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KulakRevolt  8mo ago (anarchonomicon.com)   10769 thread views

FILM REVIEW: India the Worst country on Earth

anarchonomicon.com

4Chan's First Feature film is also the first Feature length AI Film.

The Conceit? Aside from a few Joke stills, none of the visual film is AI. It is a "Nature Documentary" Narrated by David Attenborough... It is also maybe the most disturbing film ever made, and possibly the most important/impactful film of the decades so far.

Reality is more terrifying than fiction.

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Just to add my two cents into the whole disgusting affair - it reminded me of genre of movies and documentaries in my homeland of Slovakia with respect to Romani people, so I was somewhat inoculated. There is even a "thriving" boutique tourist segment where people are shown the worst gypsy slums either the urban ones such as Lunik IX or literal 3rd world villages we call "settlements" in Slovakia (here is aerial view of another one), where we have news pieces such as rats feasted on a body of little Roma boy, aged 18 months. Here is a video from that particular gypsy settlement related to another fatality due to fire.

Roma people live in Slovakia and elsewhere in Europe for centuries since they moved there probably from Punjab region of India. As far as I know, they faced incredible levels of racism with laws such as in Switzerland in 1510 where they were supposedly put to death on sight. The problem seems to be intractable, during communism gypsies were forcefully integrated with somewhat mixed results: while in some cities such as capital of Bratislava the effort was relatively successful - they literally put Romani families into blocks with soldiers and police officers. But elsewhere such as with Lunik IX it resulted in unbelievable slum. The sad thing is that while relatively substantial proportion of Romani people are assimilated and have decent life, there seems to be this permanent underclass of gypsies living in slums rife with alcoholism and cheap drugs such as toluene. You may integrate/save individuals but culture and population as a whole just propagates into the next generation.

Meta: I think this post is not appropriate as a top level post.

The content thematic would easily qualify it for the culture war thread.

I would still think it is a bit short for the CW top level post, little more than a link and a few lines of context.

Compare with that natural selection post. At least that post was articulate enough, even if I also disagree with its content (but much less vehemently).

Having top level posts like this (from the quotations from other comments, I am not reading the link) makes us appear like a bunch of internet racists. At least we could try to appear to be a bunch of eloquent internet racists.

I must disagree. Kulak is a controversial - yes, but very well established poster in the Motte community. Kulak's posting history reaches 2019, maybe earlier. I think you are long enough here to know this. The fact that he is tolerated despite his edginess means something, probably many users (including me) find his writings valuable in some sense. And look how many comments this posted has generated so far. Isn't this discussion something what we are here for?

Furthermore, I share the opinion, that the Motte is in desperate need of top posters, even mediocre, because otherwise one can easily see where this evolution is going. Users will be hesitant about writing top posts and we will be left with nothing but CW thread with comments which take hours to read and even more time to reply and only some small subgroup of the smartest/most involved Mottizens being able to contribute without getting scoffed.

I made the count and Kulak's essay is around 4000 words, while the natural selection post is about 1600 words, so I don't find the argument about length convincing.

I think of myself as pretty radicalized, but even I find the content of the movie and of the essay off-putting. And it's not about the scatology and gore, the idea of labeling any group of people 'subhuman' is too much to bear. But the argument that the post makes us 'appear like a bunch of racists' is the weakest argument I can think of. This is some sort of an Argument from authority but in its most mediocre form: "What will the people think about us?" I am not going to self-censor myself because some group of people I don't care about will think badly about me. I am interested only in people who will find integrity in my views and actions. And I don't really think a lot of people care what the Motte thinks and writes anyway.

I made the count and Kulak's essay is around 4000 words, while the natural selection post is about 1600 words, so I don't find the argument about length convincing.

I think the point is that @KulakRevolt just linked it; he didn't crosspost.

To clarify I never used the word "SubHuman" in the piece.

Only "subspecies of human", of which Whites, or however you like to divide it are another subspecies. (everyone is a member of some subspecies)

My argument is not that we must despise them or hate them, but that whatever empathy and projection of deep kinship "Brotherhood of man" is clearly misplaced, given that, as displayed by the discomfort of the film, many cannot even bear to look on them whilst employing this Euro-anthropomorphism.

Although Thames wants India nuked, I'd argue there is a middle ground between believing on the one hand white people owe just as much care and empathy to brown children as their own and should go full effective altruists sending every dime they earn into the maw of Sub-Continental parasite prevention , and on the other believing that no brown feet must ever walk the earth again.

We can just care LESS for them. We can rank our preferences, place them in a farther circle of concern where they can't affect our lifestyles and environments, and choose to just merely tolerate them without ever accepting them or embracing them.

Our Choices are not between universal unconditional love and absolute exterminationist hatred. We can just choose to neither love them nor empathize with them, just as every single human being to ever exist before the Great Awakening would have assumed you'd feel about people you've never met on the otherside of the world.

Mankind is not a brotherhood, you are under no obligation to love or identify with people across the globe who seemingly despise your every value and aesthetic, you don't owe them a dime, and if you love their children as you love yours then you're a bad parent who hates your children.

Just stop thinking its the end of history and all is one and one is all... and instead think like every other human being for the past 10,000 years and every human being whose lines will manage to survive the next 10,000.

Love Beauty, hate ugliness, love your own, don't care about strangers you've never met.

Your worth as a person is not determined by what you feel in your heart for people you've never met, don't like, are not related to you, and whom you never intend to and certainly don't want to meet.

Hate them if you want to, stop caring, think about it a little and then go to something else, but stop torturing yourself imagining your moral worth depends on your ability to love people whom you clearly don't... all you're doing is alienating yourself from the family, kin, and ethnicities you actually do love.

"Why is this thing I have not read not banned?"

Maybe the answer is that most of those quotation are not me, but me quoting the creator of the film?

The core thrusts of this article strike me as "galaxy-brain takes", in the sense of throwing Occam's Razor to the curb and going with the most dramatic rather than the most plausible interpretation. If you've actually spent any amount of time on the internet as a rubbernecker motivated by something other than confirmation of your biases, you will know that most of the material India is being singled out for is hardly unique to it; in fact a 4chan white supremacist might be somewhat dismayed to find out that many a European has formed a mental image of their beloved all-white Middle America that is only somewhat more flattering than this movie's depiction of Indians. (A while ago I binged police bodycam videos that involved a barely verbal middle aged guy in sweatpants being questioned outside of a wooden shack over the apparent presence of his mother's week-old corpse in the bedroom; druggies reenacting the 2001 monolith scene over one of their count being arrested, someone with the build of Jabba the Hutt being dragged out of a trailer, etc.; all of the aforementioned being white) Admitting only a bit more diversity, there is good video material like this.

You read a lot into normies' discomfort and inability to watch the movie for any length of time, but the straightforward explanation there is that the unapologetic racism of the narration is extremely far outside the Overton window and this is just a standard human reaction to having well-internalized language taboos violated in front of them. I have American friends who are perfectly enthusiastic to discuss all sorts of edgy voldemortean propositions but get physically uncomfortable if a hard-r "nigger" is enunciated in their presence (I learned that this is a good way to dissuade real-life usage of various twitchspeak inflections of "pog(ger)").

dammit how did I know that would be a video of Kensington before I even clicked it.

The core thrusts of this article strike me as "galaxy-brain takes", in the sense of throwing Occam's Razor to the curb and going with the most dramatic rather than the most plausible interpretation.

A wise sage on /r/themotte once said that @KulakRevolt is always wrong, but he's always wrong in a fascinating way that's rewarding to puzzle apart.

You read a lot into normies' discomfort and inability to watch the movie for any length of time, but the straightforward explanation there is that the unapologetic racism of the narration is extremely far outside the Overton window and this is just a standard human reaction to having well-internalized language taboos violated in front of them.

Yes, it was more dehumanizing narration than the sight of a man pooping on the beach that made me turn off the video before the title card.

The difference between flyovercountry crackheads/american fatties and the videographical apocalypse in that 4chan video is the lack of shit all over the place and rats. I am visually viscerally disgusted on a level unable to be put into words far more than the racist words spoken by the ai.

Also notable that they the flyover crackheads had to be chemically altered by hostile pharmaceutical companies and cartels aligned with China to get to their still mostly first world point (those on the streets are an extreme minority), whereas as far as I can tell india doesn't even have a huge drug problem, it's not mentioned on the video at all. And I've never heard stories of big narcotics trades in india.

They're just like that sober

I looked up "India drug gangs" first hits were of Canada.

By contrast Khat in East Africa, Gas huffing in Australia, meth and Alcoholism in Russia, and Opium in Indochina are all well known.

The cow dung toothpaste was the end of the internet for one night for me. Just nope.

The difference between flyovercountry crackheads/american fatties and the videographical apocalypse in that 4chan video is the lack of shit all over the place and rats. I am visually viscerally disgusted on a level unable to be put into words far more than the racist words spoken by the ai.

But the question is: how do we know said crackheads wouldn't do the same in Delhi? I don't know any cities where dirt poor whites live in Indian concentrations without welfare support. It could be that some ethnicities have more "ingrained cleanliness" than others, but american fatties benefit from abundant free bathrooms connected to a sewer system; poor Indians do not.

My priors are that if you artificially gave San Antonio third world infrastructure and wealth, the inhabitations would still clean their surroundings better than what you see in this film. But there's no test case to know for sure.

Given San Antonio’s demographics, this experiment is being run in Latin America right now as we speak.

My point is that it's unsurprising for people who are perfectly capable of watching gore/scat/gross video to still be viscerally disgusted by racist language, and therefore to want to terminate consumption for reasons that are not the gore/scat/gross content fundamentally shaking their worldview (any more than the people who were shocked by me intonation-matching their "poggers" with its ni- counterpart were so because the single word made them realise some truth they were suppressing).

Also, I've seen American flyover country content that is more viscerally disgusting to me. I can't say that rats bother me much, but I'd say a hot dog lost inside the folds of some trailer blob's gut for a few months before being rediscovered by EMTs is strictly worse than feces.

Ok, the "Big if true" takeaway from this review for me.

India: The Worst Country on Earth inflicts violence of a spiritual and metaphysical variety upon the westerner. If only Samara was crawling out of their TV to kill their physical body, they might die cursing a white girl and their salvation would be assured. Instead India: TWCoE attacks their very soul.

The Westerner MUST identity with the foreigner. MUST empathize. MUST psychically place themselves in the Indian’s shoes. MUST Imagine themselves one and the same.

They must imagine the devoured cow feces in their own mouth, imagine themselves copulating with stray diseased dogs, imagine themselves bathing in manure piles and destroying their environment by choosing to litter on a scale unimaginable, imagine themselves open defecating in the midst of busy cities. They must imagine themselves devouring unhygienic meals seasoned with animal droppings and most revolting products of the human body…

They MUST empathize, and their gag reflexes must activate and they must feel their skin crawl as if beset by parasites and sexual diseases welcomed in through a million disgusting wallowing practices.

They cannot do what Hundreds of millions of high caste indians and upper class third worlders do every day: Stop Empathizing.

Stop looking on them as your fellow man, and instead look upon them as revolting stupid bottom feeding animals, akin to diseased racoons or possums…or various mamilians who wallow in their own filth, or seek their missing nutrition in the droppings of more noble creatures such as the bovine.

For to stop empathizing, so the western thinks, to stop believing “there is only one race the human race” or “that all men are created equal” would be to abandon all that is good and true and transcendent in this world.

Except for the what is obvious to plainly see: it is neither good, nor true, nor transcendent.

It is a lie. A lie overwhelmingly obvious upon mere observation of any of the billions of members of other species and subspecies of human.

So, that's my question. Does the 1/3 or less of India that is not sub 85 IQ, per the stats quoted in this review, regard the rest as subhuman diseased animals? I'm not really predisposed to believe, or not believe it. Though scrounging through my long term memory for supporting evidence, I recall that Google's Indian CEO allowed nearly every anti-white, anti-American agitprop seminar imaginable, but shut down one that was going to talk about India's caste system.

Just for the sake of rigour:

What makes anyone think that this is another other than more Chinese robbers? That it isn't just two hours of misleading vividness?

There are one and a half billion Indians. It is the largest country in the world. Do I believe that a dedicated troll could find two hours of footage of Indians being disgusting or immoral? Certainly. I would be shocked if that weren't the case. I am sure you could easily do the same thing for China or the United States or Egypt or any country of reasonable size.

