I’ve also heard that depending on how you categorize race, there could be up to 60 different races… it’s one of those terms where the closer you look at it, the more you have to think and wonder about what the term actually means.
Just to tangentially address the OP, I don’t think it feasible to presume that creulty is genetically based either.
There are NO races. Period. There is no scientific test that you may apply to conclusively prove that a human being is a member of any particular definable group.
I defy you to prove otherwise.
However, if you just want to loosely describe tribal/ethnic groups as a “race”, my money would be on the Chiricaua Apache. Bad to the bone!
Not wanting to get sucked into another race thread, but wishing to assist elucidator, let me note that for those wishing data and discussion on the topic of race, please search under my username and race. You’ll find myself, Tomndeb, Gaspode, and others have provided reams of data and arguments on the incoherence of race as a biological category. Culture is another matter of course.
A note, with the exception of race baiters, all serious investigation of human populations, in genetics and anthropology has discarded the race idea. Genetic data (amply cited and given in other threads) have clearly shown it to be incoherent (biologically speaking).
Well, now I’ve done it.
Opened a can of worms, as it were.
(Sigh) Neither. Just curious because of making something like a Quantum leap in my thinking, based on various forms of information gathered, ranging from articles, factual written books, historical pieces, National Geographic over the years, records from WW1 and WW2, along with the Korean War and Vietnam, recordings of the Japan/China conflict, observations of Oriental clusters in America down through the years, news articles, documentaries, archeological pieces, anthropological pieces, some religious articles, various first person reports of refugees, first person reports from visitors, observations of art, poetry, philosophy and historical government.
See, I did not just jump to a conclusion, but my view can be narrow, so I’m asking.
Like, even with an extensive, though rusty, understanding of the Native Americans (First People), I was not that aware of intertribal savagery being very common. I was aware of the practice of ‘coupe,’ a nonlethal form of combat, along with raiding parties. In fact, it was my understanding that of most of the global races, the American Indian, prior to the invasion of the White people, had a considerably less violent history than anyone except the Eskimos.
The 4 basic races are simply my way of trimming things down to manageability. If you want to split hairs, the American Indian is an off shoot of the Oriental/Eskimo/Norwegian/Russian. Currently, today, everything breaks easily down into just 4 basic groups. It could break down into two: black and nonblack.
Wringing the neck of a chicken is much more merciful, (severing the spinal cord, which then stops everything) than keeping a creature carefully alive while one deep fries 3/4 of it, after having first gutted the beast. Then, while it slowly suffocates, plus probably feels the burns, with it’s muscles cooked into immobility, one consumes at leisure it’s tortured flesh.
Even in the great Texas Rattler roundup, they quickly kill the snakes prior to skinning and cooking them. Lobsters and crabs dumped live into boiling water die within seconds, many are usually chilled into numbness prior to being boiled. Much better than hacking them up alive, gutting their twitching bodies and then cooking the flesh, or not.
I compare that to going up to an immobilized cow and slicing a steak out of it’s flesh while it is alive and feeling. Even at the slaughterhouse, a humane killer is used, which is a device which delivers a steel bolt directly into the brain, or a guy swings a sledge hammer and knocks the beast out cold.
I’ve noticed that Orientals seem to have more of a penchant for slowly killing animals, though whoever thought of crushed duck needs to be shot. (They suffocate the duck, because cooks feel the terror it feels in its last moments flavor the meat.) The British and Spanish in their heyday created some of the most awful tortures known to man, but dumped them, while in recent wars, it has been noted that the Orientals not only ‘improved’ on the theme but went way beyond it.
No one else thought of Punjab sticks (sharpened sticks in a covered over hole, smeared with human feces. If they did not kill an American soldier outright, the raging infection that set in often would.) Aside from the Nazi treatment of the Jews – which was deliberate racial genocide and scapegoating – no other race in recent wars treated their prisoners so badly. They went one step beyond the Nazis in practicing vivisection on conscious prisoners to map the nervous system – or simply because they enjoyed the screams.
The Mayans do not count in this area because their cruelty was a religious practice. It did not last into current times.
I don’t recall allied POW camp personnel sliding bamboo slivers under the nails of prisoners, allowing guards to beat their captors into heaps of hamburger just for fun, deliberately starving them, doing medical experiments on them, marching them on a forced march until most died, and not even removing the fallen dead from the road, but forcing them to be walked on until they became part of the road.
