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Welp, turns out more Epstein files are finally getting released!
Apparently there will be a vote coming out to release even more, but the docs released so far have been negative for Trump's claims to be innocent of the whole matter.
This, combined with the ruckus over Trump arguing we need foreign talent, has caused a massive cratering amongst online confidence in MAGA. From my perspective, confidence in MAGA at least online is the lowest it has ever been. Many feel betrayed by Trump when it comes to his America First promises.
Add in the storm over Fuentes and Israel, and I feel I'm seeing the conservative coalition fall apart in real time, extremely quickly.
Is this inevitable, the narcissism of small differences? Or is it just Trump not being a very principled man?
I've slowly come over to the view that it's a good thing Trump was restricting immigration of the best and brightest so they instead went elsewhere. As they say: Democracy is the belief that voters know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard. We've seen the humiliating climbdowns against China and if this policy of being unwelcoming to high end immigrants continue I suspect we'll see plenty of self-flagellation from the US 10 years down the line when it's trying to rebuild up its attractiveness for such people.
Taking what you've said at face value, possibly. If the US actually pursues going closed-borders-for-everyone, maybe it will be overtaken by China, given the slight national IQ advantage (I hedge my bets with the qualifiers because Europeans were the ones to conquer the world a few centuries ago, despite being lower IQ, so shrug)
Of course, you elide the obvious, though politically incorrect, question: What race are the immigrants? As I concede, it may be true that the US will need the best and brightest of foreign Aryans, East Asians and Jews (i.e. high-IQ races) to stay on top - but what of the best and the brightest of the Third World?
I think it is true that, for a sufficiently selective (and then properly enforced) immigration policy, we can have eugenic immigration from the Third World. But, due to HBD, the amount of additional value from Venkateshes and Bhargavas is going to be much less significant (because there are just not as many of them, and just less total human capital altogether to siphon)
On the other hand, once we hop over this fence, there is the constant danger of somehow (fraud, relaxing the bar for "skilled", etc) then allowing a less filtered, and hence dysgenic, influx. This leads to pretty serious harm - either these people assimilate (and hence lower the quality of the nation's gene pool) or you get a permanent racial underclass. In practice, this might lead to, say, your capital city becoming minority White, and the replacements actually being worse on average.
If we are looking at this purely from the perspective of national self-interest, I think this is overall a net negative. There is obviously a moral argument about helping unfortunate people who could thrive in a 1st world civilisation but were born into a low-IQ race, so it is worth the necessary overhead to carefully filter these people out and let them in (and of course, the more extreme one, which is to just let everyone in so everyone in for equality-of-opportunity reasons, and just accept the nation becoming Third World)
With the substance of my reply out of the way: why do you do this? As in, I know you are a high-IQ Third World immigrant, so I'm guessing you are not super thrilled about the recent vibe shift on immigrants: you personally haven't ever done anything bad, how unfair is it that some people implicitly blame you for (or at least associate you with) stuff like Rotherham, etc.
But you've had many conversations in the past with White identarians on this forum, so I'm pretty sure you are aware of this line of thinking, and then decide to constantly post as if you are some bluepilled liberal normie. I think it's bad form to psychologise your interlocutor, so I won't speculate why any further.
I will just ask - is there anything in what I've said that you actually factually disagree with? And I stress the word factually (since your claim that the US would fall behind and later on regret its current immigration policy is a statement about descriptive reality)
Do you not believe in HBD applied to racial groups? Do you dispute the Lynn IQ numbers as being roughly accurate? Do you dispute that IQ is a decent measure of a person's ability to function well in a society? Do you think that it doesn't make logical sense to make probabalistic judgements about groups of people on the basis of race given HBD? Do you think that the issues with Third World immigration that have occured in the past (e.g. Indians in Canada) are actually very easy to prevent if we just do X? etc
You know brahmins are a high IQ group, right?
