We need some way to study culture that isn’t as silly, corrupted by Marxism and outright faddish as our current anthropology field.
No, hear me out, okay? Studying what a culture even IS and how much it influences the group it works with; what happens when the culture is broken or occupied; signs of a culture under attack; a culture under natural decay; a culture that’s gone toxic.
Because humans are social apes, it’s always a question what’s nature and what’s nurture, and because cultures as they exist currently are just a static thing, you have to look at cultural perspective, which in turn involves bias in reporting.
However, it’s possible to break through that, as through all bias in reporting issues, by having many historical reports, with many biases, and not assuming our current one is more right than the rest.
But Sarah, you’ll say, why do we need cultures to be studied? What’s with wanting all these fluffy irreproducible social science stuff? Don’t we spend enough money on those? Let’s study STEM.
Okay, you do you. And note, I’m not 100% sure these should be founded by government. In fact, I’m fairly sure they shouldn’t because wellll the inherent biases of a corrupt bureaucratic structure don’t help anything. BUT–
The other day at insty I shared this: Tough Question, Simple Answer.
Yes, I do realize it’s an old post, but I thought it was still relevant. And I wanted to point out that I agree with him on South Africa in general and on apartheid in general, but not on the whole “The population might be genetically predisposed to short-time preference and inability to plan.” Not because “racissss” (And not Kim doesn’t say “IS” because we can’t, because studies on it are all muddled, partly by being done by the apartheid regime to justify itself.) But because as far as I can determine it isn’t true.
Sure, Africa is a total mess, and Africa in general exhibits a lot of of the same pathologies (though part of this is the European export of communism which is is the worst colonialism.) But there’s really no proof they’re due to a common genetic heritage OR lack.
First of all because Africa has the most genetically diverse populations in the world, and second because African people who immigrate and make a point of acculturation often do quite well. Also a lot of African countries did well under colonial rule, and it wasn’t despite it’s native populations, but they were full contributors. Also when people bring this up, they inevitably bring up the black population of the US, which is a laugh, since 90% of them are technically what’s known in the rest of the world as “Caucasians” and Americans go on the slightest facial hints to say “that person is black.” (We recently watched American fiction, and I was baffled because I’d heard it was about a black author. I kept waiting for the black author to come in, until the character meets his family and they’re obviously black. Until then he read “Mediterranean” to me. Dan says he’s obviously black. GO FIGURE.)
Also, though this is deliberately hidden, despite all the things stacked against them, black people in America were doing quite well and were perhaps more “bourgeois” in values than white people, until the welfare state came and socked them down again. And as far as black misbehavior, it’s more or less standard “white trash” misbehavior, probably proceeding from people brought in in small groups or individually (slaves came from all over Africa) and having lost their moorings acculturating to the culture of other field hands and supervisors. So, you know “Lower class British/Irish in the 18th and early 19th century.” Like the speech. Anyway, the white underclass is going on the welfare ride along with black people in America, and both need to be freed from the degradation of low expectations.
Now, I’m not saying that there isn’t a genetic component to some human behaviors. We’re still, after all, mammals and have bodies. Oh, and an evolutionary history. It’s just that it’s not that simple. Even short/long time preference isn’t — probably — based on a single genetic trait. And all genetic traits can be employed various ways.
When I went to older son’s sweeping of every award for chemistry on his final undergrad year (not seriously. They told him “Don’t bother getting off the stage.” as they called in each new award for this and that) I will confess I felt a little uncomfortable. In the sense that every kid there but son and another kid had a German last name. And it turned out kid had a German immigrant mother, and son has a Amish great grandmother. Add it all together with the fact that chemistry — which I cordially detest — is a fussy, exacting, button counting system, and you start getting the slightest bit squirmy and going “Well, now…”
But historically that’s complete BS. First because the Germans were considered “wild and unorganized” well into the eighteenth century. Second because the communists managed to make the East Germans slovenly and short-time-preference incapable of maintaining anything.
So do I have a bad sample, or is there a correlation, and it’s just how the culture uses the “fussy, obsessive on details” genetic trait?
I’d be inclined to the latter, because, well…. because. I mean, if the entire culture is “wild” then the fussy obsessive on details gets spent on…. I don’t know. Better traps for house breakers? And the communists turned that trait into obsessive spying on everyone, till there was no energy for anything else.
In the same way, I often refer to Portugal as ADHD with borders. And it is that. It’s weird, the level of ADD that’s considered completely normal there. (And I was off the charts even for there. Oh, well.) But it took me till this last visit, when I’m almost — to the extent I’m fully acculturated here, or as much as it’s possible to be — to realize how much of Portugal’s inability to organize its way out of a wet paperbag OR maintain anything less durable than a Roman aqueduct (and even those!) is reinforced and driven to eleventy by a culture that goes “The highest virtue is doing things fast, no matter how BADLY they’re done.” And that’s pushed everywhere and by every possible means. And yes, I grew up with it (Anyone making a comment about my books gets put in the corner. Actually they’re worse if I take very long. Yes, I have an explanation, but it doesn’t matter. It is what it is) and internalized it to such an extent it took almost forty years to SEE it was there and it was bad.
And these traits can be recoverable from, if one acculturates elsewhere. I know that, because when I first moved here — I tell this story often, because it’s now hilarious — my entire family was shocked and dismayed to find out that as I was sending things over the transom, the manuscript would get rejected if I had a typo or punctuation error in the first page (Or others, but particularly the first.)
It wasn’t so much that they found I was being asked to do something impossible, but also because they couldn’t understand why I was expected — as a creative — to punctuate my manuscripts at all. “Surely the houses have people for that.”
You’ll be shocked — because I know what this blog looks like, yes, but it’s fitted in around things — that my manuscripts are actually cleaner and more grammatical than 90% of the writers’ out there. Because I spent so many years in slush, I trained myself to correctness and obsession with details. Though looking at Portugal no one would expect that.
And there’s Portugal, of course. Let’s say that to talk of innate Portuguese characteristics is …. kind of like talking about the innate genetic characteristics of street cats. My kids’ characterization of Portugal as “the reservoir tip of Europe” is mean. It’s also accurate. Genetically Portuguese are…. a little bit of this, a little bit of that, a dollop of the other thing. However they are all for real ADD AF. Even if I’m more so than most of them. And they all exhibit short-time-preference.
I suspect — to revisit the vexed question of “Africa always wins” which is not the point of this post, but needs a sort of exclamation point at the end — that Africa’s true tragedy is an overall (with exceptions, yes, I’m not stupid) climate that makes living easy for humans, and a fact that tribalism was never broken there, and tribalism is a curse on humanity. Like communism, it penalizes saving or planning for the future, in favor of short term “being in good with the group.” And it’s about as pleasant to live under as communism. Don’t be fooled by the “country borders.” Sure, countries exist in Africa, but as far as I can understand, they’re just a nifty mask for the same old tribal wars and clashes.
Which brings us back to cultures. It doesn’t matter if tribes in Africa have different cultures or genetics, their cultures are all varieties of tribal culture, and that penalizes individual action and innovation in favor of almost nihilistic obedience to and supremacy of the group. (The same nonsense our wokies want to impose here.)
And our problem is that we don’t GET cultures. The Gramscian thing of all cultures are alike, except the cultures of the oppressed which are extra nifty and should be let run rampant is killing us all.
We don’t understand cultures, or how to modify them, or how to help them eliminate bad characteristics before they damage another generation.
I know cultures aren’t sentient, but they behave as if they were. Because they embed in people’s brains when they’re so young they can’t even think, they behave as a sort of collective subconscious. And while they change and evolve over time, they are excruciatingly slow to do so.
