I read once of this “third gender” group in India called the hijaras. They’re basically transgender women — born male, operated on to be more ‘feminine’. Many of them cannot afford hormone treatment due to poverty but they typically get castrated in order to remove testosterone out of the equation. They tend to live on the street, many engage in prostitution.

Are they just a band of poor misfits in society? Perhaps. But there is an extremely sinister side to this group… hijaras cannot reproduce, being eunuchs. They cannot marry or adopt a child either. But they frequently yearn for some sense of ‘motherhood’ and thus gangs of hijaras tend to take in street children. Always little boys, never little girls. Orphans who nobody wants or cares for. And they turn them into hijaras, too.

Because a hijara isn’t always born… a hijara is often made. The little boy will be dressed like a girl by his “caring aunties”, treated like and addressed as female. And he will be emasculated in some back alley surgeon’s dirty operating room, if not by the hijaras themselves. Now he has no choice… who would ever marry the young eunuch? He is a part of ‘the tribe’ now. No way back. He’s as good as untouchable.

The sinister way in which gangs of street-dwelling Indian transgenders take in young boys and turn them into fellow hijaras is disgusting and hardly ever talked about. The very young age of their victims and their lowly status as homeless orphans causes much of society to simply turn a blind eye to this atrocity but if you ask me, these gangs ought to be rounded up...

Yes. History shows that diversity plus proximity equals conflict. Multicultural societies destroy trust and other forms of social capital and produce politics based on competing ethnic blocks, which is totally at odds with the western tradition which was only ever ‘universalist’ in the context of highly homogenous societies.

Name a successful ‘multicultural’ society. There are none. Every purported example is either either a flat out fantasy or an empire in which one group dominates all the others and allows them to exist in their own separate areas as internal vassal nations.

Then look at the modern West falling into the inevitable mess of ethnic conflict while the establishment dials the propaganda up to 11 in an attempt to keep a lid on things for just a while longer (ie until the current incumbents have shuffled safely off to retirement).

At the moment most Western countries are at the stage where there is a fragile alliance of convenience between minority blocks, held together by a shared interest in appropriating the declining majority’s wealth, influence and status. This occurs under the leadership of a cynical faction of the majority elite which sees such a ‘last man standing’ strategy as the only viable one for maintaining its influence in the medium term. This is obviously a stage that has passed the point of no return and which will collapse into an openly multilateral ethnic conflict once the majority declines far enough that it no longer has a decisive influence on the course of events. And following that, you will likely get a new dominant ethnic group openly imposing an imperial order on the rest (perhaps under the pretence of a universalist ideology), or else a breakup of the political unit.

Well, “destroy” is too strong a word, but it certainly changes a country. It depends who you let in, and how many. Immigration can be good, OK or disastrous. If you let in 200 University professors, that is going to benefit your country. If you let in 1,000 illiterate peasants and criminals, however, or the inhabitants of a third world slum, that is going to make your country worse.

I am sick of liberals telling me that immigration is automatically a good thing. Of course it isn’t, and we all know it isn’t. Even if the immigrants are educated and law-abiding, they are still going to change your culture and identity. If, for example, millions of Japanese people move to Russia, Russia’s racial and cultural identity will change. If Korea lets in millions of Mexicans (to take another random example), again, that will change Korea’s racial and cultural identity. It’s a simple fact.

In the UK, we have many Indian immigrants. In general, they are intelligent, hard-working and civilised. You rarely hear of Indian boys selling drugs or stabbing rival gang members. Many of our doctors and surgeons are Indian as well. Now, in the case of Indian immigration it has been a success. But there are some immigrant groups who, in my opinion, have made the UK worse. I won’t add any more because I will probably get banned.

White Europeans are hardly reproducing. On our doorstep, however, we have Africa, with the highest birth rate in the world. Every year, thousands of young African men illegally enter the EU. If we let Africa’s booming young population move here, it is going to change Europe forever – racially, culturally, politically. Why is it OK for the Japanese to say no to mass immigration? And the Chinese? They say that they want to preserve their cultural and racial identity, and no one has problem with that. But when Europeans say the same thing, we are called Nazis and fascists!

I’m going to go with climate change. Part of it is due to overpopulation, which would have happened anyway, but much of it’s because we got too smart and efficient for our own good, and didn’t quite realize (or care) about the cumulative damage it was having on our “home.”

What does this have to do with “society”? Ask anyone who’s suffered health problems due to poor air quality or prolonged heat overexposure, lost their livelihoods due to crop failure and overfishing, lost their homes in flash floods or wildfires, or even been driven from their homelands altogether.

Yes, we are managing to repair the holes in the ozone layer — that was the big fear in the 1980s as I recall — but the problem is so much greater. And anyone reading this is lucky in many respects: it’s not so bad right now, and many of us will live out our natural lives in these, “not so bad” times.

To paraphrase a quote I read recently, ‘This may be the hottest summer you can remember, but for your kids it may be the coolest summer they remember.’

