kiln
1yr ago
What you are alluding to can be better explained by "not understanding something since their job depends on not understanding it".
For example, opinions that toe the line on gender issues, even if poorly supported receive no push back when expressed by women. Hence, they have no incentive to think about them critically when the conclusion may not benefit them in the short term.
Plenty of people including men have shown this tendency on other issues when their privilege hinges on not addressing it.
kiln
11mo ago
Depends on what spaces you hang out at.
In the past, the folks I followed on twitter were mostly in the Software industry. It was not a fun experience to find out that most of the well known and influential folks in the industry who I once looked up to would unplatform me if I ever tried to add some nuance into the whole spiel.
I very much had to filter out any culture war relevant topics or keywords from my feed to restrict it to the technical content embedded between the rants and snide remarks.
Now most of them are off to Mastodon and my twitter feed is healthier for it.
kiln
1yr ago
So, you're saying they weren't richer. What made them higher status then? Was there no material benefit to being in an upper caste?
If we consider being a rich landowner the epitome of status in a poorly-industrialised society like India, than the link between upper caste and status becomes a bit fuzzy.
In Punjab Jatt Sikhs tend to dominate. In Tamil Nadu I hear a lot of castes who are considered traditionally as Shudras dominate but this does not make Tamil Nadu the land of caste egalitarianism that some imagine it as. They have the highest rates of caste endogamy in India and have plenty of news worthy cases of discrimination among themselves, just that you cannot plaster Brahmin in the headlines. Different regions have different dominating castes.
From my own experience there seem to be as many rich Brahmin land owners as broke subsistence farmers. My extended family leans towards the latter. To make an analogy to the US, we were trailer trash and we sure felt privileged.
This is a very emotive piece. Such optimism is often hard to find in Indian Anglophilic elite who tend to judge progress as movement towards Western (more particularly American) cultural norms. They are not completely wrong as "Western" culture does have a lot going for it. But you also get weird positions such as the low divorce rate in India being a bad thing as it means a lot of people are in bad marriages.
A minor nitpick. If you go by India in pixels' TFR figures, the 2.0 TFR seems to be mostly due to Bihar and UP working "extra" hard. The other relatively developed states of India seem to be quickly moving towards the TFR of developed countries without attaining even a fraction of their wealth. This is not encouraging since UP and Bihar will also probably follow the same path once they develop more. I remember you or someone else framing this as India implementing Woke policies way before anyone else in world while we are far from an economy that can even support such welfarism. While not relevant in my lifetime, I do worry that India will move from a poor country with some economic significance due its large population to a somewhat poor country with not enough people or industry to be of any significance.
EDIT: The last point is mostly my reflexive pessimism speaking. Given our population we'll reach that point way after everyone else if we ever do.
What is a "Hindu Nationalist" for someone on the Motte?
For the largely American/European population it is most likely an angry Twitter user of Indian origin they saw replying to Razib or an English speaking journalist reporting on India on twitter.
Indians do not really have any civilizational memory of Aryans like they have of Turks or the British and will react with skepticism. If we did not have genetic studies it would never have even become a topic of discussion. There are no physical imprints of that time.
Why are they so dead set against the idea of an Aryan invasion?
As I have mentioned in the past, India has innumerable ethnic fissures and this whole discussion of "Aryans" in India is often pushed by politicians trying to reap votes on the back of community tensions. Any discussion of Affirmative action that tilts away from "We need more affirmative action" is pushed back with "We have been oppressed for 3000 years. You think 70 years of Affirmative action is enough to fix this?". While there is some truth to this for some Indian communities, this is often pushed by influential land owning groups who want to claim oppression.
We currently have over 50% quotas for disadvantaged groups in most Indian Government institutions. Tamil Nadu, where this topic is the hottest has 67% quotas. There is no end date or benchmark given for when this will end given how useful this is for Indian politicians.
Most Indians on twitter have not really studied the scientific literature behind this issue and will pattern match any Western commentators wading into this issue to the above.
My opinions on this issue? (Notice that I call this opinion, I don't consider it relevant beyond Intellectual masturbation)
Even Razib acknowledges that the impact of the Aryans was far greater on culturally rather than genetically. And to be honest, the cultural footprint is also largely syncretic with prehistoric animistic traditions.
Except some populations in North-West India most Indians regardless of caste are largely "Not Aryan". South Indian Brahmins may have predominantly North Indian paternal ancestry, but North Indians are not "Aryan" either. Sure, some upper caste folks may have higher Steppe contributions but even then they are still largely "Not Aryan". We also have upper caste groups that do not have high Steppe ancestry.
https://twitter.com/ArainGang/status/1705319485178314918
If you compare this to ancestry studies of populations in South America you will find a lot of people are significantly European by ancestry and even more significantly European on the paternal side along with near complete Native-American ancestry on the maternal side. You will not find this even in Indian upper castes.
