ResoluteRaven
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User ID: 867
ResoluteRaven
11mo ago
The eventual result will almost certainly be a ceasefire along the line of control with no official peace treaty or concessions by either side besides perhaps the Kursk salient by Ukraine. The best analogue would be the Korean War, where the last two years were spent in a stalemate with high casualties but no meaningful progress by either side, and the core issues remain unresolved to this day despite the cessation of major hostilities. I see no way to force Putin to accept such an outcome while he still thinks he has the upper hand and can slowly push the front forward in the Donbass, but presumably there will come a time in the next two years when he has to either declare a full mobilization, risking domestic unrest, or agree to a ceasefire.
The European powers may be more determined to push Russia back, but do they have much practical ability without the US?
If a Polish/Baltic expeditionary force were deployed to Ukraine with no restrictions, they could probably force Russia to withdraw from most of the territory they have occupied except for Crimea, but such action seems likely to anger the Russian public enough to accept full mobilization and escalation to a general European war against NATO. There are ways to do this with some plausible deniability e.g. "We had nothing to do with this ambassador, our soldiers just went AWOL and joined the Ukrainian foreign legion," but the more political cover they have the more likely they are to simply be fed into the Ukrainian meat grinder without the tools they need to make a real difference in the war ("They also stole our tanks and fighter jets and launched missiles at you from our territory" is a bit of a stretch). In either case, the US and other NATO nations would not be obligated to bail them out of a fight they started.
ResoluteRaven
11mo ago
No one is arguing that the differences between capitalist and communist countries are biological in origin. That the gaps in wealth between North and South Korea or East and West Germany are explained by economic policies alone is self-evident. That does not mean that biological and cultural differences don't exist or matter.
Looking at communist countries alone we can see the difference between those with high human capital (East Germany, the Soviet Union, North Korea), which are able to maintain an orderly society with advanced weapons manufacturing and scientific research and pose a credible military threat to their neighbors, and those with lower human capital (Angola, Benin, Cambodia, Ethiopia), which are a threat to no one but their own miserable inhabitants.
ResoluteRaven
11mo ago
A repeat of the Spanish Flu seems unlikely to me given the particular circumstances that led to that strain disproportionately affecting young and healthy individuals i.e. an adaptation period among soldiers on the western front who were immunocompromised from extreme stress and injuries, in addition to close promixity and lack of hygiene. A more prototypical bad influenza pandemic is the 1957 Asian Flu outbreak, which is hardly a blip in the history books.
ResoluteRaven
11mo ago
people kept getting sanskritized and it was no longer Aryan in anything but name
Were the Aryans not the ones who brought Sanskrit to India in the first place? Or are you talking about attempts to diminish the influence of the Persian high culture of the Mughals?
ResoluteRaven
11mo ago
Not Indian, but I grew up around enough of them to observe and ask about such matters.
1. It's possible for someone to be light-skinned enough that they are almost certainly North Indian or dark-skinned enough that they are almost certainly South Indian, but in between it's difficult to tell.
2. If they are from one of the communities that tend to migrate to the US I can do this pretty well e.g. Seetharaman is Tamil, Ravi is Telugu, Bose is Bengali, Jagtap is Marathi, Portuguese names are from Goa, English Christian names indicate someone is from Kerala, the aforementioned Singh and Patel, etc.
3. Among recent migrants, language and religion are probably the two main barriers between communities. For the second generation, religious differences may persist and there is some inertia around food (which correlates very strongly with North vs South), but ancestral language is no longer relevant and most folks just identify as Brown.
4. Absent any other information, not well at all.
5. If they have a surname I am familiar with in the Indian-American community I would guess that they are Brahmin and be right the majority of the time. Otherwise I would have no idea.
6. Discrimination, at least for things like who you are supposed to marry, is not really by geography, but by Jati, which is basically your particular endogamous community. The part of the caste system that Westerners are usually familiar with is Varna e.g. Brahmin, Kshatriya, and so on, and this defines the role that your Jati is supposed to play in society (priest, warrior, merchant, etc.). As an example, Iyers and Iyengars are both Tamil Brahmins, but they are separate Jati. Discrimination along other axes includes "people darker-skinned than me are inferior," "people from [other state] talk funny and eat weird food," and "[other religion]'s men are coming to steal and forcibly convert our women." Basically none of these differences matter to second generation immigrants except for the rare few who let their parents arrange a marriage or are devoutly religious (usually Muslim).
