6 ms·

I already lost my faith in the cultural "western" elites. I hate to sound like a hardcore conservative (I am pretty leftist) but I dont see there is coming back

I already lost my faith in the cultural "western" elites. I hate to sound like a hardcore conservative (I am pretty leftist) but I dont see there is coming back from the current environment. 2+2 = 5, original English people were actually black, more diversity has been proved to generate better stock performance of the company.From the flimsiest of evidence a whole new narrative is created, one that match the social issues in vogue today.

wavefunction 6y ago
What's so hard to believe about a largely "black" (with blue eyes) population being displaced/integrated with by subsequent migrations? That scenario is supported by the myths of those islands and human migrations are the story of humanity and human cultural developments. If you want to argue with the science or point out deficiencies you're encouraged to. That's the beauty of science.
- ummonk 6y ago
  Dark-skinned people in non-fishing populations in the British Isles would have had seriously weakened immune systems from vitamin D deficiency. The theory is implausible on its face. Edit: apparently the theory is about paleolithic people (who did a lot of fishing) in Britain being dark-skinned, which is certainly believable.
  - jdminhbg 6y ago
    Fish has lots of Vitamin D in it.
    - ummonk 6y ago
      And has not been a major component of British food since the neolithic. Edit: I guess that's what the whole argument upthread is about - apparently researchers said that paleolithic british settlers were dark skinned, and became light skinned with the switch to agriculture. Which is very plausible.
- kypro 6y ago
  It's not that it's hard to believe, it's just that it's not supported by the science. Geneticists simply said that they had the genes for blue eyes while the European genes associated with fair skin were not present. What wasn't said was that they were black – that was something the media simply made up because it fit with their agenda. It seems fair to assume they were darker than modern Northern Europeans, but similarly it seems quite a stretch to assume that they were as dark as African peoples.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > but similarly it seems quite a stretch to assume that they were as dark as African peoples. “African peoples” have a pretty broad range of pigmentation, and “black” isn’t used exclusively for African people, anyhow; e.g., indigenous Australians. It's funny how White people use “black” with almost unlimited breadth right up until that challenges the original whiteness of territory they view as an ancestral homeland, and then immediately start demanding that the blackness be viewed maximally narrowly. Couldn't find a better illustration of how race is a fluid social construct.
    - dolgo 6y ago
      Fascinating that you singled out white people. The original poster could have any ethnic heritage, but you went with white. Why is that? It may be a good idea to interrogate your biases.
      - dragonwriter 6y ago
        > Fascinating that you singled out white people. The original poster could have any ethnic heritage, but you went with white. I wasn't commenting about the original poster but about the broad community that have been making this exact argument about this exact issue since it entered the public debate, and a wide number of other issues for, well, almost the entire time that population studies that would support this kind of discussion of the past have existed. (And, yes, you can see identical behavior referencing different identity divides besides white and non-white in the same period over the same broad class of past-population issues, but this specific issue of darker-skinned past inhabitants of the British Isles is one of the focuses of whites and the flexible nature of the label “black”.)
- johndrocky 6y ago
  this isn't in regards to the paleolithic - according to the modern left Richard the Lionheart was an asian immigrant that lived on curry, elizabeth I and any other historical figure else is reduced to a mulatto mob sporting product placements and virtue signaling The problem is the erasure of history and identity. It is just as ridiculous as having Dolph Lundgren play an egyptian pharoah in a film
- vmh1928 6y ago
  Focusing on skin and eye color seems imprecise and really, why even bring it up? DNA mutations or markers spread in a population. Then some members of that population travel to distant lands and intermarry (or not, maybe just die,) and spread their DNA mutations around and then die. Hundreds of year later someone sequences the DNA and says, hmm, here's a marker for X population but I found it in territory Y indicating that people moved around or were taken as slaves so there was a lot more mixing than history expects. Does your theory about the original Britons imply some direct-from-<some continent> migration? If so you'd expect markers for populations on that continent to be present in historical samples without the associated markers associated with a migration via a more lengthy route. So let's test for that which will either prove or not-prove the theory and leave the silly adjectives for twitter.
throw51319 6y ago
Yeah I agree. Also more left here. But anybody who looks at a lot of this stuff without emotion, using logic, realizes it's pushing an agenda.
xtiansimon 6y ago
> “I already lost my faith in the cultural "western" elites. I hate to sound like a hardcore conservative...” Really? This is hardly dog vivisection by the Royal Society. If it’s bad science and can be shown to be inconsistent, why ‘lose faith’? That’s what science is about.
- raducu 6y ago
  Ah, the good old "no true scotsman" argument. You can lose faith in a particular part of the scientific community without losing faith in the scientific method.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
  “ You cannot reason a man out of what he never reasoned himself into.” Attributed to Jonathan Swift The issue is that these elites did not come to their conclusion through science. They came to their conclusion because they are trying to push a certain narrative. Thus, no matter what data you show them, they will always find a way to cling to their narrative. Even worse, you might get cancelled for promulgating data and interpretations that does not fit the narrative. This is not science!
