Slavic men can do it too. Not sure if it’s a legacy of their squat toilets or the lack of anywhere to sit outside in the post-soviet collapse, but it’s a shibboleth for them: “heels in the sky, you’ve found the spy.”
While I don't really buy the "small hands hypothesis", squatting stability is influenced by the ratio between height and femur length. People with longer femurs need to elevate the heels or open the hips wider in order to go into a deep squat, while people with shorter femurs can do it while anchoring the whole foot. This has been observed extensively by professional and amateur lifters, many of whom use wedged shoes to elevate the heel.
East Asians have, proportionally, a longer torso and shorter femurs for their height. This is noticeable by the naked eye, specially in the northeast, where many Chinese are as tall as westerners but their hips sit lower. Incidentally, while Westerners feel the polite thing is to mostly ignore physical differences, East Asian women are aware of this difference and some in northeast China have mentioned to me that they feel some measure of envy of their Russian counterparts' long legs.
>>I’ve idly wondered if East Asian squatting ability is an adaptive response to working in paddy fields for centuries. This is of course about #7,375 on the topics likely to be covered by academic inquiry.
This should be testable since the original Chinese crop wasn't rice but millet, which may have been domesticated in the dryer north by the Peiligang and Cishan cultures. These agriculturalists eventually pushed south and reach the Tibetan plateau,where they switched from millet to barley. But Tibetans seem to squat as well as Asians from predominantly rice-cultivating areas. Not a definite refutation.
Oskar Schindler made the same small hands argument in "Schindler's List". The NYT article makes it sound like small hands are a skill.
I wonder about the national security implications of so much manufacturing overseas. It isn't practical for us to do it all ourselves but WWII demonstrated that the best manufacturer wins. It also demonstrated that under pressure of war, America was, at the time anyway, capable of of ramping way the fuck up on making weapons on short order. Could we do that today?
Years ago I was working on the idea of doing some standup comedy and one of my routines was going to be a Bob Newhartesque scene about a guy from the Manhattan project trying to get through an environmental impact report.
“Distinctions are the stuff of understanding.” What a world is contained in that phrase.
Many years ago, I dated a Filipina. Her parents would play mah-jongg with friends. Not only could they manipulate the tiles at incredible speed, they could tell what the tiles were by feel. I couldn’t even figure out the game play.
If chop sticks are the kindergarten, playing mah-jongg is the PhD thesis.
Sex differences too. Nimble-fingered women traditionally did sewing and mending with all their spare time, right? An incredible number of pre-sewing-machine novels have scenes with women sitting and talking and doing the mending--even upper-class women who could presumably have given the mending to someone else if they really wanted to.
This is pretty hilarious Steve, with NYT liberals bragging like a Low Country planter, "This here's Rosco, my chief negro. This young buck [playfully slaps back] will pick you four bales of cotton by lunch time!" The Chinawoman, with her small nimble fingers and straight black hair, easily tied back to avoid strands falling into delicate micro circuitry, her epicanthic fold perfectly suited for squinting at infinitesimal parts... Thanks for reading the NYT so I don't have to.
Human uniformity is still the official state religion, even when there are clues that the high priests recognize it might be shaky dogma*. It's invoked to justify mass immigration, in which all humans are equal economic inputs and therefore adding infinity semi-literate (in their native language) and unskilled new arrivals is all upside to GDP with no social or economic downside to the existing citizenry.
It's also the justification for 'diversity' in hiring, in which the proponents hold the contradictory ideas that ethnic or racial minorities are meaningfully different from boring old whites but that this doesn't translate to meaningful differences in talent or performance on the job.
* the clearest sign of this understanding is trying to destroy accurately measuring performance, particularly in education in which advanced classes are eliminated or students cannot receive below a 50 percent even on work they never hand in. State testing reveals the gaps are still there, but at the school corporation level it allows administrators to issue press releases lauding their amazing graduation rates.
It takes a tough mind to do repetitive work like the Chinese women do with the iphones. The Chinese may not have much imagination but they are a tough people. In Crab Country on Maryland's Eastern Shore, most of the crab picking is done by Mexicans who were raised on the Gulf of America coast. Crab picking is monotonous work that takes a tough mind. Few whites pick any longer and almost no blacks do.
Chinese women apparently are gifted at massage as well. It seems like every strip mall in Winchester VA has a massage parlor.
As Sony reminded us in Crazy People (1990), Asians are also short, which helps them see tiny electronic components better than tall, blundering caucasians: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96iJsdGkl44
Off topic (but perhaps not, in the broadest sense). Claire Lehmann's magazine "Unherd" yesterday published a well-written essay by unknown-to-me Tristan Rapp, "Ancient DNA and the Return of a Disgraced Theory." Subheading: "This is a story of some of the greatest findings in modern research, and of the dismal narrow-mindedness and motivated reasoning displayed by scholars who ought to know better." Harvard aDNA supremo David Reich makes multiple appearances.
Yeah, thank god for the Western toilet.
Slavic men can do it too. Not sure if it’s a legacy of their squat toilets or the lack of anywhere to sit outside in the post-soviet collapse, but it’s a shibboleth for them: “heels in the sky, you’ve found the spy.”
It helps if you wear an adidas track suit while doing it. Maybe theirs were in the wash?
While I don't really buy the "small hands hypothesis", squatting stability is influenced by the ratio between height and femur length. People with longer femurs need to elevate the heels or open the hips wider in order to go into a deep squat, while people with shorter femurs can do it while anchoring the whole foot. This has been observed extensively by professional and amateur lifters, many of whom use wedged shoes to elevate the heel.
