn’t been discovered when she was alive. Of course, most of her ancestors were “Greek” not “Black African”.
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Yep. I was poopooing race as we use it, which is nuts.
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I view it as one of the original corruptions of language by the proto-woke. Race was, more or less, equivalent to culture. That corruption of language is bloody insidious. When you realize what’s been mangled, the WTF?! that hits you is rather a shock, and often it’s out of the blue you recognize something that’s been in your thoughts, but it’s not you that put it there, so to speak.
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Yep.
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I figured out pretty early on that when people express racist opinions (“Those X are lazy” and so on), they’re almost always complaining about culture, and they just have culture conflated with race in their minds. But I’ve had the hardest time getting anyone to believe me. Thank you for also understanding that distinction.
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Yep. I’m also the one that’s been saying “race does not exist.” We are of the human race. Phenotypical distinctions exist within homo sapiens sapiens, but they are entirely too individualistic and idiosyncratic to be qualified as distinct categories themselves. Especially not when a word like “culture” encapsulates the idea most effectively.
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The evolutionary biologist Steven Jay Gould wrote an essay once where he pointed out the fact that racism is stupid because “race” is a stupid concept. As others here have pointed out, we’re all Homo sapiens sapiens, and that’s that, small differences like visible and invisible morphologies aside. He reminds us that not all precursor species are always driven to extinction, and that humanity would have a REAL moral quandary to deal with if one of our precursors had survived somewhere. They would be like us but not “us”. Ever. What to do? Preserves? Zoos?
THAT would be a “race” problem. The crap from the last couple of centuries? AS others have said – that’s culture. And I am 100% a “culturalist”.
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Part of my current book is an unabsorbable culture, because of serious (bioengineered) biological differences. SO…. Even I don’t know how it plays up going forward.
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Been there, done that — the Neanderthals and Denisovans — and that’s not how our prehistoric ancestors reacted. Today, most Europeans are part Neanderthal, and most Asians are part Denisovan.
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Somebody wrote a few stories for Analog a while back where the natives in America were not the Indians that Columbus et al found, but some far more primitive hominid that wasn’t able to master speech, but only sign language. They were kept as slaves, doing only the most basic manual labor.
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That sounds like it would either be interesting as a setting, or an abject slog as one goes through the rather painful assumptions from the author.
(Like, X-Men is good when it uses the “feared and hated” as a background setting. It destroys suspension of disbelief when folks fixate on “mutant” not “this specific guy is a walking nuke that isn’t completely understood or controlled.”)
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They were by Harry Turtledove and were collected in a book titled “A Different Flesh”.
Minor note, the primitive hominid was Homo erectus,
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…Palestinians, the dregs of the Arab world fed on hatred and a sense of grievance while subsisting on grift.
OK, that just made my Quote List. Best summary I’ve seen.
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IK,R?!
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I have a book in my collection about murders in prehistory in Central Europe (mostly central). People have been offing their neighbors, doing what today we’d call honor killings, and generally being unkind to “those strangers over there” going back to the Paleolithic. And these are all of the same “race.” The left-wing anthropologists try to ignore it, the European anthropologists are fine with it.
Now, American Indians in the Southwest are all touchy and twitchy about mentioning the evidence for anthropophagy, warfare, general nastiness to their fellow regional residents, and so on. On, and too, now, some tribal groups are trying to say that Christians are not real tribal members. Speculation about how much of this started with internal tribal politics, and how much is the influence of “well meaning” DEI types encouraging the preservation of tribal identity, I leave to the reader.
(The Hopi have a history of opposing anything that upsets the balance of their universe, I suspect in part because of the very thin margin for survival in their core area. It’s too dangerous to allow deviations from the rule, because doing so might endanger the rest of the group, even if it is not currently endangering the group.)
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Related: I recently discovered that there is a scientific discipline called “culinary anthropology,” and it is about how your ancestry affects how your body deals with food. One example given was the Navajo/Diné folk have some of the worst obesity rates in the world per capita, because their history was adapting to a mere four months of easily-obtainable food, and then eight months of scarcity. Of course, those folk were basically living in the same areas as the Hopi, so past scarcity is reflected in present physiognomy.
(A side note to the side note: the “Mediterranean Diet” is only going to work if you have Mediterranean ancestry. Sorry, Germanic peoples, you’re evolved to deal with famine.)
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I see both the inter-tribal disaffection and the tendency to go obese in our local tribes. For reasons I don’t want to research, the S. Central Oregon tribes (Klamath, Modoc, and Yahooskin) were lumped together in the reservation.. My understanding is that the Modocs were slavers, and their slaves tended to be Klamath.