Even the Germans had problems with troop moral when they tried to get soldiers to kill thousands of unarmed Jews, but the Orientals seemed to have none in similar situations.
Most Caucasian nations have passed animal cruelty laws, but few exist in the Oriental ones, except those governing a few selected animals used as pets. The British have the strictest laws, with the Royal Society Of The Prevention Of Cruelty Towards Animals having authority and powers beyond those of even US police officers.
In India, many animals are sacred. (Human life, however, is cheap.) Digging back through my memory, I don’t recall even Africans being so cruel towards animals, though, right now, they are real high on being cruel towards humans. I consider this mainly due to the social breakdown the nation has gone through. To my knowledge, Africans do not take delight in consuming an animal while it is living.
There is the Monkey Brain thing, but I only heard of that being in Arabic nations and not very wide spread. (You know, they whack a monkey about the head until it is thoroughly traumatized, but alive and conscious. The head is then inserted through a hole in a special table, fixed in place while the monkeys body is wrapped to keep it immobile. Someone carefully slices off the top of the monkeys head and the excited diners use spoons to consume the living brain before the helpless critter manages to die.)
Isn’t the torturous caning still being used in Singapore?
Other nations/races seem to have dropped many cruel and unusual practices, but the Oriental race seems to hang onto more than most.
What can one say about the above post.
I’ll just say, I live and work in the “Arab World,” speak the language (although I do draw snickers). I have no fucking idea where this monkey brain thing comes from.
How much ignorance can one pack into just one post? That remains to be seen.
If only we had some real cheesemakers around.
Yet another thread providing evidence that “intelligence” confers no biological advantage in a meaningful way. Ignorance abounds…
Cecil, the tide is rising…
I think it’s good that you’re willing to admit your ignorance about certain elements of first nation culture. Being able to say “I don’t know” is a very important thing if a free and honest debate is to take place.
That said, I think it’s fair to say that there are quite a few things which you don’t know about Asia, and the rest of the world.
I do not see how this is an appropriate reply to the statement that “races”, as defined in your OP, is a word devoid of descriptive value in a scientific or sociological sense. Are you trimming things down to manageability, or are you throwing away data which might contradict your theory?
It is, in my opinion, dishonest in the extreme for a person to count only that evidence which supports his position, and to minimize or discredit that evidence which works against it. I hope that you agree with this statement.
It seems to me that whenever presented with evidence which contradicts your assertion, you claim that said evidence does not apply to the discussion at hand. I do not understand why the cruelty of the Aztecs (not the Mayans, btw) can be written off because “their cruelty was a religious practice”.
You have also discounted acts of barbarism by other “races” since they did not happen in modern times. Why is that? How recent must an event be in order for it to count, by your appraisal?
Two points. I apologize that this is a little bit off topic, but I feel the need to address this. The only technique I’ve ever seen for cutting apart a still-living lobster involves, as its first step, chopping the creature in two lengthwise. It seems to me that this method of killing the lobster is at least as humane as killing a chicken by decapitation.
Secondly, are you certain that dousing lobsters in ice water numbs them to pain? Lobsters generally live in water that is quite cold; submerging them in water cold enough to knock them out may be cruel in itself.
Now, back to the meat of the discussion…
Other cultures have used similar tactics, though I can’t think of any which have been used in modern times. I fail to see how the use of punjab stics is any worse than the use of landmines, which achieve the same function and can harm innocent people decades after a war is over.
Do the actions of the Canadian peacekeepers in Somalia count as a counterexample to this point? I’m certain that other members of this board who are more familiar with military history can come up with some more examples.
Do you have a specific example of this which you could share? In particular, I am curious as to why you think Germans had morale problems in this regard while “Orientals” did not. What accounts of this have you read? By what side were the accounts written?
Did the American troops stationed at Nogun-Ri have morale problems when they massacred hundreds of unarmed civilians?
I’m not particularly knowledgeable about the animal rights movement in the West. So, I went to look some things at http://www.britannica.com. Turns out that in the UK, Canada, and the USA there have been animals rights laws in place for a few hundred years now.
I will assume that even though these are the only three countries listed by the Encyclopedia, other countries also have animals rights laws. May I ask you for a reference whereby I may learn more about the state of animal cruelty laws in Asia? Where did you learn so much about them? Are the laws which are in place in Asia particularly different from the laws in, say, eastern Europe or in Africa?