East Asians have, proportionally, a longer torso and shorter femurs for their height. This is noticeable by the naked eye, specially in the northeast, where many Chinese are as tall as westerners but their hips sit lower. Incidentally, while Westerners feel the polite thing is to mostly ignore physical differences, East Asian women are aware of this difference and some in northeast China have mentioned to me that they feel some measure of envy of their Russian counterparts' long legs.
Btw, respect to this
>>I’ve idly wondered if East Asian squatting ability is an adaptive response to working in paddy fields for centuries. This is of course about #7,375 on the topics likely to be covered by academic inquiry.
This should be testable since the original Chinese crop wasn't rice but millet, which may have been domesticated in the dryer north by the Peiligang and Cishan cultures. These agriculturalists eventually pushed south and reach the Tibetan plateau,where they switched from millet to barley. But Tibetans seem to squat as well as Asians from predominantly rice-cultivating areas. Not a definite refutation.
Oskar Schindler made the same small hands argument in "Schindler's List". The NYT article makes it sound like small hands are a skill.
I wonder about the national security implications of so much manufacturing overseas. It isn't practical for us to do it all ourselves but WWII demonstrated that the best manufacturer wins. It also demonstrated that under pressure of war, America was, at the time anyway, capable of of ramping way the fuck up on making weapons on short order. Could we do that today?
Years ago I was working on the idea of doing some standup comedy and one of my routines was going to be a Bob Newhartesque scene about a guy from the Manhattan project trying to get through an environmental impact report.
“Distinctions are the stuff of understanding.” What a world is contained in that phrase.
Many years ago, I dated a Filipina. Her parents would play mah-jongg with friends. Not only could they manipulate the tiles at incredible speed, they could tell what the tiles were by feel. I couldn’t even figure out the game play.
If chop sticks are the kindergarten, playing mah-jongg is the PhD thesis.
I've seen elderly Syrian men playing backgammon at light speed.
Circling back to a main topic, was Julius Caesar actually talking about manufacturing?
"The die is cast" can have a different, rather boring meaning.
Sex differences too. Nimble-fingered women traditionally did sewing and mending with all their spare time, right? An incredible number of pre-sewing-machine novels have scenes with women sitting and talking and doing the mending--even upper-class women who could presumably have given the mending to someone else if they really wanted to.
Her parents threaten to send her back to China to marry the village oaf if she doesn't make lead violin or cello.
Needle crafts too: knitting, crochet, etc.
This is pretty hilarious Steve, with NYT liberals bragging like a Low Country planter, "This here's Rosco, my chief negro. This young buck [playfully slaps back] will pick you four bales of cotton by lunch time!" The Chinawoman, with her small nimble fingers and straight black hair, easily tied back to avoid strands falling into delicate micro circuitry, her epicanthic fold perfectly suited for squinting at infinitesimal parts... Thanks for reading the NYT so I don't have to.
Human uniformity is still the official state religion, even when there are clues that the high priests recognize it might be shaky dogma*. It's invoked to justify mass immigration, in which all humans are equal economic inputs and therefore adding infinity semi-literate (in their native language) and unskilled new arrivals is all upside to GDP with no social or economic downside to the existing citizenry.
It's also the justification for 'diversity' in hiring, in which the proponents hold the contradictory ideas that ethnic or racial minorities are meaningfully different from boring old whites but that this doesn't translate to meaningful differences in talent or performance on the job.
* the clearest sign of this understanding is trying to destroy accurately measuring performance, particularly in education in which advanced classes are eliminated or students cannot receive below a 50 percent even on work they never hand in. State testing reveals the gaps are still there, but at the school corporation level it allows administrators to issue press releases lauding their amazing graduation rates.
You’d think that repetitively screwing a tiny screw into a tiny hole very quickly would be a task that would be profitably automated.
It takes a tough mind to do repetitive work like the Chinese women do with the iphones. The Chinese may not have much imagination but they are a tough people. In Crab Country on Maryland's Eastern Shore, most of the crab picking is done by Mexicans who were raised on the Gulf of America coast. Crab picking is monotonous work that takes a tough mind. Few whites pick any longer and almost no blacks do.
Chinese women apparently are gifted at massage as well. It seems like every strip mall in Winchester VA has a massage parlor.
There are other reasons for that phenomenon.
As Sony reminded us in Crazy People (1990), Asians are also short, which helps them see tiny electronic components better than tall, blundering caucasians: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96iJsdGkl44
I immediately thought of this too. 🤣
I noticed the comments are off on that video. How is it allowed to be viewed?
You're attributing way too many masculine traits to black people. Need for dominance, impulsiveness, high self-esteem, these are all feminine.
Off topic (but perhaps not, in the broadest sense). Claire Lehmann's magazine "Unherd" yesterday published a well-written essay by unknown-to-me Tristan Rapp, "Ancient DNA and the Return of a Disgraced Theory." Subheading: "This is a story of some of the greatest findings in modern research, and of the dismal narrow-mindedness and motivated reasoning displayed by scholars who ought to know better." Harvard aDNA supremo David Reich makes multiple appearances.
https://quillette.com/2025/05/28/ancient-dna-and-the-return-of-a-disgraced-theory/
At least we now know who the most famous living Japanese person is. And wait till he starts pitching again later this season.