Silicon Valley is become a brown nerd hub

Yeah, and it will remain so. It’s called survival of the fittest and the most capable! Go find yourself a forest in Idaho or a mountain in Appalachia to live in if you don’t like it.

Perhaps our trajectories and experiences have been different. I have computer science degrees, from a BS to a PhD. In my particular line, people got trained to be engineers with a specialization in CS, which involved not just programming but understanding stuff ranging from mathematical logic to circuit building. In the companies I’ve worked for, virtually everyone who works as a so-called programmer (titles can vary: SWE, developer, etc.) has an engineering background. I haven’t really had any contact with people who got, say, brief training and a diploma in JavaScript or something. I’m sure such specific non-portable skills are useful to some people, but they wouldn’t get hired directly by me or the companies I’ve worked for. Perhaps as contractors…

assuming they can keep the Third Worlders out.

If all those lands do become uninhabitable, then good luck with that!

The graphic is quite misleading though. There are highlands in southern Asia, Africa, and South America that will still be quite hospitable to life. Latitude isn’t the only factor that impacts climate.

A study finds a link between crop-harming weather and asylum applications to the European Union.

It wasn’t weather, but crop failures did result in the Irish “flooding” America a couple of centuries ago. There’s a precedent for everything!

Most people with a real technical background (engineering/science, not computer programming)

I don’t know if programming jobs where someone just codes up a spec still exist, but I for one wouldn’t hire a programmer who didn’t have solid design and modeling skills. Conceptualizing a piece of software as a black box, coming up with an extensible API, and writing a test spec are core programming skills IMO. And someone possessing such skills will readily understand the challenges of modeling something as complex as climate.

That said, the global warming scientists (or alarmists if you will) are not just talking out of their asses, Their projections and warnings are not based purely on modeling, but many years (now decades) of empirical observations that have are consistent with a pattern they have identified. Not too different from immigration alarmists, come to think of it!

You are right. I meant to emphasize the “Indian” part, not the “lightest-skinned”. The point being that Bollywood still prefers its stars and starlets to be Indian, even though it likes using white girls as eye candy. The major Indian cricket league (IPL) uses white cheerleaders (mostly from South Africa is what I’ve heard) for the same reason.

It’s like Jared and Ivanka with the genders reversed.

The reason is that the ability to impose Western culture and religion and the capacity to grow demographically is directly correlated with positive self-image and confidence in the future.

Well….no. Positive self-image and confidence in the future are correlated with success, which the Western world has had in droves in the recent past (Nazis and WW2 notwithstanding.) There’s absolutely nothing in Christianity (or in any Abrahamic religion) that imparts more spiritual value to its adherents compared to Hinduism (or Buddhism for that matter), especially for people who are raised in the latter faiths. As for Western culture: if you consider classical liberalism to be part of it, it’s rather fragile in its own right. Western populations (even Americans now) are not unwilling to elect strongmen to rule over them at the first signs of distress. If China keeps getting more prosperous and powerful, and if Western societies keep shedding off vestiges of liberalism, it’s Sinic culture that’s going to be correlated with “positive self-image and confidence in the future”, and Western culture will be treated with suspicion outside the West. (I take no pleasure from saying this, as I am a liberal in the Enlightenment mold myself.)

Bollywood seems to be importing all manner of white euro models and actresses by the plane loads

Only as extras. Notice who the lead “actresses” (dancers really) are. Still the lightest-skinned Indian chicks they can find.

(Vinay, I’m sure you know this, but this is for the benefit of others.)

In India, fair skin in a marriage partner is indeed considered desirable, but such desirability stops at the borders of the subcontinent. If we exclude the miniscule number of “global” families like the Nuhru/Gandhis, Indians of all hues are VERY ethnocentric in their marital decisions. Virtually all Indian moms and pops would prefer their kids to marry a darker-skinned Indian than a white person (or light-skinned East Asian, for that matter.)

Is “Khan”cognate with “Cohen,” Khan/Cohen denoting patrician status lineage?

Nope, it comes from the Mongol honorific (think Genghis Khan and all the rest.)

All genetic evidence suggests that Greek ancestry in India (and even in Afghanistan, which is where the Greeks had their heaviest presence) is negligible to non-existent, even among northwestern people who claim Greek ancestry. In reality, any Indo-Greek intermarriages were probably restricted to the elite (like Chandragupta Maurya supposedly marrying the daughter of Seleucus.)

Light skin in India almost entirely comes from the various strands that made up ANI, which predates the Greeks and Persians by centuries if not millenia (dates back to the Bronze Age.)

In India, and I would suspect Pakistan and most places in the world, beautiful women are seen as very valuable possessions that are guarded and never go out alone in public.

That’s really only in the north, and in in particular the northwest (which includes Pakistan), where there was a history of kidnapping of women (for you know what) by invaders. In the far south, on the other hand, conditions were very different; hardly a feminist paradise by your standards, but with very different rules from those that prevailed on the Indo-Afghan border. There, certain classes of women used to go around topless until the 19th century (the same “fashion” was followed in tropical SE Asia.)

