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I just read Kulak's review of "India: The Worst Country on Earth" on his Substack, Anarchonomicon. https://www.anarchonomicon.com/p/film-review-india-the-worst-country
I had never heard of this film and haven't seen it, but I have read other stuff from Kulak. While there are definitely points I take from his posts, I do not consider myself a confederate and find his takes to be pretty divergent and extreme from my own. His writing is solid enough I don't get bored so I consider him an example of "what a reasonably intelligent far-right person has to say." He might not be far-right, but I think that's how he identifies. I'm certainly no expert, I've read maybe 4 or 5 articles and I seem to remember him from Reddit...maybe? I would be glad to hear other opinions/warning/lauds.
In his review he claims the film is
Now that I know the film exists, will I watch it? No, I think it's unlikely. I don't really harbor Pollyanna-ish views on India that need to be rewired, but I also don't get into watching death, rape and destruction in my free time. I find it psychically damaging and can admit I prefer ignorance to knowing the true depth of human depravity. The review reminded me a lot of how people would describe "Faces of Death" back when I was a kid--another film I never had any interest in watching and remain largely ignorant of, aside from knowing it's just watching an endless string of people getting horribly killed.
I would like to know if people here are familiar with the film and what their general impressions are. I would also like to discuss some of the following:
Is it true? Can a feature-film length series of horrible phone videos give us an accurate view of what India is really like? I have no experience with the country beyond discussions with people who have been there or come from there and some low-level Youtube vids. Is this really the worst country on Earth? If so, what's the deal with the subcontinet? Is this level of degeneration directly tied to IQ? If not what caused India (I think there's some talk that Pakistan and Bangladesh are in the same boat) to be like this? If this is human degeneracy, what keeps a society from degenerating? Are we degenerating? Is India the future for everyone?
Is it perfect RW propaganda? Kulak's point is that it is so disturbing it forces Westerners to adopt an "Ohmygod the West is so much better than this I'll defend it with my life," attitude. I would suspect that hardcore universalists and "brotherhood-of-man-types" would find ways of countering the narrative, but I wouldn't be satisfied with, "it's just nasty fascist racists," if the truth content is high. Bad people can have high signal-to-noise ratio content even if I don't like it.
Is it really that bad? The horrible deaths and mutilation parts I might be able to stomach, but the accounts of the varieties of rape and abuse had me squirming just in their retelling. The scenes of ecological devastation and anti-sanitation sound almost as bad. Is India truly this decrepit and insane or is it just a white-power-washing of a place I'm meant to develop a revulsion towards so I have the correct opinon of H-1B visas? would watching the film bring me closer to understanding or just turn me into a gibbering racist? Should I go to India and see for myself? People I know who have gone there tell no happy tales so I'm biased toward believing it's as bad as they say.
Is it important? Will this film actually pin itself to history? It's hard to claim that "Faces of Death" was an important series of films from any kind of cinematic or virtue position, but it did make an impact and we remember it. Is it possible that even as pure culture-war propaganda, it's message might actually help people, either by protecting themselves when they're in India or forcing the country/global community to force some changes on the culture? Does something like 'India:TWCoE' need to happen to turn the ship? Does the left need far-right propaganda thrown in their faces from time-to-time? Does the West need to understand how terrible things could become if they don't reverse their own degeneracy? Is this an argument for AI control of humanity or will we necessarily revert to the mean where we use warfare, colonialism and slavery to force the best genes to emerge...like, are we simply doomed?
Anyway, these are just some initial thoughts, but it seems like pure, uncut culture war and I thought y'all might have more perspective on this than me.
I remember it was posted here a while back, and I think my response is still what it was back then - that misleading vivedness remains a fallacy. I knew long before this film that it would be possible to find an hour or two of footage of Indians behaving disgustingly. I am pretty sure that's true for every nationality on Earth. So in that sense the film offers no new information at all and I should not update based on it.