Meanwhile let's make a quick sanity-check. If we believe this premise, the Indians as a whole are incompetent, self-destructive, and generally pathetic, whereas the Han Chinese, with their statistically higher IQs, should be far more successful. Yet if we do a quick comparison of India and China - it doesn't seem like the Chinese are outdoing the Indians by that much. They have the edge in a few places, but it's not a massive or universal advantage. This is even more the case if we look at history. Broadly speaking, which country has been more productive, in terms of art, science, religion, philosophy, engineering, or any similar field? If there's a Chinese advantage, it doesn't look immediately overwhelming, to me. India and China look pretty comparable.

Why should we take this seriously? We ought to predict that such a film could be made regardless of whether its general claims about Indians are true or not. Knowing that, the film presents no compelling reason to believe that its general claim is true.

They have the edge in a few places, but it's not a massive or universal advantage.

A few places? Where's the Indian space station, where's the Indian navy, the Indian air force, the Indian high-tech industries in comparison to China? Where are the robotized gigafactories?

Xiaomi car factory: https://youtube.com/watch?v=a5KhnLLpoQ0

High quality scientific papers by country: https://www.nature.com/nature-index/annual-tables/2022/country/all/all

India is apparently less scientifically productive than Australia, albeit improving. The population of Australia is 26.6 million. There's an absolutely monstrous gap between India and China. China makes 5x more cars than India, they're so far ahead in AI and computing it's incomparable. In China big cities have this cyberpunk aesthetic - during COVID lockdowns they had drones flying around saying "Please restrain your soul's desire for freedom. Do not open the window or sing." I don't want to live there - I want freedom and artistic expression. Even so, the aesthetic is pretty good!

Shanghai: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Bw3yXaVHuLs

Big Indian cities have a Malthusian slum aesthetic - a totally different kind of dystopia. When it comes to cybercrime, Indian thieves tend to prefer scamming credulous octogenarians with gift cards - Chinese hackers steal 5G tech, turbines, sensitive and secret documents. When it comes to climate change, China builds all the solar panels and wind turbines, India asks for climate finance. There's a qualitative difference between India and China.

Mumbai: https://youtube.com/watch?v=gV5EU6daoVI

Even in history, India was conquered by the British - China got wrecked but not colonized. They fought bravely and desperately against all comers rather than rolling over. China was if not one of the Big Three in WW2, at least the Fourth of Roosevelt's Four Policemen. They got their UNSC veto, India begs for one. Postwar, China fought the US to a stalemate in Korea, skirmished with the Soviet Union and Vietnam. India just clobbered Pakistan a couple of times and lost a skirmish with China.

This is what irks me most about westerners, they would look at disparaging differences between two culture and rather than dig deep just blame it on "qualitative differences" between countries.

What you need to understand is India's history is quite different from what China went through. Both of their growth stories were stunted considerably by Socialist ideas, but India not only lagged behind the reforms but also has much more baggage per say with things needed to be sorted out.

A lot of the system is inherited from the British-era system and is archaic. Adding to that the socialist era baggage that was introduced, there are a mountain of things that needs reform. The fact that unlike China, which historically had strong states and weak societies, India had strong societies and weak state. What this means is no matter what reform you introduced there is much harsher resistance towards them. India has problems, but not the kind you understand.

For example, take difference between India and China in industrial might. On the surface the disparity does look large enough to conclude a "qualitative difference" but are perfectly explainable if you see how heavily regulated Indian industries are. How can you expect a big enough gigafactory to be developed when there is a piece of legislation that prevents a factory owner to fire anyone from the factory employing more than 500 without the permission of the sitting MLA(member of state legislative assembly) for the region. The only way there is any headway for the economy is through the establishment of Special Economic Zones, where labor laws need not apply. Indian Industries are heavily regulated even if you do not consider labor laws. Any attempt to reform these or deregulate the economy results in massive protests. Even Modi with all his popularity can't even touch them.

When it comes to climate change, China builds all the solar panels and wind turbines, India asks for climate finance. There's a qualitative difference between India and China.

That's a dumb argument. What is wrong with asking that the rich countries whose excessive consumption landed us in the climate crisis in the first place paying more to fix the damn thing? Why should the developing and poor countries sacrifice their economic interests to the first world worry of climate change? Why should the production of solar panels and wind turbines(which IMO are bad solutions to climate change) be a better metric of measuring contribution to the mitigation of climate change? Why do you think China that dropped down to 51st spot on Climate Change Performance Index is better than India that ranks 7th.

Even in history, India was conquered by the British - China got wrecked but not colonized.

Yeah, you wouldn't have happened to hear about the 700 years of constant Islamic conquest we as a nation had to go through. Just as the Marathas and Sikhs were done cleaning up fallout from it, lo and behold the British show up.

China was if not one of the Big Three in WW2, at least the Fourth of Roosevelt's Four Policemen. They got their UNSC veto, India begs for one.

Yeah, the seat that the UN originally offered to India and India conceded to China. That was a pretty big blunder.

The only way there is any headway for the economy is through the establishment of Special Economic Zones

Case in point. China created SEZs, India didn't. China deregulated its economy, India didn't. Was Chinese liberalization traumatic, were there people angry about losing their iron rice bowls, was there inflation and inequality? Of course! Yet they struggled through rather than shying away from reform. You say 'weak state, strong society', I say 'qualitative difference'. Build up a strong state, change those labour laws, compete or lose - that's the rule of this world.

Yeah, you wouldn't have happened to hear about the 700 years of constant Islamic conquest

Did China have foreign invasions? Yes, they had to deal with the Mongols and the Manchus. They had to deal with the Japanese. They had to deal with the Europeans too.

Yeah, the seat that the UN originally offered to India and India conceded to China.

OK, so India made a massive blunder helping the PRC. Nevertheless China was rewarded for its wartime performance with a veto, they used their strength and diplomatic abilities to take their seat from ROC. And it's the same today. All around the world, China flexes its muscles - they help Russia in Ukraine, they arrange Saudi-Iranian rapprochement. What does India do? Buy Russian oil and military technology because their own defence-industrial base is pretty poor. India's influence in world affairs? Pretty minimal.

Why do you think China that dropped down to 51st spot on Climate Change Performance Index is better than India that ranks 7th.

The reason India ranks so highly on the Climate Change Performance Index is because it's poor - I bet if they included Congo or Malawi they'd be even higher still - the Phillipines is even higher than India. Very low emissions there! Climate change is a joke and the Chinese clearly don't care - they're building loads of coal power as well. Yet they see renewables as a market to dominate like all the others.

Modi boasts about reaching 1/4 of Chinese coal production, India doesn't care either but they'll opportunistically ask for aid: https://twitter.com/narendramodi/status/1774844651394228422

Compare the national attitudes! China says 'we're a renewables/electric cars/industrial superpower' as they advance their own global strategy as a competitor to the West, India says 'give us more money', coming to the West as a supplicant.

Case in point. China created SEZs, India didn't. China deregulated its economy, India didn't. Was Chinese liberalization traumatic, were there people angry about losing their iron rice bowls, was there inflation and inequality? Of course! Yet they struggled through rather than shying away from reform. You say 'weak state, strong society', I say 'qualitative difference'. Build up a strong state, change those labour laws, compete or lose - that's the rule of this world.

I agree with the conclusion, but that doesn't mean you can just steamroll the reforms. The Chinese system has its advantages, being able to get unpopular but necessary reform done and set a long term objectives, but the major flaw is that people will only accept it if the state doesn't fuck things up. The PRC state is standing on two legs of economic growth and nationalism, that was what the weak society accepted. Economic growth is already gone, and if the nationalism bit get destroyed from let's say a major loss in a war, the Chinese state would Balkanize. In democracy on the other hand, even though it takes consensus building to get reforms done, the state much more stable to external shocks.

Did China have foreign invasions? Yes, they had to deal with the Mongols and the Manchus. They had to deal with the Japanese. They had to deal with the Europeans too.

Yeah, China had major foreign invasions, but they had quite some time to settle down as a state before the next invasion. India on the other hand waltzed from one invasion to others.

The reason India ranks so highly on the Climate Change Performance Index is because it's poor - I bet if they included Congo or Malawi they'd be even higher still - the Phillipines is even higher than India. Very low emissions there!

The premise that "rich countries will perform poor on Climate Change because they use the bulk of the energy" that's a rabbit hole in itself if you want to go there. Now coming to your point, CCPI does factor "richness" of a country, but not in a way you would presume. It does take into account the current energy usage and the share of renewables in it, in addition to policy regarding the emissions. It uses a pretty balanced in evaluation of policy, energy usage and change in GHG emissions to rank.

Climate change is a joke and the Chinese clearly don't care - they're building loads of coal power as well. Yet they see renewables as a market to dominate like all the others.

Modi boasts about reaching 1/4 of Chinese coal production, India doesn't care either but they'll opportunistically ask for aid: https://twitter.com/narendramodi/status/1774844651394228422

Compare the national attitudes! China says 'we're a renewables/electric cars/industrial superpower' as they advance their own global strategy as a competitor to the West, India says 'give us more money', coming to the West as a supplicant.

C'mon, your argument is not rooted in reality and is just cherry-picking of instances that serve your argument. There is ample proof that India is not only seeking aid but also working the money properly to ensure it reaches it targets. The CCPI ranking and India's performance in it is ample evidence about how serious it is about tackling the Climate Change. India's hybrid car demand is through the roof and Government is also investing heavily.

You strike me as an individual not familiar with India and relies on cursory knowledge and stereotypes to evaluate the country. Either way, whether India is able to overcome its disadvantages or not in the future will be clear by 10 years.

cherry-picking of instances that serve your argument

So far I've brought up space capabilities, naval power, air power, high tech industries like car factories, high quality scientific papers, AI, urban development and skylines, cybercriminals, green industry, coal production, diplomatic influence, cybercrime, market reforms, resistance to colonizers and post-WW2 military performance. Is that cherry-picking?

Where does India outperform China? In a green index which declares the Philippines a major leader? Meanwhile, big industrial powers like Taiwan, China and South Korea are right at the bottom.

India's level of development is just lower. I have a special interest in military affairs - the comparison is marked. The Indian army - a whole fleet of Russian T-90s and T-72s, Russian BMP-2s, Russian Tunguskas, Konkurs, Iglas. There are some Indian light vehicles, helicopters and missiles but even Brahmos is codeveloped with Russia. Most of their arsenal is imported. It's the same in aviation, they fly Migs, Su-30s, Rafales, Jaguars... and a few domestically produced and long-delayed Tejas fighters.

China is a different story. Nearly all their vehicles and equipment is made domestically. Like India they bought aircraft from the Soviets but supplemented them with hundreds of domestic J-10s and their own 5th gen aircraft, which India doesn't have at all.

India has lower CO2 emissions than China and higher birthrates. That's it. OP's original point was that China wasn't much more successful than India, which is bizarre. China is way more successful than India.

What I referred to as cherry-picking is your dismissing of CCPI ranking just because it doesn't align with your worldview.

I know better than anyone how India is dependent on foreign tech for defense, but I wouldn't dismiss other achievements just because of this thing.

India has lower CO2 emissions than China and higher birthrates. That's it.

C'mon bro, India rivals china in space tech even with the fraction of budget. India lags in hardware manufacturing, but has the most software exports. China is a juggernaut for sure, but the difference is not worlds apart.

Even in history, India was conquered by the British - China got wrecked but not colonized. They fought bravely and desperately against all comers rather than rolling over.

India wasn't an unified entity when the British first showed up. The very concept of India, as a coherent ethno-lingual entity, was created both for civic convenience by the Colonial administration, and embraced by the leaders of the Independence movement.

It had the then decadent Mughal empire dominating the north, and a few of its rump states to the east and west, and multiple independent and flourishing kingdoms that were quite successful in holding off initial Portuguese colonial endeavors.