Interesting note. In Korea, the story of people eating the brains of still living monkeys is a thriving UL. The country in which this is done, according to the story? France. I have several students who swear it’s true… they claim they saw it on a television documentary.
So, what’s your source for attributing monkey brains to Asia? Do you have a reliable source to back up the story?
**
First of all, a slight nitpick. Africa isn’t a nation. It’s a continent. It contains many, many nations.
African cruelty, in your opinion, can be justified due to the current political climate in that part of the world. Why can you find no such mitigating factors in your analysis of “oriental” cruelty? Forgive me for being so bold, but it certainly appears to me that most of your reasons why the cruelty of other cultures doesn’t count are ad hoc statements.
Are you familiar with the fundamental attribution error? When judging the behavior of “others”, people are more likely to overemphasize the importance of innate traits in the decidion making process. In other words, people tend to believe that when “we” do something, it’s because that’s the logical thing to do. But when “they” do something, it’s because that’s their nature. Are you certain that you may not be participating in a kind of selective thinking, such as this?
Again, I find that I must conclude that you do not present enough information to demonstrate this thesis. First and foremost, I believe that you require more information regarding cruelty in other cultures before you can make such a comparison. And you should not be so quick to ignore acts of cruelty committed by other “races”; this evidence must be accomodated by your thesis.
Secondly, I think you should be more specific in your claims. All the evidence which you have thus far presented for your theory is very general and often unverifiable. When other posters have presented counterexamples to your claims, you dismissed them for a number of reasons. Tell us what kind of evidence you would accept, either for or against your theory.
Finally, and most importantly, I think you should do a lot more reading. Though I have no doubt that you have done a lot of reading about Asia, your knowledge seems quite superficial in places. You do not seem to know a lot about what is happening in Asia today, either culturally or politically. Also, you could probably do to brush up on your genetics and anthropology.
Sheesh. The cruelest race is, without a doubt, Kobolds. I thought everyone knew that.
I’m not sure what you mean by this. If you mean, “I’ve really made these people think,” you are sadly incorrect.
Assuming that this is actually a question, and not an attack there are several problems with the setup.
As someone else mentioned, the “four races” is a problem. (I was taught it was "West Africans, East Africans, Australian Aborigines, and Everyone Else) It doesn’t matter if you consider it “trimming things down” or not. Unless the “races” you describe are actually different enough genetically, you might as well debate wither tall people are crueler than short ones.
Even without that, you do seem to be lumping the “races” together rather conveniently for your purposes. If you look at the Roman crucifixions and gladiatorial games, the raids of the Huns and Goths, the Spanish Inquisition, European imperialism, slavery in north and central Americas, French and Spanish dietary habits, and the Nazis, one could make a pretty good sounding statement that Caucasians are the “cruelest” race. Except those atrocities are spread over half the globe, a dozen distinct cultures, and two millennia.
What about Pate? Bit cruel to the geese, isn’t it? Veal?
Have you considered that perhaps the reason many of these nations don’t have laws regulating butchery (assuming they do, I’m not willing to accept that as fact without a cite) is because that, until recently, some of them didn’t eat enough meat to have professional butchers, and thus never had “the Jungle”-like abattoirs, and thus never saw the need for them?
Wow, more cruel to animals than AFRICANS! And we all know how cruel they are.
Don’t most of the people in India have a mixture of Caucasian and Asian ancestors? And while Cows may be sacred to Hindus, they’re not sacred to Indians as a whole. (Despite the old bullet story, Muslims don’t consider pigs sacred. And the bullet story is a joke, it didn’t actually happen)
And what’s that “life is cheap” crack? Is that another genetically based cruelty? If so, it’s a pretty common one . . .
How generous of you.
You’re assuming that the “delight” is based on the pain it causes the animal. Live Sashimi is prized for its freshness, not out of sadism. Again, what about veal and pate? And why do the Indonesians have to answer for a Japanese delicacy?
All humor aside, listen carefully to what you’re saying. “I admit that these breakups might not be genetically feasible, but I submit that people who share a certain set of physical features are crueler than those who don’t, irregardless of culture or even ancestry.”
And consider your sources. Your list looks impressive at first glance, but most of them, such as articles and National Geographic features present a “sound bite” view of other cultures, without looking closely at the whys. And until relatively recently, articles and reports didn’t even bother trying to look at the whys, as they started with the assumption that Asian cultures were evil and barbaric.