Gen Z is already embracing climate activism — and there’s a reason Greta Thunberg was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, regardless of what you may think of her as an individual.

They say Gen Z’s children — Gen AA as I think they’re sometimes called — will be the first to get hit hard by the climate crisis. Society all over the world will be affected, by something like seven times the extreme weather events we’re experiencing now. Imagine a Maui wildfire every 6 weeks or so, or average daily temperatures topping 120 degrees in the summer.

Yes, we can likely use our human brainpower and technology to fix or mitigate it, but it will take cooperation on a global scale far greater than the banning of CFCs in the mid-90s.

I won’t be around to witness it, and I don’t have kids so that’s a plus, I suppose. But for the sake of my nieces and nephews and everyone else’s, I’m hoping we, as a society, figure it out.

During the 90’s and 2000’s parents went out of their way to protect and insulate their children from anything that could be considered difficult, upsetting, or otherwise challenging. This approach to parenting has backfired, resulting in a significant number of young adults who are fragile and unable to cope with anything that is in opposition to their limited world views. This certainly isn’t all young adults and likely only a small percentage, but the ones who fall into this category are extremely vocal. The catch-all term for these differing (and therefor upsetting) words, beliefs, viewpoints, political stances, etc is “offensive.”

Among certain groups, status can be gained by being the most offended person in your social group. One is able to gain sympathy, respect, and in a twisted way dominance, over his or her peers by being playing up the ways in which the rest of society is out to get you. Minor misunderstandings, perceived slights, or even fictional situations in books, become opportunities for hysterics.

Perhaps most importantly, sharing these hysterics on social media is a way to further increase sympathy and demonize those who are in disagreement with you. This creates a chain reaction, causing others to pile on and punish the perceived offender. Instead of confronting the person privately and asking for an explanation or apology, sport has been made of collectively and publicly shaming those who have made mistakes or simply have a different viewpoint. Additional status can be unlocked by calling out things that you might not personally find offensive, but you think others might find offensive based on their own views. This has led to our current “call-out culture” and for those involved, finding new and creative ways to be offended feeds into this toxic culture and helps participants score status points among their peers.

In Afghanistan, there exists this centuries-old heinous practice called “Bacha Bazi” (Persian for “Boy Play”).

What is it?

Well, it is a custom consisting of systematic sexual abuse of young boys by older men. The boys range from the age of 9 to 18.

These boys are either coerced, kidnapped or purchased, and are forced into “sexual entertainment”. They’re made to dress like women and dance in a sensual manner in the gathering of older men. Child prostitution and sexual slavery also forms a part of it. The men making these boys do these things are often powerful, and could be warlords, police officials, politicians, tribal leaders, or other influential men. Often, these men consider owning “dancing boys” as a symbol of high social status.

These boys live a life of misery, suffering rape, abuse, and other kinds of exploitation. If they try to escape, they’re beaten or even murdered. Those who succeed in escaping, they’re shunned by their families and the society, and end up becoming beggars, drug addicts, or criminals, while also enduring the consequences of their abuse. Those who don’t escape, continue to suffer.

When these boys become too old for this vile custom, many of them, to earn their livelihood, then get into the business of child trafficking, as in bringing young boys to the pedophiles engaging in Bacha Bazi.

When Taliban came to power in the 90s, they outlawed this practice, but it was hardly enforced. Sometimes, even the victim boys were punished instead of the actual perpetrators. After the ouster of the Taliban 2001, Bachcha Bazi increased exponentially, with the authorities and security forces often being either direct perpetrators or complicit in the exploitation of children.

During the presence of US troops in Afghanistan, many American soldiers were disgusted upon seeing these young boys being exploited like this. However, as per a report by NY Times, their higher ups instructed them to not interfere, as doing so might mean that their Afghan allies that were fighting besides them against the Taliban, may turn hostile.

In the last decade, the Afghan government made several promises of investigating and severely punishing child sexual abusers in the military. However, despite their promises, the cases kept on rising. And now that Taliban is back in power, there’s obviously no way that any government from the outside can pressure them to act on it.

As of today, Bacha Bazi still remains a widespread practice in Afghanistan, with more and more young boys falling prey to powerful pedophiles, having their lives ruined forever. It is shameful that this “cultural practice”, which is not only disturbing but downright evil, finds its place in the 21st century.

Image Source: Deccan Chronicle

Footnotes

Q: What is the most destructive human emotion?

I think it is pride.

I think pride is at the root of many wars.

Fear of embarrassment drives us to do some pretty silly things. And I use the word drive on purpose. Because I remember well seeing a police chase. It ended up involving a whole bunch of police cars, and a helicopter or two. And the end of the chase got put on the news.

It involved a fellow who was driving, and wearing a dress. I do not know what the original infraction was, if any. But the gent, afraid to be pulled over, while wearing a dress, chose to run from the cops.

Had he simply stopped for the first cop, he could have explained away the dress as a costume for a party. Or a part in a show. Or a dare/bet he had made with friends. The cop might have raised an eyebrow. Might have doubted his story. Or might not have cared at all.

