Tag: society

Simulant Youth

boy scouts in the us, unlike elsewhere, are an abomination. between all the pedos and the paramilitaries, so much disgusting stuff going on.

The Boy Scouts of America apparently have a youth anti-terrorism training program here in California, partially dedicated to simulated border patrol exercises.
“The Explorers program,” as it’s called, “a coeducational affiliate of the Boy Scouts of America that began 60 years ago, is training 1000s of young people in skills used to confront terrorism, illegal immigration and escalating border violence – an intense ratcheting up of one of the group’s longtime missions to prepare youths for more traditional jobs as police officers and firefighters.”

Against Handshaking

Whatever the reason for handshaking, it isn’t needed. Like the Qwerty keyboard (which is designed to slow us down so that the typewriter doesn’t jam), it’s a relic of an older time that’s not only no longer needed but actually causes inefficiency. I can live with the keyboard. But I’d rather not have to catch another flu or cold from a handshake. The fact is that handshakes spread germs. You shake someone’s hand and then touch your nose or mouth and you can get sick. I don’t like getting sick. But to turn down a handshake is such an insult that there’s little choice. The hand is out there, in front of me waiting, so like everyone else I grasp it.

+1 bows would work better.

Engineering Leadership

The senior body of China’s Communist Party is the Politburo’s standing committee. Making up its 9 members are 8 engineers, and 1 lawyer. This is not a relic of the past: 2007 saw the appointments of 1 petroleum and 2 chemical engineers. The last American president to train as an engineer was Herbert Hoover. Why do different countries favor different professions? And why are some professions so well represented in politics?

The presence of so many engineer-politicians in China goes hand in hand with a certain way of thinking.

Consanguinity

Royal inbreeding

From 1516 to 1700, it has been estimated that over 80% of marriages within the Spanish branch of the Habsburg dynasty were consanguineous.

2013-04-26: Cousin Marriage and Democracy. I had no idea this was so common in some parts of the world.

Approximately 0.2% of all marriages are consanguineous in the United States but in India 26.6% marriages are consanguineous, in Saudi Arabia the figure is 38.4% and in Niger, Pakistan and Sudan a majority of marriages are consanguineous. A recent paper finds that consanguinity is strongly negatively correlated with democracy.

2016-03-07: Middle east Cousin marriage. This explains a lot of problems.

Once common practice in Western societies, estimates suggest the Middle East, along with Africa, continue to have the highest levels in the world. In Egypt, around 40% of the population marry a cousin; the last survey in Jordan, admittedly way back in 1992, found that 32% were married to a first cousin; a further 17.3% were married to more distant relatives. Rates are thought to be even higher in tribal countries such as Iraq and the Gulf states of Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Kuwait.

2018-03-03: US Cousin Marriage

Taken together, the data show a 50-year lag between the advent of increased familial dispersion and the decline of genetic relatedness between couples. During this time, individuals continued to marry relatives despite the increased distance. From these results, we hypothesize that changes in 19th-century transportation were not the primary cause for decreased consanguinity. Rather, our results suggest that shifting cultural factors played a more important role in the recent reduction of genetic relatedness of couples in Western societies.

2022-12-06: The MFP may have been a big part of why Europe developed differently

the Church’s “Marriage and Family Plan” (MFP), which included features like monogamy in addition to an obsession with preventing broadly-defined incest, had important downstream consequences in practically every aspect of life. Young men would be more likely to find marriage partners since a few high-status leaders could not claim a disproportionate share of women, creating incentives for individuals to be more hard-working and less violent. The power of elders was further reduced by an inability to arrange marriages in ways that would keep wealth and resources within the same family, unlike in Muslim societies where the son of one brother would often be wedded to the daughter of another. When incest taboos extended to 6th cousins, an individual may have had 10k relatives that were off limits in the marriage market. This wouldn’t be a big deal in a modern city, but when most people lived in small villages it would have created major difficulties for anyone trying to find a spouse. This led to a population that was more mobile, less embedded in kinship networks, and ultimately more individualistic.

What is sure to be one of the most surprising findings discussed in the book relates to how rare the individual components of the MFP have been throughout history. According to one database looking at 1200 societies before industrialization, only 5% had newlywed couples start their own households, 8% organized domestic life around nuclear families, 15% had only monogamous marriages, 25% had little or no cousin marriage, and 28% had bilateral descent, meaning that lineages are traced through both the mother and father. Christian Europe under the MFP had all five, which wasn’t true for over 99% of other societies. Today, after the rest of the world has been heavily influenced by Western culture, given its success, it’s easy to lose sight of how unique its mating and familial practices have been in the larger historical context.

People prone to individualism would go on to achieve high rates of urbanization and form guilds, universities, marketplaces, and other voluntary institutions that were based on principles of mutual self-interest and competed with one another. Ultimately, Western Europe would conquer the world on the back of the strengths of these institutions, with democracy and capitalism being arguably the most important among them.

Terminal Dating

Till-Death-Do-Us-Part.com is unlike any other dating site. It has been created for people who are living with a terminal illness–and who realize that the quality of life is profoundly affected by how we choose to face the inevitable.

How much time do you have left? How would you prefer to spend that time, and what kind of person–or persons–would you like to spend it with? Let us help you find a singing partner for your swan song.

Seasteading

man i hate the schlocky, sophomoric writing at wired.

The purpose of the Seasteading Institute—and of this gathering—is to figure out how to make aquatic homesteads a reality. But Friedman doesn’t just want to create huge floating platforms that people can live on. He’s also hoping to create a platform in the sense that Linux is a platform: a base upon which people can build their own innovative forms of governance. The ultimate goal is to create standards and blueprints that can be easily adapted, allowing small communities to rapidly incubate and test new models of self-rule with the same ease that a programmer in his garage can whip up a Facebook app. “You could roll your own government out of pieces copied from all the societies around you. Google set my standards for how fast something should grow. This has potential to exceed those standards—if we make 1 seastead, there’s room for 1000s.”