What the British did was a combination of enormous shrewdness and gunboat diplomacy (in the metaphorical sense, most of the country is too far inland for naval supremacy to particularly matter). They first established a beachhead by subverting then conquering Bengal, a vassal of the Mughals, and then steadily, over the course of decades, fought their way west and south. They were temporarily stymied by the Rajputs and the southern rulers, who had been giving the Mughals a headache, and heavily relied on friendly local powers they played off each other, as well as the massive Sepoy forces they raised to supplement the relatively minuscule number of beef-fed Britons who managed to survive in the those climes. (The beef fed bit contributed to the Sepoy Revolt, but that's a long story)

And complete conquest took, I don't recall, but a couple centuries I'd wager, at least one. And even then, colonial control was mostly through systems of vassalage, with many rulers, big or small, retaining a great deal of local power until they grew complacent and then had their demesnes snatched on technicalities (the most memorable example was a ruler who was infertile, and hence adopted a child when his death was imminent. The British rejected the heir and declared their intent to annex his territory, and when he passed away, his queen took up arms in his name to fight, not that they won)

China was a unified state, and has been for millenia. They're rightfully proud of it.

I can't critique the rest of your post since you're correct that India is far behind China when it comes to development and human capital, and not all of it can be blamed on late liberalization either. I accept that reality, and besides, I'm getting out. However, it wasn't a pushover, the British paid quite dearly to take the whole subcontinent.

It's also relevant, to the best of my knowledge, that the British didn't even try to conquer China in a similar way to India. They wanted Chinese goods, and for China to be subject to their power, certainly, but when British contact with China really started ramping up in the 19th century, they did not want another India. They explicitly didn't want a second India. One subcontinental Asian empire was enough, and the burdens of trying to directly govern and administer China were more than anyone wanted to assume - especially not when it was viable to instead get everything they wanted from China through less extreme means, going through a subject Chinese government.

There are plenty of reasons why the British didn't conquer China the way they did India, but in addition to China being a unitary reasonably powerful country rather than feuding states, and reaching China almost two centuries after reaching India, I think we have to add the fact that they, as a matter of policy, chose not to try. The expense that would have been involved in trying to conquer China just wasn't worth the potential gain, and that's even before we factor in the other European empires with stakes in China that might have objected. It doesn't seem like we need to rush to racial explanations.

This isn't to say that I am rejecting out of hand the idea that there might be genetic differences between Indians and Chinese. Heck, I'm sure there are lots of genetic differences within each category as well - both 'Indian' and 'Chinese' (even if we restrict ourselves to Han!) include a lot of historically divided subgroups. Rather, I just mean that conquest of one but not the other seems plenty explainable by contingent, non-racial factors.

I appreciate the additional context you provided, wasn't aware of it myself!

If we believe this premise, the Indians as a whole are incompetent, self-destructive, and generally pathetic, whereas the Han Chinese, with their statistically higher IQs, should be far more successful. Yet if we do a quick comparison of India and China - it doesn't seem like the Chinese are outdoing the Indians by that much.

I saw some random twitter nonsense about what makes a "genius". And sure, IQ was on the list, but so was disagreeability. You have to be willing to go "Everyone else is wrong, fuck you, I don't care what you say about it." In business, you have to be willing to put your money where your mouth is, and stake your life savings and generational wealth on the fact that everyone else is leaving money on the table that only you see.

I don't have a study about how Asians score on agreeability versus Europeans or Americans. But anecdotally, a buddy of mine moved to Japan with his wife, and his half-Japanese kid was entering kindergarten. The first day involved an hour of speeches all the 4 year old Japanese kids sat perfectly still through. His half-Japanese kid was all over the place trying to play and talk to people. My own kid, who's plenty smart and generally ahead of her peers, would probably be similarly incapable of sitting still for a whole ass hour. We took her to a 75 minute show for kids full of dog tricks, with ample calls for audience participation, and she made it roughly 45 minutes before she simply could not stay butt in seat one moment longer. We were fairly proud of her. But hearing about that Japanese kindergarten class made us wonder, are we retarded or are they aliens?

There are plenty, although definitely not universal, tradcath children who can sit through mass(hour or so) without needing to leave at 4. So it’s probably just down to different child rearing, not HBD.

if we believe this premise, the Indians as a whole are incompetent, self-destructive, and generally pathetic, whereas the Han Chinese, with their statistically higher IQs, should be far more successful

Well, Mao managed to be far more successful at being incompetent, self-destructive, and generally pathetic. Does it count? :)

I think someone here linked this review (or linked to something else that linked to said review) of a book by Mao's former personal doctor, which detailed how closed-minded, filthy, perverted, and short-tempered Mao could be. As per Olive's reply, the totalizing ideology of Communism in China, paired with the general ability of the Chinese to go along with a proclaimed direction, would naturally have led to Mao dragging an entire country down with him.

Touché.

Mao seems like a good example of the power of institutional structure and ideology, to be honest. The disaster of the Great Leap Forward didn't happen because Mao was an idiot - or at least, not because Mao had low IQ. Neither did it happen because the Chinese in general are low IQ, or have a racial disposition towards stupidity, laziness, fractious and inability to work together, or anything like that. On the contrary, the usual HBD line is that Han Chinese are unusually intelligent, hard-working, and cooperative. And yet they managed to cause the single greatest human calamity in the 20th century (against some stiff competition), and it was entirely self-inflicted!

If nothing else, it seems like a reminder just that, well, organisation and structure matter, and that bad theory and misaligned incentives can do more harm than any putative lack of intelligence.

Some scattered thoughts as Desi (Haven't visited in almost a decade and don't relate culturally at all, but I have more than a superficial connection through my parents and extended family).

Question: The part about Indian men being the least attractive of the human species kinda stung. I wonder how much of all of this content with filth is just nth-order rollover from arranged marriages being a thing.

Starting to date a (non-Indian) woman made me clean up my act (and surroundings) real quick. Within the span of 2-3 days, I threw away all my dirty clothes, detailed my car, made my room spotless, got my nails, teeth and hair cleaned, all of it.

Does the impetus of not having to atleast follow Rule 2 to ensure the continuation of your bloodline trickle down?

The part about Indian men being the least attractive of the human species kinda stung.

I'm just built different ✊

Nah, I know plenty of Indian guys, including my best friend, who get what they want. But they're also heavily Westernized and have their shit together. Most Indians, well, I've already insulted their rizz enough, and I can't comment on living standards because I'm a slob myself.

But I guess I'll have to work on that, can't ruin it by having the first girl I bring back home run away screaming, after seeing that my pet cockroach died of starvation.

How much does effort does a succulent take to keep alive again? Or do you think they'd notice if I snuck a few fake plants in there?

Does the impetus of not having to atleast follow Rule 2 to ensure the continuation of your bloodline trickle down?

What is this rule?

Rule 1: Be attractive.
Rule 2: Don't be unattractive.

Rule 1: be attractive

Rule 2: don't be unattractive

Question: The part about Indian men being the least attractive of the human species kinda stung. I wonder how much of all of this content with filth is just nth-order rollover from arranged marriages being a thing.

It's not some fundamental law of the universe that Indian men must be on the bottom of the totem pole.

Being the mimetic sex, a lot of what women find attractive or are willing to give a shot is socially mediated. If not for (the) Western media, entertainment, academia, and education system putting their thumbs on the scale, East and South Asian men would do materially better (and black men materially worse). Solving such a problem does, however, indeed sound coup-complete.

Kulak, I signed up just to beg you to let a cat girl proofread for apostrophe use.

For the love of God, your stuff is fun but stuff like "its a corpse with it's eyes eaten by rats floating down the Ganges" really does deserve a content/rage warning.

Grammarly updated and then started crashing chrome.

I lost an entire draft of an essay because of the grammar editor crashing my computer. So this is just what people will have to deal with. Torturing pendants who can't handle typos is worthwhile if it speeds up my output by 1 article every 2 months. which is more than what I've lost to crashes over the years.

I am in a volume business, not a polish business. There is no solution, there will never be one, and even what works now will degrade to the point where other flaws will creep in. This is the nature of all computer based businesses in a competency crisis and DEI hellworld

Kulak, I love your stuff, but you're being a whiny bitch. Correctness is important. Quit making excuses. Proper grammar is a gift from the writer to the reader that makes the writing easier to understand.

Pay $20 for Claude or GPT-4, or get an open source one (WizardLM-2 came out today), and feed your posts through it tuned for copy editing. Not hard.

I think Claude would have a robo aneurysm at kulak's topics, but it's not hard to just learn these grammar rules! It's totally worth it if you're writing several articles a week!

pendants

Another swing against pedantry.

"This is the nature of all computer based businesses in a competency crisis and DEI hellworld"

...or just have a couple of your friends proofread before publishing?

You can't really do that when your schedule and business model demands you publish a new 4000-10,000 word article every 4-5 days.

Even if I had infinite friends that I never ran out of people to demand that of, the 1-2 days it would take for them to get back to me with the edits would increase the turnaround time by 25-50%, destroying my growth and maybe my business viability.

This sounds like an excuse, it took me only a few minutes to read the whole thing and I could probably knock out a corrected version in an hour tops, maybe even less. I acknowledge that maybe the work of proofreading is harder than what I've dealt with as a student from kindergarten to college, but it can't be that hard.

Alright- halfhearted defense of India. I don't want to live there(I mean, I live in the financial capital of a core province of the wealthiest society in history, I really don't want to move), but it's not as bad as Haiti. India is a rising power and it's made massive progress in things like sanitation and economic growth. Given that it's burdened with like a billion people with sub-90 IQ's, it's actually kind of impressive that India is able to consistently make progress despite its admittedly low baseline.

Yes, the rural north is like, sub-saharan Africa level sucky. I won't deny that. And Indian immigrants do their fair share of fraud to get to live in nicer countries. I certainly don't begrudge Canadians for not liking their new neighbors much. But, uh, if I had the misfortune to be born in India- and India is nowhere near the worst place to be born, Haiti, Somalia, Eritrea, North Korea, Afghanistan all seem like they're strong contenders and we just notice India so much more because of the sheer size, for that matter it seems like Pakistan and Bangladesh are both suckier than India- I think I'd have as a top goal "living in a first world country". It's kind of hard to blame random Punjabis for having a flexible arrangement to the truth in trying to move to Canada(and yes, I do find it hard to blame Guatemalans who walk to the border and make fake asylum claims even if I'd rather they stay put). And India seems like it's genuinely improving, albeit slowly. To be fair to them, there's a lot of inertia holding them back.

it is not a rising power. It has 70 plus percent affirmative action and rising acts like the SC ST act. You have governments paying people if they marry someone of a more backward caste and the state policy has reduced land holdings to nothing.

Temples are taxed, barely ever under the control of the priest but rather run by the state. History is being mangled to suit the current leaderships far left idea of the world by eliminating any trace of the Aryan Invasion theory.

India is not improving, it has offloaded its best minds to the rest of the world already, the only two Indian fields medlaists are people not even born here and the only surviving Nobel prize winner in the sciences had to leave early in life because of such policies. Sure we are not haiti but we are closer to haiti than we are to Greece in most aspects.

It hurts to see the land my ancestors built turn into a playground for savagery where women are not safe. As for punjabis leaving, a good amount want a separate state called khaistan which is why nijjar was shot dead there. They were never able to establish a stable kingdom and never will do it which is why the cope is off the charts.

History is being mangled to suit the current leaderships far left idea of the world by eliminating any trace of the Aryan Invasion theory.

Surely that should be "far right"?

Not at all. Far right is the return of a rajput monarchy which is not happening. The government has schemes that pay you liquid cash for marrying a person of a higher caste or filing a complaint against hem (look up the sc st act).

Anyone who thinks that India is "far right" is clueless. The country is conservative because of poverty and even that is changing ultra fast.

But Tarn still raises a good point: the current ruling coalition of India is a political party and a strongman head-of-state who is considerably right-wing compared to the previous ruling coalition. Will Modi reverse every last element of socialism stemming from India's independence? Probably not, but I'm under the impression that much has already been done in that direction. And given the uncertainty about the old Congress ever managing to wrest their seat of power back from the BJP, it's hard to thus conclude that India will accelerate leftwards.

I don't know man, a lot of this just seems like middle-class bourgeois disgust at how gross an overpopulated 3rd world country is. But give them time. Their income is rising rapidly, their birth rates are falling, and they're developing new infrastructure. It takes time to develop the state capacity to build public sewers and landfills. For now, it's still a lot better than it was a few decades ago when those poor people would have simply died.