But his pride, it motivated him to run. And the result? Him splashed all over the news, climbing out of his pickup truck, in his dress, while scads of cops, guns pointed, and news people, cameras pointed, witnessed the whole affair. 1000 times the negative impact. And for sure, whoever he most wished would not see him in his dress, surely did.

By a large margin, his pride was his own undoing. Though I do not know the rest of his story. Perhaps it was a blessing in disguise, his inadvertent “coming out” of the pickup, proclivity on full display. Maybe it led to the rest of his life being more self-true. I really do not know.

But certainly, in the moment, his pride, his fear of embarrassment, led him to a moment he surely did not consciously desire.

Pride can make people hurt others, in order to feed their own ego.

Pride was surely a part of Hitler’s composure, and in the collective memory of humanity, he rots in a reviled hell. Not before he destroyed many, many, many lives. And it seems made his own end less than optimally.

We should believe in ourselves. Love ourselves. Have self confidence. But not put ourselves above others. Sometimes easier said than done. It can be a tightrope.

…..

That’s my vote, anyways. For the most destructive emotion. Pride.

A combination of “The Peter Principal” and greedy lawyers.

The Peter Principal, as explained in the book, holds that managers in a business rise through the ranks until they reach their level of incompetence, and rather than being demoted, they stay there. This is generally summarized as: “Cream rises to the top, and then sours”. What most people don’t realize is that this principal can apply to other things than business managers — things like social or political movements. The liberals of the ’60s ended a bad war, passed the Civil Rights Act, and established women’s equality in law, and then Gay equality. After that, with the major bigotries in American society defeated, they had no bias of equal gravity to oppose. Liberalism could have sat back and rested on its laurels, but the next generation wanted some righteous cause to pursue, and there was nothing obvious around. Enter the Southern Poverty Law Center, which had made its fame (and money) fighting cases that applied the Civil Rights Act, and it wasn’t about to give up its lucrative lawsuits. The only way to keep the lawsuits (and the fund-raising) coming was to find more and more applications for the CRA, which meant finer and finer definitions for “racism” or “sexism”. Soon enough, academics — especially law professors — got into the game. The icing on the cake was the infiltration of creeping Jihadism into law and academia too, whereby victimization became politically as well as financially profitable. Today there’s a whole industry built around the professionally offended.

The solution, besides the growing disgust with Political Correctitude, would be a revival of lawsuits for “barratry”, “legal harassment”, and “malicious prosecution.”

Yes.

The multiculturalism now being foisted upon the West is nothing more than a very transparent mask worn by people who feel a bizarre and uncontrollable need to bash Western Civilization — the one civilzation that, for the most part, has gotten things right, as evidenced by how many people are desperate to live here and how few, if any, seem determined to leave, which demonstrates what Milton Friedman meant when he said people, when given the chance, would “vote with their feet.”

People of different races, faiths, and ethnicities can no doubt sometimes live in harmony with one another, but that harmony only exists when the members of these groups are commited to assimilating into the dominant culture.

Due to the many profound ways that different cultures express opposing values that can lead to conflicting lifestyles, no one should be surprised that when large numbers of people refuse to assimilate and respect the larger culture, the results range from unpleasant to catastrophic

It is preposterous to conclude that the innumerable and very well-publicized clashes, both great and small, which have antagonized virtually everyone who lives in a society aspiring to become multicultural, can somehow be deemed a strength.

And these clashes are only exacerbated by the dogmatic and almost never critically examined proposition that all cultures are equal.

Even the most deluded postmodern mind should recognize the absurdity of the notion that all cultures are equal and that the cultures from which people are desperate to flee and the culture to which they are risking everything in order to reach deserve the same respect.

The rule of law, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, free and fair elections, a free press, the prosperity created by free people and free markets, the separation of church and state, self-reliance, science over superstition, reason instead of dogma, and civil discourse rather than mob violence are just some of the values that have conspired to create an earthly paradise for those fortunate enough to live in the West while, at the same time, creating a tantalizing beacon of salvation for the many hopeful but unfortunate souls from around the world who have only known grueling poverty and unspeakable oppression.

Considering all the good things the West has to offer, it's hard to understand why anyone would defend the many shameless, uninformed and irrational attacks directed at the history and achievements of a civlization that has produced more security, freedom, and prosperity than what most people around the world could even imagine.

Multiculturalists propagate the false notion that all cultures are equal but will then rhapsodize about the so-called merits and beauty of nearly every culture that has ever come in contact with the West, while bitterly describing Western Culture as racist, oppressive and patriarchal.

The proponents of multiculturalism defend their political battles and social movements as the natural expression of a popular and noble crusade spontaneosly formed in order to defeat the oppressive forces of greed and hatred, which we are supposed to believe represent the dominant characteristics of Western Civilization, while they, of course, purposely ignore entirely the many atrocities and horrendous living conditions that are prevalent around the world.