Apparently, the Klamath ended up being more politically “in” than the Modoc (the Yahooskin seem to be bystanders in much of this drama; they’re related to the Snake tribes in NE Oregon/W Idaho), and this friction caused the Modoc to leave the reservation in the early 1870s (see Modoc War). The friction still continues, though (usually) not at the level of inter-tribal bloodshed. Certain families have well deserved (poor) reputations, though; in my short stint as fire/EMS, I had occasion to deal with two of them. Whee. OTOH, there are some very wealthy, respected tribal ranchers in the area.
Re obesity: According to the local museum, the diet consisted of a local sucker fish (I’ve had very mixed reports on the taste–ranging from “It’s good” to “My cats won’t touch it”) and acorns. (Oaks seem to grow on the west side of the Cascades, so that would have been an issue getting them over here.) With a western diet, I note that a non-trivial number of the morbidly obese seem to be Native American, so yeah, bodies adapted for famine getting lots of calories, not going to be slim…
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I have read reports in smaller tribes of larger-scale disenrollments due to gaming revenue; e.g. fewer members = greater share per remaining member.
And clans within a tribe can be a big factor. The region I used to work in included the Navajo nation, and my observation was that after a presidential and council election different families from different clans were issued the tribal vehicles and subsidiary positions, depending on the winner. And rules & laws may have been interpreted differently based on clan.
The Hopi have been there for about 1,000 years in a land where the climate and neighbors have more often than not been a bit hostile. Yes, they can be friendly, but also very particular about what they allow within their boundaries.
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This is definitely something that is happening. Know of a family, kid was class behind our son’s, so early sports and some cub scouts, etc., who were “dis-enrolled out of 4 tribes. Grandparents are 1/4 of the 4 different tribes, making parents 1/8, and the kids 1/16. They can trace the linage back. Doesn’t matter. They are out. Not helped FWIW that the two current living generations can pass for Irish or Scottish, down to the red hair and tendency to burn, the other part of the genetic inheritance. Kid now represents the tribe of “Natives but multiple tribes” here in Oregon. (Or did. Haven’t seen him or his parents around much.)
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High IQ may have been needed to come up with the idea and design of the nuclear bomb.
Average IQ is what built the components and succeeded in delivering it.
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Case in point I hit recently: There’s a photo of the final prep for Fat Man at North Field on Tinian – a guy is spraying black tarry goop onto the seams of the casing to seal the outer shell from humidity. He’s standard issue GI, late war, dressed in shorts and presumably combat boots and that’s it due to August 1945 tropical heat. (Heh, no respirator, pre-OSHA).
This guy might have been specially selected and exhaustively background checked and sooper-dooper-TS-ultra cleared, but he needs neither high IQ nor a PhD to spray black goop onto that bomb. And yet he was critical to the bomb being certain to work after going from tropical humidity at sea level to twenty thousand feet for a couple hours.
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IQ has nothing to do with diligence. Conscientiousness is a very valuable trait that is orthagonal to IQ.
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I recall two guys I knew in college who were brighter than I was, but both flunked out. ADHD might have been a factor for one of them, but lack of attention was key.
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ADHD seems to be highly correlated to very high IQ. To the point I wonder if it’s just “teaching not adapted to that IQ”
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Our class valedictorian, 4.0 GPA, max SATS, etc., flunked out of state college his sophomore year. ADHD? IDK Party? Definitely a factor. Last I heard he had 3 PHd’s and counting so didn’t stay “flunked out”. There was discipline involved. Stationed for awhile at the pentagon, high officer rank (don’t remember), but not one in the news. Given the entire class is 68+, pretty sure he is retired.
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Could have been pot, too, I have seen that deterioration in a brilliant mind. Different way to deal with boredom probably.
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Not to dispute your comment, but it is rather ironic that you misspelled orthogonal.
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If you’re not making tyops, you aren’t trying!
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You do know most people with IQ between 165 and above typo like mad, right? (Actually IQ and typoing have nothing to do with each other, so your comment is rather ironic not the way you meant it.)
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I had a coworker/friend who was MENSA. She was so smart she honest to god thought in quadraphonic. A couple of problems with her IQ, she was extremely arrogant.
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Mensa isn’t that high…. Eh.
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It’s the problem with not having a word come up regularly. Interestingly enough, no red line came up under it, but I’ll get it for properly spelled words that are also unusual, so I’m guessing spell-check has been infested with LLM nonsense as per usual.
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And yes, the Fat Man atomic bomb was yellow. Little Boy was olive drab Army green.