All of this is a problem in a world of rapid innovation and deliberately open borders. If we don’t study cultures and figure out how to make the better ones prevail — those more useful to human civilization and happiness, on the individual side, because that’s the only measure we CAN use — what we end up with is hordes of locusts roaming the earth, eating out each slightly better off country. Or if you prefer, tribalism on a global scale.
Take a lot of the things we considered once upon a time problems of “overpopulation”. It turns out what they actually are is problems of a culture that has been conquered and is occupied. The women become whores (to survive the occupation by the enemy, because if your kids are of the enemy, well…) and the men become effeminate, and no one works, and– ALL of these are signs of a culture that has lost a war and been occupied. NOT of overpopulation. It is also the signs of a culture taken over by Marxists, which the culture obviously interprets as “foreign occupiers” — and if you see what they do, it’s typical colonizer stuff, from taking over the schools to punishing everyone who doesn’t display allegiance.
But no one is paying attention to that, because no one is studying the “mechanisms of culture” qua culture, and what cultures do and how they change and use humans almost as their instruments to survive/replicate/conquer/die.
It is necessary. It is urgent. And I don’t know what to do about it.
I do know it’s needed because we don’t have the …. ruthlessness to use the old methods, let alone thinking the old methods were horrible. (They were.)
In the old method, either all men over the age of three were killed (that had mixed success as women often managed to pass on enough of the conquered culture, anyway) or everyone but “the babe at the breast” was killed. That effectively destroyed the culture, and let the conquering culture — often simply more ruthless, but often also better organized and more capable of overcoming tribalism (see Rome) — become THE culture.
The history of civilization is made of such encounters, but we can’t do it. As we are, we simply can’t. And faster travel has made the world one large neighborhood.
So, we need sane, non-fluffy people to study: What cultures are (They’re not food and clothes. And they’re not race. To what extent those influence culture is debatable, but they’re not what culture IS); how cultures clash; how to make cultures that are objectively bad/destructive/useless go away without putting everyone to the sword; the symptoms that a culture is in trouble and how to fix it.
I don’t know how to do any of that, though I suspect a lot of my ponderings on it is coming out in the current headache of a book/series. (Yes, published soonish. But so weird, most of you will run screaming into the night. Never mind.)
There is an entire field of knowledge it’s urgent to study. Our culture ignores it because it’s decided culture means race.
And I have no idea how to fix it. These things always fix themselves eventually, but usually by those old, er…. ruthless methods.
If we don’t want to end up there, we’d best figure it out now.
*Because these are my two weeks of fundraising, I’m obligated to add the following:
This blog is reader funded. I don’t have a grant or a patron. You’re my patrons and only you can compensate for the toil of keeping the blog going day after day, year after year. For the full explanation of why a funding drive, and what I intend to use it for, if you’re interested, go here.
There are several ways of supporting me.
GiveSendGo, for which I make no promises meaning I’m not giving you anything for your contribution; Chapterhouse, for which I will give you my fiction that is in process and yes there will be typos, backtracking, characters who change names suddenly and other mishaps; and Patreon, for which I give you cat pspsps posts. For the more exotic ways to donate: email me for paypal address. The book promo email will do for that: bookpimping at outlook dot com. And there is the snail mail address at: Sarah A. Hoyt, 304 S Jones Blvd #6771, Las Vegas, NV 89107.
I know times are tough — for all of us — and I don’t hold it against anyone who can’t contribute. But all contributions are greatly appreciated. – SAH*
According To Hoyt
I have uncoalesced thoughts about Sociology being mostly the asking of questions.
Does this situation ever happen? What do you do in this situation? Why do you do it that way? How did that way of doing things come to be? Please explain this to me like you are teaching a particularly stupid child.
Except you have to gain good will with your subject to get answers, or maybe even to ask the questions, and you will never ever know if they aren’t just trolling you.
You may be forgetting about cultural blindness.
“Do all girls like pink?”
“Of course.”
“Is there ever one who doesn’t?”
“No.”
Those living in the culture do not always have a clear picture of that culture. Those living outside of it, even more so. And the one studying the culture really has no way of knowing which answers include cultural blindness, cultural bias, etc. It’s the story of the roast with the ends cut off.
Need to find high functioning autistics to tell you? I’ve had multiple autistics tell me they read me as autistic, but I’m actually pretty socially functional, however I do have a running theory in my head of why humans do ‘thing’ because I seem to be almost completely unplugged from the human hive mind. It is very strange to watch other people, but especially women, seem to know all sorts of things on instinct, whereas I have to do everything consciously.
Thus the theory of why people chat in the break room.
I am high functioning autistic. I have spent my whole life studying this weirdness from the outside. 90% of what humans do makes no rational sense, but they firmy believe their actions are rooted in logic.
I was well into my 30’s before it clicked enough for me to pass.
The “pink” thing? I was once told that if I didn’t like pink I was either not female, or lying. It’s that deeply ingrained. Few human beliefs and rituals have any more basis in reality than that one.
I once talked to “Barbie” about cultural bias. You know the kind; inch long fingernails, perfect hair, perfect clothes, and thoroughly convinced that what she “knows” is reality. She couldn’t explain flirting, or why those colors match, or why she so firmly believed that these are things “all women know.”
I can only hope that she learned something from the discussion.
Pink being for girls came from an early 20th century discussion in some housewives’ magazine.
Before that it was considered a light red, and suitable for boys.
The person who told you that not liking pink makes you a liar or not female is insane.
There’s a decent Harry Potter fanfic on Reddit (“Make a Wish”, I think), where, in a footnote, the author claims that the Vikings considered pink a manly colour. I’ve never been able to verify that, but it does make you wonder about “all girls love pink”.
I always liked yellow and red.
Tell me about it. I threw up my hands in defeat long ago (long before I knew what “autism spectrum disorder” or any of the previous related things were let alone that it described me. I just could never understand these aliens among whom I lived. I kind of learned to pretend (it’s amazing how many conversations I had where I mostly just quoted movie lines at the person I was talking to), but I never understood. Still don’t.
I could fake it well enough to write fiction but then fiction has to make more sense than reality. 😉
Same same.
Lots of girls don’t like pink. And some don’t like pink specifically because it’s a “girl” color.
Very good analysis! I’m thinking you are “right” as in correct and yes, something to study what is labeled culture is really needed. However, even if there were some way to do it – there are also a whole bunch of ‘sub-cultures’ which are imbedded within the over all thing called culture.
In a given location – likely a city/urban area – you’ve got the overarching culture “American” but then it is broken into segments. The west side has the Irish, the north side is Blacks or whatever. Then… The mythical city has, for example, a criminal justice/public safety system so there is a ‘cop’ culture a culture for the fire department (and medics within that) and a sheriff culture etc. Then there are all the other sub-groups like medical, legal, business, etc.
Here’s also a wrinkle I see – the next city/urban area over has all the above but is still different and not the same culture. Ok… I think I need a drink, a cookie or something now as my head is on overload. I still think you are right and I hope there is someway to do it.
It’s almost as if one could build a model of the entire galactic empire by merely studying Trantor.
Now we get into the notion of Cities-as-Entities and each having its own soul or Stadtgeist if you will, like what Jacques Ellul discusses in The Meaning of the City. And of cities per se being part of the wicked heritage of Cain the Fratricide.
I agree with the need to be able to study culture without the crypto-Communist prism. Alas, the only people with a chance to do so are military historians – and not all of those. Amateurs like me are immune to job threats…professionals in academia aren’t.