This from the article,

[...] mere observation of any of the billions of members of other species and subspecies of human.

with accompanying graphic, reminded me of an exchange I had here last month

I've never seen the claim that different human races should be considered sub-species, at least not by anyone who isn't absurdly racist.[...]

Maybe the geneticists are just knocking down a straw man when they say humans don't have subspecies and therefore there aren't biological races of humans, but it is a thing they do. [...]

There are admittedly an handful of absurd racists out there, so at some point I think scientists do have to knock those down. [...]

So here you go, @non_radical_centrist, the subspecies take in the wild. Or was @KulakRevolt already established among the "handful of absurd racists" around here?

Yeah the races=subspecies is a racist talking point and professional geneticists and other scholars do not consider it valid, but all it practically means is that we commit to call human populations, no matter how distinct, only that – populations, at most races, not subspecies. It's much the same construct.

Applied to human races, the genetic differences between human racial groupings fail to stand out against the backdrop of human genetic diversity sufficiently, across the whole genome, to make the cut as biological subspecies, at any threshold of "sufficiently" to be useful across the rest of biology (not that biology has a lot of use for subspecies in general -- species are fuzzy enough already)."

No, there's no solid quantitative reason to say that eg. Australian Aborigines and Germans are that less distinct than two recognized subspecies of Canis Lupus and thus can't be called subspecies. It's simply not a matter of quantity.

I don't read much of Kulak's stuff, I find most of his writing to be wrong in some way. I would call this piece he had pretty racist too, since it implicitly dismisses any possible environmental cause for India's woes. The amount of extreme government disfunction, poor nutrition and poor healthcare many, many Indians receive I think are very plausible candidates for low human capital there, which he doesn't address at all.

> non_radical_centrist

> doesn't read much of Kulak's stuff

...fair, username checks out.

Kulak's edginess-to-insight ratio is really high, and maybe increasing lately? Contrast him with Zero HP Lovecraft, who's definitely absurdly racist, usually wrong in some way, and also has edgelord tendencies. ZHPL sort of credibly presents himself as a classic philosopher who bravely followed his quest for the wisdom to save society deep down into the blackest abysses of edginess. Kulak presents himself as a guy who wants to watch the world burn, which, to me, makes his forced edginess even more obnoxious.

Given Kulak's recent post about blonde women, I'm disappointed he passed up the opportunity to speculate here about how hundreds of generations of arranged marriage must have relaxed the selective pressures for physical attractiveness on Indians. It would be very on-brand.

We know the IQ pretty much varies with white admixture.

So, it's not environmental.

Ridiculously bad take. Genetics certainly set a cap on maximum achievable IQ, but the idea that environmental factors cannot suppress IQ is self evidently ridiculous. Do you seriously think childhood nutrition (as an obvious example) plays no part in brain development? "There's no environmental influence on IQ" is as stupid as "there's no genetic influence on IQ."

I'm not saying it can't be environmental, but cognitive ability in India is directly proportional to genetic closeness to the people who conquered the horrible place. (horrible because it's hot, full of bugs and worse)

Sure the stupid insistence on vegetarianism is probably lowering IQ by a few points. But genetically Indians apart from maybe Brahmins are far below snow people mean. You can probably even find hard data on that today, what with polygenic risk scores for education.

What do you mean by white admixture? As far as I know, the history of the various physical features that are typically thought of as white is pretty heavily debated and there is no clear understanding of it. People aren't even sure if proto-Indo-European speakers were white by typical modern definitions of whiteness.

If you mean relatively light skin, narrow noses, and so on... well, I'm not sure it is actually known that the IQ of Indians correlates with those features. Certainly it is easy to find many counterexamples, and I'm not sure that a trustworthy quantitative study of this topic has ever been carried out.

People aren't even sure if proto-Indo-European speakers were white by typical modern definitions of whiteness.

Late PIE speakers were almost certainly white-looking in the sense of having European features, although in practice the definition of "white" in western countries seems to be "belongs to a historically-Christian ethnic group with light skin and doesn't have any noticeable admixture from other groups", hence the exclusion of Turks, Azeris, Kazakhs, etc, and the PIE speakers were definitely not Christian.

India was conquered by the same people who conquered Europe. Steppe pastoralists, first people to develop horse chariots, a pastoral nomadic lifestyle and thus thrive in the trackless wastes.

This gave them a huge boost, they took over the entire steppe in 300 years and then went on to topple every adjacent civilization, ushering in a centuries long dark age, out of which we got the classical era.

They were likely proportionately a far smaller population than in Europe, and it's also unclear whether in India they practiced genocidal policies like in Europe. E.g. from grave DNA it seems for several generations after the conquest, men from the conquered populations weren't procreating much, or at all.

The info-Europeans had already expanded off the steppe by the Bronze Age collapse- both Hittite and Greek indo-European writing survives from the Bronze Age proper.

Yeah, I got pwned by Khan who for some reason claimed steppe herders caused a dark age and my sleep-deprived self messed it up.

There was nothing worth writing about going on in Europe before the classical era except maybe Minoans who probably haven't even noticed anything having happened. Nevertheless, it must have been traumatic, getting conquered, enslaved and cucked for generations. Still, not a dark age.

The various invasions by steppe herders were finished mostly in the early bronze age.

There’s no actual strict definition of either subspecies or race(and for that matter species doesn’t have a particularly strict definition in practice, either).

Referring to blacks or East Indians as a different subspecies would mark you out as an absurd racist(and kulak is, to be fair, pretty racist). But that’s not because the idea is scientifically absurd(although I suspect the most scientifically supported subspecies would not match cleanly onto typical racial groupings). It’s because the very statement is a political one.

If zoologists classified humans anything close to the way they classified animals there would definitely be multiple subspecies. Zoologists will classify two morphologically identical species of fish that can interbreed as different subspecies because the fish in Pond A has a spot on its dorsal fin and the fish in Pond B does not.

Zoologists don't seem to classify subspecies in a consistent way, at least not in a consistent way that conforms to obvious large physical differences. For example, generally zoologists do not consider chihuahuas and Great Danes to be members of two different subspecies.

I talked about this in the thread I originally linked -- I think zoologists are trying to classify based on something like relative distance between overall genomes, whether or not that corresponds to obvious phenotypic differences. They're trying to make it more consistent than old-school 'natural history', and that makes their definition diverge from popular use.

I'd say this just highlights how the stuff the zoologists are interested in among other animal species doesn't correspond well to what's politically relevant in an HBD sense, and it's an unhelpful veneer of scientism to try to apply the zoologists' "subspecies" label to human races.

The real argument is to show that politically-relevant behavior relevantly originates in genes that distribute unevenly across politically-characterized racial categories. That can probably be done, but it shouldn't be confused with what the zoologists are doing with other species.

I’m not even referring to any of the HBD stuff, I think the observed physical distinctions would be enough.

"subspecies" is not a well-defined concept, so arguing about whether human races are subspecies or not is meaningless. If someone wants to score political points by either refusing to say that human races are different subspecies or by trying to convince people that human races are different subspecies, they're free to do so. But in either case, it's a political argument with no scientific basis.

As for people who argue that the concept of race is unscientific, in my experience they're usually either just ignorant of the topic and repeating opinions they have read elsewhere, or they misunderstand the relevant topics and for some reason believe that just because many frequently recognized human races are not cladistically monophyletic and all human beings are part of a genetic spectrum, it means that genetic variation between humans has no recognizable clusters.

For example, it is certainly true that "sub-Saharan Africans" is not a monophyletic group and its meaningfulness as a well-defined concept on the level of genetics is very questionable. But that does not mean that human genetic diversity is an undifferentiated distribution where every single individual is equally distant from every other individual. In reality there are recognizable patterns of various kinds in the distribution. It's just that the real patterns don't necessarily map well onto the typical racist's notion of what races are.

Thames isn't a name of a person or video creator it's taken from the logo of Thames television

"The Pajeet, breeds out of control like a plague of rats. Often defecating out in the open with no regard for its native habitat, the Pajeet spreads across the face of the earth like a cancerous tumor consuming all in its path while the world watches on in disgust and horror. With almost 1.4 billion Pajeets and rising our mother earth buckles under the terrible strain, whilst these creatures rapidly multiply in their own filth, with seemingly no end in sight.”

I've been thinking about Christianity lately. Christians (at least the modern ones) struggle with the question of subhumans. They prefer to thrust the question completely out of mind. "That couldn't happen. There could be no such thing!" is their comforting bromide and thought-killer. Understandably, Christians are afraid to put themselves in the position of judging whether a fellow person could be subhuman. But the unwillingness to entertain a hypothetical reflects a kind of cowardice: you are so afraid of being bad, you won't meditate on what makes the good.

Let me elide the question of whether Pajeets, or a subset of them, qualify. I don't know. This movie is selective. Nevertheless, it is certainly possible to imagine the breeding and education of an organism devoid of the divine spark. If you're not a Christian, it's even easier to imagine the creation of an organism without the virtues a materialist uses to define "human". Such a beast is, if C.S. Lewis is to be believed, what God casts into hell after the corruption of pride eats it completely. To materialists, it's some level of sophistication between "ape" and "moth".

If we are to preserve Christian morality, being Christian or no, we must come to terms with God's treatment of the Canaanites, the Hittites, Sodom, and Gomorrah. Subhumans in other words. He killed them. Ostensibly these people had fallen into extreme depravity of human sacrifice, mass rape, etc., and after many generations, these patterns of sin soaked into their very nature. God saved the righteous, but he commanded his people to kill the first two, and he personally rained fire on the others. I've heard protestants claim that this was "old morality" which the New Testament overturned, but this seems exceptionally weak reasoning to me. It endorses morality as something God arbitrarily decides, which Christians deny in every other context.

So there exists a threshold beneath which a "human" does fall below human dignity and should be treated as a beast. At least if you believe in sky daddy™. If you don't, it's an interesting parable to consider for whatever you consider the "source" of morality.

Another possible answer to the question of subhumans is stewardship. My bae Kevin Dolan did a long meditation on this idea, so I won't repeat it. This answer says: the subhumans have value in God's eyes, as we mere humans have value. But that value does not imply the necessity of equality, or the abolition of stewards and bondsmen. Hierarchical relations are perfectly in line with this Christian morality, unlike "modern" post-Christian morality which holds that the divine spark in everyone implies the abolition of rulers and ruled.

I don't have a conclusion, but these are things I've been thinking about.

Understandably, Christians are afraid to put themselves in the position of judging whether a fellow person could be subhuman.

I would argue that historically this is untrue in general. Europe between 1600 and 1800 was Christian to a degree which has been unmatched in the Western world since then. While I do not believe that European Colonialism and the slave trade was primarily a Christian undertaking, I also can't help but notice that most Christians of that time did not be afraid of judging their black contemporaries subhuman. (Of course, the abolition movement was also sparked by some radical Christians.)

I am not a Christian, but I think your interpretation of God genociding the 'subhumans' because they are evil and degenerate beyond redemption is shared by the major Christian flavors. I might not remember my gospels much, but I don't think that Jesus (who is kind of a big deal in Christianity, I hear) ever encouraged his followers to kill anyone.

Also, if your belief is that God did have a good reason to genocide peoples historically, does this extend to modern day "acts of God"? If earthquakes, tsunamis or diseases strike, do you shrug and say "looks like God decided to wipe a few millions subhumans from the face of the Earth again, good for him!"

Basic human rights for everyone human being born make for a great Schelling point. It is not perfect (Why don't three year olds get the right to self-determine how much candy they want to eat? What about rights for mammals who are smarter than toddlers?) but empirically the people who deny these rights tend to end up as rightfully reviled.

is shared

I think you missed "not" here

Oh come on man, do we really need 30 distinct trigger warnings? I watched most of this without even flinching once.

TBF: The parts that gave me the heeby jeebies was the food stuff. Food with rats chewing on it and gargling into drinks is some real eek shit lol

Really? It takes all kinds, I guess. I was on the train this morning, enjoying a rare day of sunshine (it's been very rainy) and I had to stop the wave of nausea before the title card when I think I saw some kid fellating a dog. Maybe it wasn't a dog. Maybe he was biting. Biting is worse, but just barely. (Edit: Or is it? I don't even want to know.) The perverse part of my soul that I try to keep down as much as possible wanted to pause and rewind. Better Me won. I dragged the bar a bit and then saw what looked like a few snapshots of men with malformed faces, I guess to show, what, malformed faces are bad therefore Indians are bad? And a woman getting kicked very hard in the stomach to the point that she went flying. I saw a man dying as he was struck by a train.