Multiculturalists direct all, or nearly all, of their ire at the West, which, they seem convinced, requires, by far, the most reform.

And because of the increasingly powerful force of political correctness, thoughtful and uncensored public discussions of any allegedly sensitive subject associated with multiculturalism have become almost impossible.

Tolerance for opposing political views has now almost completely vanished in academia where freedom of speech was once extolled but is now the place where speakers are routinely ridiculed and ostracized for their audacity to question the merits of multiculturalism and defend Western Civilization against charges that the West is racist, sexist, xenophobic, and homophobic, to name just the most popular of the many disparaging epithets that Western critic's revel in spewing.

Whether in a public conference or in a private conversation, clear and sturdy boundaries have now been constructed to distinguish opinions that may be safely expressed from those that, however thoughtful, are never to be spoken out loud, lest the speaker is prepared to face the specter of immediate social and professional ostracism.

When the direction of a discussion must immediately be altered or suspended altogether in order to protect the feelings of anyone who may claim to have been offended, what remains of that discussion will be less than useless.

Because criticism of the West can no longer be questioned and polite, rational, uncensorsed public discussions of multiculturalism are no longer possible, the unchallenged criticism of Western culture has now devolved, at least for some of us, into a self-loathing disgust that distorts our history, damages our prestige, saps our energy, destroys our confidence, and makes it far less likely that the West generally and the United States in particular will have the necessary strength and resolve to act decisively the next time the world needs to be saved as was the case at least three times during the last century.

Multiculturalism is now being championed by far too many people despite very little serious discussion of its merits and consequences. And this criticism of the West, which has now become synonymous with so-called common sense, will never lead to any kind of healthy reform so long as the critics of Western Civilization are themselves protected from criticism – and, if left unchallenged, this criticism will almost certainly threaten our way of life and eventually our survival.

In my opinion, the tenets of multiculturalism foster neither tolerance or diversity but are instead a form of political correctness designed to silence those among us who value a way of life here in the West which was created by people who made enormous sacrifices to ensure that their descendants could enjoy a better life than what they themselves had experienced.

Despite all the many vociferous assertions to the contrary, it seems to me that multiculturalism is best understood as a powerful and uncompromising force that has now become the very antithesis of the reasonable and voluntary assimilation that the West once expected from its citizens so we would all feel, despite our many differences, that we were one people whose primary allegiance in a dangerous world, after God and family, was to a country that made us proud and a civilization that could best be described as the greatest that has ever existed.

I believe that the proponents of multiculturalism are not, as they allege, bringing people together in an atmosphere of mutual respect but are instead driving us further apart with consequences that, though difficult to predict precisely, may nonetheless prove catastrophic.

History seems to suggest that the freedom for which our ancestors fought and died, the order that we have voluntarily imposed upon ourselves, and the prosperity that we often take for granted are quite rare and much more fragile than most of us realize. Considering all that we risk losing, I would think it extremely unwise to experiment with the fundamental nature of our culture more than a very little.

But unlike the multiculturalists, I am not suggesting that anyone should be silenced or that we have reached a stage in history that demands that we become as intolerant as those who, to state it charitably, are unwittingly extolling intolerance; instead, I am suggesting that before it becomes too late, this conflict — the outcome of which, I believe, will control the fate of our civilization — must be resolved on the basis of open discussion and vigorous debate.

Despite its great accomplishments, the West has known some very dark periods. No rational person should want to risk reviving any of the deadly forces which periodically appear throughout history, grow very quickly, inflict unspeakable horrors, and then disappear, never becoming dead and buried, only sleeping, and never very soundly.

Accordingly, if the critics of Western Civilization, who claim that the West is violent, intolerant and chauvinistic, continue to shout their views above the rest of us in order to drown out any opposing opinion they feel ill-equipped to politely discuss or thoughtfully debate, then I would say that these critics should not be too surprised if they eventually get what they claim they fear most.

I don't know if I am justified in presenting it as the singularly most destructive emotional energy that humans possess, but on an individualistic level it causes a lot of damage in many aspects of interpersonal interactions and the problem with it is that we can become shaped by the actions of others, as Cooley illustrates in his theory of “the looking glass self” he identifies that for some people, the names they are called and the way we are treat, ultimately can shape the way we perceive ourselves

Jealousy can arise when people have something we don't - it can affect the way poor people see the rich and it can affect the way that a beautiful girl can be made to feel like she has done something wrong when other girls get jealous or boys want that which they can't have.

Clever kids are more likely to get picked on by others who sense their own lacking - they want to do well at tests, they wish that they could impress teachers and peers - but they can't and so they project that onto those who have abilities.

And that is the affect that jealousy can have - it makes people who have done nothing wrong, feel like they have.

It's is often about things that none of us have control over - a beautiful person never asked to be born that way. Nobody asked to be born with silver spoons choking them, did they? And a lot of clever kids have to learn to dumb down quick and laugh at stuff that they don't even find funny - just so people don't wrongly assume that they actually feel, in anyway superior to anybody else.