  - xtiansimon 6y ago
    > "This is not science!" This is not a response to your comment. Hahaha
asveikau 6y ago
I'm not an expert in history, but it doesn't take much reading to understand that our current national, ethnic, and racial identities are all much more recent than popularly believed, and will likely be in flux again in the future of human history. I do not think that is "2+2 = 5" thinking, that seems to just be what happens over time. I had a few head-scratching moments of realization of this when I was into learning Romance languages in my college years, which led me to read about history of various Romance-speaking countries. Look at the Latins. They were a small group in Lazio (Latium). Their culture expanded and absorbed the whole of Italy and then Europe and much of North Africa. (Well known story.) In each of these places there were distinct ethnic divisions, languages, cultures ... which shortly vanished and assimilated. We know very little of those distinctions today. The empire fell and outside sources came in, Germanic peoples, maybe Arabs and North Africans especially in the south. Eventually separate nation-states came about. Today many people assume those nations that emerged are homogeneous identities or ethnicities. They're not really. Additionally, race in the United States of course has a bunch of bullshit in its history about "white people", where "white people" is a loosely defined and moving definition. I was recently reading about very odd phrases that used to exist, like "octoroon" to describe people with 7 european great-grandparents and 1 African-descended one. They bothered having a word for this. They looked pretty much like "white people". They were discriminated against. To a lesser extent, immigrants from non British or non Germanic parts of Europe were also discriminated against as if "nonwhite". In this 1899 drawing, Anglo-Saxon and German-descended Americans are said to be racially superior to Irish and Iberians, because those are said to share traits and ancestry with black people: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Scientific_racism_irish.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Scientific_racism_ir...
- atomi 6y ago
  On a related note: Celts descended from Spanish fishermen, study finds https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/celts-descended-from-spanish-fishermen-study-finds-416727.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/celts-des...
  - asveikau 6y ago
wisty 6y ago
Universities exist to teach teenagers basic literacy skills, and maybe a few technical skills in the STEM degrees. They're mostly just high-school English teachers with a few more qualifications and better writing skills and more dedication (which what it really takes to get the qualifications). When have they been worth putting any faith in? Back when they were all theology schools? Back when the elite academic establishment drove Ignaz Semmelweis to an early grave for daring to suggest doctors wash their hands? The days of the "Invisible College" (why couldn't the enlightenment happen in a real college?)? The days of Freud?
- esperent 6y ago
  I'm honestly insulted on behalf of all my friends who studied engineering and medicine and worked 40 hours a week for 4 to 7 years to get their degrees - many of whom (including myself) were adults when they started studying. Not to mention the many hard working researchers I've met, dedicating their entire lives to furthering human knowledge for way less money than they'd make in the corporate world. And here's some guy on the web dismissing all of that as "a few technical skills for teenagers". Yes, there are some soft degrees out there, and universities have many problems, like all institutions. And I met my fair share of lazy tenured professors amongst the good ones. But come on, if you've got to dismiss people like this to make a point, there's something wrong with the way you're going about it.
  - wisty 6y ago
    > I'm honestly insulted Sorry you feel that way. > "a few technical skills for teenagers" Oh OK, yes STEM (for the most part) is pretty good. Now there are valid criticisms of the way it is done (much of the best criticism coming from within STEM schools) but nothing is perfect. > Yes, there are some soft degrees out there More than a few (https://educationdata.org/number-of-college-graduates/ https://educationdata.org/number-of-college-graduates/), and if you break it down by course I think you'll find that a lot of the most common courses are also pretty soft. To be clear, I'm not complaining about the technical courses (some of which can be very good), almost every sane person trusts scientists on questions about science. It's that once you step outside the stuff that makes clear, empirical predictions a lot of it is pretty soft and always has been (since fields which don't make predictions are never wrong so they never really learn anything).
Apofis 6y ago
"I hate to sound like a hardcore conservative"... don't make excuses for conservative views, they are not exclusive to political leanings. Being careful isn't political.
watwut 6y ago
"2+2 = 5" referred to approximations and group theory which were standard (and practically useful) math for over hundred years. T
wesleywt 6y ago
The original English neoliths were dark skinned. You don't have any evidence to support your narrative that everything was white and not diverse. The genetic and archeological evidence (such as finding metal or objects from South Europe in North Europe) is showing that people travelled widely in historic times. I don't understand why this is so controversial to right wingers?
dang 6y ago
Please don't go on generic ideological flamewar tangents here. It leads to predictable, tedious, and usually nasty threads. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=generic%20ideolog%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24508308 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24508308.
- Razengan 6y ago
  What about comments like these, dang? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24502064 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24502064 They remain up despite flagging and reporting. What value, in your mind, do these bring? (I'm mentioning this here since it's a detached thread anyway)
  - dang 6y ago
    Of course that's a bad comment, but would you please stop posting so many bad ones yourself? It just makes things worse.