A culture is a worldview, a set of assumptions of how the world works, how it’s supposed to work (not necessarily the same as how it DOES work), and right/wrong definitions. You learn it at your mother’s knee. It’s firmware, and can’t be overwritten. It may be OVERRIDDEN by what is learned later, but uprooting it is impossible.
The problem is that some cultures are not compatible with others. There’s always cultural friction when one culture encounters another…but some cultures are just plain incompatible. Like mixing hydrogen and oxygen, you get explosions. The Islamic world has always had great difficulty living in peace with its neighbors, for example.
Mike’s Theory: Culture is, to a significant degree, affected by environment. The development of advanced civilizations required several things, IN ORDER. These were:
Rivers/boats. The great ancient civilizations were all riverine. The Tigris and Euphrates, the Nile, the Yellow and Yangtze…all supported civilizations that made the second cut. (Rome/Greece used the Aegean Sea as a river, it’s the same travel by day/pull ashore at night operation). Note that having a river didn’t help if you didn’t make the first cut of having beasts of burden.
Open-ocean navigation. Western Christian civilization passed Final Cull at 0700 EDT 12 Oct 1492…or maybe six months later, when Columbus RETURNED to reinforce the stranded crew of the Santa Maria. Everybody else was island-hopping, the West had the seamanship and navigation to sail blue water routinely.
One of the secret weapons of Western Christian culture was that it was divided – and thus had internal competition amongst nations. It was a VERY Darwinian environment.
Part of holding a nation together is REQUIRING adherence to the public culture. Multiculturism is a recipe for civil war. There can be room for tolerance…to the degree compatible with maintenance of the public culture. Definitions of right and wrong, in particular.
“Presence of beasts of burden. All human cultures domesticated animals, but only some had horses, oxen, and other animals that could pull and carry. Note that there are no such animals native to North America or Sub-Saharan Africa.”
No comment on Sub-Saharan Africa. But for North America, yes… and no. While there were no large beasts of burden, dogs were in widespread use throughout North America as pack animals. In the arctic areas, you had (and still have) sled dogs. In open areas like the Great Plains, dogs would be fitted with a three-point travois. And in more rugged areas, such as forests, the dogs would be fitted with bags to carry whatever needed to be carried.
While dogs can’t carry as much as an ox or horse, it’s easy to breed large numbers of them. So it wouldn’t be hard to make up in quantity what they lacked in quality carrying capability.
You couldn’t use them to pull a plow. And you certainly couldn’t use them as a mount. But they were used nearly universally to transport goods and supplies.
All this, plus…
A functional culture depends on functional families and functional communities to spread and preserve itself.
I had the dubious pleasure of watching the culture I grew up in disintegrate. Divorce became socially accepted, immigrants with no desire to assimilate moved in (and only a few percentage points of the total population, at that), and something I saw as rock solid just fell apart like wet newspaper.
And it took less than a decade.
There’s more than just that, of course. Public schools and federal bureaucracies actively worked to undermine the transmission of the culture, and were more successful than they had any right to be.
Conquests And Cultures: An International History by Thomas Sowell has a long chapter on the geographical issues of Africa.
Ah tribalism. There was a novel in the 30’s by a Scandinavian author named Sandemose where he laid out the Laws of Jante. They fit for most small towns anywhere:
An eleventh rule recognized in the novel as “the penal code of Jante” is
My nephew is marrying a girl from Zimbabwe where they have the “Africa tax,”. Her father, who did very well for himself, has to pay to fly his whole clan out here and put them up. The way he did well was to get out of Africa. But, as my mother used to say when she was scolding me for keeping my hands in my pockets, “you can take the boy out of the bog, but you can’t take the bog out of the boy.”
There was another commenter – John Derbyshire, I think – qualified as a doctor and did some tours of duty in Africa. He noted sadly, that the native Africans just couldn’t get ahead, even if they were doctors, or owned a small store, or a profitable farm – because all of their relatives would batten on to them, expecting to be supported, or be given stuff for free. The hard-working, creative, enterprising … they were drained dry by the expectations of their families or tribes. It was very sad – the only way they could make it would be to emigrate, and if possible, without leaving a forwarding address.
My mother’s Swedish side of the family breaths the Jante law, I keep my distance from those toxic people, but the Czechoslovakian and Scottish sides seem to be encourage everyone to be their best.
((Shudder)) This could nearly as well be called “The Laws of the Crab Bucket” for any culture / subculture that tends that way… always to nowhere good.
(It does have some advantage in immunizing against, say, two or more “cults of personality” setting off a cultural civil war between Rabid Followers of A and Rabid Followers of B. But then again, a single sickle cell gene making you resistant to malaria still does absolutely nothing to make sickle cell disease any less bad.)
“the symptoms that a culture is in trouble and how to fix it.” – I’m actually messing with that in part in the draft-in-progress of The Words of the Night, and I suspect that’s part of why it’s such slow going. Because the culture my isekai’d guy Jason lands in is definitely in trouble, with more headed down the pike… and he’s just one guy, with a kid to look after.
The first thing he needs to do is survive, and try to reach an understanding with their rescuers. Which is going to be… lumpy is the best word that comes to mind ATM. There’ll be things they agree on right away. Things they won’t. And likely harder to deal with, things they agree on for very different reasons.
I’m giving Jason a fighting chance by dumping him with people who see some of the cultural trouble and how it kills people firsthand, and are dedicated enough to saving lives to at least consider other ideas.
We really do need cultural studies.
…And back to work, these holes in the draft aren’t going to fill themselves….
see, I’m playing with it in hermaphrodite world, where the distancing is obvious. But– Not slow, but MASSIVE.
I’ve liked the clips! : )
Though maybe you have a wild suggestion for this… I’m trying to get plotbunnies to settle on one of many new ideas so they’ll stop being so locked on this draft and ease up a bit. But ATM my plotbunnies keep throwing zombies at me. We’re talking an image of a more classic fantasy setting with a cranky druid in a forest finding one zombie wandering through, before the horde really gets there….
This might be less of a problem if my brain weren’t also tossing in the dratted zombie deer from Kingdom: Ashin of the North. Including the clip for completeness, but warning it is eeeeep….
Any suggestions how to knock the plotbunnies to something else? (Anything else?) Maybe I just need some other kind of near-mindless horde monster to stomp in a story? I dunno….
No. Usually I write a summary of upcoming to get the plotbunnies to settle down. Sigh.
Well, appreciate the thought. 🙂
Right now I’m trying to figure out why my immune system is freaking out…
Too much pollen and stress, likely….
I keep thinking I’m about over something and it keeps coming back. Argh.
Make the zombie deer mounts for some other zombie?
Your zombies, too, can be different!
A lot would depend on if the zombies are necromantic or some kind of parasite/infection.
I think part of the interest of the idea is, a druid who can grow/control plants and stone shape parts of the landscape would have a lot of interesting options for fortress-building/funneling a horde away from a protected area and/or toward a kill zone.
Seriously, if you lived up in a wilderness treehouse, might take a bit to realize there was a zpoc going on….
I just don’t like the hopelessness/shock at the impossible leading so many people to get infected and killed aspects of most zpocs. Hmph.
“I just don’t like the hopelessness/shock at the impossible leading so many people to get infected and killed aspects of most zpocs. Hmph.”
Amen. Ugh, no. No, no, no. Gimme something to work with here, like Kabaneri did, you zpoc mongers….
In part because… well, at this point I find the shock and hopelessness semi-implausible? Yeah, sure, walking dead, ack. But there have been so many zombie movies, I honestly think a lot of people would act on reflexes built on “gee, if I were in that situation” before they actually rationally thought, “we have zombies?!?”