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Apparently that one is colorized, but here’s one in original WWII color – caption is “US Navy electrician’s mate spraying ‘Fat Man’ bomb with plastic paint in front of Assembly Building Number 2, Tinian, Mariana Islands, Aug 1945” with the term “plastic paint” here meaning “flexible paint” – other sources say it was liquid asphalt, with. The orange-red under it a primer:
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I did wonder about the color. Looked too close to what a modern camera would produce. That explains it.
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The main thing that was bugging me was the first picture was too fine grained. Early color film was coarse grained because it had to in effect expose three times the film emulsion with the same amount of light exposure for practical non-studio-lighting use, so each layer had to be three times as fast. Fast film is coarser grained film, so color use in the field meant coarser visible grain, as can be seen in the real 1945 color photo.
The other thing is how black & white film handles colors, specifically reds. That orange-red primer seen in the color image is actually already painted on the Fat Man casing in that first colorized image, but it barely shows up as very light variation from the casing base color of yellow, and so it was not picked up by the colorizing AI tool. The original film basically images reds as light grey.
All of this film chemistry arcana will be lost when the last person who actually printed and developed photos in a darkroom eventually goes.
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Agreed; the first one had to have been colorized from a decent B&W picture. I’ve seen references to “WW 2 in color”, but it would not have been common. Kodachrome was invented in 1935, but you needed a sophisticated lab to develop it, so anything would have have to have been shipped back to the States. Not likely.
Ektachrome hit the market just after the war, and amateur development was possible by 1950, says Wiki. I did a bit in the 1970s in E4 and E6 processes, plus a couple rolls of something that needed E-3 and bright light to do the color reversal (I think Fujifilm). Digitizing those slides needed some serious color correction. Dad’s Kodachrome stuff, not so much, but the 1961 Ektachrome, lots.
Not sure who made color cinema film, but that could have been used for the color photo. AFAIK, you can use cinema film in a 35mm camera.
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Here’s the black & white original of that first colorized photo:
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From https://ww2db.com/photo.php?list=sp&sp=series&image_id=21089
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I was going to question how much radiation those guys would pick up, but apparently not that much. U235 is an alpha emitter, meaning a sheet of paper should be enough to stop high energy helium nuclei. That steel shell, plus whatever neutron reflectors, explosives, and Styrofoam tamper/packing is in it, should be stopping just about everything. I wonder if they had it in the sun to raise the temperature to help push some of the humid air out while they sealed it?
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Fat Man was the Plutonium implosion bomb. Little Boy used Uranium in a gun-type setup.
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I hit up the Wiki article on Fat Man, and it actually uses a lot of uranium. Not U-235, but (apparently) either as-refined or depleted. It was located just outside the plutonium core as a tamper (inertial backstop). Wiki says the core was about 3.6″ in diameter, with the hollow sphere of uranium around 8.75″. Also, according to Wiki, once the neutrons got going, the uranium was willing to fission, giving about 30% of the total bang.
Wiki’s description is consistent with Richard Rhodes’, though he had considerably less detail on the makeup. I’m pretty sure the Wiki article is not bollocks…
I was surprised about the uranium–hadn’t seen that bit before, but it makes sense. Heavy/dense metal, and fissionable. Should have been a lot of depleted uranium available from the separation facilities.
For those sufficiently interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_Man
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Styrofoam was invented in 1941 by BASF, a German firm, so I’m thinking they used excelsior or something else for styrofoam type applications at this time, in this place. The GIs might have had Coca Colas to drink, but no Fanta!
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Being a “genius” might help, but being THERE is the critical thing.
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“Sometime during the long road to civilization, probably during the hunter-gatherer period — least of all because if it had continued in tiny highly incestuous groups we’d each have more than three eyes and countless toes. Also possibly tentacles — the bands coalesced into tribes.”
(anthropology hat on)
Early modern humans: drift, founder effect, and genetic bottlenecking. Actually, let’s zip back a bit farther. Homo Erectus circa 900,000 to 800,000 years ago. This would be somewhere around the latter part of the Pleistocene era. Lots of glaciers around. Shifting coastlines, water locked up in ice sheets, and those bloody glaciers going and wrecking all sorts of sites that had evidence of our proto-human ancestors (darned glaciers, always messing up the real estate).
Genus homo is absolutely ridiculously inbred as f#ck. No question. This is a cultural taboo that all freaking cultures share, with very few notable (and exceedingly small in total population) exceptions. Because that’s how you get three eyed seventeen toed babies. If they even live past a week, which is doubtful. This is because we are descended from a very freaking TINY population of individuals. Not even five digits. Less than 10k. Closer to 3k. Or even 1k.
Some disaster happened (helooo glaciation!) and we were left with this tiny band of survivors. All of us are descended from those proto-humans. ALL of us.