I stopped after that. I probably didn't flinch, but revolted seems like the right word.

I stand behind the notion that you shouldn't dismiss a whole piece of art unless you've watched/read/listened to it in its entirety, so I won't dismiss it, but damn.

You didn't really miss out on much. You don't really need 1 whole hour of "this place is uniquely a shithole and its inhabitants are subhumans" over and over again. I think 5 minutes of it is enough to drive the point home for anyone with some imagination.

Also, "uniquely a shithole" would require me to first watch 1 hour of the worst a dedicated 4chan hater could dig up about other places, as well.

I expect that you could create the same or worse at least about Russia, USA, Nepal, China and Mexico. Just from video material I have seen or know to be existing.

(maybe in a bit different terribleness flavour, but).

Yeah, I’ve seen some wild liveleak stuff in the past but the scene with the dog was enough to make me decide my brain really doesn’t need this content in it.

This comment made me think some about how I specifically see the civilizations/countries of the world.

I probably would say 1st world (anglosphere, rich europe), 2nd world (poor europe), developing, won't develop.

For many contexts thinking of the islamic countries as a group also occurs. I'd say to me China counts as the most important developing country (although with their current problems that economic position could easily backslide for the rest of my life) and india somewhere in the middle of the developing countries. Not a "can't develop" like most of SSA but not of special note. Something like indonesia.

The talk page of that article is crazy. Reviewer refusing to pass it unless the writer bashes the book as "discredited sinophobia" in the lead and removes positive reviews. Wikipedia is amazing.

In the eyes of the west, there are only 3 major civilizations - Abrahamic, Chinese and Indian.

[citation needed]

For start, in Poland difference between Chinese, Pakistan, India and Bangladesh would be considered much smaller than difference between Germany and USA. Or Russia and Mexico. Or Mexico and USA. Or Brazil and Saudi Arabia. Or Mexico and Poland.

No idea why you think that China and India are considered more distinct than any other countries. You may overestimate how much people from West care specifically about India (or China, though here people actually care a bit).

Indians consistently overestimate how much time we spend thinking about them.

At least in America, in terms of the groups that grab headlines and really dominate the political discourse, it's blacks, South Americans, Chinese because of the geopolitical tensions, Jews to some extent recently because of the Palestine conflict, Muslims too because of the same conflict although not as much as during the Bush years or even the peak ISIS years... Indians are honestly way down there, most Americans don't have much of an opinion on them outside of some vague stereotypes.

The average American is pretty self centered. I'd be surprised if they thought of any nation that is not of immediate concern to them.

Yes, just freshly seen on orange cat site: https://rdrama.net/post/260165/american-forgets-the-rest-of-the

I guess this is a privilege you get from being a citizen of the global hegemon, you end up forgetting even the mother country which birthed you.

I'd be surprised if they thought of any nation that is not of immediate concern to them.

And very often not even then: https://youtube.com/@JustinAwad/videos

In the eyes of the west, there are only 3 major civilizations - Abrahamic, Chinese and Indian. African and Native American cultures get a lot of praise, but only because they are considered to be ideologically harmless. The west sees Chinese and Indian civilizations as threats.

I think your model how the west sees the world is wrong. Lumping Canada, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Russia, Afghanistan, and Columbia the category "Abrahamic" and contrasting it with China and India (with much of the rest of SE Asia and Africa missing) is not how I see the world.

The way I would lump together countries would be based on the block nomenclature originating in the cold war. The west (which is ironically a term you used, instead of saying "in the eyes of the Abrahamic countries") are countries which are somewhat capitalistic, prosperous, and typically liberal democraties. This includes NATO, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and so on. (Turkey falls on the borderline, IMO.) The east are Putin's Russia and China, not necessarily in that order. The Muslim countries were kind of seen as a useful category after 9/11, even though they are inhomogeneous (Turkey, Qatar and Afghanistan are much more different from each other than Sweden and Taiwan, IMO.) The rest (which can include some or most Muslim countries) are the countries which are typically too poor to be a military threat to the established order and are sometimes useful to exploit for their cheap labor and natural resources. Some are kind of allied to the West (often in the 'their dictator is a SOB, but he is our SOB' way). If they are lucky, they enjoy some form of democracy and/or economic growth which will mean we will eventually count them among the west, if they are unlucky they are Somalia, Haiti or North Korea.

India is different from the rest of the 'rest' in that it is English-speaking, democratic, has some nukes (which they point at Pakistan, the west does not care either way) a huge population (which mostly won't by iPhones or European cars, though), a large land mass (which probably comes with some important natural resources) and (to my knowledge) a few excellent universities plus plenty of universities below the western standard.

Lumping Canada, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Russia, Afghanistan, and Columbia the category "Abrahamic" and contrasting it with China and India (with much of the rest of SE Asia and Africa missing) is not how I see the world.

There's a difference between "the world" and "civilisations".

I'm not sure I'd put India in the list, though; definitely there is "civilisation that traces back to the Ecumene" and "civilisation that traces back to China", but India doesn't seem especially separate from the Ecumene (in particular Persia acted as something of a bridge, and Sanskrit is Indo-European).

This is the only image you need to understand the 2 hr documentary and the 2000 word blog.

I disagree. I read the blog but didn't watch the movie (though if I understand correctly it is just a montage of the most degenerate extremes of India)

Neither of them are really about litigating pros/cons of British/Mughal rule - they focus solely on the present state of the country, and make the claim that it's very bad.

...The west permanently conquered every civilization except India.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but it seems like you actually mean this literally (in another comment you say "These [Japanese and Muslim] people have been squarely defeated." - if so I don't really see your logic:

Based on my (limited) understanding of Indian history, until the mid 1900s essentially the entirety of what would become "India" was under the control of the British. Independence was something the British voluntarily gave to India because a growing anti-colonial movement had made the Raj too inconvenient (notably - there wasn't a part where the proud Hindu forces teamed up to cast of the chains of their old masters and launch a counterattack on the UK)

Furthermore the original government, whilst Indian in blood, was clearly Western in thought and education (Nehru literally went to Cambridge!) and English continues to be the co-national language of India.

In the eyes of the west, there are only 3 major civilizations - Abrahamic, Chinese and Indian. African and Native American cultures get a lot of praise, but only because they are considered to be ideologically harmless. The west sees Chinese and Indian civilizations as threats.

This doesn't really line up with what I hear from my Western friends, living in the West. I think for the most part, no one in the West (excluding Canada) thinks about India. I have never gotten the impression that Westerners are threatened by India.

China is wierd. First, China nuked its own civilization and replaced it wholesale with communism (an explicitly western construct). Second, China was isolated (hard to access information on internal suffering) and became successful (harder to critisize). Lastly, China became an enemy. There was no reason to use dirty methods for critisizing China, because you could now be aggressive over the table. "Every Chinese person is a spy. Ban their brands. Sanction them to death, etc. etc.". It helps that China's population is in steep decline, where they might self-own themselves into extinction anyway.

On the isolation - yes this would have made collections such as this harder to obtain. But the problem is that a lot of these things (to take one specific horrific example: eating the cow dung) literally never happen elsewhere (maybe in SSA? But is that really an acceptable standard?), it's not that there just lots more examples in India vs China (or even a country with a similar GDP), there are literally none. Of course these are all the most extreme of extremes - a normal Indian person isn't this way - but if the worst of the racial stock behaves this way, it suggests the average is still very bad.

As for the bit about there being overt Chinese racism in the West, this is completely insane. Whilst it's true that the West has a hair-trigger for anti-Black sentiments, it would still be completely unacceptable to be genuinely racist to any non-White group (you may get away with a well-intentioned joke about e.g. Indian accents, EAs all looking the same, etc - but not an actual criticism of the race)

India on the other hand remains an intact competiting (well, not so successfully) civilization that isn't an enemy. It has preserved its civilizational values. And if you're American, the Indian diaspora appears to be ascendant. Indians here are rich and peaceful citizens. They are now becoming powerful. And worst of all, for the first time, they are getting portrayed as cool (Monkeyman, RRR, list goes on).

What "civilizational values" has India preserved that say China or Japan has lost? (To go back to a previous point - English is one of the two national languages and the entire government was modelled after the Westminster system)

So the rich and peaceful part is accurate (Indians appear to out-earn everyone-excluding-Jews by quite a margin, I cannot find any data on crime rates that doesn't just cover "Asians", but since they're high-earners I think this pattern holds for Indians in particular too)

As for becoming powerful, I have heard this said online sometimes, and it certainly seems possible in the future (the incomes/crime-rates suggest a good genetic stock) - currently they're just proportionally represented Again this is fairly impressive, but they're hardly at the level of Jews for instance.

Your point about movies feels unconvincing. I've never heard of Monkeyman, and I only heard of RRR because it was referenced on The Motte some time ago. As someone who probably watches too many US TV shows, without any numbers at hand, I would not say that there is any significant representation of Indians.

India is the best country to be portrayed as the worst in the world. India is civilizationally distant (so ciriticisms aren't self-owns). India is ascendent (so it is a threat). Indians near you are rich (so it is okay to make fun of them). It has no consequences (unlike China or Muslims, where such a documentary would have implications) and there is an ounce of truth to it (India is still very poor).

This feels completely off to me.

India has indeed been improving rapidly, but it still lies miles behind the West (On visiting India to see family basically everything was significantly worse than in the UK) - I really do not think that the West sees it as a threat (indeed I personally do not believe it is a threat, except in the big-picture sense that every non-White race is a threat because over centuries they could evolve and overtake Whites)

As I said previously, you can "make fun" of Indians (and Jews, Chinese, Hispanics, etc) in a way you cannot do so for Blacks. But anything even approaching this video/blog post in tone, content or intention would be completely out of the question for any non-White race in the West - it goes beyond being politically incorrect and into travel ban/jail time territory.

I don't understand what you mean by "consequences". This wasn't a piece of government approved propaganda, it was done by a twitter anon. What exactly do you think would happen if "Thames" had made a similarly hateful work on Chinese/Muslim people?

As for the "ounce of truth" - what precisely is the lie? Do you dispute that the events that occurred in the film actually happened? Or are you saying the conclusions regarding racial inferiority aren't legitimate? (If so - I would like to ask if you also think the cornucopia of Black crime videos on right-wing Twitter don't reflect anything about Blacks)

My dream in life is to under-go a public cancellation. It means you are threating enough and your competition has ran out of ideas. They're pulling out every dirty weapon to bring you down, and if you make it out this. You're part of the ruling class for good. An inevitable 'rite of passage'. India seems to be facing (very very) early signs of something like this. If the Indian economy keeps growing, I predict this kind of hatred is about to get a LOT LOT worse before it gets better.

What "dirty weapon" has been used here though? Whilst Kulak and Thames obviously hate the Indian race, the images weren't doctored, and the events that transpired occurred without any foreign influence. You compare this to a (presumably unjust) cancellation, but this is not footage of rural Indians jumping over toll booths or wearing torn clothing. Do you honestly think that any of that stuff is acceptable, even for the most primitive elements of a race?

Also I disagree generally with your logic that hatred is only ever motivated by jealousy. Do you also think that DR Twitter is "jealous" of the state of the American Black when they post video #34839 of Black teenagers destroying a convenience store / harassing random White people?

This isn't to say I think this wasn't in poor taste. But if we're doing metaphors, this makes me feel upset in the way you would be if a stranger decided to make fun of your profoundly mentally retarded younger brother as he drives the family to bankruptcy and eats crayons: there actually is a serious problem, which necessitates drastic measures - but the stranger humiliating you about this is unhelpful (and quite aggravating!)

To every Indian, I have the same advice. Everything is a dick measuring contest. Grow a bigger (economic) penis. Your economic penis is the only thing that matters.

I strongly disagree here. I've only done some very cursory reading on HBD stuff, but I think genetics (especially IQ) is much more important (From what I found just now, IQ correlates with GDP at r=0.82, which is insane by social science standards)

I believe that (especially in the long-run), the most important thing to get done if you wish to be a serious Hindu nationalist is to improve the racial stock of the nation. In the past such measures have been attempted but never on a particularly large (by the standards of India) scale. Also alongside coercive sterilisation, there would have to be some kind of government program to encourage high-IQ couples to have a lot more children (as we can see, already several states are below replacement, and since low-IQ people tend to have more children, the situation is even worse than the diagram suggests)

Until then....sucks to be us.