:nods: In certain locations or with certain people, I can see panic (cue up local “mean girl” or “I am the center of the universe” type and place here). Everyone else? Zombies, okay, let’s go get the chainsaw while dad fires at them. Also, we have gas, so we can at least set them on fire, and if we can get to the truck we can be mobile….
I would write horrible horror movies. The MCs would all find ways to survive, and not make certain very obviously stupid decisions.
I would love movies like that!
I wish there were more action horror movies like what you’re describing. I know they exist, but I’m having a hard time coming up with examples that aren’t comedy (Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters, Van Helsing) or solo protagonist (Blade, Underworld).
There are specific characters in zombie movies like Train to Busan and the Dawn of the Dead remake that are competent, but they tend to get betrayed/dragged down by the panicky ones. Zombieland technically counts, although now we’re back to comedy.
It doesn’t even have to be as precise as actual freaking zombies.
Part of why a lot of self-defense prepping involves zombie themes is because the “act right away, scream later” responses will keep you alive.
Like, folks were shocked when a SWATed guy had a “Zombie Apoc” type sign out front of his door, but also was aware enough to shoot the poor sheriff that came though it.
Because while yeah, it’s a game– the reflexes are still valid. Something bangs through the door, you set at least three shots into the dead center of it.
(Sheriff was fine, though bruised– the state trooper that came to help with the murder/suicide in process save talked him into putting on a bullet proof vest. The guy that shot him voted for him in the next election. It was the next door neighbor that SWATted him, and yes he was legally charged.)
Or, to call on a movie example near and dear to my heart– Tremors!
They didn’tspend time going “that’s impossible,” they went for a more suited gun.
That scene when the people on rooftops hear shots, and hang their heads….
And then the shots keep going.
Absolute great survival humor there!
(I’ve seen 4 of the Tremors movies, and loved them all. That bit in Tremors 2 where they actually have too much gun….)
I hope they threw the book at that neighbor. Sheesh.
I’ve always wondered why Burt built a basement gun room and didn’t put rebar in the walls! A lot of it. He didn’t even fill the cells of the cement blocks with concrete. Those walls were barely strong enough to hold back the dirt. That Graboid smashed right through.
But the Nitro Double Express elephant gun did the job.
And the SWATted guy didn’t get shot after he opened fire on the police? He must have dropped his gun really fast and surrendered once he realized who he’d shot at. That is one lucky guy, and one seriously disciplined sheriff not to return fire. No wonder the guy voted for him next election.
Everyone involved performed amazingly, other than they went in with way too few people– but there was one cop, and one deputy, in the town at all, andwhich is WHY the highway patrol guy came in to help.
Break in, get shot, shooter realizes this is NOT criminals running in, he and his lady both hit the floor, cops realize this is NOT a murder-suicide in progress, clear the house anyways, probably lots of yelling.
I saw A Quiet Place Part II for the first time recently, and I noticed that all of the characters are at least minimally competent and catch on quickly. They still make mistakes, but not boneheaded ones, and they always fight back when there’s a sensible opportunity to.
It was a nice change of pace.
I took my mom to see A Quiet Place Day One. I found it a refreshing and interesting change. *Spoiler Alert*
End of the World comes and the protagonist is terminally ill, never seen those things juxtaposed in a movie before, she has a unique perspective on End of the World because than everyone else because of her condition.
I saw it too. I enjoyed it, but not as much as the first two. Not quite as visual. I liked the main character, but the cat was the real star of the show. (As it should be.)
That sounds like one of those “We entered the labyrinth the moment we stepped in the forest, and never realized it until now” type of deals.
There was one zpoc comic I read – “Stand Still Stay Silent” – that in one scene showed… runes, I guess… that one character drew on the ground to secure the party’s campsite. It functioned by encouraging the zombies to go around and not notice what they were going around. Misdirecting them, rather than stopping them, which would have drawn their attention.
If I remember correctly it was the kind of thing normally used to herd cattle. And it worked just as well when the cattle had been zombified.
*Notes!*
Rats. Rat hordes are SCARY. I still have not gotten over the giant rat and his minions in Battle for the Castle by Elizabeth Winthrop. Brr.
Failing that, you could try the cryptid “Not-Deer,” which…it stands up, and it has teeth and that is NOT A DEER. (Not sharing pictures. Whoo, boy, not showing pictures. Brr.)
I am also poking culture, but from the reverse: people transported from Medieval times to today. They’ve had a few things softened and Don’t Talk About certain things they have Opinions on outside their circle, and they’re all cops now. But let’s just say I’m tired of UF Fae courts and Once Upon A Time made me mad, while Grimm gave me a few ideas. Still in the outlining stage, but I’m working on it.
Sounds cool!
Hmm. Rat hordes are a lot trickier than human zombies, yes… and I’ve seen some Not-Deer pictures. Meep.
Meep, indeed! Rat hordes also have the, er, “benefit” of being land piranhas. At least, they were like that in Battle for the Castle. Have I mentioned I have never gotten over that book? Because I really, really have not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mautam
The real-world basis….
Ack, ack, ack! :runs for nearest tree, scales it, NO, won’t come down without ability to get rid of the durn things…:
National Geographic did a special on it, reimbursed some local farmers so they could film when they thought it was going to happen. (They were right.)
The farmers were glad to see them and take the deal, because, well… anything that wasn’t already harvested by the time the rats exploded was gone.
Uh-oh. Did you notice that the mautam rat explosion is entirely predictable, because it’s linked to the bloom cycle of one species of bamboo? And mautam alternates with the “thingtam,” also a rat explosion, linked to another species of bamboo? And the next thingtam is predicted for… 2025. So no matter what happens here, there’s going to be famine in large parts of India next year.
…Well that’s not good.
In fact, it might be Egon Spengler levels of Bad.
…We already knew the next few years were going to be – ahem – interesting. Drat.
Sounds like a recipe challenge….
Fuuuuuuuu…… There are so many stories of shit like that from the military especially in the general Appalachian area.
And then there’s the Hawaiian shit. And the Okinawan. And the southwest. and the pnw. And Afghanistan. And Iraq/Syria….
Yeah. I’ve been looking into Appalachian folklore and I somehow missed that one. Yikes.
I started following an active duty guy on IG whose entire page is creepy shit. He actually two books out on Amazon about the crazy stuff people have seen/experienced while in. Ghosts, aliens, night marchers, the skin walkers or wendigo or whatever in Appalachia… And now I’m getting a lot more suggested to me about cryptids, etc, which is really really interesting, and scary as fuck.
Huh. I might have to look for those books.
Tales From the Gridsquare.
Alma put a line in one of the Familiar Generations books that the Silver John books were actually a documentary.
Meeeeep….
As somebody who got an anthropology degree a dozen years ago, I heartily agree. Sociology and cultural anthropoly are horribly infested with Marxism. I was lucky enough to take most of my cultural anthropology courses with adjuncts who had real jobs or were coming back to the field after working in the real world. Even though they weren’t Marxists the texts they were teaching from were tainted by it. One of them even referred to a bunch of it as Marxist BS. The text for the one sociology course I took was even worse.
But of course, all cultures are equal except for “White Western Culture” and of course “White Western Culture” is Evil. [Sarcastic Grin]
Humans have a tendency to see themselves as the pinnacle. We’re not.
For example, we are not the “most evolved”. Evolution is a generational process. Just about any bacterial strain has had orders of magnitude more generations than the entire human genetic line – until you get back to eukaryotes.
The idea that culture is an emergent property of interacting humans (just as chemistry is an emergent behavior of physics and biology of chemistry) and needs to be studied non-reductively is something that most will just not accept. We are not component pieces/parts! We are the END, not the means!