Thank you for bringing them up! This seems to be a fairly esoteric HBD claim that is stated very matter-of-factly (iirc you said in the past that you think the Tamil Brahmins have IQ on par with the Ashkenazi) by various race realists from different backgrounds.
I don't think it's an obviously crazy assertion: there are Brahmin STEM nobels, fields medalists, and the Indian per capita income in the US is extremely high: 72k vs 36k for Whites (but as I long suspected, the household income chart showing them blowing everyone else out the water is misleading - they just live in bigger households - they come in 2nd to Taiwanese, also Jews aren't listed, I'm guessing they come 0th)
And the national IQ of India is
75IQ(according to the Lynn numbers), roughly on par with Sub Saharan Africa, and they have no STEM nobels, and I don't think there are any SSA diasporas in first world countries that exceed the White household income significantly.So I believe it is justified to complicate our model from just a single 75IQ-centered bell curve to a mixture, at least a mixture for Brahmin vs. non-Brahmin. To explain a real and significant difference from a mean 75 population.
Now the question of whether the higher IQ of the Brahmins is actually "high" (75 is a very low bar to be high from!)
The obvious thing is to look stuff up online. There is some guy called Anatoly Karlin who talks a lot about it but doesn't give any numbers. All the actual analysis I can find goes back to this paper: Lynn, Cheng 2018 Mankind Quarterly
It is too late in the night for me to go through this paper properly... so I'll just take the abstract at face value. They claim that Brahmins are more intelligent, by 5IQ points, giving an IQ of 80, i.e. on par with North Africans and Arabs (and they do indeed manage to get STEM nobels, so this feels reasonable to me now)
But wait, there is a point you did not bring up in this comment, but you (and others) bring up elsewhere. What about Tamil Brahmins?
I cannot find any estimates on this online. I suggest a crude method of estimating it though: regress IQ from STEM nobels per capita.
Let's get the Lynn IQ numbers, and also STEM nobels- I define a "STEM" nobel to be Physics, Chemistry, or Physiology or Medicine (so exclude Peace, Literature and Economics) - I got these counts by scraping the wikipedia page for nobels by country. This isn't great, as it lists by nationality instead of race. But just doing a cursory reading I didn't find much sillyness (there's a "Belarusian" winner who is Jewish, and a few Chinese / North Africans for France, but not that much, anyways this is crude - I didn't bother correcting this stuff)
We get the following plot. To clarify: a lot of countries just don't have any STEM nobels (for IQ / low population reasons, those are the red "x"s on the left of the plot. As you can see, the 0s really do span the full IQ range (it's not just SSA countries with red xes), so I think it is reasonable to discard those data points and do a linear regression on the remaining countries-as-proxies-for-races (blue dots)
The red line is just the line of best fit (minimising least squares: beta = 7.47, intercept = 142)[*], so now we just need the STEM nobel per capita for TamBrahms. If we survey the wikipedia page again, I find 4 Indian STEM nobels:
Venkatraman Ramakrishnan (Tamil)
Subramanyan Chandrasekhar (Tamil)
Har Gobind Khorana (not Tamil)
C. V. Raman (Tamil)
So 3 TamBrahm STEM nobels[**], but what about the population? This sounds easy, but I literally cannot find it online. The only quantitative information given is in the Wikipedia article, in a subsection about a specific kind of Tamil Brahmin called Iyers (but there are only 2 apparently, so close enough):
So, if we just use these cities (and assume that is most of the TamBrahms in the world), we get: (102_905 + 58_301 + 916_857 + 289_916) * 0.1 130k population So as a lower bound, let's say 1e5 TamBrahms. And as an upper bound, let's say 1e7 (this is 10% the population of all of Tamil Nadu)
So using the population estimates, and then fitting using our model we get the following IQ estimates for Tamil Brahmins (depending on population size):
pop 1e5: 108 IQ
pop 1e6: 101 IQ
pop 1e7: 93 IQ
So, using this estimation technique, in the very best case, the Tamil Brahmins have an IQ of