If by "us" you just mean Indians in India who care about the future of their race, then yes. I think being an Indian in the UK (and more so in the US) is quite nice (assuming you're not too much of a racial identarian, but then of course it doesn't matter much where you are)

The image is meant to reflect Abrahamic perspectives on India, not the reality. India sucks, that's no surprise. Many other countries suck too. Why pick India as the target for a 2 hour 4chan doc (rant) ? Indians being 'hindu' is fundamental to how the world views it. The same squalor would be treated quite differently if this was a christian/muslim country.

Okay I see what you're saying now. The motivation for this was already discussed in another chain - I think it was most likely done by a White Canadian. I think the internal motivation for this was just because, in the case of Canada, the Indian immigrant population is of poor quality (hence the natives would get angry - in the same way a lot of UK natives have come to dislike Islam/Pakistan)

... Ofc, That was an era when holding colonies was already become politically untenable across the board.

This could be interpreted as further proving that it wasn't a proper "victory". It had become "politically untenable" because the West had personally decided it was unfair (this is how I see it, but of course you could argue that the morality stuff was just an excuse to save face)

In any case I don't think the means by which India gained independence matters. I was mainly responding to your comments about other countries being "conquered" but not India (every example you give of China, etc being conquered seem to be things that also apply equally or worse to India)

eh, I'm not sure I buy this.

Within a given race*, most traits follow a bell-curve. In some cases we have extensively studied the trait, given it a name, a measuring standard, etc (e.g. IQ) - so we can just compare races by measuring the mean and variance (then the (non)-existence of extreme individuals follows by integrating the area under the curve)

The video shows examples of extremely "degenerate" (I don't like how vague that word is, but I honestly don't know how else to describe it) things that don't happen elsewhere (minus maybe Africa)

There is some trait(s) within the people in those videos that makes them act in this way (I think low IQ explains most of it) - they do not represent the average but the fact they exist tells us about the average (The small number of instances is still meaningful, because the normal distribution decays so rapidly at the tails)

*In the case of India it is slightly more complicated, since the castes are effectively separate races themselves with separate bell curves. So the videos don't actually directly tell us about Brahmins/Upper Castes (. The success of Indian immigrants in the West is evidence that there is human capital there. But it does raise the separate question, already talked about in this thread, of why these people are willing to allow all of this)

Take a decade of all the shitty things done by white americans, scale that by 8x.....and you'd be able to make a similarly disgusting movie about the US. I dispute how representative it is.

Well this is the entire point of the video - the argument is you can't make such a movie. The West has even more technology than India, and there's no censorship confounder like with China. Yet are there any instances of American Whites doing anything like what's shown in the video? (I don't need a movie, but I would like to see at least one single video of any of this stuff happening in the US by Whites, not just in nature but also degree)

It definitely isn't representative - but as I said above, it is reflective of something bad.

Agreed. So let's start with reducing malnutrition first. 35.5% of Indian children are malnourished. In the 90s (those who are now adults), it was above 50%. I'd bet that <5% of Indians have a sufficiently high protien intake for optimal brain development.

So from what I can find online, in the most severe cases (which I think reasonably applied to ~1/2 population in the past) malnutrition can lead to a loss of 15 IQ points.

So even in the most extreme case (where since most people will be malnourished to an extent, we count them as being severely malnourished) such a program would add 15 IQ point, raising the country to a little over 90 IQ.

I think this is still way too low (and this is already a generously high estimate) - the average IQ of US Blacks is 85 and they function poorly even with a 1st world country pre-built for them.

So I think some kind of eugenics program is still necessary (also unlike curing malnutrition, this would have a positive long term effect beyond the individual)

In the coming decades, the bottom 80% is going to be completely irrelevant to the GDP of a country. There will be a huge internal services sector, and a small skilled sector which generates all the actual productivity. India needs a high enough average IQ to run an effective service sector and enough geniuses to run the 'high productivity' sector.

This sounds reasonable (in broad strokes, no idea if the 80% figure is too high/low)

But I don't see why this makes average IQ obsolete. Even for accountants, programmers, etc having a higher IQ will make them do their grunt work more efficiently (you say "high enough", but I disagree there is such a thing, things can always become even more efficient - and remember that China has a racially homogenous population with average IQ 104, so unless something is done our (optimistically) 90 IQ internal service sector is going to lag behind)

The 2 are not tightly coupled. A country with 5x the people doesn't need 5x the number of geniuses. You need about 100k competent new-grads to run everything in the country. Everyone else can be manned by an average base population. You just need high compliance.

My previous point about average IQ still applies, but even more so. Again, no country "needs" any geniuses at all, but if you want to come to the top, you need to have more geniuses than everyone else: more innovations will be made by 500 geniuses than 100.

And when you remember the geniuses are arising as the top whatever quantile of a normal distribution (or in India's case, a few different normals), this means that if you're able to produce 500 instead of 100, the 500 will all be of higher average quality than the 100 (the probability density only gets more and more concentrated at the threshold as you move the threshold further to the right)

I don't really buy that image.

  • by all accounts India seemed pretty prosperous before the Mughal invasion
  • many comments here conflate conditions in the south and the north but the reality is more complicated. For one indicator picked at random, take a look at neonatal mortality rates. Uttar Pradesh seems like one of the worst places in the world that doesn't have a civil conflict going on, but Kerala and Tamil Nadu are closer to the US than to the north.

The mughals, as a matter of fact, never conquered the very south. So long as we are throwing out theories, can it be a coincidence that the worst parts of India are those with the most Mughal influence?

It sucks as much as any country in its socioeconomic class.

No.

You cannot understand how much India sucks.

Maybe the next generation will. Or the one after that.

To every Indian, I have the same advice. Everything is a dick measuring contest. Grow a bigger (economic) penis. Your economic penis is the only thing that matters.

Wrong too, but expected.

The specific way India sucks even among very low-income nations, as seen through Western eyes, has little to do with poverty (there are very poor places in the world indeed) – and everything with its spiritual pollution, the lack of taste and disgust that finds root in your religious iconography and fully generalizes to contemporary ideas and beliefs; the physical squalor you can buy your way out of, but the rest, you will happily elevate into prestige. You are blind to the non-materialist dimension of the suckiness. No, I will not elaborate.

as seen through Western eyes (...) and everything with its spiritual pollution, the lack of taste and disgust that finds root in your religious iconography

You are wrong, so wrong.

Avoid low effort comments. "No, you're wrong" is not an argument.

Uh, no.

Elaborating is what separates an argument from unbridled booing. And the latter is against the rules.

I prefer @2rafa 's explanation of your viewpoint to your actual viewpoint, which I am not sure I even understand, mainly due to its vague word salad. I'm sure you have a point but I don't understand it yet beyond what seems to be a visceral disgust you have for India, and something to do with I presume Hinduism.

You want specifics? What I mean by the disgusting lack of taste is inability to notice how, say, stuff like this – the whole (acclaimed in India, allegedly) channel – is garish and, ideally, ought to not exist; how it differs not just from high Western culture, but from mass entertainment too. Its existence is downstream of the same cause as willingness to drink feces from the Ganges; most likely mediated by the same neurophysiological differences. From what I can tell, a typical Indian male sees no problem here, because he involuntarily acts out those same mannerisms and thought patterns, whether as a Western politician – more polished, of course, by virtue of high intelligence and class and usually caste – or a bitter troll on themotte who suffers from lack of success on Tinder; in lower castes, this is often so pronounced and cringeworthy that I physically cannot bear to watch for long. What is the point in explaining it, pointing out cringeworthy inflections and expressions of the body, tacky spice of exaggerated interests, sloppiness of thought? Humans cannot meaningfully debate deep intuitions of propriety and grace, and I do not care to force some mimicry even if it were possible to convince Indians of my "correctness". It's a comprehensive and, yes, visceral sensation of rejection. Another race, another civilization, is entitled to a different set of standards. Indians do not know cringe or disgust, and I suppose that's psychologically better for them. Superpower by 2030 anyway, and Americans, who are also rapidly forgetting what it is to feel cringe, will be friendly to India anyway – because English, because economics, because geopolitics.

P.S. The phrase «spiritual pollution» is something I've taken from an offhand comment, long lost, by a Brahmin, about reasons Brahmins historically and contemporarily tend to live with their own, even at substantial cost, and seek to distance themselves from other Indians: to not be infected, not learn to move, act, think like… this, to cling to what purity they have salvaged. He saw the same thing I see, and I guess this is part of why they insist on bringing casteism even to Silicon Valley. I sure would love if it worked the other way around, «pollution» of civility and taste spreading to all. But probably not.

So if I'm getting you, your view is that the kind of music video you've linked is, in your view, not just distasteful to you personally, but is in fact objectively bad--bad as an adjective here not quite capturing the really badness of it. It's an abomination to proper values and taste. Ruskin would be spinning in-his-grave-bad. And further, the fact that such a video is popular (or this is how we are proceeding, because probably it's popular) is symptomatic of the badness of those who like it or watch it, or for whom it was meant, its target audience. Those people (Indians) are bad, too. But not only do they have poor musical taste, they're actually Bad. I am not using other adjectives here because I don't want to put words in your mouth. (You used garish, tacky, bitter, and one of my most loathed words: cringey or cringeworthy). You further suggest that this is not just a cultural difference between you and them. It's a deep gulf, a difference in fundamental make-up, something neurophysiological that causes them to be that way, a way that to you is revolting. (I am using that word but you didn't. But I think it's a fair assessment of what you are expressing--revulsion.) This same quality (if we can even use that word, maybe condition or state) in these repulsive beings is what also compels some of them to behave in unhygienic and woefully ill-mannered ways. It's just who they are, it's what they are.

If all of this is an accurate, perhaps less lyrical but more succinct crystallization of your views, I think I've got you. I disagree entirely. I also think sideswiping other users of the Motte to make a point is something we might do without and not be the less for it.

I don't think I'm going to convince you of anything and unless you invite that dialogue I won't even try. Please do however correct me if I've misconstrued your intent.

That's all essentially correct (plus their ridiculous nationalism and self-esteem in spite of all that, and clannishness, and opportunistic toadyism, and…) with one minor detail. I accept values relativism just like I accept relativism of tastes. This video (again, this whole channel, and pretty much every Indian entertainment channel) and everything it stands for is objectively bad within my subjective perception and is offensive to my vision of beauty and propriety; just like I find Subcontinental spices deteriorating my food. But it's not illegitimate in some ground truth sense of Cosmic Justice, the way Anglos thought of Indian caste structure or the tradition of immolation of widows. It is simply incompatible with me and people like me. I don't want to «fix» those people to make them more like myself and mine. I just don't want to partake in their unhygienic, high-pitched, gimmicky, r-selected dance of life. When I say that their society sucks in a way they are blind to, in a way going beyond backwardness, and this drives negative perceptions that they optimistically chalk up to their poverty, I speak for more than myself (eg I speak for white girls on Tinder who are too nice to say it out loud but not nice enough for a right sweep), but I do not speak for God. God must smile on them more than on me, if he smiles at all.

There's one more detail. I genuinely respect Indians for a few things, even as those things are tied to the offensive Weltanschauung. Their optimism is pretty enviable, their willingness to share and teach is noble, and their recognition of being imperfect – though vague and not very compatible with my own idea of their specific imperfections – makes them the most enthusiastic thanshumanists on the planet. Solar, hopeful Nietzscheanism comes easier to them than to the annoying and sanctimonious but also imperfect Hajnal line goodbots. If only it could help them develop good taste.

I don't recognize your right to disagree, by the way – it makes little sense, and you have made no argument as to why my evaluation is wrong, only not-so-subtly expressed your condemnation of my immorality, evidently driven by some equally subjective sentimentality.

Edit: I had not watched the video nor read Kulak's essay prior to engaging in this thread. Having checked it out now, I find the gleeful and self-righteous dehumanization appalling. My gut feelings about events showed there are obviously directionally similar, but I do not think indulging in such reactions to feel better about oneself and worse about Indians is appropriate. I am not a Westerner beholden to "one race the human race" creed or anything like that, it's just ugly to gratuitously mock humans who are in no condition to help themselves, about as ugly as the object level content of the video. It's also obviously counterproductive if you want to sway the immigration discussion (even bringing up Koko the gorilla etc. – incidentally, no, Koko didn't have the IQ of 75 or any other figure, she was just an ape), and this angle is a cope to cover up base meanness and engagement baiting.