I'm not sure you're going to find may vids of Americans eating cow dung...maybe as a rare college prank?
I think the question "is it true for every nationality on Earth," is sort of the point. I'm less certain it is. I think India has special characteristics like, 1.2 billion people with an even larger gap in wealth than anywhere in the West. This opens the door for a broader range of pathological behavior--so in that sense, maybe if we all had a massive underclass we'd be eating poop too?
I think "should I update" is precisely the question. I wouldn't say I've got a high opinion of India, more true to say I think of it very little. But if India isn't "the Worst Country on earth" what is? Kulak sort of defends Africa as equally as poor but not as environmentally degraded or mad.
Anyway, I think there's definitely some bullshit racism going on in this video/review but there also is an important question about what elevates humanity vs. the depths to which we might sink: Eloi vs. Morlocks. For me it raises a longstanding and fundamental concern about the overwhelming power of human depravity, something I've worried about since I was a kid and 2 Live Crew was the hot thing.
The equivalent looney religious person comparison would be the subset of American Pentecostals waving around venomous snakes while speaking in tongues.
"This is what Americans think church is‽" Nope. Just a fringe few who we also think are wacky. But there's hundreds of millions of us, so there's plenty of wacky to fill a documentary of cherry picked crazed Americans.
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I think Kulak had posted that here on the Motte too, and given that I have a rather high threshold for discomfort, I sat and watched through most of it. I'm going off memory, because it's definitely not worth watching a second time.
The short answer is: It's full of shit. Pun perhaps intended.
You're being treated to a lowlight reel lovingly amassed by 4chan of all the wretchedness and misery a poor nation of 1.4 billion people has to offer. Did the incidents depicted happen? I expect so, it's not trivial at all to deepfake all of that. I expect that budget was blown on free ElevenLabs credit.
It is however, not remotely representative of a single human's existence in the subcontinent. Or what you might observe passing through. It's as honest as compiling reels of SF fent addicts drowning in their own feces and triumphantly depicting it as an accurate representation of Americana as a whole.
For fuck's sake. I am often the first to criticize India, and am bearish on its future. That doesn't mean the country is a literal cesspit. It's a highly diverse, unequal nation where billion dollar privately owned skyscrapers tower over slums. The majority of Indians lead a difficult, but reasonably optimistic life, one that wouldn't strike a Westerner as being devoid of experiences worth living. We're poorer, we live in a corrupt and polluted land, we've got funny accents and an Eternal September to end all the rest when internet access became cheaper than bottled water. We're not savages, not en-mass.
No.
No when it's 4chan writing the script.
I can assure you that I have spent the majority of my life in the country having seen precisely zero gang rapes or public sexual assault (if someone got their ass pinched in front of me, I've yet to notice). The number of times I've seen someone defecate in public is a number between 1 and 3, and that's a conservative number because I can't rule out never having seen it. Let he in the West who has never seen evidence of human feces on the street cast the first stone.
The majority of Indians, even Hindus, have no truck with the consumption of cow feces and urine. They're fucking weirdos to the rest of us.
Let us be thankful that this particular example certainly doesn't.
If it's not obvious, it isn't that bad. I might be upper middle-class, but I'm not blind, and have used my fair share of public transport and gone out into the boonies and slums on many an occasion. It's not a post-apocalyptic movie out there, it's just dirty and congested.
Leave aside power-washing, unless you're using a backed up septic tank as your water source, you can't ridicule the country this badly.
I'm reasonably certain that even the terminally online would forget its existence in a week.
"Only a fool would take anything posted on 4chan as a fact".
Eh, probably not? What's the West supposed to do, tactical airstrike us with bunker-buster portapotties? India is dysfunctional in a rather coup-complete way, or perhaps AGI-complete.