As a Westerner, insofar as I prefer India more Westernized and Christianized my own sympathies of course lie with the Congress Party

And why would you prefer that? That’ll guarantee a higher pull for Indian immigration into the US. More Hindu nationalism means more attachment to the homeland, more aversion to foreigners (Muslims as well as Westerners), and a disinclination to emigrate. Until not too long ago, there was an explicit taboo (especially among the higher castes) against leaving the sacred confines of the Indian subcontinent, which is why the oldest emigrants from India date to the mid-19th century.

To people on this forum, who overwhelmingly prefer “separateness” (the Boers would use a different word) on an international scale, less Christianity and an aversion to Westernization in non-Western countries ought to be preferable by your own logic.

In cases where the taxed felt themselves unrepresented in the legislatures, there was even armed resistance, but by and large, the tax issues were resolved by having representation.

Then that’s what you should do with your current crop of immigrants, legal or otherwise. Give them representation pronto! (By your own logic.) If you feel they don’t pay taxes (untrue, but I’ll play along), it’s perhaps because they resent their “lower” status vis-a-vis natives.

Class is over.

Good try, but there’s nothing you said that adds to what I said. And there really isn’t much you can add to what I already know about American history and politics.

As for foreigners, taxpayers or not, they have no right to even be here. It is a privilege. Given the presence of entitled a*******s like yourself among them

I live in my country, not in America, so save it.
And you hardly get a veto over who has the right to be in America. If a majority of Americans as fine with immigration, you’ll just have to such suck it up and tolerate “foreigners” in your midst. If you can’t, you’ll just have to find yourself a mountain hideaway and pass your days. Waxing nostalgia for the hallowed ’50s won’t get you anywhere.

The revolutionary tax issue was about taxation WITHOUT representation in Parliament.

As a historical fact, this is accurate, but the way you are spinning this to counter what I said is BS on a massive scale.

You talk about taxes being necessary to bolster a society and provide a high standard of living. Absolutely true, but that has nothing to do with representation. The British Crown was already providing all such services to Americans and more for the “meager” taxes they were able to collect from the colonists. How do you think they managed to maintain an infrastructure and military for the Indian Wars? And for the general expansion of colonists across the frontier? None of the returns from these investments were flowing back to the mother country, so denying representation was not the massive crime that many of you think it was. (Though on a matter of principle, I’m with the Revolutionaries.)

Most of your villainous immigrants have no prayer of becoming citizens and even getting a vote, let alone representation in Congress. So by your own standards, they are within their rights not to pay taxes. But in the real world (unlike the fantasy tinseltown you inhabit), most of them do, at likely larger rates than natives, because unlike natives, they are almost all employed and get an income.

Learn OUR history

I already know it much better than you do. Just living in the country doesn’t make you automatically knowledgeable; it just makes you an entitled a******e. Magic Dirt, as many of you would call it!

Third Worlders can’t see how they’ve ruined the town

But for you, an exalted First Worlder, it should be easy to describe how.

Not wanting to pay taxes has been the raison d’etre of red-blooded conservative America since before the Revolution, so I’d say your villainous immigrants are following a noble tradition.

I’m from Los Angeles, and cannot unsee what I’ve seen. 3rd Worlders, even the best behaved ones, ruin Western cities.

How exactly have the “best-behaved Third Worlders” “ruined” Los Angeles? Are they the ones who started the recent fires?

Got it! This particular fire (or set of fires) caught my attention because of its proximity to UCLA (I have fond memories of grad school there.)

Anyway, good luck, and hope you and everyone in the area stay safe.

How do you manage to post so frequently, Mr. Sailer, with fires raging in your backyard?

On Nov 3 2020…the destabilization of Christian Russia will continue apace when Hindu-Jamaican POTUS Kamala Harris is coronated as our Dear Leader.

Looking forward to it! Soon your national religion is going to be a mixture of voodoo and Tantra.

Why were there Russians, who are eastern European Slavs, in Central Asia at all?

Enoch Powell was a hypocrite. He was an imperialist and wanted to be Viceroy of India. Yet when a few workers from Pakistan and Jamaica made it to his country, he became a demagogue braying about rivers of blood. To him it was always “nationalism for me but not for thee.”

The Neolithic Revolution started in the West in the Fertile Crescent.

The Fertile Crescent was no more “West” than modern Kurdistan is. And your view of history is quite bogus.

Remember that there was a time when almost all grads of their IIT came to the US (and went to grad school at MIT or Stanford). Now, only a third come to America, because their opportunities are better.

With due respect, I don’t believe there was ever such a time. I went to one of the IITs in the 90s, and even at that time, we would hear of maybe a quarter to a third of students going abroad to graduate schools. And those students majored in cutting edge areas like Computer Science, expert in which were scarce in India. Now most of those who went did tend to go to good schools in the US like MIT and Stanford, so that stereotype is accurate; if one didn’t get admitted to a highly-ranked school with financial aid, one tended not to bother and find the best job they could in India.

Also, the trope about these students being loaded or coming from elite families is nonsense. The IITs were completely meritocratic; you had to master high school Math and Science over a period of 2-3 years to have a prayer of answering any of the questions in what was a seriously rigorous set of exams. Most of us came from modest backgrounds; there were a significant number of JD Vance-types. We lived in very spartan surroundings, and those of us who came from any kind of money knew better than to flash it around.