It' all just seems like a whole waste of life, to spend time acting on such a useless emotion.

I would feel different about it if more people seemed willing to become more like that which they covet; to work to learn to become more clever, to groom and excercise to beautify - if that is what is important to them; to work hard and earn riches IF they wish to acquire them and live a luxurious life.

If the emotion of “wanting that which you don't have" wasn't jealousy, if it became “inspiration” then it would be beneficial, more so than the bitching, backstabbing, sabotage and spiteful destructiveness that it can actually lead to, often.

It makes clever; wealthy; beautiful; funny; popular people feel like they should feel shame and know that they are begrudged.

I can't see that anything good comes from that emotion; it's purely unproductive and trully destructive.

Is everyone “offended by everything”?

Or did people who were always offended, for good reason, get to actually start speaking up because they didn’t get lynched anymore?

It took until the 1960s or so for American free speech to allow you to “offend” the government with relative impunity. In much of the rest of the world, libel laws are restrictive enough that if McDonald’s gets offended, they can try to sue. Truth is not an absolute defense to libel everywhere. So is that “offense”? Conservatives accuse liberals of wanting censorship, while voting for a man who has talked openly about opening up the libel laws, calls all dissenting opinions “fake news”, and has restricted press freedoms. So who’s the “snowflake” who gets “triggered”?

Let’s talk about the South for a moment. If a black man or woman in the pre-Jim Crow South got a little too loud, did people say “That’s offensive”? Or did those folks get strung up, or beaten?

I shouldn’t have to explain that the “n-word” isn’t just something that offends people but is actually, you know, scary, in that it often accompanies fairly bad behavior. I shouldn’t have to explain that women worried about sexual harassment aren’t frigid people but have a real concern that their co-workers may grope, attack, or undermine them to the point that it makes it impossible to work. I shouldn’t have to explain that anti-gay and anti-trans slurs are part of a broader social stigma that exposes them to serious risk of physical attack, workplace discrimination, and limitation of their latitudes. Meanwhile, a Christian not getting their cup

So, to me, the idea that marginalized people just suddenly became whiners is nonsense. They swallowed incredible problems, and still do. One could say that the new generation of, say, people of color are louder and more “offended”, but is that even true? The Black Panthers were plenty loud and plenty willing to call things racist.

Therefore, the only interesting question is why people who aren’t in marginalized communities may be being more offended than before. I don’t know if this is true, incidentally. Again, it’s easy to point to whites today being mad at being called “white boy” or “mayo boy”, but I have to imagine plenty of powerful white men in the past were quite chuffed when they had to deal with rudeness from someone of the lower classes. Someone would have to find a way of operationalizing offense-taking, then measure its frequency over time. But let’s grant for a moment that it’s the case.

Some part of it is disingenuous. As the excellent Innuendo Studios notes, those who really don’t believe in safe spaces, or slurs as dangerous, or diversity, or anything else, will happily appropriate that rhetoric. They do that for a few reasons. First: It muddies the waters. When a neo-Nazi calls themselves an “identitarian”, it makes it that much harder for legitimate identity politics to happen… which is something the Nazi is perfectly fine with, because they will do just fine in a world where identity politics become more toxic and violent. Second: Left-wing rhetoric works and is popular. When feminists would create safe spaces for women, such as victims of abuse and rape, to talk, men’s rights activists quite naturally thought that they should get their own space to talk about men’s issues. And this isn’t even inappropriate, by the way, until the MRA wants to claim that they are the same thing. It’s fine for husbands to have a conversation in a support group and let off steam about their families, but it’s not the same as a support group for domestic violence. (Of course, there are male-led support groups for domestic violence and rape that affected men, and these are comparable and should be treated with similar respect).

In other words, this culture of offense will inevitably start to fade.

Some part of it is just sheer ignorance. If you’re privileged but relatively decent, you might hear the concern over the n-word as being one about courtesy rather than justice. Now, the hypothetical you in that case wouldn’t be wrong: it’s certainly uncourteous to use a slur. But the Bo Bice “white boy” example is an indication of where that can mislead us. We can put aside that the term “white boy” is, on its face, fairly benign, indeed a relatively affectionate diminuitive, compared to comparable slurs like “coon” or “porch monkey” which are by their very etymology dehumanizing. Even if “white boy” were exactly comparable to the n-word, the difference is about four hundred years of slavery, oppression, lynchings and systemic terror.

I get it. It can feel appropriate to engage in one-upsmanship, a kind of “me-tooism”, when other people have a serious problem. I’ve seen it in the friends of cancer patients, in the acquaintances of rape victims, and in everyone else. We instinctively want to make sure that the recognition that someone else has had a very serious thing happen to them won’t undercut compassion to us. Very occasionally, the reaction can even be appropriate. Most of the time, though, it’s something we as adults need to move through and gain perspective on, hopefully through empathy and humility.