Foreign aid is unlikely to fix our actual issues. Political pressure is of dubious utility, though like SF miraculously divesting itself of the homeless when Xi paid a visit, some foreign scrutiny can't hurt. Unless the West is willing to invade and annex a country where the average person doesn't have an utterly miserable life, what's to be done? We're not North Korea.
In a slower world, we would slowly keep rising up the ranks till we were comfortably middle-income. It seems unlikely events will play out that way.
Call me self-serving and biased if you will, but the kindest thing the more fortunate denizens of the West can do is let some of us on the raft. Selectively, with skilled immigrants first and foremost, I don't ask for charity. Indians Not In India are much luckier Indians on the whole. Fuck brain-drain, if the country wants to keep us, it better make it worth our time to stay. And a non-negligible proportion of those who could trivially leave, don't.
At the very least, I attempt to be a decent denizen of where I'm at. No street-shitting for me, though I can cop guilty to taking a leak on someone's fence at the dead of night after dragging myself home, subsequent to crawling more pubs than was good for me. An honest Scottish pastime, someone gift me a kilt already.
This was my first reaction too. It's got a bit of a Cormac McCarthy problem of the "gritty realism" of history consisting of the worst things anyone ever had happen to them.
Europe seems to have a far more common relationship with public urination than the United States. A Singaporean friend told me he was sure he'd be arrested for that back home. Americans generally try to find a side street or hide behind somebody. Spaniards just find a storm drain.
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God bless you sir!
Thanks for the thoughtful reply! It seems to mostly fit my priors.
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My impression of the actual truth of the matter is that India is very much a third world country, or at least big parts of it are, but unlike Congo or Afghanistan it’s also part of the global system. We can’t stop information about third world behavior in the subcontinent from leaking out the way we do for Afghanistan without even really trying.
That documentary may be an effective way of putting this information into broader salience in first worlder’s minds, but ultimately third world behavior is simply off putting and disturbing to people used to civilized first world societies.
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I’ve seen the whole thing. Like many male millennials, I discovered the “shocking, extreme, gory, etc.” parts of the internet — Rotten.com and the like — when I was in middle school, so I’ve developed a fairly strong stomach for this type of content.
Like everything Kulak posts, his description of the film and its significance is bombastically overstated, emotionally overwrought, but with a kernel of truth. The film does indeed make a persuasive case that there is a lot of fucked-up stuff going on in India. The only part that I found tough to watch was the part where people are literally eating shit, but obviously there’s plenty in there to trigger nearly anyone’s distress. The lower-caste people of the subcontinent really do seem to be profoundly dysfunctional and unpleasant, and there’s ample footage of their problems to cherry-pick and compile into a worthy propaganda reel.
My mother and father traveled to the subcontinent on their honeymoon, and my mother found it a fairly distressing place. She’s spoken about the leering behavior of the men on the trains, how she felt as though at any moment they might begin pawing at her like a pack of hyenas surrounding a dying elephant. She complained about the shocking poverty she saw, the overall levels of filth, and the several times she witnessed people openly shitting in public areas. This was in the very early 90’s, so presumably some things about the country have improved since then. The footage in the film appears, based on video quality, to mostly be filmed more recently than that, though, so clearly many of the problems have not gone away.
I also want to take a road trip through India at some point — mostly to visit ancient architectural sites, and also to see some of the more modern architectural delights bequeathed on the country by British administrators — but I know I’m going to have to carefully plan my itinerary to maximally avoid exposure to the grosser aspects of the place. Maybe I’ll have more objective anecdotes to convey here once I’ve done so. It’s certainly not the worst country on Earth, if for no other reason than it still contains the remnants of a legacy of magisterial glory from its past, and enough intelligent and clear-eyed individuals who have so far committed themselves to preserving it. If they start blowing up Mughal and Zoroastrian monuments out of some revisionist Hindu nationalist vendetta, then I’d be willing to comfortably call it a contender for the worst.
agree. I find it over-the-top, but I'm still kind of glad it exists. I've lost the plasticity-of-mind to "go there" anymore.
