Charles Gaba has been covering this ruthlessly, every week, since the get-go. The death-by-ethnicity data is jaw-dropping. Forbidden thoughts rolling around my head: - I've been trying to make it through The Divide. It's bleak as fuck. It basically makes the point that the West has cruelly exploited all other economies since the advent of capitalism, and that while there might have been a brief, shining period from 1945-1980 where we could pretend we haven't been, it was all pretend. Capitalism corrupts, absolute capitalism corrupts absolutely. - Jared Diamond's ostensible reason for writing "Guns, Germs and Steel" was because someone on Papua New Guinea wanted to know why the fuck white people were in charge. Diamond's answer was guns, germs'n'steel - Western Europe dominated because we had the right kind of resources. This flies in the face of Niall Ferguson's Civlization: The West and the Rest, which argues that Europe won because we outsmarted everyone else, which is racist AF. Hard to credit smarts when the Conquistadors had warhorses and the Americans had nothing to domesticate. - Jonathan Haidt's Righteous Mind argues that rational, self-interested, freedom-loving liberals - basically western civilization - aren't normal at all, and that most of civilization really cares a whole lot more about whether you offend God or not. He's got lots of data points. His argument, fundamentally, is that you have to meet people where they are and most people aren't at Cogito Ergo Sum - And then I got to A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century and the authors' basic point is that Dawkins fucked everything up with memetics, it's stupid to argue nature v. nurture because they're both evolutionary pathways regardless of mechanism, behavior is heritable and the social structure we create is every bit as much of an evolutionary adaptation as language centers and they go out of their way to point out that nobody has been able to talk human evolution with any seriousness for a hundred years because, frankly, Western civilization is evolutionarily superior. I mean, why did the Europeans wipe out the North Americans? Same reason the Cro Magnons wiped out the Neanderthals. Same reason Army Ants wipe out Carpenter Ants. Same reason crows outcompete ravens. There are limited resources and you gotta catch 'em all. Heather Heying and Brett Weinstein would likely argue that MAGA-heads are evolutionarily inferior to Jonathan Haidt's "WEIRDs" except they're on Team Horsepaste. So I don't fuckin' know. I guess the Republican majority is plague-proof.