108 (clipping the lower end of Ashkenazi IQ estimates: 107-115, and aligning with your claim elsewhere that they are on par with Jews), and in the worst case they are on par with trans-hajnals.I'm pretty skeptical myself of what I've written, mainly because of how I discarded all the countries without STEM nobels. But I've been putting off researching this question for almost a year now, so for my own sake at least, I thought it was worth writing down my crude estimates and resaoning on the matter, as someone who has not done any serious reading/research in race science / genetics / etc - so I can test my possibly shady thinking on this (and "quantitative" HBD in general)
So now I ask you - what is your reason to think that (Tamil) Brahmins are high-IQ? (also I would like to ask @self_made_human and @2rafa, as they make this claim too) For Tamil Brahmins is it based on similar calculations as mine? And what about for generic Brahmins? (as I mentioned, online sources just give the generic Brahmin IQ as 80. My model gives a more favourable 88IQ, but even that is not very high)
[*] As a separate interesting point, and sanity check, if we do the regression of log10(stem nobels / capita) onto IQ, we get a beta of 0.048, i.e. increasing a population's IQ by 15 makes each person 5x more likely to be a STEM Nobel. Which sounds... reasonable?
[**] The fact that 75% of the Indian STEM Nobels went to TamBrahms was also why I originally decided to entertain the sub-stratification of Brahmins into Tamil Brahmins. Even at just n=4, this seems so significant, it is reasonable to me to look into this even smaller subpopulation without risking overfitting.
Great question and certainly an interesting topic.
At some point, you have to ask yourself why half the Indians you meet at the top of every high performing PMC job belong to a tiny minority that makes up 0.15% of the Indian population. Something similar happens when you realize that in many cases it feels like a majority of PMC Africans in the West in fields like medicine, finance, big law etc are Igbos (although the outperformance is less great; there are a lot of Igbos). In both cases there are partial emigration dynamics explanations - the socialist government of Tamil Nadu after independence forcibly acted against the dominance of the Tamil Brahmins, stripped them of their caste names, removed them from positions of power, and drove many into exile, and of course for the Igbos there was the whole Biafran War thing, but those explanations are insufficient. Plenty of other tribes, after all, have faced similar circumstances without that outcome.
You also become adept at recognizing Tamil Brahmins, even if they no longer have the Iyer/Iyengar names because of anti-casteism policies in their home state. I see them everywhere now, they are impressed when I recognize them, although they can instantly recognize each other.
Quantitative data is limited; it is sometimes forgotten that the only reason we have good data on Ashkenazi Jewish outperformance and various European groups in general is that they were present and recorded in the early 20th century at the height of the scientific study of group differences; Tamil Brahmins were not (certainly in large numbers). Data is more limited. Nobels tell part of the story but, like chess competitions, far from all of it. Performance can be depressed in various ways. Clearly today when international emigration is commonplace, Tamil Brahmins outperform almost all other ethnic groups per capita in terms of leading roles like making it to the top of US corporations, senior PMC jobs, especially when accounting for legacy effects (like a corporation run by a Jewish or white gentile guy appointing his son, nephew or whatever as his successor) that they don’t have access to.
Nepotism is a poor explainer; there are so few of them and North Indian Brahmins, who are far more numerous, often look down on them for being from South India, having darker skin (lighter than all other Tamils, but certainly darker than northern Indian Brahmins) etc.
Generic Brahmins are best seen as the hereditary ancient higher segment, but remember that there are almost a hundred million of them, in some places well over 20% of the population. The best analogue is to the aristocracy in somewhere like early modern Poland where 15% of the population were technically nobles. A tiny percentage of them were actual elites, lived in palaces, had hundreds of servants, owned lots of land. Most were essentially kulaks, smallholders, people who would be considered barely above (or indeed) peasants in more restrictive European estates systems. Most Brahmins in India are rural poor, the average urban middle class person of any caste is much richer.
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