Yeah, I think calls for reparations or apologies are quite silly, especially after so much time has passed. Tharoor doesn’t exactly call for actual reparations (like Ta-nehisi Coates), but more of a token, as an acknowledgment of responsibility. And when it comes to apologies, I’ve heard him say that if Willy Brandt could get down on his knees in front of the Warsaw ghetto, then surely the Brits could apologize for Jallianwala Bagh. Somewhat more understandable than a blanket apology, but neither that nor the token reparation serves any purpose, in my opinion.

But the mass migration to the West of people with his complaints and bugbears, unconscious or not, must be stopped—for the very same reason the EIC and the British Raj were ended in India: They don’t belong.

I can’t speak for the masses, but when it comes to someone like Tharoor, their complaints are directed laser-like at just the British, and not the West in general, and certainly not at white people. You’ll find a lot of Indian admirers of Germany and Russia (for very different reasons, needless to say), for example. And when it comes to America, many Indians relate to the US, both countries having struggled for independence from Britain. Apart from the Parliamentary system of government, much of the Indian Constitution is inspired by the US Constitution. Indians, whether in India or in America, generally don’t think of America as a racist oppressive country the same way black Americans do.

I’m not sure what Mehta’s particular hangups are though. Perhaps he was racially abused as a kid, and never got past it.

Just talking number and not morals: a high wage economy cannot return to America without a moderate amount of growth, or at least stability. Because if American goods cannot be sold abroad, there isn’t going to be enough revenue coming in to pay high wages (or any wages) to those workers. And if the US goes protectionist all the way, other countries are going to reciprocate and US companies aren’t going to be able to sell much abroad. The high-wage economy you are referring to came about in a peculiar set of circumstances, when America’s position vis a vis most of the world was one of overwhelming advantage. More than half of the rest of the world after WW2 shot itself in both feet by adopting stupid socialist (or communist) economics, thereby crippling their growth prospects. That situation doesn’t exist now.

The Yankees Stadium still has a monopoly over the product it provides to its patrons, so the analogy doesn’t apply.

You guys really don’t believe in the free market, do you?

The point of my comment was not to say that the West was uniquely bad or abnormal in using violence to subjugate others. It was to point out that many Westerners (on this forum too) have a tendency to glorify western colonialism and make it out to be a humanitarian expedition like the Peace Corps. Which is most definitely was not, as Huntington’s quote indicates (I quoted him because I thought he would get more respect from your lot than I would when I say the same thing.) And, by the way, this glorification is a form of 19th century political correctness, as I mentioned in an earlier comment.

Do you think you might be post-dating the West’s rise when you refer to the Thirty Years War? Would you say that the West’s military prowess was honed in the struggle (ultimately successful) against the Ottomans? The Spanish conquered all of Latin America almost a century before, right? Soon after the expulsion of the Moors. England might be a special case in that if its kings had been able to keep their holdings in France, they may have retained strong ties to the Continent, and never invested in becoming a maritime behemoth.

But I believe you are a military guy, right? So I’ll accept your judgment on military matters. The point I’ll make about India is that it was conquered through probably one part military superiority and 3 parts smart politics. India was fragmented after the Mughal Empire collapsed, and the British made a sequence of strategic alliances that heavily inflated the number of troops and arms at their disposal. And they were able to rely on fifth columns/traitors within their enemies’ domains in many of their battles (Plassey and Mysore being two examples.)

A serious question: Would you describe yourself as politically/philosophically aligned with Hindutva?

Sorry about the anger. I thought you were just switching topics for no good reason.

To answer your question: no, I have no love for Hindutva. I think it’s a pernicious ideology, built on some truth and some myth. Many of my closest friends happen to be Indian Muslims and Christians (none of us are religious in anything other than a nominal way), and this ideology is already having the effect of making their lives untenable in their homelands. By ideology, I come closest to being a libertarian, though hardly a dogmatic one.

I think I understand where your question comes from. Many of my comments on these forums do have an Indian nationalist bent, but I don’t see them as being biased or factually incorrect. It’s a bit like how you all protest (and poke fun at) the pieties of the left and the left-wing spin that the media puts on any “controversial” news item (read “race”.) There was a fair amount of exaggeration and self-service in the British rhetoric about their Empire, and about the nature of the people they ruled over. If they could lower the self-confidence of their subjects and paint them as barbarians who the British were bringing into the light, those people would be so much less inclined to protest British rule. So I see some of the Hindutva rhetoric (and polemics like Tharoor’s) as a necessary corrective.

I live in India, you dimwit!

Ancient Aryans are not the “West”. They were never part of the West, genetically or culturally. They and their culture live on in this world through Indians (all of us, and not just the so-called upper castes.) The assumption that they were Europeans who must have invaded and subjugated prior “natives” just like recent white colonists did, has zero evidence, and is a fantasy held by white supremacists like you because you are a loser in real life and want to feel superior to darker-skinned people.

I will also add here a quote from the late Samuel Huntington, one that speaks for itself.

“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion […] but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.”

I am a non-Westerner, and so is Tharoor.

Next time, use the “Reply” option.

Your comment is incomprehensible blabber, so you needn’t have bothered anyway.