Thank you for your response. It's true, I've made no argument, but I gave a reason why I felt to do so would be pointless. There's no reasoning one's way forward in this. You're dug in.

Still, I respect that you own up to a subjective viewpoint and stand by it resolutely. Few do.

I also admit to sentimentality, and a staunch view that Kulak rejects in his blogpost (or whatever we are calling substack posts), namely I think that we are all God's creatures, that we have value inherently as humans. And I believe this is true even when I personally find any particular person irredeemable. To me it the dismissal of an entire race, or large group, is outside my ability to sympathize. I just don't get it. Is not individual interaction relevant? Do you have no (Indian) friends or acquaintances whose benevolence (or whatever) gives you pause in your wholesale rejection? Is it so easy to categorize people into groups and be done with it?

I have lived since around the age of 21 in cultures not my own (a country in Africa, Japan) but I somehow assume you, as well, have had firsthand experiences on the ground, as it were, with, possibly, Indians, that have allowed you to form this worldview, or Weltanschauung as you say (though you use that to describe the other, not yourself.)

What do you have against a good curry, by the way? That seems an odd point to fixate on. What are you views on cilantro (not Indian, but disliked by many, particularly in Japan)?

I ask these questions but you've earlier expressed a desire to avoid elaboration or extended discussion on this topic, so if you don't want to say anymore, fine. Also if this response also doesn't pass muster, well. I'll try again, but a bit occupied at the moment.

More comments

@2rafa wasn't describing the same viewpoint though - her explanation was still couched in entirely materialist terms. Having "taste", as I understand it, would entail being able to appreciate how even something that is perfectly sufficient on a physical level can be insufficient on an ethical/spiritual level.

It's not the first time he's levied this accusation, for what it's worth.

wasn't describing the same viewpoint though

No, she was much more clear and readable, for one, and made reasonable points that could be supported. I appreciate that link, by the way, it was an interesting read. Am I correct that DLtD is formerly Ilforte? I remember that name from the reddit days, but I really need to start a notebook where I keep track of who is who and what post has made me remember them.

DLtD is formerly Ilforte

That is correct.

It's not the first time he's levied this accusation, for what it's worth.

Lol, I just followed that link and saw the following:

I think your problem is typical for Indians (and most other non-WEIRDs and non-Japanese, to be fair, including my people… but worse so in Indians): you have no taste, not even the notion of "taste", to you it's probably an arbitrary set of markers of one's social milieu rather than some relatively lawful intuition.

The idea that Indians have no taste seems so silly to me as a fan of Indian music that I'm not sure where even to start here.

Not only that, but even a cursory glance at Indians' extensive history of writing and arguing about what constitutes good taste shows that, far from having no notion of taste and considering it to be arbitrary, they are in fact probably one of the ethnic groups that believes most heavily in taste being something that follows lawful intuition. Indeed, they perhaps follow this idea excessively, hence the numerous attempts in Indian writing to argue things such as why one performer's rendition of a raga follows the raga's essence more closely than another's, or why some given language adheres more closely to a Platonic ideal of grammar than another language does.

Who "they"?

Indians.

Derivatives of Indian culture in the form of Western Buddhism and other enlightenment-oriented philosophies are actually quite popular in the West, so I don't know where you are getting this idea that Westerners think of India as being spiritually polluted. Maybe in the 19th century the majority of Westerners did, but that has not been the case for a long time now. Likewise, the average Westerner who has any awareness of Indian art generally does not consider it to be spiritually polluted. I mean, the most popular and influential rock band in history was made up of Indophiles.

Your idea that Indian religious iconography is characterized by lack of taste and disgust does not resonate with me whatsoever. Sure, there is much in it that strikes most Westerners as weird, such as the elephant God. But it just seems weird to me, it does not seem to me like it lacks taste and it certainly does not arouse any disgust in me. And, not that this has any bearing on your argument about what the typical Westerner believes, but to me personally, when I think about it objectively, the crucified Jesus seems at least as bizarre as anything I've seen in Indian iconography. It is only familiarity that makes the crucified Jesus seem un-weird. And as for European paganism, with its various sacrifice rituals and stories about divine rape, I wouldn't say that it is objectively any less strange than Indian paganism.

If anything, it is the guru-learner relationship which is common in Indian religion that arouses some disgust in me, because of its authoritarian style, not Indian religious iconography.

I am not convinced the 19th century Westerners were any better – there was Theosophy (and eventually Jiddu Krishnamurti) after all. You do like to project your abstract sentimentalities on sleazy Indian grift, see what isn't there based on advertisement, just as you like giving money to horny, filthily materialist gurus with harems, who in turn spin their depravity into a sign of some higher Enlightenment with a few easy turns of the tongue. Even your idea of what might be disgusting to me has already been sanitized: Ganesh, rather than lingams and yonis and Kali and the repetitive psychedelic excess of temple architecture.

But I don't really care if modern Westerners, whether average or Indophilic ones, have the capacity or interest to notice the difference between the actual Indian – personality, art, taste, ethics – and the one imaginable based on some handpicked artifacts and a ton of charity and mind-projection.

Affluent and educated Indians simply have no retort to the core criticism of many people on the DR about India, which is that it is the only place in the world in which the rich are so permanently content with public squalor.

You cannot simply appeal to ‘socioeconomic development levels’. No. African countries with small fractions of India’s median income have much cleaner capitals. I was in Central Africa again last week. Kinshasa is much cleaner than Mumbai or New Delhi. I work, on occasion, with senior African officials across many sub-Saharan countries. One of the first things they’ll do, even the most corrupt ones, as they increase state capacity and collect more tax money, is beautify public spaces, hire people to clean the park opposite the national parliament, that kind of thing. I have walked through shanty-town level African neighborhoods where the working class is and you will see boys picking up litter, sweeping streets and so on. Of course, sheer poverty means these places are still squalid by first-world standards.

But they are much cleaner than even middle class neighborhoods of Indian cities. Even wealthy ones. If you are a wealthy Indian you have probably been to Soho House in Mumbai (a few years ago at least it was one of the places the wealthy younger people hung out, probably less fashionable now). Even there, the street outside was dirty, garbage everywhere, unswept, sandy. Street cleaning has been solved, we have machines for it now, India can afford them (many other cities with much lower median income than Mumbai manage it). This squalor is a choice.

India fills me with a certain horror that the rest of the developing world does not. You see, I can go to Singapore and see what a Chinese civilization that is rich looks like. It may not be to everyone’s taste, but it is pleasant enough, competently managed and a high-quality place to live. Even the Arabs, when they have money, create a passable or moderately livable society. There are good parts of South and even Central America. Africa is very poor, but as I said, I am encouraged. Only in India are the rich content with public squalor. I cannot understand why. I don’t think even you know, exactly, I’ve engaged on this issue with the many intelligent Indians here and I get the sense that it’s not something they really think about, even though to me it is obviously, by very very far the biggest issue with their country.

I don’t condone the ridiculous racism of the 4chan troll, Indians are by and large decent immigrants to the West. But the question of India’s squalor looms over every stamped visa.

Even there, the street outside was dirty, garbage everywhere, unswept, sandy.

When I get the "oh, you spent a month in India? How was that?" small talk, scenes like this, and a hundred others flash through my mind before I politely lie: "it was fine", and change the subject. The pristine western retail stores with literal rubble half-blocking the entrances.. The designated landfill streets.. The street curs gnawing at their severed paws in the middle of the road.. The absolute state of the power infrastructure (live? wires pulled down to street level and woven into clothesline). The constant smell of rot and pollution and feces. I could go on.

It's not so much the squalor. It's the squalor plus dressing up in shirt and tie, working in an air conditioned office and pretending there's no problem at all.

The truthful* novel set in 1970s India, written by a Midwest US writer who visited Calcutta in 1970s notes that western world used to have pretty horrible slums too before Victorians got disgusted with them and bulldozed them all & built sewers...

*half of the horror is basically just the things noted in this thread ..

We have (very early) photographs and sketches of what rich parts of Victorian London looked like, though. Sure, horse manure on the streets was a fact of life, but even then sidewalks were a lot cleaner and better kept than they are in major Indian cities today. Nobody is complaining that slums are dumps; this is a universal fact of life. The mystery is why the nice parts of Indian cities where average residents make US-middle-class salaries are such.

We have no way of measuring a person’s aesthetic or (full) ethical value through educational and visa selection processes. This is the problem underlying immigration where immigration looks good on paper. Are Indians smart, hardworking, and nonviolent? Yes. But this is only part of the value of a human being. We must also care that a human has a high ingrained sense of empathy without the threat of punishment, and that a person can sense visual beauty and the invisible value of beauty. These are almost terminal values: an ideal world must consist of empathetic humans who love beauty, because these qualities are necessary for an optimal world according to Western values (love-filled people in a beautiful world).

When I look at videos of India there does appear to be people whose eyes never rest momentarily to notice the ugliness and poverty surrounding them. They do not seem to feel the pain of guilt when they rip off tourists (an eternal complaint about gypsies, whose extraction is Indian). It is as if their inner life is too locked in to the ratrace of personal interest. Cognitive science has begun to understand the role that eye movement plays in a person’s inner life, and the way that some Indians stare at people sets off a threat detection alarm to Westerners.

I do not know the best way to measure the full ethical dimension of a person for the purposes of immigration but looking at how they live is certainty better than ignoring the question altogether. And maybe better then this would be looking at what happens in their brain when confronted with suffering strangers, or scenes of ugliness, and looking at infant behavior for AI-determined signs of empathy.

Indians appreciate public beauty so long as the cost of maintaining such beauty is borne by others. It is the tragedy of the commons writ visibly large on a societal scale.

The irony of course is that indians are actually perfectly happy, and even proud, to live in clean public spaces. The Indian elites in quaint English cottages are hardly violaters of personal space and public cleanliness like travelers or junkies; Indians do not lower property values by their presence.

No, the observable difference is in civic consciousness: Indians make no attempt to clean up their public spaces in India, because such huge costs are immediately wasted when the tide of humanity washes its excreta upon the shores of civilization to bleach in the sun with each passing day. Is it a fundamental moral deficiency, or a total collapse of state structures? A convincing case can be made for both, but when considering how much elite (and frankly non elite as well) Indians are net acretive outside of India, there must be something uniquely terrible about Indias structure that ruins the country so.

While criticizing Islam might be more controversial, westerners generally regard Islam as a distinctive civilization, and I’m also wondering why the criticism doesn’t apply to Japan.

Japan is rich. It’s safe. Most of its problems are attributable to low birth rates, but they’re more lower end of average than exceptionally low the way Taiwan’s or South Korea’s are. It’s distinctly not-western culturally.

You don't get it, do you?

Japanese aren't docile. They're still the same people.

They're just not at war.

I am going to join the others in disagreement and point out that it definitely seems like the Japanese have been pretty anti-war since 1945. Now, sure, attitudes can change, the Japanese aren't ignorant of the rising tensions and potential threats of the current age, and there isn't exactly a political monoculture, but one needs only to look at the freaking cartoons they make to see that the population seems pretty inoculated against the more warlike tendencies they had in ages past.

And wait a few short generations, and we start getting shit like this. It's still relegated to the sketcher and trashier side of fiction for now, but generational memory is pretty short.

Care to elaborate?

That given a few years of the right propaganda and a state of war, they'd do the same stuff all over again.

People have a switch in their mind that allows them to wage war and to be at peace. For most people, tripping it takes a lot of social pressure , combat and deaths of friends etc.

True, the Imperial Army was extremely brutal but you don't need brutality to cause someone to be brutal.

Waffen SS had for the era rather humane training methods, and ones that were largely copied by western militaries, yet people who are barely criminal in real life were pretty good at being war criminals.

All that matters is that you have young men, lack of accountability and a hated enemy. That said young men are from a population that isn't fond of random acts of senseless violence doesn't really matter. In war, the stress ensures someone will snap.