Moties and those folks in the “eclipse ends the world” story come to mind. They’re doomed by their very nature, no matter what they do. We’re like that.
Even if a set of Laws of Culture could be determined, who should do anything about it? This comes very close to your eugenics post from the other day – but involving myriads of people within a culture, not individuals.
Proofreading that was depressing. It’s not meant to be.
The Reader believes any study of culture begins with Thomas Sowell (http://tsowell.com/trilogy.html). The Reader has read all three of them a couple of times. He isn’t sure Sowell is correct in some of his conclusions, but unlike most sociology junk, they are well researched.
My husband-naturalized immigrant from Africa-is solidly in the camp of climate. African climates do not require long term planning. More importantly, they don’t reward long term planning: they punish it. Europe is crazily mild compared to here, but you either plan for winter or you don’t survive in European subsistance agriculture. Africa does not enforce that planning.
Furthermore, if you do plan ahead and store food, it rots. Up until canning shows up, historically, storing food against future need was a waste of your time and did not actually keep food available, so storing against future need is punished, not rewarded, by the environment. You cannot butcher in the fall, smoke cure the meat, and expect the combination of cold and smoke to keep meat usable. Butcher and consume now, feed the tribe, and when someone else butchers they will feed you. (Some of the desert areas excluded, where it’s dry enough that dried foods last.)
You can see the same climate problem in S. & Central America, and in parts of Asia.
Hm… Sounds like the “keeping food available against future need” would involve more… Staggering your planting so there’s always something ripening? Having livestock that will eat whatever excess you produce?
You can literally survive on weeds pulled out of the ground, year round. Africa is ridiculously lush with edible plants.
(anthropologist hat on)
Ow. That pinches. Okay, now. Digging up the old memory files, compiling, discarding the bullfaeces…
”Not because “racissss” (And not Kim doesn’t say “IS” because we can’t, because studies on it are all muddled, partly by being done by the apartheid regime to justify itself.) But because as far as I can determine it isn’t true.
Obligatory “race does not exist” comment goes here. Culture does, though, and that’s often what folks mean when they try and use the term, from what I can tell.
“First of all because Africa has the most genetically diverse populations in the world, and second because African people who immigrate and make a point of acculturation often do quite well.”
Yep. I’m related to a few of those exceptions. Any speculation that “blacks” or “African Americans” (which somehow does not include Elon Musk and Kim Du Toit, but does include weirdos like the Painted Hyena) might be somehow “genetically inferior” (another phrase that they don’t understand) such as Affirmative Action (et alius) is simply phrenology regurgitated for modern audiences. People that tan well are not dumb or incapable as a class. They’re just human.
“And as far as black misbehavior, it’s more or less standard “white trash” misbehavior, probably proceeding from people brought in in small groups or individually (slaves came from all over Africa) and having lost their moorings acculturating to the culture of other field hands and supervisors. So, you know “Lower class British/Irish in the 18th and early 19th century.” Like the speech. Anyway, the white underclass is going on the welfare ride along with black people in America, and both need to be freed from the degradation of low expectations.“
Had the same exact thought going in to this (and Kim’s) post. Well, I was more comparing it to trailer trash and urban lower class whites. Now I think on it, include lower class from beyond our Southern border, lower class Canadians, and so on. It’s nearly ubiquitous enough to qualify as a human universal. Nearly. Something deep in the monkey brain gives us certain trends that flow out through the cultural lens to remarkably similar behaviors. Amoral familism is one flavor, but there are also close trust cultures (my term, the official one I forget) the appear in stressed populations (victims of Marxism, losers of wars, etc). Even the form of corruption is largely recognizable across language and cultural barriers if you know what to watch for.
“tribalism is a curse on humanity. Like communism, it penalizes saving or planning for the future, in favor of short term “being in good with the group.” And it’s about as pleasant to live under as communism. Don’t be fooled by the “country borders.” Sure, countries exist in Africa, but as far as I can understand, they’re just a nifty mask for the same old tribal wars and clashes.“
YES. A thousand times YES. Tribalism is a curse of the old school, the kind that lingers long after you think you’ve killed it for the last time. As to the last, it is a *very* thin skinned mask. The tribe is all. Full stop. Everyone and everything else is just there to be used.
It’s better than the weak structure that comes before, but worse than nearly everything else. Yes, including Communism. Which they do poorly, but it is designed to go poorly anyway, which somehow bizarrely works. Sort of. Badly. Nearly anything would be better. Except rampant chaos, but then they have that, too.
It’s bad for people. All the people. Tribalism? Communism? Yes to both. Bad all the way down.
“We don’t understand cultures, or how to modify them, or how to help them eliminate bad characteristics before they damage another generation.“
There are ways. Most of them are awful, some are abhorrent, a few are downright evil. Some of them actually work. But a lot of them are purely inhuman. Forced acculturation. Co-opting of ritual and belief.
The best ones I know of, the least damaging, involve religion though. Compatible religions. Some aren’t.
“I know cultures aren’t sentient, but they behave as if they were. Because they embed in people’s brains when they’re so young they can’t even think, they behave as a sort of collective subconscious. And while they change and evolve over time, they are excruciatingly slow to do so.“
I think this sort of like how Dr Peterson talks about how ideas don’t want to die and how intelligence falls in love with itself. Cultures are, at root, ideas and emotion. They help define us. Of course we don’t want to kill off part of what makes us us, as individuals.
“…we don’t have the …. ruthlessness to use the old methods, let alone thinking the old methods were horrible. (They were.)“
Yes. Very much so.
Break here, as this is getting long.
Moving on:
“So, we need sane, non-fluffy people to study: What cultures are (They’re not food and clothes. And they’re not race. To what extent those influence culture is debatable, but they’re not what culture IS); how cultures clash; how to make cultures that are objectively bad/destructive/useless go away without putting everyone to the sword; the symptoms that a culture is in trouble and how to fix it.“
Cultures are habits of thought and action, in broad strokes. They are often untaught and unexamined patterns of thought and behavior that define a group from their neighbors. This can and often historically has included rituals.
Rituals. Rites of adulthood. Rites of marriage. Rites of fealty. Rites of banishment, atonement, formalities of family, proper courting behavior, proper responses to insult, to threat, to grace and charity. Rituals are very important in defining a culture.
We have rituals. The progressive movement has very different rituals. There are cultural rites that involve subcultural entities within the overculture. Jocks and nerds. Every one of you has a picture in their mind when they read those terms, and that picture is going to be very similar to other people within this culture. More to the point, there are ideas like this that we share with progressives, whether they realize or believe this or not.
Now ritual is an easy to see point, and a lot of anthropologists and ethnographers (special kind of stupid- err, I mean cultural anthropologist) use these as the points to hang their whole ethnography on (*cough* Margaret Mead *cough*).
Rituals are acted out behavior, though. They’re not the patterns of thought and belief underneath. Those are what the anthropologist has to tease out.
These patterns of thought are not weak little fickle opinions. These are the defining characteristics of a people. Ask a USAian, and you might hear “freedom” (or a bellowing cry, a la Braveheart, “FREEEEEEEDOOOOOOMMMMMMM!!!”). But what is that idea, freedom? What does it represent? Freedom to what? Freedom from what? Or to/from who? What does it look like? What does it feel like? What does it mean? How meaningful and/or important is it? How do you get it? How do you lose it? How do you defend it when it is threatened?
Progressives have their own defining characteristics. They’re not totally different from our own. Really. We share some roots. Judeo Christian memetic roots. English common law roots. Rituals. Ideas. Patterns of behavior.
How do you study a culture? Put on your big boy britches folks, the smelly stuff is getting deep here.