People of your ilk think much the same way the antifa/Marxist/SJW left does; just the substance is different. Cannot be bothered with logic and arguments, but will pick up on one stray line you deem offensive, fit that into a model of what you think your target looks like, and use that as a cudgel to beat them up.

We are viewed as the place that has got their loot. Our stuff is actually their stuff.

Shashi Tharoor was talking specifically about Britain, not the entire Western world. And he’s right about the fact that the British, at least during the first half of their rule, looted India. This is a fact, and really doesn’t need to be obsessed over at this point in time. We’ve been independent for 70 years now, and our current problems are of our own making and our responsibility, so the British loot of India has little bearing on current events.

But someone like Tharoor is forced to say the stuff he does because of the periodic paroxysms of Empire-love that arise among the right-wing in Britain (and the West in general), who peddle a revisionist version of colonial rule as beneficial to the natives.

In reality, the Brits behaved in India much the same way the Turks behaved in, say, Serbia. They just talked a better game; the Turks were not so hypocritical. But the reality on the ground was the same: milking the conquered territories for resources and fighting manpower, and to some extent cultural genocide.

I’m just puzzled why there is not a whole massive industry back in India just dealing with it.

Because India doesn’t allow dual citizenship (just like the US shouldn’t either, as another commenter mentioned.) Unless mommy and daddy want to give the baby up for adoption in the US, they’ll have to take it back to India and give it Indian citizenship.

Why didn’t the Papuans invent calculus, gunpowder, or penicillin?

Did they need to?

The entire thesis of GGS can be summarized as: people do what they need to do in order to survive and reproduce; and what they need to do to survive and reproduce is highly dependent on geography.

OT: More immigriping… From the people who would still be at the Mesolithic stage of civilization were it not for the British Raj.
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In their own land they’d be squatting and shitting in the street.

When the British first encountered India, the latter was arguably the more advanced civilization in everything except naval technology. That’s why the British bothered to sail halfway around the world; to buy goods they couldn’t get back home.

And, by the way, you all (British, etc.) were shitting in pitchers by your bedsides around that time and for a while to come, so the comparison of pooping habits isn’t so flattering to your lot.

Delhi to Indians is like Washington to middle Americans. A corrupt swamp full of entitled people.

You don’t cover yourself in glory by regurgitating observations made by 19th century British colonials in India and using that to pontificate on what India is like today, Mr Sailer! India may or may not be the world’s most reactionary civilization, but it’s an every-changing one, like every other civilization. There’s a world of difference between the India of 1868 and the India of 2017, just like there’s a world of difference between the America of 1868 and that of 2017.

As for these “surveys” you report on, I’d take them with a huge pinch of salt. The population of India had seen its society and world-view completely upended at the time by the British, and they it knew that the Englishman was the master, at least for the time being. Many people just made things up when the British talked to them in hopes of currying favor and gaining some advantage in a “new’ country.

You have Indians commenting on your blog, many of whom are sympathetic to your ideology. Listen to them to understand what India is like instead of digging up colonial texts. One comment from the likes of Dot not Feather is worth more than a shelf of colonial writings on the topic.

As for caste, I understand it’s an anthropological curiosity to you and most of your commenters, who like to take a little bit of real information and spin fantasies around it. The truth is that caste has indeed lost much salience in modern India, though less so in the rural areas. The only sphere of life where it matters is in marriage, but that’s not because the bride and the groom are caste-conscious but because they prefer Mommy to pick their spouses, and Mommy prefers to stick to the caste system. By the next generation, that will change too. Inter-caste marriages in India are like interracial marriages in the US; still a minority phenomenon, but rapidly increasing in proportion.

I was also a bit surprised at how many students seemed to look down on their professors.

I call complete BS on this. I grew up in India and went to an IIT. There are absolutely no such dynamics in India. Quite the opposite: teachers are expected, and given much more leeway than in the West, to be authoritarian in their classrooms. If anything, Indian students don’t question their teachers even when they should. They learn that behavior when they go to grad school in the West.

As a Freedom of Association absolutist, I’d like to see all anti-discrimination laws repealed.

But not across borders?

Trump wasn’t president when he and his henchmen met with Russians. (If Kennedy had met Khruschev in 1959 trying to get dirt on Dick Nixon, there would have been holy hell to pay.) In fact, no one at that time gave Trump a prayer of winning (including himself and many in his team), so your comment that Trump was entitled to have such talks as befits a President is silly on its face.

That said, whether or not whatever Trump did rises to the legal definition of misconduct, I believe this Russia issue has been a red herring from the start. The left and the media, even if they get many scalps this way, will likely come to regret the time and effort wasted on this. There’s so much else to criticize Trump about. The guy is a empty suit, and a narcissistic as*****le, whose only “skill” is to throw his name and his ample funds (which he inherited from Daddy) around. He is both completely self-centered and has no ability to think about or analyze any issue, including the ones he ran on. The best description I have heard of him is “an evil Chauncey Gardner”, as Sam Harris refers to him. He is a disgrace to your country and to your (alt-right) cause, and you all are chumps for sticking behind him.

Not buying this given the types of ships that existed during the slave trade days. No more than a couple of hundred on a trip.

Slaves were not guests in cabins. They were packed like sardines in the holds. Use your imagination.

black slaves were offered their freedom if they would only rise up against their masters. They in large part refused.