What articles and books? A book on Japanese war crimes, even if unbiased, is hardly a fair account to judge an entire country on. Likewise, making judgments on an entire “race” based on their actions of some countries, when invaded by a vastly superior force, is grossly unfair. (And Vietnam is hardly the brightest moment in the histories of any of the countries involved)
Have you read anything from the other side of ANY of these conflicts? (I don’t mean war propaganda, I mean something like Requiem for Yamato)
Likewise, a war refugee is hardly an unbiased judge. (cough, SERBIA!!, cough)
In other words, if you base much of your opinion on military reports, you’re hardly going to get anything like a fair view.
What philosophies have you studied? Taoism? Hinduism? Confucianism? Zen? Shinto? Or (and I’m making a WILD guess here . . .) Bushido?
You also seem to be basing a large portion of this on dietary taboos. That’s understandable, as these provoke surprisingly strong reactions in most people. But it’s unfair. Cultural diet is based on a huge number of factors, which a “visitor” or tourist is unlikely to appreciate, but IS likely to react strongly too. (Incidentally, I’m fairly certain Spielberg either made up or culturally misplaced the monkey brain thing)
I’m also curious as to what “observations of Oriental clusters in America down through the years” have supported your thieis. Or is this more diatary stuff?
Incidentally, do you know what a “rice culture” is?
–
“I hardly think that a nation that eats frogs and would go to bed with the kitchen sink if it’d put on a tutu is in any position to preach couthness.”
I think the “monkey brain thing” came from that scene in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom where they are eating all those exotic foods. Chilled monkey brains was the desert. That is the only place I have ever heard of someone eating monkey brains (and he wasn’t in the Middle East, he was in India. As far as I know, monkeys don’t live in the desert).
Could someone please explain the purpose of this thread to me? The topic seems to be too broad to have any meaningful discussion. I mean come on! Asking which race is crueler?
It’s like asking, “whos smarter? Red haired people or dark haired?”
Bhudist monks are pretty gentel (except that they can use their Chi to blow up your internal organs;) ). The Viet Cong were fairly cruel. Both are Asian cultures (not Oriental, thats a type of rug).
Maybe the OP should have asked which CULTURE in history was most cruel. That would have at least led to a more reasonable discussion of historical torture methods.
Actually, I have one: In the Middle Ages, Europeans (caucasions) would take a prisoner and have him “broken on a wheel”. Similar to Roman crusifixion, they would tie a prisoner to a wagon wheel. Then the executioner would break the bones in their arms and legs and braid the limbs through the spokes of the wheel. The prisoner would then usually die of trauma or exposure within a few hours to several days.
I stand behind my initial vote for dark elves. True, kobolds have given us some atrocities, but I can kind of sympathise with their political grievances…
Oh and I suppose you would deny that Dark Elves themselves don’t have political grievances?!?! Splitter!
Oh great, we’re arguing with someone whose cultural information derives from an American movie?
Why, oh why?
Well who did you think you were arguing with? The head of Anthropology at Harvard?
As you may have heard, Adventurious82, Japan is one of the safest countries in the world when it comes to violent crime. I just ran a web search on the subject, and according to the first relevant site that came up (http://www.ncpa.org/studies/s202/s202.html) Japan has fewer murders each year than the state of Texas, despite having a much larger population.
But the Japanese like to eat raw fish, so clearly their fiendish yellow race is more inherently cruel than the civilized white man or the noble savages of Africa and the Americas. :rolleyes:
** Adventurious82**, from all you’ve said, you’re basing some conclusions about general traits of a group of people purely upon your own casual observations.
Turn the situation around for a moment; take a hypothetical Martian scientist and plunk him down in the middle of the worst parts of New York, Chicago, New Orleans or other major US cities at night. He’d be observing gang fights, shootings and other violence. Then, drawing conclusions like you have, he’d deduce that all US citizens humans are violent and sadistic.
The point I’m making is that from a few casual observations, you’ve leapt to a very broad, general conclusion about a wide group of people.
I have to represent my yellow-devil race here and mention that I myself have eaten still-living lobster. The waiter pulled one out of a tank, showed it to us, and brought it back to the kitchen. When it came back, the tail had been removed, sliced up and put on ice. The claws had been ripped off and kept in the kitchen. The torso and head though, were stood up on one side of the platter as decoration. While we were eating the sashimi style tail, the legs of the lobster started waving. My stepmom turned green, but my mother in fact started poking the lobster with her chopsticks, which the lobster clenched with the deathgrip of its mini-claws.