A very little bit of genetic variability can be attributed to mutation. Yes, that kind of mutation. Changes to the human genome. Changes that happened to be repeated in subsequent generations (mutants made babies that lived and had more babies when they grew up).
I do question if there might- might be something to the theory that those tribes of one dude all his female friends with benefits (including the daughters) might be a holdover from previous hominid band traditions that worked- for them. Incest is less of a problem with greater genetic variability- much less likelihood of the stillborn three eyed, seventeen toed infant. Nearly zero, in fact, with sufficient variability.
(anthropology hat off, because that freaking thing pinches)
“There is at least one theory of the spread of Indo European culture that leans heavily on “They told the BEST stories.” I leave it as a reader exercise why I adore this theory while being agnostic on its veracity or even plausibility.”
I’ve been saying that, in some form or fashion, for nearly thirty years. No records exist to support this hypothesis (though it’d be freaking amazing if there was), but cribbing from a bit of psychology, some theology, and bits and bobs of history I pronounce it “pretty danged likely.” Plus, it’s a fun idea.
“Yes, it will take time — Lord, give us a decade! Two! — but it means the poison is now coursing through the tribalist mindset, and it will die.”
Kill it with fire! Filthy freaking tribals are the bane of civilized man. Everywhere. Civilization uber alles.
“No, I don’t think “all races” are the same. I think the divide is far finer than you think, though, and sometimes the results will surprise you.”
“White trash” is the same, regardless of culture. And it ain’t always white. I’m beginning to think it’s one of the human universals. A stinky, lazy, low-cunning but dumb as a box of rocks human universal. There’s always that one dumb, lazy sonofastitch.
“The most essential thing for any immigrants — besides coming in legally, which is needed because Americans get to choose, damn it! — is the golden rule: Fit in or Fuck off. “
Counts for subcultures, too. Show up at a new place to work- and fit in or fuck off. Change states, towns, coastlines? Same. We’re not as bloodyminded about it as other cultures. But it sure as anything, it helps.
“He’s done it by forbidding DEI (DIE) and by making it possible for governmental dependencies to hire by testing for competence.”
D.E.I. must DIE. There is no stepping back on the path. End it. Return primacy to the individual. Judge not on phenotype, but on work ethic and character. Show up (on time and not a minute later- earlier if you can), do the dang job (to the best of your ability, and seek to grow it over time), respect your customers/fellow employees/bosses/subordinates. May the Marxist mind infestation be relegated to the category of history now set aside for “stuff we won’t ever do again, because it’s dumb and awful with no conceivable benefit.”
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All of this. No disagreements.
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Go to Regency-era literature and you’ll find a lot of cousin marriages among the upper class. While that was a means of controlling money, it wasn’t great over the long term (*cough* Habsburgs *cough*). It fell out of favor, especially once the concept that “hemophilia can run rampant through your family line when you’re all related” came out in regards to royalty.
They have determined that (especially in the US) there is a lot more variation, and marrying your first cousin *might* be okay. But most folk rightly look a bit askance at it, now that it’s common to know how recessive genes work.
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Even now there’s enough variability that anything up to “oh, no, that’s just too close” might be okay.
If we’re talking prehistory when a huge infant mortality rate was normal, the effect on infant viability of excessive consanguinity was likely in the same neighborhood as variations in food availability and variety for the mom during pregnancy, or parasite load, or whatever.
The rate of “might not” eventually emerged as the other stuff got better after beer created civilization, such that the practitioners of those particular traditions stood out from those who did not, and taboos were created to discourage those practices.
But when talking prehistory, one has to remember just how incredibly sparse hominids were on the ground for most of the time they were hunting and gathering across this rock. For a lot of those million or so years having non-relative neighbors would probably have been fairly unlikely.
I can imagine any hunter-gatherer band chance encounters that did not immediately escalate to open combat likely resulted in trading off handy offspring as well as cool rocks and shells, and those that traded kids off would have had more babies survive.
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I remember a story by Larry Niven (collected in N-Space maybe?) where humans were deliberately “managed” by some power in that small groups were scattered forcing inbreeding to fix any advantageous traits and cull bad ones then as these small groups would grow and migrate, they’d meet each other and interbreed to take advantage of hybrid vigor. Finale of the story was that since the characters talking about this, since they figured out the plan, got split off as another round of that development (found themselves alone in a wilderness to survive and prosper…or not…as their abilities would allow).
You can make of it what you will, but I thought it was an interesting story anyway.
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“What do You Do with Chocolate Covered Manhole Covers?”
