The existence of human biodiversity shouldn’t be such a startling new insight, but I guess it is.
It ought to be obvious by now that different people flourish or decay on different diets.
And yet we constantly read of nutrition studies that assume that their goal should be to find the best diet for everybody rather than to find diets that work better for some people.
Comments to Steve Sailer:
* Americans who relocate to Europe or Asia frequently lose weight – mostly from smaller portions and greatly increased walking. They generally regain the weight when they return to the U.S. where the portions are bigger and there is much more driving.
* English became very rigid physically. Stiff upper lip and all that stuff.
So, all that bottled up energy had to find outlet through wit.
Since Brits were supposed to be physically restrained, they had to suppress the more boisterous kind of humor, slapstick stuff. Instead, they had to sharpen their wits and go for shades of subtlety and nuance.
This was different from mere refinement as all cultures have the refined class.
It was the art of transgression dressed up as manners.
Outwardly polite and conservative but inwardly subversive and irreverent.
Few cultures can be so polite and deadly at the same time.
This is what is so unnerving about THE DAY OF THE JACKAL.
He never loses his cool on his path to calamity.
It’s like a ‘dry’ drink.
Maybe it also had to with English love of liberty/individuality and hierarchy/order.
How can one have both?
To have order/hierarchy, there must be lots of restraint.
But liberty/individuality needed some kind of outlet.
English found a way to maintain outward form while using wit to hint at all kinds of nastiness.
This is strange and odd to a lot of cultures. They understand order/manners and they understand freedom/confrontation. But they don’t have the fusion of the two found in English culture.
It’s like the Jappers could be refined but just don’t get the kind of razor sharp dual sensibility of the Brits.
In violence and poverty, Japanese did fuse refinement with cruelty or beauty with brutality. It’s like in that movie Gohatto.
But in verbal expression, there is nothing quite like the combination found among the English.
Jappers appreciate cherry blossoms and slashing people.
* Two peoples saw a cultural renaissance of artists in the 20th century, the Irish out of the Abbey theater and the Jews out of Hollywood. Funny to think the former was unmoored from Church tastes while the latter was under them explicitly. The Hollywood Renaissance maybe hasn’t ended, and the best young writer in the world is Ireland’s Colin Barrett. Interesting that being Irish in Ireland is not a debate, and being Jewish in America means you own the debate. As if owning this thing called heritage does wonders for this thing called art. Which is not wielded as a political advantage on the Island that owns itself because Yeats summoned Cuchulain to Pearse’s side at a post office.
* Americans might also lose weight if they were to develop adult palates, and learn to spurn brown sugar water and sugar-laden foods. One can rationally believe this without joining the “sugar is the spawn of the devil” zealots.
* Some people do well with carbs, some do well with fat. All do well with high protein, because of the thermogenic loss, role in maintaining muscle and building muscle, and satiety that protein engenders.