First, have one. Not just any one. A strong one. You need a strong culture of your own to study another. You need to know your own strong beliefs, patterns of thought, your own “biases” and your own stomach for the weird (almost known and similar) and the unknown- and prepare for the unknown unknowns.
Once again, DO NOT go studying culture without a strong sense of your own. Why? Because one, there’s no point in doing so if you can’t translate what you learned back into your own culture, and two, you’ll go in face first and get swallowed up. Maybe killed, maybe co-opted, maybe a lot of things, some of them very very bad. Going into another culture to study it without a strong sense of your own rarely ends well. Don’t be that guy.
Two, start a study of culture from the ground up. How do they train up little babies? What kind of schooling/enculturation activities? Is there ritual involved? How strongly enforced are the mores, the moral structure, the religion, the politics (see: the wages of Marxism upon victim populations etc)? What are the sex roles? What are the expectations as the child grows into adulthood? How are aberrations dealt with? What does a prime and respected example of that culture look like (heroes/heroines)?
Look at the history of that culture as you grow. Cultures are grown in conflict. All cultures- even aborigines deep in the Amazon or African jungle. Cultural conflict might be war, might be religious (Leftism is a religious conflict, not just a political one), might be environmental stressors, might be technological in part- the age of sail changed every single culture that was in contact with it- and so on.
Cultural change is as inevitable as the tides. Channeling that change into useful, productive tracks is rather a tricky business, especially if you disallow the brutal methods that were used in ye ancient tymes. It also requires something constitutionally unusual in the human toolbox: constant effort and attention.
Short, sharp shocks will change a culture. American culture changed a bit post 9/11. Wars change cultures. Both the defeated and the victors. I think most people would rather not be caught up in a nasty little “civil” war in their own back yard. Most sane people, anyway.
Absent that, a slow, grinding change could require several things. Some of them expensive. You’d need access to young minds. Education, primarily, but entry level jobs, too. Human brains are still quite plastic (moldable/changeable/not yet matured) into their twenties at the least. Assume you have sufficient (whatever level that is I leave to the reader) access.
What do you change it to? What is the end goal? Be specific. Reinforce that continually. Show the benefits. Better yet, have them grow up in a household that reinforces said memetic change you want to see. But school and early job training is, I think, adequate to give the initial nudge.
Add to that, you need to go broader. You need entertainment. You need marketing. You need legal- judges, lawyers, politicians and the like. You need the bureaucrats, too. Yes, those pesky little burrowing parasites- you need them too. You need as much as you can get. Everything. Throw in the kitchen sink if you’ve got it. You need memes, you need the whole underground shebang as well as the straights in ties and suit jackets.
I’m just spitballing here, but you probably see where I’m going. Without mass deaths, you need a tidal wave of epic proportions in effort to get it done, and even then I only give it 50/50. My generation was fed mammoth amounts of proglodyte pap and still flipped the bird to the Lefties for the most part. Granted, we checked out of politics just as hard for years too.
To study the American culture, including lefty prog culture sounds like an extremely hazardous job fraught with no-sh!t lethal dangers. There’s a lot of things that some are invested in not having them brought to light in clarity in there. Just look at the statistics on gun ownership that John Lott put together. That was just one limited aspect of the whole pie. Look at Andy Ngo. There are places you’d have to go where they would literally kill you if they found out what you were doing, and realized what it could lead to.
In summation, it’d take a whole leviathan of effort and I still don’t give it straight odds. There’s also a reason I hated cultural anthropology other than the fact that I’m not any good at it. It’s terribly imprecise. You’re dealing with difficult people constantly. And in the end, you have to lie a little bit (or a whole lot, depending) to get your funding approved.
The current American culture is even more a melting stewpot than ever. It’s got Marxist faeces innit, it’s got gun culture redneckery, it’s got overeducated tomfoolery, it’s got pissed off normies, it’s got criminal groups embedded in bits and pieces all over, it’s got religious nutjobs and quietly religious saints, it’s got blue collar beer gut good ol boys that somehow keep the logistics running despite all the mess, it’s got overworked infrastructure workers that nobody’s listening to, it’s got sweet little babies and their adoring families, it’s got trailer trash kings and queens (yes, that one is sarcasm), it’s got the vets that somehow keep things running despite bureaucratic shenanigans, it’s got it all.
The quintessential American is disgruntled with the way things are going and wants a change (both parties agree on this, by and large- just their endpoints wildly differ.
Now I need to go find some brain bleach to wash the cultural anthropology out. I’ll go see what the cats are getting up to. Doofus is watching the door awful intently, so that probably means some shenanigans are going on in the front yard…
It seems like we used to know how to do this as a culture, but it’s been lost, or more accurately purposefully buried. The waves of immigrants from cultures all over the world, who all forted up in various monocultural ghettos in places like NYC, such that in Italian neighborhoods one could get by speaking only Italian, in Eastern European Jewish neighborhoods speaking only Yiddish, and so on, with effectively clan and tribe loyalty paramount, yet the generation count to fully assimilated kids hitting the WWII beaches together was in the low single digits, and the generation count to only knowing swear words and names of dishes in the mother tongue was similarly low.
The last group that it worked on to my knowledge would be the Vietnamese refugees after the fall of Saigon.
But not now – the kids in the Somali neighborhoods in Minneapolis will still be tribally oriented for decades to come, as will the other waves of insular immigrants since the mid 1980s at least.
It was in part the public schools, which with the 1980s saw a major shift away from teaching the kids English and putting them in common classes to teaching separate ESL classes in the native languages, but it’s more than that. And apparently al together it’s something that’s lost, except maybe as a cultural bring-along in the Chinese immigrant communities, who like the Irish, both formerly were absolutely excluded from “whiteness”, but were able to achieved assimilation well enough to be accused by the classification cultists as now having intrinsic whiteness cooties.
So to me it seems that knowledge existed, it just would have to be rediscovered and reimplemented.
I think the operative phrase is “We’re Americans now. We speak English.” and the operative mechanism is “Granny said so.”
Word-for-word what Great-Grandma used to say. (My adoptive mother’s lineage is, we THINK, Volga Valley German. But we had to put that together from her handwritten cookbook, as she and Great-Grandpa were very firm about speaking English. They had HEAVY accents, but damn if they didn’t speak English. All the time. Even in the privacy of the family.)
I am, as they say, a case study in nature/ nurture. Raised from two weeks of age by people with whom I shared NO genetic links whatsoever.
Teaching the kids American English is important. A language is built around the way that the culture that uses it thinks. There are words and concepts that won’t translate properly into other languages because those languages don’t regularly deal with those words and concepts, and thus haven’t needed to create a way to describe them simply and accurately. If you want to get kids thinking like Americans, then you need to teach them to speak like Americans. You need to get them to understand the language.
That’s not *all* that you need to do. But it’s an important early step.
Which explains why they try to destroy the language.
But that’s, like, hard, y’know?
My grandparents were bilingual but raised my father and his brothers to speak only English.
Excellent, thought-provoking post; thanks one more time!
Your point that modern “educated” thought (that race defines culture and vice versa), is false is well-taken. I believe it was Wolfgang Pauli who said, about pseudoscience in general, that it’s “not even wrong”; IOW it can’t even be discussed as a scientific debate. This particular one is an assumption based solely on superficial physical characteristics, and could be easily debunked by providing huge numbers of examples of various races reared in “other” cultures who then become full members of that culture. But of course the “experts” know better, and so won’t listen.
This all reminds me of a very interesting book called The Culture Code by Clotaire Rapaille. I should track it down again. Also what if any, are y’all opinions on recent European elections, especially in France?