Sick bastards, aren’t we? 
Our general feeling is that we have no sympathy for food. Sorry, but I’ve seen my mom beat the crap out of a fish so that we could have dinner. It’s truly us or them.
The freshness thing is key for Cantonese or other seafood eating cuisines. It allows you to use less powerful spices and allow the true taste of the ingredients to come out. This is why good sashimi should never taste fishy (except for sea urchin).
And on a mysticism level, freshness of ingredients means more of the power of the animal is retained. My mom told me that when she was walking down the street in Hong Kong, she saw a person go into a snake shop. The guy sat down, and the proprietor grabbed a snake, chopped off its head and immediately put it to the customer’s mouth as he began drinking its blood. Now that’s FRESH!
Is it cruel? To you maybe. To our culture, it’s just the way things are done. If you had to go to the market and pick out which fish, chicken or pig you were going to eat every day, you wouldn’t be so attached to them either.
Now I’ve never heard of half-cooking a fish; it seems to me to be just a form of showmanship on the part of the chef. It it cruel? Nope, it’s just food. If you don’t allow yourself to see it that way, it’s your problem. The shark-fin thing? The reasons for doing it are obvious. If you have limited space and time, do you really want to capture, kill and store a whole shark? It’s much more cost-effective in the short run to just take the fins. We may be bastards, but we’re pragmatic.
And that’s what it all comes to. What seems like cruelty to animals is a undeniable show of freshness. Punjii sticks are absolutely effective in hurting the enemy. Torture is useful in extracting information (and great entertainment! :p). Killing prisoners outright is wasteful. Granted, somewhere along the line utilitarianism stopped being balanced by Buddhist or Confucian ideals (you could blame Communism, Imperialist Japan, etc.) but you’re not the first person to blame the actions of a race on the deeds of a few.
Actually, Collunsbury and msmith537, I believe it comes from the first volume of the “Faces of Death” movie series. I know there is a scene in it in which diners have a monkey at their table, and proceed to hit it mallets, and then eat its brain. I thought that the diners killed the monkey with their mallets, but maybe they only stunned it.
Regardless, most of “Faces of Death” is pretty universally acknowledged to have been staged, and I find no reason to believe this sequence wasn’t.
Out of morbid curiousity, am I the only person who would love to see Cecil Adams address this question in the column? I can’t even begin to imagine the verbal reaming Unca Cece would give to the topic… 
(It is taking longer than we thought, isn’t it?)
1.) I believe that if you randomly started looking for instances of human cruelty, most of the ones that you would find would have been committed by Asains. Why? Well, Asains comprise the greatest percentage of the world’s population, and they have since the dawn of history. Naturally, you would expect them to have committed the greatest number of atrocities.
Somebody remarked that Europe was the sight of the greatest number of wars and conflicts. I have an explanation for this one, too. In Europe, there has always been relatively high population density, and the climate is generally harsher than in Africa, Southern Asia, or Central America, other places with large concentrations of population. Therefore, we would find more competition for land and resources in Europe than elsewhere.
2.) (I am an animal lover and a vegetarian, so don’t accuse me of supporting animal cruelty here.) The entire debate about the practice of killing animals is not relevant. In our society, we believe that animals are capable of thoughts and feelings. Howver, other societies may not even have believed that animals were capable of experiencing pain, so ‘torturing’ animals would not have been regarded as cruelty by them.
The Mayans do not count in this area because their cruelty was a religious practice. It did not last into current times.
So cruelty on religious grounds is different than cruelty on culinary grounds?
Is there a fundamental difference in inherent cruelty between Northern Europeans whose culture seems broadly more concerned with preserving small, pretty birds vs. Southern Europeans who generally think small, pretty birds go well with polenta?
And I’ll ask again - If level of cruelty is inherent to “race”, why do some of these “races” seem to have outgrown these practices in your opinion? You seem to be insisting that there is some genetic component implicit in being asian that renders them more cruel. Or at least that is your implication, since you deny the role of society and envirnment. But you acknowledge that various other “races” have been cruel in the past. So what changed? A spontaneous mutation that was somehow preserved and spread in all non-Oriental people? Because we all know the nice guy always get all the women, right 
?
sigh
Do please look at the thread in this forum on the existence of races and check out the information that Collounsbury provides. Self-education is a good thing.
- Tamerlane