Some part of non-marginalized groups using the language of offense, pride and counter-dehumanization is in fact a very positive thing. The opening up of the culture to discussing real harm helps everyone. Plenty of men, white folks, straight folks, cis-gender folks, etc. will benefit from the norm that we all get to talk about our feelings, deal with offense and express their concerns.

Some of it is a result of right-wing Christianity. Christianity often leads to a persecution complex, due to the Gospels seeming to sell the idea that the Christian will always be persecuted. If other groups that are not viewed as part of the folk community by evangelical white Christians push for their rights, this will lead to a feeling of persecution and therefore offense. We’ve seen it with gay marriage, we’ve seen it with trans rights. There’s always a claim that “those people” are just feigning wanting equal rights and that once they have gay marriage, they’ll just keep pushing for more until we live in a… homocracy I guess? (Never mind that this is of course absolute bull as an excuse goes, since “Someone might ask for something they don’t deserve later” is in no universe a rational reason to deprive someone of something that they do deserve).

But there’s a deeper issue.

Marginalized people beginning to express themselves and push for equity will always lead to a pushback. This is because of the very nature of power and privilege.

In order to accept power and privilege, at some level, folks have to believe that not only do they deserve it but those Others don’t. That means that one has to expect that those Others will try to take it if they get half a chance, because, well, they’re undeserving. This is where Schrodinger’s Racist comes from: one really can note that the immigrants are here to take our jobs and also to take our welfare, because they’re not so much individual people as a kind of vague ooze. (Incidentally, Jason Richwine tried to pretend that the two accusations of welfare mooching and work make sense simultaneously because, well, low-income workers do get welfare. But Jason, that’s not the point. The point is that the rhetoric is simultaneously that immigrants take our jobs and also that they’re lazy moochers. Low-income workers who use welfare because they work hard and need help isn’t what the right wing is talking about, Jason, and you know it. And that’s before we discuss how immigrants actually don’t get anywhere near the public services they pay in for).

This is a matter of social science, incidentally, not mere speculation. When a group is used to power, they implicitly will accept a zero-sum game. It’s precisely the framing that they and you can’t have stuff at the same time that allows privilege to exist, after all; otherwise, you’d be insisting that everyone have the same amount of stuff as you.

So when some people express that transphobic slurs make their jobs not only difficult to do but dangerous, or that the rhetoric of “law and order” dehumanizes them and leads to direct threats to their communities, or that Islamophobia contributes to real harm to Muslim communities, under a zero-sum framing those outside of those communities have to find their own offense. Otherwise, they’re losing.

And that is made worse by a culture that tends toward competitive and dehumanizing trends due to the specific form of corporate capitalism at play in our society.

So how do we deal with it? Well, we have to lower people’s defensiveness on all sides and hope to make clear that gains for some don’t have to come with losses for others. In fact, fighting for someone else to not be dehumanized helps protect you from dehumanization in the future, by destroying the norm that makes dehumanization acceptable.

But it’ll also help when folks stop just assuming that they know what other people are going through and try just listening.

There is Carthage and there is Rome.

Rival societies can seek ultimate triumph by obliterating their archenemy. But long-term dominant societies have succeeded in maintaining empire by suzerainty and acculturation, enforced occasionally by military presence.

There are fewer cases of salt sown upon ashes than of seeds planted in dominated soil. There were vast advantages to joining an empire, even if by force, if the local society could maintain some sense of identity.

But empires eventually disintegrated and local rulers re-asserted control, often becoming rivals with each other in seeking dominance.

Hitler sought the obliteration of Russian peoples because Stalin was a rival for total power over the Eurasian Continent. Operation Barbarossa was war by mass murder. In the meantime, Hitler gave France over to the Vichy quislings, conducting a war by remote coercion and intimidation.

But the Third Reich lasted only 12 years and ended in calamity. The European Continent resolved to abjure dominance and embrace cooperation in the greatest non-imperial binding alliance between nations in all of human history, the European Union.

It is interesting to apply the premise of the question to the Abrahamic religions. They are theologically related but culturally quite different. The episodes of rivalry are remembered but accommodation has been the rule over the centuries. This suggests that different religions can get along were it not for politicians who leverage religion for their own ambitions.

But I wonder about the motives of the question. Sometimes, asserting a cynical interpretation of the past is but an excuse for cynical ambitions. I fear for an America that thinks the right of conquest is affirmed by a warped version of history. “Conquest by obliteration is the way it’s always been, so as the mightiest military power on earth we are entitled by history’s example to do the same.” It is easy to imagine such an abominable utterance coming out the mouths of many who call themselves patriots.

In the secure rooms of Europe, leadership may be contemplating how to anticipate an America already showing signs of fascist craving that can only get worse. A citizen of the US must have extreme detachment from social forces to see what Europeans have already begun to notice, that the US is starting to embrace the culture of nationalist, racist dominance that Europe rejected decades ago. An American-Russian Axis, which seems on track to be realized, might become a real threat to Europe.

Primitive ambitions often seek history’s sanction. We are either living at the peak of civilization before abysmal decline, or we are experiencing the pains of a new world’s progress resisting the old world’s last throes.