Most likely because they weren’t sure if the North would succeed in winning the war, and not because the slaves and masters had “affectionate” relations. If the South won, there would be reprisals against the rebel slaves to match what the Romans did to Spartacus and his followers. This is “duh” on a gigantic scale.

Every system yields few returns for some people. The American system is hardly fair to everyone. And it wasn’t fair back in what you regard as your Golden Age either. Also, every Englishman who landed in America to colonize it left the mother country because he had no hope there.

Yes, absolutely.

Yes, I believe politics trumps economics. Bad politics can negate the effects of good economics.

That’s not true of legal immigrants.

From a logical standpoint, if third worlders were more hard working than Americans, than they wouldn’t need to move to America.

The ones that are hard working want to move because their hard work yields few returns back home.

There, was that so hard to understand?

High-caste Indians-in-India also often adhere to vegetarian diets with very poor nutritional characteristics (no protein, <1600 calories a day), which would lower their IQs relative to lower castes who eat more nutritious non-vegetarian diets.

This is nonsense in multiple ways. First, there is no correlation between caste and vegetarianism. Brahmin vegetarianism is specific to two regions (the UP, or the Gangetic belt) and the deep south (mainly Tamil Nadu.) Brahmins are meat-eaters virtually everywhere in the country. On the other hand, all castes in the western state of Gujarat practice vegetarianism (an influence of the austere religion of Jainism.) Second, Indian vegetarians tend to be very heavy dairy consumers (I’m one example), which provides enough proteins.

Higher-caste Indians are also quite a bit more resistant to giving up Hindu practices that are harmful to (largely, due to segregation, their own) public health (defecating outside instead of in toilets being the big one).

The only people who defecate outside in India are those who don’t have access to toilets. It has nothing to do with caste.

As far as I know Europeans have never been offended by this idea. So why are Indians upset by it?

Because the narrative tends to be be similar to comment #2, that Indo-Europeans == modern Europeans (more or less) while Indians are a degenerate mestizo population with some (but not much) IE ancestry. India is condemned to be hopelessly mired in poverty and backwardness until white invaders (Indo-Europeans, British) come in, marginally improve the gene pool, and innovate (and then eventually go degenerate themselves.)

That Europeans themselves are a hybrid, and have as much IE ancestry as modern Indians, is not well-known or advertised. If it was, the theory would probably gain more acceptance in India.

This is the same India that my wife saw last year on a two-week tour of the country.

It’s possible (even inevitable) that a foreigner will see a lot of poverty in a two-week tour of India. Everything else is projection though. Just because someone is poor doesn’t mean they are lower caste. Just because there are a lot of poor people doesn’t mean that society (or its elites) are keeping them in that condition wilfully; it just means that the country is so damn poor that it cannot afford to relieve the condition of its masses.

Your (or your wife’s) impressions sound exactly like David Duke’s impressions of India during his visit. Exactly as superficial, exactly as blinkered, exactly as wrong.

You must have seen a different movie from the one I saw. What I recall is Arthur being the son of a Roman soldier and a British mother, with the ethnicity of the soldier never mentioned anywhere. Where did you get this “Ossetian” reference?

You have no idea what you are talking about. First, “Dravidian” is not synonymous with “low caste”. Second, Dravidians and Aryans (northerners really) have no history of conflict ever (the 20th century separatist movements were inspired by 19th century theories, and have nothing to do with historical memory); they all considered themselves part of one Vedic civilization. Third, Dravidians have done rather well for themselves historically speaking. Well into the Islamic era, southern kingdoms and dynasties were not just up and standing, they were themselves colonizing lands in SE Asia (e.g., the Cholas.)

As for the East India Company, it intruded just at the point when Hindus were getting the upper hand. The Marathas were the most powerful force in India throughout the 18th century, and the Mughal emperor had become their virtual puppet. The British were just a band of mercantile brigands who saw their opportunity with a lot of “infighting” in the subcontinent, made some good bets about who to ally with and who to oppose, and spread their rule like cancer throughout the country.

Apparently, the ancient Indo-European speaking peoples who invaded India in those distant far-off days were, originally at least, closer genetic relations of such living populations as modern Ukrainians, Russians, Poles, Lithuanians etc than to modern Indians.
Even living Britons are closer relations to them than modern Indians are.

This is an idiotic formulation (mainly because it’s inaccurate, and partly because it’s inspired by your white supremacist impulses.) It’s also the kind of formulation that will rile Indians and keep preventing them from accepting this theory.

Really, to trade for a world of say General Robert E Lee’s conflicted morality, skilled generalship under desperate conditions, and complex religious yet belligerent personality so that we have a world better for maximum numbers of gender-confused brainless boobs is sickening.

Yeah, that’s all the world has: Robert E. Lee and “gender-confused boobs”. Nothing else.

Talking about Robert Lee, here’s a hard (negative) look at the man: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/06/the-myth-of-the-kindly-general-lee/529038/ . Can you find anything here that isn’t factual?

The only historical revisionism lies in portraying The Lost Cause as some sort of pure (even romantic) quest for the principle of states rights. The people who started and led the Confederacy were under no illusion about what their cause was; they were completely open about it.