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I think the idea of showing the west what some places are really like is important and ultimately red-pilling simply because the regular media only shows certain aspects of the countries we’re importing migrants from and only generally the positive. The South Americans of media are poor people who just want to be like us. They don’t talk about the drug gangs and the corruption and the murders. They don’t talk about the poverty, the lack of education, or the strange cults (santissima muerte for example). Undoubtedly this is true of MENA and the Caribbean, Africa, and South Asia as well.
I think honestly if we saw the end results of a lot of our “degeneracy” caused by our lax approach to education, productivity, permissive social norms, and embrace of sexual deviance we’d be much less okay with normalization of that kind of thing. Most of this is likewise hidden and we’re stuck trying to keep the lights on for the civilization with people less and less inclined towards doing the kinds of self control and work required to keep it all running, let alone building a future.
It's a peculiar form of shelteredness that I shouldn't fall victim to (since I'm the only member of this generation of my family who remembers living in an absolutely dysfunctional country) and yet do : this belief that what happens over there can't happen in America/the West.
Maybe thats why some of the disorder-promoting unforced errors annoy me so much.
I suppose, if you're pro-migration and define yourself against the "import the Third World, become the Third World " bros it's an easy trap to fall into.
It’s easy to get blinded to anything you don’t see on the daily. We’re becoming a low trust society without thinking about it because at least in the beginning, most of the rot is far enough away from the people who matter that they can afford to ignore them and simply not show people the problem. For the last 60 years or more there have been areas of America where people of means were urged to not go for safety. And for the last 30, we’ve been promoting sexual deviance on a scale that’s not really been seen before and now it’s creating insane results of kids being super sexualized at young ages, being so convinced they’re trans that they (enabled by the school system) are adopting new genders and being lead down the path to major surgeries that they can’t possibly understand well enough to consent to. We’ve promoted self esteem to the point that people no longer feel the need to improve themselves in any way. That’s before adding immigrants from places where they’re much farther down various paths to degenerate behavior or outright barbarism.
And I think a lot of people are noticing it a lot more simply because of the results of a low trust society invading their suburban enclaves. Now their stores are locking up expensive items because “Thou shalt not steal” is no longer an expected norm of behavior. Some of it is imported with immigrants, some of it is the rot of civilizational decline and the loss of norms that go along with it. But if you really want to get a good feel for just how close the frog is to boiling, go look at videos of city streets in any city in 1900 and the same streets in 2024. Philadelphia used to be a great place to live and you could walk the streets without fear. Now those same streets are boarded up and filled with fentanyl zombies and open air drug markets while the authorities say they can do nothing but distribute Narcan and clean needles. It’s getting worse, and while I don’t think third world immigrants are helping, I’m much more concerned at the moment with helping people to rediscover the pro-civilization memes that we used to take for granted.
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Whether it's "true and accurate" is likely to depend on how representative the events in the film are of what's actually going on. You can easily cherry pick misleading examples of bad things in a mostly good country. On the other hand, you can pick things to give an accurate impression of a bad country. And both of those are going to look pretty similar in a video.
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I watched most of the film back when Kulak did the review of it, my impression is that it is cherry-picked but the parts that are cherry-picked are true enough. The parts that are true mostly relate to the lowest castes in rural India, although it's arguably an indictment of the entire civilization. High caste Indians though are clearly able to immigrate to the West and not engage in the degenerate behaviors like those portrayed in the film.
The biggest takeaway of the film is that Indians are fundamentally not a sympathetic people, to be charitable. The clannish, nepotistic, sometimes antagonistic behavior of Jews is tolerated because, on some level, the West is sympathetic to them after a long history together, Abrahamic ties, and yes Hollywood propaganda especially. That, and they are White-passing and talented so their engagement in that behavior is often inscrutable and has plausible deniability. The Indians don't have any of that sympathy, lack subtlety, and are not white-passing, so if they come here and act that way it is going to rub people very much the wrong way. The Indians coming here to draft on the preexisting Silicon Valley culture industry, which they did not build, and bringing with them a big dose of nepotism and Hindu nationalism, that is going to trigger a "Racism" response in people who have been thoroughly trained to have sympathy for Blacks and Jews. And then documentaries like this basically validate the racism.