I think people take freedom in America for granted to feel that they can do whatever they want , without any responsible actions or questions of conscience, respect, or to face repercussions for their acts of depraved and immoral behavior?

Well, for the past 60 years in America, we've become three generations lost in confusion, with a loss of good moral character traded into a message of nothing matters with the traditional Patriarchal and Matriarchal family values, selling out to feminism for the gain of money, status, greed, where our children have become lost, broken, and are without common sense, but their are many factors at which I've mentioned before, but what sense does it make to keep saying these things in redundancy, as society here in America has spiraled down to dire depravity, without happiness?

However, when Men and Women cannot come to a solution to settle their differences, with hatred for one another, without any natural affection, with Love in the World growing cold, where equality means for Women to stomp out Man's integrity and bury them into the ground, to become the tail end, while the Woman become the head leadership, then you know that time is coming to a close, but rightfully so, as we become bodies with hallow shells without genuine substance!

For me that title would have to go to the Roman Empire. While the Roman Empire did indeed allow some of its conquered people to keep their religion and culture, they brutally enforced their own Roman rule and culture on them. Conquered people were expected to adhere to Roman law, and to worship their gods and goddesses. Anyone who dared to stand up, were brutally struck down. The Romans loved to maim, rather than kill, whenever they came across rebels, unless they were forced to kill them. They ruled by terror, raped women, and brutally beat up men. The one thing that caused the most trouble though, was the strict military discipline and culture that the Romans enforced. Legionaries were to serve at least 20years in the military, during which they were cut off from their families, and endured brutal training and warfare.

Trying to get your way at any cost. People on the left and the right will twist and butcher the law to get their way and it leaves everything in broken heap.

Want healthcare; to bad it’s not in the federal governments duties. Get your state to do it.

Want decisions made with god in mind; to bad your morality isn’t supposed to be enshrined in law.

The country today is a far cry from the stated intent of the founders. Any ideological or moral high ground was lost a long time ago due to people with good intentions doing what they thought was necessary. Without regard for whether it was in sync with the dream of our founders.

Culture is additive.

It is the aggregation of beliefs, attitudes, approaches, behaviours and social output.

Everything you do or think changes culture.

You cannot purge or destroy, you can only add.

If you attempt to purge and destroy, you only take existing beliefs like ‘I am happy and I am filled with love’ and you add to them the belief that ‘some people are evil and want to purge and destroy’.

You cannot get rid of the original knowledge.

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Shrugs

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If you want to destroy people who are full of love, there is nothing you can do. They will always be full of love.

If you want to work with people who are full of hate, you can only keep showing them love until the balance of experience is positive.

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Mainly it is worth asking yourself why you want to control people.

Stupid people who engage in judgment, holier than thou attitudes and mob rule on the internet.

There is a line in the bible which states something like the sins of the father are passed onto several generations.

Let’s say John steals something worth $1,500 (I beleive that is the magic number in my state) and because of that number he gets a felony. He goes to prison for five years. That costs YOU, the tax payer, about $200,000. Why not just make him repay it and leave it at that? Why must the tax payer now pay for his crime?

Worse yet, when he gets out of prison, YOU’RE not going to hire him so, after spending five years in crime school, he needs to turn to crime to survive. Whose fault is that? Sure, many will say it is his own fault but, we had the power to correct and forgive but we as a society chose judgment and vengeance.

Then, unemployable, he goes on welfare and guess who pays for that? You do. You pay his rent, heat, cell phone, electricity, food and “disability.”

A pastor friend of mine has a parishioner steal over $40,000 and instead of calling the police, they forced him to repay that amount. He owns a business and employs 15 people. If he was arrested, there would be 15 people unemployed.

As Lincoln said, “Mercy bears richer fruits than strict justice.”

People are dumbfounded that they can’t come up with a motive for Stephen Paddock killing and harming over 500 people in Vegas. Well, his father was arrested for bank robbery and sent to prison. Paddock grew up without a father, the family probably struggled to survive and Paddock’s motive was probably a long simmering hatred for what all the good people in society had done to HIM, through the sins of the father. I bet those shootings never would have happened had Stephen’s father was simply given a second chance and forced to repay the bank.

Who knows. Could be.

Where do I even start?

My culture [northen European caucasian] is famed for being tough, ruthless, and harsh.

Colonization, barbaric execution techniques like drawing and quartering, language imposition, slavery [ although we don’t have the monopoly on that], eugenics [ well the Hawaiians had a bit of that in the royals] , and institutionalized racial supremacy doctrines…..

…and don’t forget the the original “vandals” were German in origin to say nothing of Hitler.

Yeah, it’s not good, but being the roughest and toughest sons-of-bitches on the block was what made us able to thrive harsh climates, so there was an evolutionary purpose to it.

We’re getting better now though. Sometimes.

Well, there are a few ways to answer this. I could say deforestation, rising temperature, destruction of the ozone layer, etc.