Two couples at a party talking to a guy always throwing out strange ideas. He starts talking about creation myths, and suggests they were breeding programs. Turns out he’s a servant of the breeders, and they have just self-selected (by following and understanding his argument) to start the next round of the program.
The story ends with one of the women telling the others they need to protect the chocolate covered manhole cover which is the only item that came with them, because it’s the only thing they know they can eat.
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I had a friend who had relatives in that FLDS group, and she told me of a horror story that some of her cousins had to endure. In short, there’s a recessive disease that causes uncontrolled bone spur growth, and there was enough inbreeding in their family line that it was no longer recessive. I believe she said that one cousin had left the group and was working as a genetic counselor, planning to never have kids of her own.
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It fell out of favor, especially once the concept that “hemophilia can run rampant through your family line when you’re all related” came out in regards to royalty.
Hemophilia isn’t really a disease where in-breeding matters all that much. The fact that it’s sex-linked and that (virtually) all of the males with the gene have the disease means that you can’t have two recessive carriers come together unknowingly. And a woman who’s a carrier isn’t taking any more of a risk with a male cousin than she would be with any other man.
What caused the hemophilia issue was really the insistence of many royal families that they could only marry into other royal families. And that the Queen who had produced the largest supply of marriageable princesses was herself a carrier of the bad gene.
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?
I thought you were going to post on the Reptile of Russia.
….
But yours was good, thanks.
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Well, someone had to say it.
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Sevin bides for sevin bothers?
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It were truer to saythere was nothibg but war before civilization. All civilization did was provide better tools.
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“Shooters wear yellow”. A Navy carrier has distinctions based not on skin color, but on shirt color (and function). Yellow = aircraft handling, launch. Blue = plane handlers. Green = maintenance. Red = Ordinance, fire. Purple = fuel (a grape ape). Brown = maintenance. White = medical, safety. Knowing your tribe at a glance.
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Skittles.
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Yoo-Tuber KeroNgb is still asking college students exceedingly simple questions, which they are unable to answer:
I knew the correct answers to all of those questions in 4th grade, except the last one. My answer to that is “There was no 46th president.” Due to massive election fraud the White House was occupied by a shambling moronic zombie that barely knew what day it was, while the country was run by a cabal of ‘aides’ and bureaucrats squabbling over the auto-pen machine.
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Last time this came up, I wondered how many people he had to ask those questions before he got one who looked appropriately stumped on-camera. E.g., how cherry-picked is the video you see?
Also, how many of those unable to answer were people who were busy thinking about something else at the time and unable to switch mental gears? I know when I was talking a philosophy class, if I had my head full of Kierkegaard (who is one of the most difficult philosophers to understand, and I only rate him as “one of” the most difficult because idiots like Jacques Derrida exist(ed)), I would have had trouble switching mental gears to do basic math, even though I knew the answer. It’s entirely possible that some of the people in KeroNgb’s videos (which I haven’t yet watched) were people on their way to a philosophy class, who just aren’t good at handling ambush questions that require switching mental gears when their head is full of trying to understand Kierkegaard or similar difficult stuff.
I’m sure he also found some people who were genuine ignoramuses, of course; I’m not denying that such people exist. But I do question how many of them there are.
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Too many stories of cashiers being given $5.25, for a $4.25 charge, and not understanding that the customer wanted a $1 bill back. Worse, manager comes over and states “we can’t do that”. Rolls eyes. I have a whole list of “They exist.” But I’d have to type it in. FYI, not always the “young calculator/computer” crowd either.
Don’t get me wrong, I can be tired enough myself (and old, yep blaming it on being old) to make stupid mistakes, but not the ones listed.
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That has to be from before the era of cash registers that do the math for you, because the cashiers I encountered were the ones who would just unthinkingly punch in whatever amount you’d given them and then hand you the change the machine said to give. Which was fine most of the time, but I learned that if I was trying to give them $10.06 for a $9.81 purchase I’d better dig out the nickel and penny first and hand it over, and only then give them the $10 bill, otherwise they’d take the $10, punch in $10.00 into the register, start handing me nineteen cents, and look blankly at the six cents I was trying to give them with a “What do I do with this?” look on their faces. Mostly younger women.
OTOH, older Hispanic women? Would invariably, in my experience, be able to do the change math in their heads, not even looking at what the register said. They would be pulling out the nineteen cents, see the six cents I was handing them, and switch to pulling out a quarter instead.
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When I started my summer job at MacDonalds in 1969, the manager did a 30 second explanation of the “add change” and how to deal with it. Most of the crew, and everybody who was on the registers was 16-18, and was expected to know how to do it. Might have taken a little longer for some people, but it wasn’t hard.