wavefunction 6y ago

What's so hard to believe about a largely "black" (with blue eyes) population being displaced/integrated with by subsequent migrations? That scenario is supported by the myths of those islands and human migrations are the story of humanity and human cultural developments. If you want to argue with the science or point out deficiencies you're encouraged to. That's the beauty of science.

ummonk 6y ago
Dark-skinned people in non-fishing populations in the British Isles would have had seriously weakened immune systems from vitamin D deficiency. The theory is implausible on its face. Edit: apparently the theory is about paleolithic people (who did a lot of fishing) in Britain being dark-skinned, which is certainly believable.
- jdminhbg 6y ago
  Fish has lots of Vitamin D in it.
  - ummonk 6y ago
    And has not been a major component of British food since the neolithic. Edit: I guess that's what the whole argument upthread is about - apparently researchers said that paleolithic british settlers were dark skinned, and became light skinned with the switch to agriculture. Which is very plausible.
kypro 6y ago
It's not that it's hard to believe, it's just that it's not supported by the science. Geneticists simply said that they had the genes for blue eyes while the European genes associated with fair skin were not present. What wasn't said was that they were black – that was something the media simply made up because it fit with their agenda. It seems fair to assume they were darker than modern Northern Europeans, but similarly it seems quite a stretch to assume that they were as dark as African peoples.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > but similarly it seems quite a stretch to assume that they were as dark as African peoples. “African peoples” have a pretty broad range of pigmentation, and “black” isn’t used exclusively for African people, anyhow; e.g., indigenous Australians. It's funny how White people use “black” with almost unlimited breadth right up until that challenges the original whiteness of territory they view as an ancestral homeland, and then immediately start demanding that the blackness be viewed maximally narrowly. Couldn't find a better illustration of how race is a fluid social construct.
  - dolgo 6y ago
    Fascinating that you singled out white people. The original poster could have any ethnic heritage, but you went with white. Why is that? It may be a good idea to interrogate your biases.
    - dragonwriter 6y ago
      > Fascinating that you singled out white people. The original poster could have any ethnic heritage, but you went with white. I wasn't commenting about the original poster but about the broad community that have been making this exact argument about this exact issue since it entered the public debate, and a wide number of other issues for, well, almost the entire time that population studies that would support this kind of discussion of the past have existed. (And, yes, you can see identical behavior referencing different identity divides besides white and non-white in the same period over the same broad class of past-population issues, but this specific issue of darker-skinned past inhabitants of the British Isles is one of the focuses of whites and the flexible nature of the label “black”.)
johndrocky 6y ago
this isn't in regards to the paleolithic - according to the modern left Richard the Lionheart was an asian immigrant that lived on curry, elizabeth I and any other historical figure else is reduced to a mulatto mob sporting product placements and virtue signaling The problem is the erasure of history and identity. It is just as ridiculous as having Dolph Lundgren play an egyptian pharoah in a film
vmh1928 6y ago
Focusing on skin and eye color seems imprecise and really, why even bring it up? DNA mutations or markers spread in a population. Then some members of that population travel to distant lands and intermarry (or not, maybe just die,) and spread their DNA mutations around and then die. Hundreds of year later someone sequences the DNA and says, hmm, here's a marker for X population but I found it in territory Y indicating that people moved around or were taken as slaves so there was a lot more mixing than history expects. Does your theory about the original Britons imply some direct-from-<some continent> migration? If so you'd expect markers for populations on that continent to be present in historical samples without the associated markers associated with a migration via a more lengthy route. So let's test for that which will either prove or not-prove the theory and leave the silly adjectives for twitter.

throw51319 6y ago

Yeah I agree. Also more left here. But anybody who looks at a lot of this stuff without emotion, using logic, realizes it's pushing an agenda.

xtiansimon 6y ago

> “I already lost my faith in the cultural "western" elites. I hate to sound like a hardcore conservative...” Really? This is hardly dog vivisection by the Royal Society. If it’s bad science and can be shown to be inconsistent, why ‘lose faith’? That’s what science is about.