I think there are like three results.
One is some sort of EU body, and I dunno but potentially good?
UK, and France, I do not think these indicate real changes for the positive, yet, but perhaps more elections down stream will have good results.
Oft times it is the burned hand what teaches best.
I predict a mortal lot of burned hands in the future of those two countries.
Reportedly Le Pen’s party got the single largest chunk of the popular vote in the French elections. Unfortunately that didn’t directly translate into seats in Parliament. But I do think it’s an encouraging sign. It indicates that there’s a shift taking place there that will bear fruit… assuming the current form of French government lasts long enough.
The UK elections appear to be somewhat similar. IIRC, Labour’s representation in Parliament is all out of proportion to the percentage of the popular vote that it received. So while Labour cleaned up, subsequent elections will likely see it get hammered – assuming that the current form of British government lasts long enough.
Yeah, I read that Labour got 2/3 of the seats despite only receiving 30% of the votes. They will take complete control over a country in which 70% of the people voted against them.
Something stinks in Britain. 😦
That’s how parliamentary systems work – the total vote is literally irrelevant, it’s the seats you win that matter.
Our founders were intimately aware of the shortcomings of such, and quite intentionally structured our republican system accordingly.
Damn; I should have refreshed before posting, then I would have seen that you addressed the point. 👍👍
It can happen here, too. In a legislative election season, if a political party wins some seats by landslide majorities, but loses most by a very slight margin, then the party will clean up on the popular vote, but still lose the overall election.
That being the whole point of Gerrymandering — concentrate support for the opposition into a few precincts and win the rest by ‘just enough’.
I’m no expert, but I believe that’s a “feature” if the Parliamentary system, wherein you vote for the party and then the various parties make deals among themselves.
Thoughts from the people in the family who follow this stuff more closely:
-EU: a lot of what’s wrong with the EU is done by the permanent bureaucracy, so the populists picking up seats in the EU parliament isn’t going to make it much better or worse.
-Britain: main bright spot is the Labour Party leader makes more moderate noises than his predecessor Corbyn and has solid personal reasons for checking the antisemitic tendencies in his party. Secondary bright spot is the damage done to the Tories by Farage’s outfit. Main bad news is that Labour is all in on all those “green” technologies which don’t really work, which means in practice that they’re going to be buying really expensive nuclear-powered kilowatts from France.
-France: this was a snap election and I believe the regular one is next year, so the results are not very permanent. Best case scenario for Macron’s party is that they manage to deadlock the leftwing coalition’s plans in the Assembly, and then get back into power next year. Best case scenario for Le Pen and allies is that Macron and the leftwing party go hard on the one thing those two factions agree on – more immigration – which turn radicalizes Frenchborn citizens and more assimilated immigrants, pushing them towards Le Pen. Neither is great for France in the short term, and Le Pen and allies lack a coherent platform beyond cutting immigration and some basic family values stuff.
-For those people who were rooting for the Catalan separatists a while back: Barcelonans are attacking tourists because they claim the latter drive up the cost of housing, and Dumb Commie Mayor is proposing Dumb Commie Solutions. Then again, for a culture made up supposedly of entrepreneurs, the Catalans have a long history of falling for Dumb Commie Solutions, or believing they can exploit said Dumb Commie Solutions. On a related note, supposedly Spain’s economy is in bad shape overall.
-Italy is doing relatively okay economically, but this isn’t being widely advertised in the media because the people running the place are not in good odor with the media. Random interesting trivia: Chinese women who work in Italy are supposedly much more interested in staying there and assimilating and less interested in returning to China than their male counterparts.
-Denmark or Sweden is trying some kind of climate tax per head of livestock. One assumes this will go about as well as the anti-ag measures in France and Holland.
Denmark just apparently had a young woman get arrested because she successfully defended herself against a would-be rapist… using pepper spray. Pepper spray isn’t allowed in Denmark.
The would-be rapist slipped away before the police arrived, of course.
“We need some way to study culture that isn’t as silly, corrupted by Marxism and outright faddish as our current anthropology field.”
“I know cultures aren’t sentient, but they behave as if they were.”
May I propose the Polandball theory of cultural analysis? I mean, it’s silly, but it isn’t corrupt.
Polandball?
Vintage comic/meme format featuring anthropomorphized countries as cartoon balls.
I don’t have any good examples handy (all the ones I can find skew kind of…Reddit), so here’s the Know Your Meme page: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/polandball
…y’know, at this point, writing about my shoggoth human weaboo character is going to sound more and more rational as time goes on…especially since she’s going to try and publish her writings on the human condition and nobody is going to believe her…
I suspect that an outright alien (or an eldritch horror) might have a better understanding of humans than any Marxist.
Which is one of the big gags for her. Unlike Marxists, she actually likes human beings..,and accepts them for what they are, not what they think they should be.
Tasty and crunchable? 😏
Only some! She does have some self-respect and there are some things she won’t eat.
Kill, yes. Eat, no.
To truly understand the human condition is to look the horror of Chaos right in its ugly face. Bright, shining potential for transcendent good cheek-by-jowl with the potential for the most sickening depravity. All humans are born with both. Few ever follow one path to its end, but those who do…
….shoggoth……human…………weaboo……….
KERNEL PANIC
She’s a very nice shoggoth! (Chose female for her primary identity because it lets her get away with being more of a weaboo.) Safe around kids, small animals, and family members. Any home invasion is going to end with her lamenting that she had just cleaned up and now she’s a bloated because of the bodies.
(Hilarious story where one of the kids she’s keeping an eye on nearly gets kidnapped. Before anybody can see, she eats the kidnapper and cleans up before the kids even notice…
(After all, she’s taking care of them!)
“kernel panic” is a CPU crash. Compiler failed. Blue-screen. “Norman, co-ordinate!”
You boggled me.
…cool!
Now that it’s crashed, we can see what went wrong and fix things so it doesn’t crash again!
c4c
On a different kind of culture clash, see
https://allthatsinteresting.com/medieval-cat-skinning-portugal
Do Not Motivate Engineer Cat …
No. He’d conquer Portugal.
“Studying what a culture even IS and how much it influences the group it works with; what happens when the culture is broken or occupied; signs of a culture under attack; a culture under natural decay; a culture that’s gone toxic.”
Anthropology. I have a BA in it. Showed some promise before Franz Boas became a prof at Columbia, he’s the one to thank for Margaret Mead and the rest of that generation of Marxists.
Currently, the field is utterly corrupted, and needs to be burnt down and started over.
However, if one were going to have a go at it independent of the Ivory Tower, looking at infant mortality, food production and leisure time would not be the worst place to start.
IMHO if you have a high infant mortality rate with miserable food production and no time away from work, that’s a toxic culture. Whatever they’re doing is creating misery and death.
By contrast cultures with low infant mortality, robust food production and a hearty amount of time away from work, that’s pretty good. They’re doing well.
A culture with no infants, free food and no work, that’s the opposite end of toxic. Misery and death again. Detroit.
Most of these things are -glaringly- obvious. The solutions are generally also glaringly obvious.
The problem we have at present is the -lies- we’ve been told since before we were born. Such as, off the top of my head, income tax is a normal and natural thing, necessary for a good life in a fair country where everybody gets a share. There are plenty of places where people will absolutely scream in outrage if you suggest otherwise.
Peel all that away, and the solutions will present themselves like trained seals. Arf arf.
Eh, there’s a few anthropologists what aren’t wholly corrupted. They’re just hated, reviled, and hardly ever funded. I’ve known a few.