Yeah, the problems started creeping up with the introduction of the “change back” registers. I’ve not seen the cashier’s side of the DQ registers, but judging by the problems new employees have with it, the human factors people were on a long-extended vacation when the layout was rolled out. Figuring the change addon is/would-have-been a bridge too far.
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I suspect the latter. Not notice the additional change, then unable to adapt.
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On a recent trip, I had to buy something inside a Circle K. The cashier did not handle money at all; the machine took money inserted and dispensed the change itself.
I had to wonder how many robberies prompted that invention.
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Or embezzlements.
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:points at this:
The exact-change-out registers came into use because of “mistakes”. Which can be hard to prove, so you make it so the machine knows *exactly* how many pennies it has, exactly what cash you’re given, and will tell you exactly what coins to give back.
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I have had to tell them to punch it in. Once, the manager had to back me up.
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The vast majority of my cash transactions are now at fast food places (usually DQ; MacDs pretty seldom) and at the garbage/trash transfer station. DQ usually has young people at the registers, and maybe 75-90% of the people have problems with the “add some change”. The guy at the transfer station is really helpful, but is seriously math-impaired.
When I could still eat at the taqueria, it was seldom a problem with change. (Recipe change, putting my body in repel boarders mode. Once was too much.)
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Doing modern cash register work puts your head into salesperson territory, not math. It gets hard to shift over in one’s head, and it potentially screws up the till if it is electronic.
Also there is a scam that starts with adding money to get different change, so unless it is a regular giving the change, you always have to wonder where this is going.
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I’m a regular at DQ, though I’ll only offer change if that pocket is starting to act as ballast. Used to collect change, but that was years ago when I’d have daily opportunities or more to pay cash. Now it’s once a week, so it takes a while to get a surplus.
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Assuming anyone manages to fail the IQ test of “speaking to a youtuber for his channel,” it’s unlikely that a successful salesman would also fail his IQ check and actually post people saying something that didn’t support his desired goal.
They also consistently ignore things like the Chocolate Milk Comes From Brown Cows survey.
The population most likely to say “yes” was dairy farmers. Because you were wasting their time with deliberately stupid questions, so no, they’re not going to give you more courtesy than you’ve displayed to them.
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We need more civilization.
Real civilization. Not the thing that the Woke and their acolytes call “civilization” (which is yet again another variation on feudal oligarchy).
We need something like…oh, the 1990’s, when there was just enough common culture that we could all kind of agree that there was at least one or two good shows on Network TV prime time. That you had to go out and look for the “alternative” cultures, for arthouse “films” that made you depressed and sad and might have even been confusingly titillating in the whole process, for the weird and unique.
And not have it shoved in your face on a regular basis.
What we have right now is the efforts of our new “lords and masters” to atomize us into mutually loathing tribes/extended clans that they can either support or use as scapegoats when it’s time to blame someone for why things have gone wrong (and it’s usually our new overlord’s fault).
I know we can get back to sanity. The process is going to be painful…and we might lose things like the UK and maybe Canada in the process.
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no. By the 1990s they controlled ALL the culture. The corruption had started. It just wasn’t so far. Sorry.
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I’d argue that the shift we were seeing was from the previous generation that was “yes, we’re going to cram in our ideological positions in like marshmallow fluffy in a DingDong, but if we don’t make any money, we’re screwed! So some subtly and aiming for a general audience, please!” to “the idiots will buy our wallpaper paste as long as we have the right combination of explosions, CGI spectacle, and (racially harmonious) tits, so who cares if they hate the politics? It’s NOT MADE FOR THEM!” generation.
…and man, did the next generation hate the fact that the people they were supposed to bury were still liked and were still the go-to people for stories. You have to wonder how many of them (Joss Whedon, Warren Ellis, etc, etc, etc) had their skeletons dug out of the closet because nothing the new people did got any traction at all.
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Here in America your ancestry is not who you are, but it can provide a bit of entertainment. I just got the results of a My Heritage DNA test yesterday. If I were forced to pick a tribal identity other than American (which is not tribal), my next choice would be Minnesotan (which is also not really tribal). I guess someone who wanted to re-tribalize society would probably assign me to the tribe White (which is too large a group to be really tribal). I have to default back to non-tribal American or Usaian.
As for the test results, My Father was from a recently immigrated Swedish farming/logging/mining family. My mother was from a not so recently immigrated mostly German farm family, partly from East Prussia, partly from German or Swiss Mennonite stock by way of Pennsylvania Dutch country, Ohio, Indiana, and Iowa. I expected about half Swedish, the rest vaguely German with other parts of northern Europe thrown in for good measure. The only surprise was the more than expected 58% Swedish plus 17% Norwegian for a total of 75% Scandinavian. The remaining 25% split between Germanic, East European, French, Dutch, Baltic, North Italian, English, Scottish, and Welsh.