Now, sure you can say that most of the Steppe ancestry was passed down by men and bands of roving men in those times can hardly be pacifistic peace loving eccentrics. And perhaps, the only reason India is not fully "Aryan" is because there weren't enough Aryans to replace the pre-Aryan population, but given the ways things have played out I do not see any justification for any steep racial divide.
kiln
1yr ago
I would say most of them can't do anything about it other than complain about it bitterly on the internet. They speak about any of this under their real name there is a very real risk of losing your job and getting smeared by highly online zealots and spineless employers worried about losing face.
From my limited engagement in this space which is themotte and some subreddits threads I stumbled upon through culture war discussions is feminists or progressives will do their very best to put down any discussion that actually touch on men's issues as sexist, patriarchal, racist, authoritarian, fascist, supremacist,... you can go on and on.
The few spaces that seem to be greenlighted like /r/menslib are utterly useless in covering issues that most men actually worry about. Discussion on gender issues will involve points that are not very charitable to men... and women which feminists and progressives can't seem to handle with their binary oppressor/oppressed mindset.
kiln
8mo ago
Is it that while travelling she doesn't have easy access to low-prep, decent tasting easily eatable food?
As a financially constrained student, if I wake up in the morning and don't have stuff prepped the previous night, I am going to gorge myself on milk, cheap chocolate and cereal.
kiln
1yr ago
What do you mean?
The rare few times QQ comes up on SB it's just mentioned as the place where people write NSFW stuff.
The colloquial dialect of Hindi and Urdu are very similar. But their more formal registers have sufficient differences in vocabulary to confuse a casual Hindi speaker a bit.
I remember stumbling on a news report in Urdu and finding that while I understood everything that was being said, I had to infer the meaning of quite a few unfamiliar Persian/Arabic origin words by context.
Possible reasons for a difference in opinion.
In the order of fluency, I can speak English, Kannada and Hindi with my grasp over Hindi primarily being through the Bookish register and some exposure to the colloquial one during undergrad. I also do not consume Bollywood movies/music which I've read tends to use Hindi that leans slightly more towards Urdu vocabulary.
kiln
1yr ago
While I wouldn't go as far as to call it unethical, I agree that avoiding meat is more ethical. Many of the animals we eat seem to be able to experience suffering similar (enough) to what humans do. And for me at least the response to seeing animals suffer is very similar to what I feel when I see humans suffer.
But the current prevailing sense of ethics among most of my peers do not recognise eating meat as particularly unethical and meat is a decent and easy source of protein so I do not shy away from eating meat whenever it's available. In case the ethics of my peers changes significantly enough to start regarding meat as highly unethical I wouldn't mind stopping.
Ultimately, while I agree it is not very ethical, I don't care for it enough to act on it, especially when there are no social consequences for not doing so.
Indophilic rhetoric
I disagree. If you follow news from Western (mainly American) progressive news outlets, it is as far from Indophilic as it can get. Downright Indophobic is a better word.
Progressives have no love for India or its people. The rhetoric pushed by Progressive media already tries to frame relations with the country a la Saudi Arabia. A country America needs to partner out of great reluctance and needs to civilize, sanction wrongthink, fund Activism to teach Indians to vote the right way. Hell! why are we even partnering with this country? Do we even need them? They should be crushed under America's heel just like China.
I don't need to speak about Conservatives. I find their honesty (especially religious conservatives) at least as far as India goes admirable.
The Chinese hate us and even they don't have that bile that Progressives in the American political establishment have on a hair trigger. That the civilization at the core is considered to be irredeemable is only hidden beneath a thin veneer. Our plethora of ethnic fissures is a rich feast for those in search of nails to to wield their Oppressor/Oppressed hammer on.
I don't know what the US government thinks, but they seem to be onboard with the portrayal. Keeping public and political opinion of India under such tension gives the US significant leverage over the country. They can push or pull either way as needed which is harder to do with other "friendly" countries that they cannot give sermons to without being called out.
We're no saints. I am also not fully on board with the current administration. But, I can see the double standards.
Note: For brevity I used Progressives as a single grouping. Perhaps there is more diversity of opinion but in a discussion about Indian geopolitics, it makes sense to focus on the Progressives that are a part of the US Govt. geopolitical policy apparatus.
I think there is something to discuss regarding affirmation-seeking behaviour among trans women. I haven't seen as many suggestive selfies on the social media of cis women Software Engineers as I tend to do for trans women.
Though, I would oppose the use of "attention-seeking" since many of the blogs I am referring to are very much the opposite of low-effort and portray work that requires some serious technical chops and a high level of verbal skill to explain to a layman.