These days, anthropology is a sycophant’s game. There’s no money in it hardly ever, but if you’re depending on low level politicians to fill your rice bowl, you gotta appease their egos.
This has also applied to, of late, scientists of many stripes (climate science anyone?).
Maybe it’s a coping mechanism for something or other?
Like, the English “black dog” metaphor works for the type of depression to which the English are prone; the Irish “all their wars are merry, and all their songs are sad” combined with things like having a big party for a funeral, complete with laughing– it functions in a way that prevents manic-depressive spiraling.
In my family, if you want something done, you usually come to me- because I will do it right the frick now. Because if I don’t, I’ll forget to do it at all. If it’s something that’s done in steps, I’ll be done right on the clock, because if I don’t it won’t get done at all.
My mom is very similar.
My sister and aunt? Tell them the party starts at 5, if you want them there by 7.
This sounds a bit like our hostess’ theory that upper class British formal manners developed in part to make social interactions unambiguous for people with autism. I wonder if there are any more examples out there.
Individuals come up with coping mechanisms all the time. It stands to reason that cultures do the same.
Especially when problems are not uniform, but you have a higher tendency towards them with genetics.
And the upper ten thousand were a small and inbred village, genetically.
Memetics. That idea. Did that ever get ashcanned? I’m a little hazy on it.
No.
The brain-as-computer analogy is badly stretched, and often breaks down when closely examined, but sometimes it’s useful. For example, if the brain is the hardware, and conscious thought is the software running on that hardware, culture is the operating system. You’re barely aware of it most of the time, but it shapes everything you do. And while it can be replaced or adjusted, it takes a LOT of effort to do so.
So we can get back to the totally normal things like detective book store owners daughter that keeps tripping over murders, or body-stealing version of Khan, or diners run by shapeshifting dragons.
Oh, completely normal. *G*
*Tries to shove various isekai/odd urban fantasies back under bed and into closets, at least until they cough up more story….*
yeah. Normal stuff.
“African people who immigrate and make a point of acculturation often do quite well.”
On one hand, there is the question of what culture they came from, and on the other, there’s the possibility of selection bias in who chooses to immigrate.
Thomas Sowell noted that different locations within England fed different locations while emigrating, and cultural patterns could follow that.
see Albion’s Seed by David Hackett Fisher, on the persistence of cultural norms / folkways in different regions of the United States based on which regional British culture fed immigration to that part of the USA….Cavaliers, Puritans, Quakers, or Scots Irish….
}}} And as far as black misbehavior, it’s more or less standard “white trash” misbehavior, probably proceeding from people brought in in small groups or individually
I am not so sure. I think there is a strong black cultural attitude of “If it ain’t nailed down, and I can grab it, I deserve it.”
This makes “black trash” different from “white trash”, as white trash tends to be a bit less grabby.
I had a long argument over this with an ex-FB acquaintance, who whined about some instance where the cops had put a truck full of Nikes in a neighborhood that was unlocked, and then staked it out for obviously grabby types.
HE claimed it was “entrapment”. I said, no, not unless there was an undercover cop nearby who was pointing it out and saying “Free Shoes!!”
His position was that just having it there, so inviting, was “entrapment”.
And no, I don’t think a White Trash neigborhood would have done the exact same thing with a truck full of XBoxes. Sure, some would, but not the same percentage as the Black Trash did.
Again: don’t think this is a skin-color thing, but it posdef is a culture thing.
And I don’t believe that this has anything to do with black oppression — as far as actual crime goes, blacks tended to be no worse than whites in the same poverty class until, as you note, the magical wonders of LBJ’s “Corrupted Society”.
OF course there is NOW post welfare and post HOW MANY generations of being told they were done wrong by? Hell, the fact that not all of them are thieves and saboteurs means that humans are amazing.
Your example is not from right after slaves were freed. It’s not the same culture anymore, and therefore it’s rrelevant, null program.
There was a creep in my town beating sleeping homeless people to death with a baseball bat. The police put a dummy in a sleeping bag and waited for him to show up. His lawyer called that entrapment. That’s not a skin color thing that’s a lawyer BS thing. No he wasn’t black.
Entrapment? No. ‘Hunting over bait’ at most. And only for those that would consider a helpless sleeping person ‘bait’.
They were moderate.
-I- would have put an impact-actuated booby trap in the bag. Think upwards-aimed claymore with the clacker in the “head” of the bag. In that movie script I keep thinking of writing. Ahem.
A friend from high school lost several cats to a neighbor running them over. So did several other of his neighbors. Someone obtained reasonable facsimiles of housecats, and placed them over small trenches containing 2×4 chunks with some ginormous nails driven through.
Dipshit just had to hit two in one pass. Wrecked his jackkedup hickup truck. Dang.
Saw one story about a family building a 10-foot snowman in their side yard. A few days later, some jackass rammed the snowman with a jacked-up pickup truck.
What the jackass didn’t know: they’d built the snowman over a huge stump.
Final score: jackass 0, stump 1 😛
Not police entrapment.
Have heard similar snowman stories, only brick or cement encased mailboxes. Mail box front was “visible” for receiving mail. Thus any “enticement” was thrown out. Should have know mailbox was there. Not unknown for said mailboxes to be atop of steel posts, or encased in brick, given the neighborhood.
Oh, I do love a happy ending story!
That’s pretty standard trash-class. It’s part of the crab bucket.
And it’s not even only anthropology, applied cultural anthropology or (if we’re really honest and explicit, I guess), cultural engineering. (How to design, build, repair, and maintain cultures… that work. Compare with — now still largely-fictional — genetic engineering.)
Because political science, the real engineering-worthy thing not the abstraction (known almost always as “polly sigh” anyway) and ivory tower game of the same name, is useful and/or necessary too, and for much the same reasons.
Example: Mars colonization. Which due to the efforts of our real world answer to D. D. Harriman (and his flock of thousands of co-workers and fellow travellers), might actually be something we could try within a few decades, because (suddenly) we can actually get there.
But how do you feed / power / radiation-shield / supply with air and water, etc., one is far from a solved problem; but also not the end of the problems begging a solution. Also how do you seed / maintain a viable culture, under some stable and morally-defensible system of government — given that even if we try to monkey-copy functional American culture today, it probably won’t stay perfectly unchanged.
It would be nice to have some organized knowledge on that, or at the very least of the limits of our ignorance. Beforehand. And not just to do the (all-too-obvious) “fix the sick” job needed here and now.
Thomas Sowell did a two book series on culture. His conclusions are similar or at least they resonate with your back of the envelope musings. To the dismay of the geneticists.
Organizational psychology/industrial sociology MIGHT, might I say, give you some of the tools of cultural analysis without the Marxist baggage. It’s more about how to to create “cultures of innovation” or whatever within a business environment, so it’s all about how to create and sustain cultures. Their methods don’t necessarily work, nor are they sustainable, but the basic framework might be useful in terms of at least pointing where to look. Or what to avoid looking at.
Sarah, there’s a book you may want to read that discusses this in detail. Specifically, L.E. Modessitt’s book Adiamante. It looks at a human civilization and how, culturally, it can endure for thousands of years. And it’s pretty spot on – so much so, I used it as one of the books I did my thesis on. If you don’t want to read (an excellent stand-alone novel) then just read the Paradigms of Power that were the foundation of his future society:
http://www.archivesofrecluce.com/excerpts/adiamante_paradigms.html
Winning the culture war…..
https://dailycaller.com/2024/07/11/pentagon-schools-dei-kids-teachers/?pnespid=t_BkGH1cNa4I1vKYqymtGJ2DoQ60SZxncbCzmLUy9U1mNSg47O_9SagYRQ.K59dTrfS1pUbg