None of those places could even be called my home country, much less a tribal homeland. Between individual and population mobility, Armies moving all over Europe for the past several centuries, and the further genetic chaos of settling in America, there is no place and no culture to go “back” to. There is no real choice but to stick around here in non-tribal America until some future generation decides to emigrate to Mars or to the Stars.
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My father’s parents were apparently born in the US, but when we did a DNA test, it estimated that the time they immigrated was around the time of my father’s birth, because they were born in an ethnic enclave.
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Dan pinged with a full blood German grandparent. He didn’t have that. He had an Amish ancestor who was ancestor to both maternal grandparents. So….
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The two most important regions that got thumped by the Western powers during the Colonial Era were India, and China. I haven’t read much about Indian history, but from what I understand India was in yet another warring states phase when multiple western countries arrived. The European powers took advantage of the situation while also squabbling amongst themselves, with the British coming out on top and chasing the other Europeans out of the region.
China, on the other hand, was united, and was widely believed to be a powerful country right up until the First Opium War.
In 1794, the White Lotus Rebellion erupted in China. An effective minister was put in charge of strengthening the army to put down the rebellion, and making sure that equipment was up to date. As was usual in Dynastic China, he put members of his clan into positions of power and influence related to his new role. Even after the rebellion had been put down, these clan members continued on in their positions, using those positions to siphon ever greater amounts of money out of the government and into their own pockets. Eventually the costs became unsustainable, the clan members were removed from power and the clan was severely punished (I don’t remember the exact punishment, but wiping out the entire clan would not have been unheard of). The flip side of this clean-up was that the government found itself unable to keep its military equipment up to date due to the aftermath of all of the embezzling. But no big deal, because who could threaten China?
The First Opium War erupted in 1839, and lasted three years. The affair was a huge embarrassment to the British, who recognized that they were in the moral wrong. But the amount of opium that had been destroyed was a massive amount of money, and the British trading companies needed restitution…
For the Chinese, conversely, it was an utter and complete disaster in the military sense. British warships gave the British utter and complete control of the entire coast, and any settlements within range of the navy’s guns could not be held. The Chinese had warships for anti-piracy. But they didn’t have the guns that the British ships did. And to make matters even more one-sided, a British ironclad arrived before the war ended. IIRC, there was exactly one recorded Chinese victory during the entire war, and it was accomplished by peasants and not the Imperial Army.
As a result, China’s paper tiger status was put on display for the entire world to see, and the “Century of Humiliation” began.
Even after the end of the First Opium War, Chinese troops continued to perform exceptionally poorly. As an example, during the Taiping Rebellion (which was started by a Chinese man who had become acquainted with Christianity, and proclaimed himself Jesus’s brother), Chinese merchants in Shanghai ended up hiring an American to form a mercenary unit made up of Westerners. The unit actually performed quite well against its Taiping opponents, with the only real problem being that the Imperial Army consistently failed to properly support it on the battlefield.
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I was thinking WAY before that. Africa and the Americas.
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And yet the original comparison isn’t all that off for the two big Asian countries, imo. The Indians vastly outnumbered the Europeans in India, particularly after the non-British powers were forced out. And yet the British were able to exercise effective control over the place, even with the occasional revolt. It wasn’t exclusively due to the power of British rifles. Some of the rebellions involved British-equipped local auxiliaries, iirc. It had to be head software.
It’s the same with China. My understanding is that at the time of the White Lotus Rebellion, China was roughly equivalent to the Europeans as far as land-based military technology was concerned. But the nepotism and corruption that resulted from the suppression of the rebellion put Chinese military technology into effective stasis for forty years, at a time when the Europeans were rapidly improving due to the evolutionary effect on military tactics and technology due to the Napoleonic Wars. Prior to the First Opium War, the Chinese could have bought the latest European guns in theory. But the clan corruption – part and parcel of Dynastic Chinese culture – and its aftermath meant there was no money to spend.
And it’s worth noting that this never improved. The post-Opium War naval problems weren’t entirely China’s fault (China knew that the Europeans could build better ships, and ordered a pair of modern battleships from the Germans; but knowing they were about to go into battle against the Chinese navy, the French convinced the Germans to delay finishing the ships until *after* the French had wrecked the Chinese navy). But they bought sufficient guns and factories that they should have been able to compete on land. Despite that I’m only aware of one land battle that the Chinese Imperial Army won (ironically, it was one of the few battles in Imperial China that US troops participated in). And as I noted, during the Taiping Rebellion, a small motley collection of Western mercenaries did better than the Imperial Army against the rebels.