As to whether the film will be important- well I've only heard about it through Kulak's writings and nowhere else. But I would agree that Indians seem poised to reintroduce racism into the Western psyche as greater contact only seems to lead to growing the backlash and a willing audience for things like this.
You got reported for making it about the Jews again. I noticed it too - for real, dude, can you go one post (without using ChatGPT to generate some nonsense - don't do that again) without turning the topic to Jews? Like, I know that's your only reason for being here, but put some more effort into engaging with the actual topic. You have been told repeatedly to stop your single-issue posting, because you have become singularly obnoxious about it, and every time we ding you for it, you whine that you're being persecuted because we are protecting Jewish interests or something. When the reality is that every time you post, whether it's about Palestine or India or Japan or literally any country on Earth, surprise! It's actually about Jews.
This is just a warning, because it's been a while since your last tempban, but considering your usual pattern is to dip in, do a little Joo-posting, and dip out again when the rebuttals start piling up, I am warning you that this cycle is tiresome and will not continue. Everyone has their causes and their hobbyhorses and their topics of greatest interest to them, but most regulars can at least talk about more than one thing, and not insert their obsession into every single thread.
This warning doesn't make any sense, previously you all made the standard for the "single-issue posting" rule by looking through the first page of someone's comments, and if they were all about one topic they have broken the rule. I've been posting about a bunch of different issues, I am not single issue posting.
Jews are relevant to this discussion because we are discussing the reaction of Westerners to a new type of Immigrant. There are parallels between Indian and Jewish behavior and significant differences, which are relevant in a discussion about racist backlash to the immigration of that group to the West.
It seems like you've dropped the pretense of "single-issue posting" now and you just don't want me to talk about Jews, even in a comment where it's a point of comparison with another immigrant group. I am not single-issue posting, this is terrible moderation.
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This reminds of something that happened in 2021 on Twitter. I think it speaks to your point almost exactly. I pulled this directly from a website that talks about it:
On September 26th, 2021, Twitter[2] user LILAVYVERT quote tweeted a TikTok video shared via a tweet[3] posted two days prior. The video shows a nightclub somewhere in India where many young, Indian people are dancing to "When that one song that comes on in the club." LILAVYVERT quote tweeted it, using the phrase "I know it smell crazy in there". The tweet (shown below) received roughly 51,600 likes over the course of one month.
LILAVYVERT's tweet, however, also received roughly 23,700 quote tweets over the course of one month. The quote tweets mostly revolved around LILAVYVERT's statement allegedly being racist. LILAVYVERT received the most amount of backlash from people of Indian descent. For instance, Twitter[4] user @pinkfr1day tweeted, "they going slur for slur in the quotes wow" and received roughly 22,600 likes. This tweet commented on and poked fun at the Indians and the African-Americans in the quote tweets and replies being racist or derogatory to each other.
The sheer volume of racist tweets coming from Indians was like nothing I'd ever seen before. Since certain speech on online was pretty heavily policed at that time, being able to see those tweets making their rounds was very cathartic. It's like the powers that be at Twitter couldn't handle it all. It was hilarious because the pure unfiltered racist vitriol coming from some of these people was so beyond what was normally accused of "racism" in the West that people were borderline speechless. It's precisely their lack of subtlety and the willingness of Westerners to tolerate it that aligns with your point.
/images/17361781215486736.webp
I literally don't think I've ever heard a white person say anything racist about Pakistanis, unless they were an actor playing a role. As far as I can recall, 100% of the racist statements about Pakistanis I've heard were spoken by Indians.
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