I don’t blame Southerners for this at all. Every group of people who are defeated and traumatized need myths to hold on to (there are a number of defeated and browbeaten countries around the world where such “Lost Cause/Culture” nostalgia lingers.) What I am puzzled by is why non-Southerners seem so moved by this, especially when the Cause was about slavery, from start to finish (plus rebellion, though that could easily have been forgiven if the Cause hadn’t been so abhorrent.)

It crosses my mind, in an imprecise way, that the current liberal hatred of Russia, a country and culture that dwells on its historical hardships, is not dissimilar to the liberal hatred of the mourning that the South expresses for a lost cultural past.

Per my understanding, the South was nor mourning a lost cultural past, but rather its failed attempt at preserving and expanding a slave society. After all, if they hadn’t tried to secede, they could have remained in the Union, kept their old culture, and periodically blackmailed the North into accepting their demands (pretty much what happened throughout the first half of the 19th century.) But that wasn’t enough for them. They fought, they lost, and they should have moved on. Why the rest of the country tolerated their attempts at celebrating rebellion and treason beats me. Now, if the descendants of slaves weren’t still residing in the country, perhaps this “mourning” would not be a big deal. But they are!

I don’t see a valid comparison with Russia here. I’m a liberal, and I have no idea why American liberals have decided to wage a jihad against that country in cahoots with neocons. There’s no Russian equivalent of mourning for a slave society. It’s not even that Putin is celebrating Communism; he’s shown no signs of wanting to bring back the Politburo. If Russia seems revanchist in any way when it comes to its neighbors, it’s purely a reaction to NATO’s overreach. But nothing Russia is doing or has done comes close to the immorality of the Confederacy’s ultimate goal: to keep people permanently in bondage.

after Partition India was 3% Muslim.

Fake news! (Or alternative facts, take your pick)

Here’s the 1951 Census of India that says Muslims were almost 10% of the population.

I’m not saying you are wrong (we are both arguing counterfactuals, after all) but I think your projection of the current state of affairs back to the pre-1940s era may not be accurate. The areas comprising Pakistan today were not the obscurantist hellholes they are today. Punjabi Muslims were quite liberal as Muslims go (many of them had been pro-British partisans since the Sikh wars, and proudly flashed their knighthoods; there was a thriving movie industry that would eventually lose many of its stars to Bollywood after Partition.) Even the Pathans on the border were more liberal than they are today in their Talibanized country. As for Hindus massacring (lynching?) Muslims, that’s a relatively recent phenomenon too. Hindu nationalism would probably never have been able to rear its head so high without the bogeyman of Pakistan, and what they see as a Muslim fifth column in the country.

Up caste Hindus are below replacement, like white people in the West.

I don’t know about caste, but the only parts of India that are increasing heavily in population are in the northern Gangetic belt (UP and Bihar, with some surrounding areas.) Southern (peninsular) India is at or below replacement rate right now.

The Singapore gov’t would have zero compunction about razing a mosque and jailing forever anyone who was plotting a terrorist attack, and that is common knowledge. They don’t do Chinese guilt and they run the country to make it work for everyone.

Yes, but they also have zero tolerance for “offensive speech”, which would cover pretty much all the comments on sites like this. If you criticize Muslims or Islam or the Koran openly, you’ll be deemed to be a disturber of the peace as much as a Muslim who preaches hate from a mosque.

But i’ll tell you in my experience–lots of discussions with lots Indians–the smarter they are they less they buy it.

I know lots of smart Indians who are completely nuts on this issue. They don’t know, or read, much of history, so they paint a picture that gives them the most comfort. I speak as someone who was born and raised in India, and who moved back after a brief interlude. I think I know more about my country than foreign expats who have inherited old grudges from their parents.

Between having one country dominated, however tenuously, by a Hindu majority, and having two countries, one of which has evolved into a playground for Islamic terrorists and is independent to keep doing what it will, I’ll go for the former any day. India has seen a number of Muslim invasions, but India has also always been able to civilize and integrate its Muslims. That’s why I said Jinnah broke what was working.

Think about your own Civil War, and what a successful Southern secession would have resulted in. North America would never have had the stable, prosperous, and world-dominant position it ended up with. You would have constantly been skirmishing along your borders. There would have been some terrorist acts now and then (think John Brown.) But because the Unionist cause won, you were able to resolve your differences somewhat peacefully and build a country together, even if it came at the expense of blacks for almost a century.

CBSE stands for Central Board of Secondary Education. It’s a government-controlled body that governs high school education in many schools in the country. It sets syllabi and conducts tests (only at graduation time though.)

India does not have a standardized K-12 system like the US does. There are a couple of national-level boards (CBSE and ICSE) that various schools around the country are affiliated with. Then every state has its own board, and sets up its own syllabi and conducts its own tests. Since virtually each state speaks a different language, and many have different histories, I guess this level of decentralization was in demand, though I’m not entirely familiar with the history. The ICSE is a descendant of the English Cambridge Board (which I believe has evolved into the GCSE.)