Another poster here attributed this to MtF transgenderism and interest in Computer Science being correlated with Autism spectrum disorders, which sounds convincing, though I haven't read into this much.
EDIT: @faul_sname, pointed out that if "autism" is the reason for the overrepresentation (by proportion) of trans folks among CS open source communities, then you would observe the same in other "autism" dominated hobbies like train lovers, which we don't.
The hard left is very much okay with 3rd World Nationalism by any means as long as it is from the "Oppressed". It is only a problem if it is a sentiment expressed by the outgroup.
I looked through the twitter likes of a few prominent Open Source Software developers. I lost any taste for writing Software outside of 9-5.
I don't know how much Social media furor translates over to the real world but I am seeing a lot of white collar (leftist) westerners finding their latent "It is nuanced" superpower in response to the Israeli girl with bloody pant bottoms.
EDIT: Forget "nuanced" most of them say they had it coming, as the posters up the chain mention. I find this horrifying despite regarding the creation of Israel deeply unfair for Palestinians (though they haven't given a good showing since then).
kiln
8mo ago
I agree with the folks saying it's too easy to press the collapse comment icon without meaning to on mobile.
But, it's a useful feature that I use frequently enough to have trained my thumb to hit reliably despite the diffuculty.
I doubt anyone truely cares about the actual proportion of various ancestries. What they care about is ethnogenesis, how their people came to be.
For this purpose, Y and Mt DNA shed light in some aspects that autosomal DNA only cannot, such as the type of intermingling that gave birth to your ethnic group, power dynamics, etc.
For example almost all Latin Americans have y-haplogroups denoting European paternal descent but their Mt DNA shows near complete Native American ancestry for Maternal descent.
Hence we can infer that Latin Americans of today originate from European men and Native American women.
What about European maternal ancestry? The conquistadors were almost all men.
Native American paternal ancestry? You can guess.
This pattern of ancestry turns up in many other populations.
Most modern Europeans attribute their ethnogenesis to such asymmetric gender mixing.
kiln
11mo ago
neutered the Hinduism of wealthy British Hindus (even of high caste
Minor nitpick on the "even of high caste".
From my personal experience current gen urban/wealthy higher caste Hindus are among the most deracinated groups in India or the diaspora.
You will find more genuine faith or adherence to tradition among the middle caste Hindus or Christians/Muslims of all castes.
kiln
1yr ago
On reddit the participation of progressives largely felt like folks dropping by to sneer on themotte for a few comments rather than actual engagement. It felt as if a good number of them wouldn't have minded if themotte got hit by the banhammer.
That said, preaching to the choir on themotte while feeling nice doesn't give you much. But I do not have any ideas for how to improve upon that. People like places that echo their views back at them and enforce the ideological conformity for their worldview. For this use case reddit is strictly better especially if your views are aligned with the current zeitgeist.
A lot of people on themotte may want to convince progressives that their positions are not logically consistent and patently unfair. But progressives have no incentive to engage with you to be convinced or to try to convince you. Their views are already mainstream and platformed by institutions.
My "It is nuanced" was more in reference to the rhetorical device used to downplay something you don't want to discuss. I think it is important for a civilization to unconditionally condemn acts that cross a line of barbarity. Being able to understand and empathize with the motivations of a murder should not stop one from condemning the act.
This is different from an emotional "let's turn Gaza into a parking lot" response which I consider as problematic as the "they had it coming" arguments.
Some folks even drew equivalence to condemning Hamas' brutality against Israeli civilians with "All Lives Matter".
kiln
7mo ago
If we can use the words of the Indian Political Commentariat (at least the ones who did not predict a landslide win for INC in 2019) as a proxy for what the Indian Government thinks.
Punjab is a border state. Even worse, on the other side lies Pakistan. Separatism in Punjab is believed to have received significant support from the Pakistani ISI as part of their sponsorship of cross border terrorism in India like in Kashmir. There have been seriously worrying flare ups regarding this issue in the past culminating to the assassination of a Prime Minister.
Punjab, while rich compared to many other Indian states has stagnated in recent decades. Unemployment among the youth, cross border drug and weapons trade. It is addicted to Environmentally damaging state subsidized agriculture that is not sustainable or scalable if you want to reach first world living standards and industrial capacity. But, the status quo is a pretty comfortable one for a few rich Punjabi landlords/middlemen leaching off the rest of the state. The system of state subsidy came into place due to governmental efforts to guard against potential food scarcity that's no longer an issue. They now produce too much rice or wheat.
Attempts by the Indian government to move away from this led to the 2020-2021 Farmer Protests. The state lies right next to Delhi, the Indian capital, which they blockaded for months. The proximity allows them to wield disproportionate influence on Indian politics. Us folks down South can't march to the Capital to protest on a whim.