7. I can tell if their native language is North or South Indian, but usually not more than that. I can probably distinguish North Indian languages like Gujarati, Hindi, and Bengali by hearing better than I could those same accents in English.
8. If it's a group of international students playing cricket on the college quad, they probably all came from the same state and are of similar caste backgrounds. Among the second generation this may still happen if it's a group of friends who all grew up together because their parents were in the former sort of group and moved to the same part of the US (I know a lot of Telugus from Northern Virginia, for instance), but they won't go out of their way to exclude others on those lines.
9. The communities I'm familiar with basically have no lower-caste people in them at all, at least if we're talking about Dalits and such, so it's hard to tell.
ResoluteRaven
11mo ago
While I think Bryan Caplan, Noah Smith, and co are correct that with reasonable economic policies India could climb above the deepest rungs of poverty i.e. no more shitting in the street, basic literacy, and an end to chronic child malnutrition, and that this is something the rest of the world ought to encourage and celebrate, they are far too bullish on its long-term convergence with industrialized nations.
Caplan's last point in particular strikes me as either willfully ignorant or completely insane:
Even if you have cultural fears about immigrants in general, what exactly is culturally objectionable about Indians? I live in one of top centers of Indian migration in the United States, and no one here even claims that they’re clinging to their native culture of crazy driving and rampant littering. They’re definitely not unleashing stray cattle on us. Yes, I know Indian Americans are self-selected from high castes and top schools. But after ten days in India, I confidently declare that the children of randomly-selected Indians would do well here. Like the Indians who are already here, they’d adopt almost everything good about modern U.S. culture, while retaining the strong family values that Americans have been foolishly forgetting.
First off, this man has apparently never told an Indian Uber driver that he's in a hurry to get to the airport. And as a supporter of elite Indian immigration (we can certainly quibble on what "elite" means, since that's really the crux of the issue here), I must strenously oppose the claim that we can just import randomly-selected(?!) people from any country and expect a good outcome, economic, cultural, or otherwise. We in fact have a pretty good idea of what importing random Indians looks like, in the form of Guyana and Trinidad, and it isn't pretty.
As for North Korea, I think the fact that in their current state they are still able to build and test nuclear missiles and field an impressive IMO team, among other achievements, is a testament to the inherent biocapital of the Korean people, and something we don't see in other nations with similar regimes like Eritrea or Turkmenistan. With nations as with individuals, you may sabotage someone with the potential to be intelligent and successful by starving them as a child or hitting them in the head with a hammer, but I have yet to the see the opposite.
ResoluteRaven
11mo ago
I found it notable that a Mexican corrido has already been written about him.
ResoluteRaven
11mo ago
I think there is a distinction to be made between the Asian work model as institutionalized through a network of cram schools, tiger parents, and autistic focus on maximizing a small set of quanitifiable parameters, and the more generalized immigrant striver mindset that can be observed in everyone from Mexicans to Nigerians and is probably closer to what Vivek was trying to articulate. The former is almost always unhealthy, while the latter combination of grit, frugality, and focus on education and getting a good job seems to me like a much more reasonable thing to promote. Of course, the descendants of immigrants will eventually regress to the mean, and despite the fact that their parents and grandparents would describe this as "becoming lazy Americans," it is really at this point that it becomes more relevant what their origins are.
There were certainly a few black slaves and freedmen in imperial Rome. Most were probably Nubian, as travel along the Nile is easier than across the Sahara. I would not take lack of genetic traces in modern populations as clear evidence of absence, as modern Italians bear essentially no imprint of the cosmopolitan population of the classical Mediterranean. Parts of Europe under Muslim rule such as Sicily and Iberia would have continued to host some number of sub-Saharan African slaves into the medieval period and I'm sure some made their way to Constantinople as well. I have also come across the claim that Lisbon was 10% black just a few decades after the Reconquista.
If we are limiting our scope to say northern European states under Catholic rule between 550 and 1400, then I think the presence of even a single black individual there would be highly unusual and noteworthy, but the argument that some part of Europe has been inhabited by a non-zero number of individuals we would call black at most points within the last two thousand years forms a motte from which the bailey of "here are some black vikings or knights in medieval England" can be defended. I won't pretend to know the motivation of everyone making these claims, but I imagine the most informed and introspective among them believe that they are presenting scenarios from within the realm of possibility that, while not the most likely, are the ones with the greatest expected social utility in the present day.
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