Anyway, the OP’s comment relates to the fact that educational syllabi has always been politicized in India, especially when it comes to history. When I was a child (80s), our history books did not shirk from describing the details of Muslim invasions, but there was specific content designed to promote the theory that Islam had a good influence on caste-ridden Hinduism by making it more egalitarian (this theory is not without merit; the Sikh faith started out as an attempt at Hindu-Muslim fusion in the borderland of Punjab.) But since the (sort-of-Hindu-nationalist) BJP has come into power (at the turn of the century), there have been attempts at complete revisions. Which the “establishment” historians have vigorously opposed.

OP thinks that my comment was inspired by the so-called secular history traditionally taught in India. It wasn’t. If anything, my background pushes me to be sympathetic to Hindu nationalism, and many in my family are. But what I said was inspired both by my experience (of growing up India, and also presently living there), plus my extensive reading of history.

Jinnah was quite an attractive character until the mid-1920s. Then his wife died, and around the same time he lost his influence within the Congress Party (of which he used to be a leading member) to Gandhi, whom he despised. By the 30s, he went completely nuts, and was sold to the Pakistan cause (he was adulated by the Muslim League stalwarts as their last best hope.) The Jinnah of the 1900s and 1910s could never have said the things that Steve quoted here.

Lee Kuan Yew’s views on the strengths and weaknesses of the various ethnicities in Singapore were explicit. He thought Indians made for good accountants and CFOs, but were not CEO material.

Do you have any citations for this? If LKY thought so, presumably he thought Chinese made better CEOs than Indians? The stereotype seems to have been reversed in the US though; many Fortune 500 companies have Indian CEOs, many more so than East Asians.

In Singapore itself, history has been retconned to downplay and pigeonhole the role of Indians in its history, to the extent of completely avoiding any mention in their war museums of the presence of significant numbers of the British Indian Army during the fall of Singapore in WWII.

I didn’t know the demographics of Singapore changed so much recently, so thanks for the info. As for Indian participation in WWII, we should keep in mind that the Japanese, while being very hostile to the Chinese, advertised themselves as well-wishers of Indians (whether or not they were sincere is a different question.) They wanted the Indians on their side, at least for a while, to stir up trouble in India against British rule, and possibly even help the Japanese “liberate” India (and then fall into the Japanese lap, I guess.) The Japanese let the Indian nationalist leader, Subhash Chanbdra Bose land in Singapore and recruit an army from among the Indian POWs. Given that many of these POWs had seen their British officers surrender pusillanimously to the Japanese, they were completely disillusioned about the superiority of the British, and many of them enthusiastically flocked to Bose’s Indian National Army (which helped the Japanese invade eastern India, but eventually lost and was disbanded.)

I wonder if these events increased antagonism the local Chinese (including LKY) felt for the local Indians, because the former were most definitely oppressed by the Japanese. Do you have any info on this?

This is just re-litigating old history. Reams have been written on Jinnah, his motivations, and whether or not Partition was a wise thing, so it’s not like you are breaking new ground here.

What you call “acute” was criticized even at that time by people of all communities. Jinnah was not acting as a prognosticator but as an advocate for his faction, the elite Muslim-dominated party called the Muslim League. What he said though became a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you keep beating the drumbeats of division, then people will eventually divide, with horrific consequences of the kinds we saw in 1947 (and are continuing to see till this day, with seemingly perpetual enmity between the two countries.) The reality was that divisions existed, but people had forged a common culture over the centuries, and splitting them apart was not a trivial task. Hence literally millions of people had to be moved across the borders of Punjab and Bengal with horrific massacres (and suicides) occurring on a daily basis.

It is quite clear that Hindus and Mussalmans derive their inspiration from different sources of history. They have different epics, their heroes are different…. Very often the hero of one is a foe of the other, and likewise their victories and defeats overlap.

True to some extent but he vastly overstated the case. The Mughals, originally invaders, acquired legitimacy as sovereigns throughout the subcontinent. Throughout the 18th century, even after they lost all real power, they were propped up as puppet rulers in Delhi by the very Hindu Marathas.

And what (non-trivially-sized) country or culture is the above not true of? Didn’t the Saxons and Normans have different heroes and epics, and didn’t they fight each other once? How does that impact England today?

Jinnah decisively broke what was sort-of working. It was hardly perfect, but given time, things would have worked out. It would definitely have been better than the situation we have today, where two p***-poor countries keep poking each other in the eye on a daily basis rather than focus on the development of their societies. So no, thanks; we in India do not consider Jinnah to be any kind of a prescient figure. To us, he was a monster, one of the villains of our history.

As a Pakistani you must know that half of Afghanistan was directly conquered by the British and is currently part of the Pakistani state.

You are probably referring to the NWFP (capital at Peshawar), and including what is today known as FATA (like Waziristan)? They weren’t conquered by the British per se, but by the Sikhs (based in Punjab) in the early 19th century. The British, by conquering Punjab, inherited those parts too, so they got incorporated into British India, and eventually into Pakistan. When the British tried to conquer Afghanistan proper (west of the Khyber Pass), they actually got beat up pretty bad, so they abandoned military efforts and tried to make the Afghan ruler some kind of a vassal.

Italians Were Victims of Racism from Italians

I think it’s common knowledge that northern Italians don’t think much of their southerners, and make fun of them in popular culture. I don’t know how deep the roots of this phenomenon are, but it’s been observed at least since Garibaldi’s unification of Italy. I read somewhere (don’t know the provenance) that “Africa begins at Rome” was a common sentiment held in the northern part of the country.

