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Notes -
India is collapsing
The attack in Kashmir last week led to a lot of outrage and public statements about it from Pakistan. I am posting about the direction the so called "Nazi Hindu right" party took. They announced a caste census.
India has massive hbd spikes, when you go from the middle castes to the upper castes. I do not consider China-style entrance tests to be the best metric, they make for even worse policies. India in a fit of leftism, upon its modern conception post independence in 1947 mandated affirmative action of less than 30 percent, which got stretched to 50 with the Mandal commission in the 90s. Affirmative action and bioleninism are two genies that you cannot put back in a bottle.
Currnetly you have cases where people who score a literal zero in exams can teach math, you can get your neighbor jailed without proof by alleging he used a castiest slur wherein the government will give you 8 hundred thousand indian rupees or about 10k USD within a week of filing that case, under the SC ST act, a worthy rabbithole to check out for the more curious ones. You even get money for marrying people of other groups, thousands of USD actually in some states.
The caste census is a death blow. The nation is not industrialised, and real estate, basic amenities like running water, avoiding land grabbing, and education are out of bounds for most. Land grabbing and owning a house is nearly impossible, even with high incomes, without a back-breaking mortgage. This leads to people wanting to get employed by the government and that is done via exams. In each exam, you have to present a caste certificate if you are "backwards" and by Central Law, anything government-related has to have at least nearly 50 percent if not more sanctioned for people of backwards bent. In case a few of them score higher, they are allotted spots in the "Open" list as opposed to the "backwards" one. So even the 50 percent that the "upper castes" get is not truly for them. Most if not all people who get decent posts indulge in illegal things. Kickbacks are the only way to afford a house.
Modi and the BJP are using the caste census as a way to distract people from their inaction with the Kashmir issue. The census will show that the evil upper castes make up close to 10 percent of the nation, therefore, even 50 percent is too much. Places like Bihar are already pushing it, and frankly, this is India's fate. The country's economic slowdown is not going to stop the chery on top is that the Indian Armed Forces is nearly 95 percent upper caste. The army is also the only place where you do not have any affirmative action as even the bioleniniss know that would be stupid because the army actually has to win wars. Bridges collapse here regularly from shit engineering but people learn to live with that, wars are not a place you want to fuck with. The people who serve right now, their own kids, will not get to have good career outcomes.
Sure, you have state-wide bans or attempts at them on everything, crypto, proton mail, signal but what will fix that is ensuring more people leave. I have zero issues with any castes, the post illustrates a deeper point, which has to do with the universal nature of culture war. Anti caste scholars saw the backwards people as blacks and their own people as whites. And now, you end up in a state where posting any of this risks jail time. When Spandrell wrote bio leninism, he used the examples of minorities in Europe, but that very concept describes India way better.
The Indo Aryans were not pot-bellied soydevs, they were capable people, the majority was always the underclass, but it was closer to 90 than today's 99. something percent. Each year, you see people get visibly dumber. Plenty of Canadians are right to blame their boomers for selling them out by allowing an influx of the subcontinent's underclass. Today, I can relate to that sentiment. The elders here simply gave up without a fight, and now you are left with less social upward mobility. The entry-level IT sector and customer support people will get replaced fiarly soon, what then happens to the hordes of not-so-smart engineers and the economic fallout? Another proposal is to mandate state recommendations for social justice in private firms. This has not been enacted yet, but I will not be surprised even if it is.
Nothing is ever enough, they have land ceilings here to thwart to the evil upper caste from owning all the land and even had large scale land redistributions (hello south Africa) but nothing is ever enough. The upper caste male exists to pay taxes and fight wars. He does not get to enjoy any benefits and his leaders like the Canadians want him dead. Instead of making an example out of kashmiri "youth", the government showed a middle finger to its capable people on the frontlines. You can't own guns in the nanny state, now you won't get to be upper middle class either. The nation is doomed and pajeet elites deserve bad things, the kind that would be considered fed posting. I'm critical of most migration advocates as filling your nation with third world underclass and soydevs is a good way to end up with India like issues. Some is beneficial but letting large amounts of genetic rejects from Indian or Pakistani Punjab is suicidal.
They'll mandate the affirmative action policies in all things private too, schools, jobs, unis. It's over. It's actually over. Here is the leader of the opposition posting about it.
I know this isn't the main thrust of your post, but it reminded me of a blog post that was trending on Hacker News sometime this past week. It basically describes the author's disillusionment with the academic "industry" in Romania after an influx of EU funding to increase the number of PhDs in the late aughts.
I'm becoming more convinced that creating an actual education system (one that creates highly skilled intellectual workers) is nontrivial and probably rare throughout history, and it's far too easy to create systems that LARP or cargo-cult education instead of actually performing education. Authoritarian regimes seem to have a knack for creating systems of alternative science that are more palatable to their dear leaders and their cronies than whatever "mainstream" science they are supplanting. It's almost as if the deck is stacked against humans and scientific progress is an unnatural status quo that we've lucked into because of certain post-enlightenment conditions?
This is also me positing nurture over nature - that humans have quite a bit of potential but the difference between a real education system and one that LARPs as an education system is staggering in terms of the intellect of the people it produces. There's a bit of big fish little pond / little fish big pond in there as well (speaking from firsthand experience).
It's interesting that you mention the soviet union; the soviet academy had some serious missteps but also made enormous progress in mathematics and massively outperformed its lackluster economy in other areas.
One of the nice things about hard sciences like math and physics (and, if I had to guess, one of the reasons the Soviets performed so well in it - aside, of course, from having a good pool of genuine talent) is that you can run standardized objective tests for it pretty easily...and you can maintain oversight of it pretty easily, I would guess, relative to softer sciences.
I'm not suggesting that you can't test for things like literacy (and in fact communist regimes are actually very good at producing a literate population, too) but at the end of the day if the Politburo demands you go to the moon or be shot, well, okay, even the Politburo can figure out if you went to the moon or not. Whereas if the Politburo demands good literature you can hand them a pamphlet denouncing the latest object of the Politburo's denunciation and even if it's quite bad by what standard, the Politburo isn't a literature department, and even if it's obviously bad can they condemn a condemnation of the thing they wanted condemned?
And I suspect you can get a very similar dynamic under non-totalitarian regimes in the West (including not just governments but of course things like universities and the like).
Not related, but reminds me of a recent Chinese commentary in some newspaper that slobbered praise all over Xi Jinping, comparing him to Mao and Deng — it got pulled very quickly, and the suspected reason for the censorship was that Xi considered himself an equal to Mao only, and superior to Deng.
Hilarious.
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