Those things I just mention are the cause of humans. So I could say that we humans are destroying the Earth.

Let’s zoom in further on the humans. All of these humans have a common goal, that is to get more money, more stuff at whatever cost. Apparently a lot of them will even do it at the cost of the Earth and everything in it.

So the real answer to your question would probably be greed. I think that is where the problems originated.

Big mining companies are scraping in tons of cash from mining fossil fuels. Their obsession with getting cash is causing them to ignore the scientific facts that mining and using fossil fuels (coal, oil and gas) is literally killing our Earth.

It’s not just the big mining companies fault though. Our greed contributes to it too. We need to start taking the warning seriously and put aside our want for more to really save the Earth.

Is destroying culture and history the way most societies have been taken over or destroyed in the past?

I will assume you are asking about the very long-term past, not just the modern era.

No, the most common way societies have been taken over is to be conquered by another country, incorporated into their empire, and forced to pay tribute to the overall ruler. Sometimes the empire would allow the local system of governance to continue, if local bigwigs pledged their allegiance to the new overlord; sometimes the empire would import its own, loyal and trained administrators as local governors to make sure things got done the “right” way. (Yes, yes, I know the old joke that “there all always 3 ways to do something: the right way, the wrong way, and the [fill in name of organization] way.” Bear with me here.)

But throughout history, for the most part, the only reason the conquering forces would destroy the culture and try to erase the history of the locals is if the locals were (A) in rebellion against the political authority of the empire; (B) disrespecting the culture of the empire, by, for instance, refusing to participate in its rituals and observances; AND (C) doing so because of what the locals deemed to be required by their own culture and history. That’s why Rome destroyed Judea, for instance, in the 1st and 2nd centuries C.E. “Jewish War;” the Jews refused to bow to Roman gods, rejected Roman authority over their territory, and justified both rebellions on the basis of their own culture and history — the commands of their God. Although their infrastructure (the Temple, and so on) were physically destroyed, and the people largely dispersed, they persisted — because of that unique culture and history and their adherence to the commands of their God. Which is something to think about, if any other cultures or empires might get similar ideas.

Empires and kingdoms have also destroyed and decimated their outside-the-empire enemies, rather than simply conquering them and bringing them into the sphere of influence of the empire as either tribute-paying vassals or allies or full-fledged provinces, when those outside powers persisted in attacking the empire again and again and when nothing else short of total destruction seemed to be able to get them to stop. That’s why Rome destroyed Carthage in 146 B.C.E., ending the Punic Wars which had gone on for centuries; and it’s also why Judea not only conquered the Canaanite nations within the Jews’ sphere of influence but also tore down their temples and altars, smashed their idols, and drove them out of the land in the 10th century B.C.E. (Canaanite peoples still existed in the region, of course; the Phoenicians of Lebanon, who went on to colonize North Africa and founded Carthage, were of Canaanite stock, and their descendants still live in Sidon and Tyre. Apparently their Punic descendants at the other end of the Mediterranean still had the habit of repeatedly attacking their neighbors for no good reason once that neighbor was Rome, too. But, I digress.)

But most peoples, though unhappy to be brought under someone else’s yoke, grumbled but just got on with it; they adopted new rulers, new gods, new coinage, new taxes, new contacts with people from other cultures within the empire. They took lemons, and made lemonade. OR, they gradually assimilated entirely, and lost any separate identity they had once had, painlessly and bloodlessly, simply by intermarrying and becoming one of “them.” That is how most separate peoples throughout history have in fact disappeared; they settled down and blended in, often creating an entirely new identity in the process arising from that admixture of ethnicities.

Is evil a cultural phenomenon?

On the contrary. The things we call “evil” are just intrinsic animal qualities. Violence, attacking and killing others, stealing food or other property, torture, even cannibalism… every animal practices these things from ants to humans. There’s no “peaceable kingdom” in the real world. Culture, civilization and religion were developed to help tame these animal urges and encourage sympathy and cooperation instead.

Soccer is getting increasingly popular in the USA.

MLS = Major League Soccer

For this travesty, I blame the Latino immigrants.

And the Africans.

And the Europeans.

Some of the Asians too.

I am a proponent of free movement of people, but they should leave that game where they found it. We have enough boring native sports as it is.

We were just starting to kill this shit off, and now we have to worry about soccer.

If we restrict the question to physical, technical inventions, it's the plough (UK) plow (US).

We lose a huge proportion of our topsoil to erosion because its structure has been destroyed by tillage, and it then gets washed away by rain. Plowing gives a short-term benefit in weed reduction, but there are other ways to achieve the same goals. And the cost in human development has been catastrophic.

Soil erosion leading to the loss of agriculture has been partially or wholly responsible for the collapse of empires. For example, Tunisia was the breadbasket of the Roman Empire, in a climate very similar to our own. Go there now and look at the state of the fields. Over most of the country, there is no soil to speak of.

Imagine where humanity would be now had we understood the principle that civilisation requires topsoil. And where it will be if we don't start getting this right soon.