Economic research begins with theory. The econometrician constructs and tests a model. Sometimes the results are consistent with the theory, sometimes not.

That sounds perfectly reasonable to me. But it looks like Chetty was trying to collect and crunch the data first before positing a model or a theory.

In my field (computer systems), we try to collect data across all dimensions (control a variable, vary all others) before proposing any conjectures. Of course, we need to have enough awareness about how exactly our system is instrumented (because that determines the results we will get), but trained researchers tend to be aware of that.

What’s wrong with a mode of inquiry that seeks to answer the question: “how can governance be bettered in a particular locality/region to improve life prospects for people there”? Chetty seemed to be focusing on social mobility, and it’s unclear to me how social mobility is related to average IQ, which is the pet obsession of people here.

“Magic dirt” is a term I have not heard anywhere outside of alt-right forums. Based on my limited knowledge, academics focus on good and bad institutions (the very word inspires contempt around here, I know.)

Please don’t let this country, the U.S.A., be similarly destroyed.

Doesn’t the UK have a much higher percentage of whites (~85%) than the US (~65%)? And that’s what you really care about, don’t you?

inhabitants of what formerly were British colonies and are now, since the Brits left, failed states sunk in poverty and disorder.

Those states were in worse poverty and similar levels of disorder when the British were there. The British were responsible for a lot of it.

First, it seems Steve wants economists to start their studies with certain assumptions in mind (like different races regressing to different IQ means.)

But good science is usually done by starting with a completely open mind, being agnostic of the reasons of the phenomena under investigation. When a study reaches an impasse, assumptions based either on common sense or drawn from other fields can be introduced to gain better understanding. But if you begin with a theory in mind, you’ll only end up self-reinforcing it. So there’s value to the research Chetty is doing, and the way he’s going about it.

Second, it is not clear to me that Chetty has hit such an impasse yet. As Sailer himself says, there is both nature and nurture. Nature we cannot control, but nurture we can. In the context of this study, one cannot control the nature of the citizens themselves, but governmental institutions can be improved (doesn’t mean govt has to do more, sometimes decreasing its scope and letting market forces take over could be better.) If Chetty’s goal is making recommendations for politicians and bureaucrats to imbibe, he’s going in the right direction. Because what can politicians if they are told that a county is better if it has more white people and fewer black people?

We are not forcing our policy on others

Har, har! Like this is ever true when it comes to the United States.

Thanks! Peace.

which I interpret basically as “Those lazy losers can go to hell”

I am sorry you interpret it that way, because that is not what I wish for at all. And neither do you wish for its opposite, if are honest with yourself, Let me elaborate below.

The alt-right wants to privilege people based on race.
You want to privilege people if they’ve won the genetic lottery and have inherited high-IQ genes (because basically that’s what your talk of “meritocracy” is about…no amount of hard work will compensate for genetic stupidity).

This is mostly accurate, but I would say “genes + hard work”. The effect of good genes can be undone if one grows up in un-salubrious environments or if one does not work hard.

But when you say you want to privilege people based on race, unless you are a full-blown socialist/communist, you are probably OK with some inequality among people of a particular race? What you seek is some sort of floor below which no one will slip, right? And not that everyone must be able to own a yacht?

Well, that is what I wish for. Let the genetic lottery plus one’s achievements provide benefit to individuals. It is then society’s responsibility to ensure that the “losers” don’t suffer too much, and ALWAYS have the opportunity to rise again through hard work of their own (which in practice would mean a progressive tax code, welfare services, even basic healthcare, etc.)

And sorry, but if anybody comes across as thin-skinned in this thread it’s you imo.

When people misinterpret me, or read ulterior motives into what I say, or if I feel they are ganging up on me, then yes, I do get defensive.

This is an example of misreading comments that I alluded to earlier, and it irritates me to no end.

I did say that it was perfectly fine for someone to criticize Spencer for his views in public. I NEVER said I advocated his being kicked out the gym. I did not read the entire article linked to, and thought he had chosen to leave the gym of his own volition. My mistake was pointed out, and I stand corrected.

As far as I can see, you simply favor things that benefit yourself

Whether or not I advocated for Spencer to be kicked out of his gym (I did not), how does that benefit me either way?

I am an advocate for meritocracy regardless of whether it benefits me. At certain points in life it has helped me, and at other points it has hurt me. I earn a modest income (though comfortable enough for me) and am rather low on the totem pole in my organization. So I don’t need any lectures on sacrifice from you, Mr. Investment Banker.

What a bad cosmopolitan you are.

If your definition of cosmopolitanism includes transgenderism, then I’m guilty as charged. My cosmopolitanism has limits. I’m liberal on issues like speech, association, and commerce, but rather conservative in my personal habits and preferences.

I know you are trolling but I’ll still respond and say that I always start hoping for a constructive debate. (Though I won’t apologize for the fact that I make my arguments forcefully.) Only when someone makes it personal, or willfully misreads what I write, or expresses contempt or condescension, or when people gang up on me, do I respond in kind.

I don’t understand what you were trying to convey. Transgendering has as much of a correlation with your ideology as it has with mine.