Despite the protest starting for other reasons Separatists who had found refuge in Canada and other countries quickly found the discontent to be a useful lever to push their goals. The Dollar even Canadian goes a long way in a poor country like India. A middle class family in Canada or the US is filty rich in India and can gets disproportionate financial leverage.
The Indian Government squashed the bill despite the need for agricultural reforms to avoid it being used to inflame Separatism. We have had serious material and political consequences as a result of a bunch of Canadians still stuck in the 1980s.
And, as @self_made_human said Indian think tankers seem to be of the opinion "Doubtful that we did it, but good riddance".
kiln
1yr ago
Dayum!! I recognize all of these people except the first one.
"existing SNES emulators support 80% of the games, and the rest require game-specific hacks, I'll write an emulator that works exactly like a real SNES, so that it will run all games by definition" - a whole can of worms, let's go with non-binary
Their passing away triggered a hell lot of drama, if I remember correctly.
One explanation is that we're not the target audience of the PR.
The other explanation is a divergence in the hierarchy of values. For example, appealing to patriotism may work quite well for a lot of cultures, but will completely fall flat if the target audience is blue tribe coded. The PR attempts of a lot of countries that targeting a western audience completely fall prey to this, especially since they do not include all the required progressive shibboleths.
A counterexample of a non-western culture that has learnt to play this game is Extremist Islam. No matter how regressive the Islamic exceptionalism and double standards pushed, the figureheads know just the right words to use to pull at the heartstrings of progressives looking for an outlet for their white savior tendencies.
In general people do not understand that everyone does not think like them. In the US, you see it with progressives and the conservatives who seem to only succeed at preaching to the choir, though the progressives make up for this inability with a ruthless and relentless focus in subverting institutions.
kiln
6mo ago
Random nitpick. It may make sense to root a device to strip away tracking or privacy impacting features. Though some way argue that your attempt to do so itself may be fingerprintable.
For security... doubt it'd do much. If your device maker is releasing poorly secured software why would the hardware/firmware be any better.
kiln
1yr ago
I can empathize that it's not a nice experience to face positions that you feel are an attack on your person or deeply held beliefs.
I pretty much feel the same in every corner of the internet. To give an example that should hopefully be at some distance from the American Culture War, I definitely do not enjoy people claiming that India being colonised by the British empire was good for us and civilized us unwashed barbarians. It is not fun to be spoken down to by Americans who believe my lived experience of living in my country holds no weight. Nor do I enjoy reading about what Americans say behind our backs about the Indian expats in the Software industry.
But as much as I would love to give objective statistics to prove people wrong, I doubt I will ever be able to satisfy those who disagree.
Now on whether "Men are funnier than women", it is a poorly supported argument since the only thing going for it is anecdata. But given the dumpster fire that is the reproducibility in Sociology, anecdata is probably the best you will get. Besides, how many people even base their social know-how on studies over anecdata from folks they know or can relate to?
Also is it that the argument is poorly supported that bugs you, or is it because you feel that it puts down women?
Would it feel any less offensive if someone gave "objective" proof for this?
It wouldn't be any less painful for me even if someone threw objective proof at my face by ripping open a portal to a parallel universe where India never went through successive stages of colonization and is still a cesspit of suffering.
kiln
1yr ago
Does anyone have a good model for Elon's thought process here? I do not see him deriving any satisfaction from his current role at Twitter.
Investing effort as the CEO of a Social media product seems like a big step down from being known as a Tech Entrepreneur in the Electric vehicle or commericial Space aviation space.
Getting into fist fights on Twitter trying to squeeze non advertising revenue from a social media product seems like the least interesting and the most self-defeating thing to do. The general population is now accustomed to getting Social media for "free". It's a losing battle to make them pay for it with the glut of other "free" options.
While I cannot give any point in the support of "Men are funnier than Women" since that's not something I believe to be true.
I think I understand our point of difference better. You expect The Motte to be a forum for perfect rational debate. And I guess that's what many on themotte claim it to be.
But it's not that and that bugs you.
It doesn't bug me since I do not expect The Motte to be a forum for perfect rational debate. While folks here are better at stating and accounting for their biases than other spaces on the internet, I do think a lot of people end up venting their frustrations a bit. And that's fine.
I feel that mainstream progressive (and conservative) spaces impose binaries on topics and rule out discussion on domains that their binaries fail to explain.
The less restricted nature of The Motte helps to find arguments that may offer better explanations and would otherwise be banned. But of course you also get bad arguments that should have received more pushback. We all have our biases, I just see that as a part and parcel of the trying to model the world better.
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