raducu 6y ago
Ah, the good old "no true scotsman" argument. You can lose faith in a particular part of the scientific community without losing faith in the scientific method.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
“ You cannot reason a man out of what he never reasoned himself into.” Attributed to Jonathan Swift The issue is that these elites did not come to their conclusion through science. They came to their conclusion because they are trying to push a certain narrative. Thus, no matter what data you show them, they will always find a way to cling to their narrative. Even worse, you might get cancelled for promulgating data and interpretations that does not fit the narrative. This is not science!
- xtiansimon 6y ago
  > "This is not science!" This is not a response to your comment. Hahaha

asveikau 6y ago

I'm not an expert in history, but it doesn't take much reading to understand that our current national, ethnic, and racial identities are all much more recent than popularly believed, and will likely be in flux again in the future of human history. I do not think that is "2+2 = 5" thinking, that seems to just be what happens over time. I had a few head-scratching moments of realization of this when I was into learning Romance languages in my college years, which led me to read about history of various Romance-speaking countries. Look at the Latins. They were a small group in Lazio (Latium). Their culture expanded and absorbed the whole of Italy and then Europe and much of North Africa. (Well known story.) In each of these places there were distinct ethnic divisions, languages, cultures ... which shortly vanished and assimilated. We know very little of those distinctions today. The empire fell and outside sources came in, Germanic peoples, maybe Arabs and North Africans especially in the south. Eventually separate nation-states came about. Today many people assume those nations that emerged are homogeneous identities or ethnicities. They're not really. Additionally, race in the United States of course has a bunch of bullshit in its history about "white people", where "white people" is a loosely defined and moving definition. I was recently reading about very odd phrases that used to exist, like "octoroon" to describe people with 7 european great-grandparents and 1 African-descended one. They bothered having a word for this. They looked pretty much like "white people". They were discriminated against. To a lesser extent, immigrants from non British or non Germanic parts of Europe were also discriminated against as if "nonwhite". In this 1899 drawing, Anglo-Saxon and German-descended Americans are said to be racially superior to Irish and Iberians, because those are said to share traits and ancestry with black people: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Scientific_racism_irish.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Scientific_racism_ir...

atomi 6y ago
On a related note: Celts descended from Spanish fishermen, study finds https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/celts-descended-from-spanish-fishermen-study-finds-416727.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/celts-des...
- asveikau 6y ago

wisty 6y ago

Universities exist to teach teenagers basic literacy skills, and maybe a few technical skills in the STEM degrees. They're mostly just high-school English teachers with a few more qualifications and better writing skills and more dedication (which what it really takes to get the qualifications). When have they been worth putting any faith in? Back when they were all theology schools? Back when the elite academic establishment drove Ignaz Semmelweis to an early grave for daring to suggest doctors wash their hands? The days of the "Invisible College" (why couldn't the enlightenment happen in a real college?)? The days of Freud?

esperent 6y ago
I'm honestly insulted on behalf of all my friends who studied engineering and medicine and worked 40 hours a week for 4 to 7 years to get their degrees - many of whom (including myself) were adults when they started studying. Not to mention the many hard working researchers I've met, dedicating their entire lives to furthering human knowledge for way less money than they'd make in the corporate world. And here's some guy on the web dismissing all of that as "a few technical skills for teenagers". Yes, there are some soft degrees out there, and universities have many problems, like all institutions. And I met my fair share of lazy tenured professors amongst the good ones. But come on, if you've got to dismiss people like this to make a point, there's something wrong with the way you're going about it.
- wisty 6y ago
  > I'm honestly insulted Sorry you feel that way. > "a few technical skills for teenagers" Oh OK, yes STEM (for the most part) is pretty good. Now there are valid criticisms of the way it is done (much of the best criticism coming from within STEM schools) but nothing is perfect. > Yes, there are some soft degrees out there More than a few (https://educationdata.org/number-of-college-graduates/ https://educationdata.org/number-of-college-graduates/), and if you break it down by course I think you'll find that a lot of the most common courses are also pretty soft. To be clear, I'm not complaining about the technical courses (some of which can be very good), almost every sane person trusts scientists on questions about science. It's that once you step outside the stuff that makes clear, empirical predictions a lot of it is pretty soft and always has been (since fields which don't make predictions are never wrong so they never really learn anything).

Apofis 6y ago

"I hate to sound like a hardcore conservative"... don't make excuses for conservative views, they are not exclusive to political leanings. Being careful isn't political.

watwut 6y ago

"2+2 = 5" referred to approximations and group theory which were standard (and practically useful) math for over hundred years. T

wesleywt 6y ago

The original English neoliths were dark skinned. You don't have any evidence to support your narrative that everything was white and not diverse. The genetic and archeological evidence (such as finding metal or objects from South Europe in North Europe) is showing that people travelled widely in historic times. I don't understand why this is so controversial to right wingers?

dang 6y ago

Please don't go on generic ideological flamewar tangents here. It leads to predictable, tedious, and usually nasty threads. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=generic%20ideolog%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24508308 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24508308.

Razengan 6y ago
What about comments like these, dang? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24502064 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24502064 They remain up despite flagging and reporting. What value, in your mind, do these bring? (I'm mentioning this here since it's a detached thread anyway)
- dang 6y ago
  Of course that's a bad comment, but would you please stop posting so many bad ones yourself? It just makes things worse.