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are Israelis forced toward tribalism?
minorities support identities greater than the tribe as it makes them and the majority the same group.
after ww2 the anti racism sentiment allowed for the hope of such western identity.
the reaction to 7/10 made it clear that anti racism don’t mean no antisemitism.
which gives incentive to not belong to western identity, & maybe see the west as an enemy.
returning to a Jewish tribalism.
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Except that Israel isn’t retarded, and has been quite good at recognizing the not-even-Jewish-ancestry-much-less-practicing-Jews Israelis and what they’ve done to protect Israel.
One of the stories during the attack was the reservist who figured out what was up and drove into the active attack zone, unarmed, to get to where he could get weapons out.
Bedouin.
The Arabs who refused to join the attack, and paid with their lives.
The… well, let’s just say Israel would have to get a couple of lobotomies to get dumb enough to throw away what they’ve built. And I don’t think they’re nearly stupid enough for it.
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Jews are not tribalists in that sense. Can’t be. Because all descended from Adam and Eve. So, no.
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To be fair, as Jews, we are literally part of the 12 Tribes of Israel (though down to Judah, Levi, Benjamin, Dan and Naftali).
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I don’t mean rejecting non Jewish Israelis, but rejecting other western nations.
maybe making a IsraeliJewish tribe.
can Israelis accept a European who support Palestinian rights as a member of the same identity as they are?
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That’d be a nation-state and nationalism not tribalism.
It would be sane, wouldn’t it? And yet Israel won’t do that either. Because they’re civilized.
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We, in Israel, have great anger about the west’s betrayal.
it pressures toward new ways of thinking.
maybe making a new type of civilization that is not the same as western nation.
I fear it might be more tribal and less civilized for our own good.
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I think holding it against a lot of the west, like France and England is baked in. or at least against their leaders.
OTOH no, I don’t think long term this changes Israel that way.
Anger. Anger I get. I’ve been livid since and livid at the leftist fafsers who pose and strut about their humanity.
But tribalism STILL isn’t the answer.
Also, it’s not the West that’s wrong. It’s the Marxist invasion and control of the West.
Look, we’re fighting back, at least in America, and i suspect elsewhere but we don’t see that because their media is still controlled by the Marxists.
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Anger is an emotion.
emotions make bad counsel, but you can’t escape them.
Israelis might give in to the dark side.
I don’t think the problem in the west is just Marxism:
you got latent old antisemitism,
electoral power of Muslims,
and old imperial legacy.
and maybe they just don’t care, as they don’t see Jews as fully human?
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“The West” is large and varied.
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“Come to the Dark Side. We have Hamentashen….”
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Except for the fact that I never bothered trying to enroll, you are describing me and my family. Pop-pop was 1/4 and looked it, I’m 1/16 and definitely don’t. Mom was the blonde in the family. Her sister was the darkest and her kids really look it.
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Whereas under Islam the idea of tribe was enlarged. All Muslims are “The House of Peace”; , with Allah as a “super clan chief”; everyone else is “The House of War”. The House of War is inherently less. My own reading is that one reason Christianity hasn’t overcome tribalism entirely is that it ran into this “over tribe” and needed to unite a hundred plus countries who were still largely tribal and otherwise wouldn’t unite enough to successfully resist. Thus “Christendom” and Crusade and “Church Militant”
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I didn’t see this addressed yet, but WRT wars in primitive cultures, a good read is “War Before Civilization” by Lawrence H. Keeley. It’s on the ‘Zon, and I’d give the direct link if it wouldn’t use up all my spare pixels…😉
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I’m ok with the chemists all ending up German, so long as we ensure that there are routine mixers between the opthomoligy departments, pediatrics, and quilt groups to keep the gene pool nice and stirred.
Actually I’d settle for any mixers at all. Leaving all that to Match dot con seems seems to be a recipe for the great salt flats…
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Yep.
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I just had someone on X (in response to a comment of mine noting that the European right isn’t the same as the American right) state that the only hope of “white America” is socialism.
/facepalm
The people urging whites to race war on X usually at least pretend to be anti-government. But apparently not this guy.
On an unrelated note, I mentioned on a previous post that OnlyFans has a very wholesome looking front page, and you’d never know what’s behind it if it weren’t for its very widespread reputation. Early this morning I was surprised to see an ad from OnlyFans in my X feed. It was for a free livestream by a comedian who doesn’t appear to take his clothes off (at least based on the pictures in the ad). They’re trying to get people to equate them with streams that aren’t porn, but I don’t think it’s going to work all that well. They’re likely stuck with it until something better comes along for the “adult” streamers, or the site shuts down.
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