Interesting. I was under the impression from the finality of your earlier post (and its abrupt "You don't get it" rhetorical move) that you were suggesting insight into Japanese national character specifically. It seems you're just generalizing on the brutality of man during wartime, and suggesting in a deterministic way that we are all William Calley (or whoever) under the wrong circumstances. Correct me if I've misunderstood.

Yeah, pretty much. Although Calley was just stupid. Terror tactics can't be used in the age of TV when the domestic population isn't a blood frenzy like today Israelis are.

And even then, they're of dubious use as even if the terror successfully intimidates Arabs, the loss of support due to the disgust and horror of Israeli's naive foreign allies might outweigh the benefit.

that we are all I'd say you'd be hard pressed to find a population that would not commit atrocities in warfare if they had impunity. Certainly, the rate at which they would behave so would vary a lot, but in the end, no matter how good our impulse control is, we're all humans, we're not infinitely moral angels, and we're all descended from a long line of animals who generally picked the right choice when they had to decide between becoming a killer and becoming a corpse.

People were talking recently about how Germans tended to obsessively follow laws. Eichmann in Jerusalem points out that, in the 3rd Reich, the Fuhrer's word was law, above any of the written laws. And the result followed logically from those two things.

I can believe that about Germans, it also spills into the electronics and machines they develop. I've seen overwrought designs with double and triple redundancy with security and safety interlocks so overcomplicated that the final product can't even perform its intended function properly. That is until you go in and remove half the safety interlocks and defeat some of the redundancy to get a workable solution that will work non stop for years.

I was reading recently that contrary to common narratives the Kamikaze bombers weren't that thrilled to sacrifice their life (under those terms) but this was in 1944 and they knew Japan was in a desperate situation. In other words, their perspective on the matter was not as alien as we might imagine. They weren't eager to be suicide bombers.

And from what I've read at least some of the 9/11 hijackers were at least somewhat conflicted. There was that hijacker who called his girlfriend before boarding the plane and just kept repeating "I love you".

"Hey, people love to shit on Islam more so that other religions, and we have to preemitivaly make that harder".

No its because Google doesn't want literal heads rolling.

The movie is most likely made by Pakistanis or Bangladeshis or the Sikhs. The three despise Hindus (upper ones) in particular and feel that they are above the slur pajeet despite all having worse per capita GDP and other issues. India is not for beginners but Pakistan and Bangladesh are worse and khalistan is a pipe dream that is about as realistic as lighting striking me thirty times in the next 10 seconds.

These things are very common on Twitter, people have such infighting to prove that they are better than each other (groups I mean). The writer of the movie is most likely a pajeet, just not a Hindu pajeet but a pajeet nonetheless since people of European origin do not care enough about the subcontinent to spend so much time and have a refined sense of racist humour.

Is there a reason you're spelling Canada as Kaneda or is it just for fun? Is spelling it that way "a thing" in India or somewhere, so to speak?

I see. Thank you for this.

The writer of the movie is most likely a pajeet, just not a Hindu pajeet but a pajeet nonetheless since people of European origin do not care enough about the subcontinent to spend so much time and have a refined sense of racist humour.

This claim seems plausible to me, though @WestphalianPeace's claim also seems plausible (and overlapping) to me:

I suspect the creator is actually Canadian. Either Old Stock Anglo-Canadian or the 90's generation of Cantonese/Korean first gen Canadian. There's also a smaller but real possibility of earlier Indian immigrant family who moved to Toronto specifically to get out of India and now feels like the Old World is chasing after them.

Indians definitely fall into "fargroup" territory for me. I have known many professionally, and all were uniformly and unapologetically caste-ist (is there a better word for this?). Americans who grew up post-civil-rights are frequently stunned by the vitriol Europeans often seem comfortable spouting about Gypsies, and I think I feel something similar when I hear Indian physicians and lawyers and professors talk about lower castes. Because with respect to American politics, they are often quite woke, or at least willing to play the "race" card whenever it seems likely to benefit them. Listening to "brown" people complain about racism in one breath and then air disdain for the browner people of their homeland gives me culture war whiplash, I guess I'm saying.

I watched part of the video and it seems like pretty high grade troll bait, but like most of 4chan's projects I am skeptical that it gets anywhere interesting, ultimately. Perhaps I am underestimating the level of public fascination with AI-generated stuff, though.

There's a Garth Ennis graphical novel set in WWII called Out of the Blue that touches upon this. There's a Hindu Indian Brahmin serving in the Royal Air Force (not the main character but one of the main cast) and he's resentful of bigotry but he also believes in the caste system to some extent.

Lmao, the peson who poasted it has the account name exposed pajeets, pajeet is an ethnic slur for people of indian subcontinent. I am from India but the movie by the looks of it focuses on the rural poor class which makes up most of the nation. These are the people who are found in disturbing imagery because of their poor conditions. Being poor, not very smart and living in India is not a good combination at all.

I find myself in a bit of a twist now, a lot of the stuff in the documentary is true, which is why those who are slightly upper middle class or above look down upon everything that is associated wth poor Indians. I cannot fully criticise all Indinas publicly since I by definition am one but at the same time, this stuff is vile.

Regardless, do lemme know what you guys think about it.

Despite the creator's pseudonym being Thames (implying British) I suspect the creator is actually Canadian. Either Old Stock Anglo-Canadian or the 90's generation of Cantonese/Korean first gen Canadian. There's also a smaller but real possibility of earlier Indian immigrant family who moved to Toronto specifically to get out of India and now feels like the Old World is chasing after them.

There is a quip later in the video about Indians & Tim Hortons. That's a Canadian specific stereotype. Nobody from East Anglia or Texas would have strong associations about Tim Hortons. In the US the association would be between Indians and 7/11, Dunkin Donuts, or even Motel chains. The UK I'm sure has it's equivalent. But the association of first resort would not be Tim Hortons.

I therefor conclude that the creator was born and raised in Brampton, Ontario and born in 2000. Brampton was extremely European pre-90s, 70% European in 96', and 60% European in 2001. It's now 18% European (mostly retirees) and 52% South Asian. These are circumstances were people falling into hate-spirals become a real possibility.

When Algeria was willing to commit ethnic cleansing ("by suitcase or coffin") it's population of French Europeans in Algeria was ~10%. Demographic shifts can make people go into dark places.

I am, of course, making up the exact age and location out of the flimsiest of pretenses. But I'm thoroughly convinced this is just another propaganda effort in the ongoing Canadian ethnic tension that now exists.

I would not be surprised tbh, canada taking in pajeets was a mistake given how many of them scam, literally scam their way to a visa or a pr. Regardless, I do not know how critical I can be of pajeets on the forum rn, Mods? can I talk about this and not get banned?

I don’t think you can use racial slurs but they’re ok to mention. And Indian immigration fraud and its negative effects on Canada is something that comes up here, and gets repeated, regularly.

i can call other Indians those slurs since I am native to the subcontinent. Indians commit terrible visa frauds, telugus especially. Mentioing this may get me flamed by other Indians but fuck it. I dislike any kind of mass migration, it is parasitic in nature and the people who do it later help others in doing the same. I know plenty sindhis in the UAE who go there with just a high school diploma and end up magically getting a college degree.

The UK I'm sure has it's equivalent.

Deliveroo riders.

These are recent immigrants who left their family back home to try and get a slightly better life for themselves, however the amount of vitriol aimed at them from all quarters of the white british establishment (high and low) is something to behold. You can make reasonable complaints about them (such as their moped driving being absolutely terrible and a potential danger to public safety because for some reason known only to God and the British state it's possible to drive a moped without a full driving licence as long as you put a big red L on your vehicle) but the attacks coming at them frequently seem to be little more than attacking them for its own sake.

While I personally don't like them either (I also don't dislike them, they just are there) at the very least they know how to properly say "Thank you Sir" when handing over your food, which to me places them above a majority of the "native" people of the UK.

There’s also that no one in the USA cares very much about India or Indians.

Indeed Kulak is Canadian, and I agree it’s possible the video creator is too. Canadians are common online, and in internet rightist circles the extremely high proportion of Indian immigrants in Canada is well known (as are Tim Hortons memes), so I wouldn’t read too much into that specific form of evidence. But in general, extreme ethnic hostility towards Indians (by non-Muslim or Chinese) tends to be a Canadian thing.

In America, racial hostility by the far right is primarily targeted at blacks and Jews, while anti-immigration activists focus on illegal Central American migration. Some are opposed to H-1B Indians and will share anecdotes about them taking over Silicon Valley but it’s non-central. Indians are also probably overrepresented on the American DR, not to the extent of Jews or Irish but certainly a little.

In the UK the far right care much less about Indian immigration. Of course they’d rather it didn’t happen but it’s a distant secondary concern compared to mass immigration from the Islamic world, particularly Pakistan, Bangladesh and the MENA region. Most of continental Europe has comparatively little Indian immigration except for some in Portugal perhaps.

In Australia and New Zealand white identitarianism is hostile both to the domestic aboriginals/maori movements and to immigrants, but in Australia Lebanese are a more common target in the latter category and in both countries Chinese are too, especially given growing concern over CCP influence in Oceanic politics. Indians are widely used as examples of ‘good’ immigrants by civic nationalist types in most of the Anglosphere except Canada.

Canada is probably the only country in which Indian immigration is the (or at least ‘a’) primary concern of many domestic conservatives.

If I had to guess... Vietnamese. maybe an Asian/Swarthy-white mix. (like chinese and Greek)

He strikes me as the kind of second gen 90s Asian kid who'd gone full tilt into South Park humour and assimilated entirely into white Canadian culture, but isn't fully white so feels no compunction about Canada's oppressive tolerance and norms around racism.

India is the worst country? Has anyone ever seen Pakistan?

Obviously no.

India is easier to call the worst place since people in the west have at least some notion of what things are like there. Pakistan? Nobody knows... or cares (other than when it comes to Islamism).

The failures evident within India contrast against pretensions articulated by cogent members of the diaspora, hence the ready mocking of 'Superpower 2020' By contrast, there is no illusion that anyone even entertains a single claim of the Pakistanis. With the record of failure being unwritten because it is automatically presumed, why would anyone waste brain cells mocking these failures.

Hello, and welcome to the Motte!

I recommend familiarizing yourself with our rules, especially those about “proactively providing evidence” and “building consensus.” Asserting that no one has ever held any expectations for a country is the kind of hot take which cries out for a more elaborate defense. By all means, I’d be interested in seeing that laid out.

That's a valid point.

I think India is seen as worse because in a way, Pakistanis being Muslims, they're seen as an enemy. Or should be, at least, as Islam seeks cultural hegemony and is very assertive about it.

India isn't seen as such, yet it has very similar problems.

Pakistan was developing pretty rapidly until the 90s while India languished under Congress’ quasi centrally planned economy. Today India is doing much better while Pakistan has suffered from overpopulation due to stubbornly high birth rates in some regions and political instability.

You forgot to mention incest, or more precisely serial cousin marriage which if done repeatedly results in basically brother/sister incest risks. Big past-time in Pakistan. Slightly decreasing as of late.

Meanwhile Indian castes give a good impression of being inbred and data shows basically reproductive isolation for perhaps 2500 years, at minimum 1600.

You can have populations more distinct than Spaniards and Swedes speaking basically the same language and having lived next to each other for millenia.

You rarely see such disturbingly looking people in Europe outside of narrow mountain valleys in the Alps, where half of the people look like they're related to each other and have unusual facial features.

India's special thing is that they religiously restrict meat eating and even eggs, thus their stunting conditions actually mildly worsened since 2000.

While it's valid to say that e.g. England had horrible slums before 1840s, we know that IQ wise, the populations are incomparable even if some castes (brahimns) and ethnics (parsis) are pretty much at white average or even slightly above it.

So India won't get much better unless the substandard human capital running it is substituted for by AIs, and you can bet their bureaucrats and politicians would not like that one bit.

Less hopeless than Africa, but I understand why everyone is trying to get away from there, and I also understand why that must be prevented at all costs.

Opinion of people I know IRL working in IT on Indians (N=4) is about on the same level as opinion of random eastern Europeans on the Roma.

~Yes, there's a few good ones. No, if I could I'd prefer never to come into contact with them, as on average it ranges from disappointing to having your day ruined and getting very angry.

They are called mujeets by extremely online Indians for some reason. Regardless, I may watch the movie now.

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