site banner
KulakRevolt  1mo ago (anarchonomicon.com)   5792 thread views

FILM REVIEW: India the Worst country on Earth

anarchonomicon.com

4Chan's First Feature film is also the first Feature length AI Film.

The Conceit? Aside from a few Joke stills, none of the visual film is AI. It is a "Nature Documentary" Narrated by David Attenborough... It is also maybe the most disturbing film ever made, and possibly the most important/impactful film of the decades so far.

Reality is more terrifying than fiction.

12
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

This from the article,

[...] mere observation of any of the billions of members of other species and subspecies of human.

with accompanying graphic, reminded me of an exchange I had here last month

I've never seen the claim that different human races should be considered sub-species, at least not by anyone who isn't absurdly racist.[...]

Maybe the geneticists are just knocking down a straw man when they say humans don't have subspecies and therefore there aren't biological races of humans, but it is a thing they do. [...]

There are admittedly an handful of absurd racists out there, so at some point I think scientists do have to knock those down. [...]

So here you go, @non_radical_centrist, the subspecies take in the wild. Or was @KulakRevolt already established among the "handful of absurd racists" around here?

Yeah the races=subspecies is a racist talking point and professional geneticists and other scholars do not consider it valid, but all it practically means is that we commit to call human populations, no matter how distinct, only that – populations, at most races, not subspecies. It's much the same construct.

Applied to human races, the genetic differences between human racial groupings fail to stand out against the backdrop of human genetic diversity sufficiently, across the whole genome, to make the cut as biological subspecies, at any threshold of "sufficiently" to be useful across the rest of biology (not that biology has a lot of use for subspecies in general -- species are fuzzy enough already)."

No, there's no solid quantitative reason to say that eg. Australian Aborigines and Germans are that less distinct than two recognized subspecies of Canis Lupus and thus can't be called subspecies. It's simply not a matter of quantity.

I don't read much of Kulak's stuff, I find most of his writing to be wrong in some way. I would call this piece he had pretty racist too, since it implicitly dismisses any possible environmental cause for India's woes. The amount of extreme government disfunction, poor nutrition and poor healthcare many, many Indians receive I think are very plausible candidates for low human capital there, which he doesn't address at all.

> non_radical_centrist

> doesn't read much of Kulak's stuff

...fair, username checks out.

Kulak's edginess-to-insight ratio is really high, and maybe increasing lately? Contrast him with Zero HP Lovecraft, who's definitely absurdly racist, usually wrong in some way, and also has edgelord tendencies. ZHPL sort of credibly presents himself as a classic philosopher who bravely followed his quest for the wisdom to save society deep down into the blackest abysses of edginess. Kulak presents himself as a guy who wants to watch the world burn, which, to me, makes his forced edginess even more obnoxious.

Given Kulak's recent post about blonde women, I'm disappointed he passed up the opportunity to speculate here about how hundreds of generations of arranged marriage must have relaxed the selective pressures for physical attractiveness on Indians. It would be very on-brand.

We know the IQ pretty much varies with white admixture.

So, it's not environmental.

Ridiculously bad take. Genetics certainly set a cap on maximum achievable IQ, but the idea that environmental factors cannot suppress IQ is self evidently ridiculous. Do you seriously think childhood nutrition (as an obvious example) plays no part in brain development? "There's no environmental influence on IQ" is as stupid as "there's no genetic influence on IQ."

I'm not saying it can't be environmental, but cognitive ability in India is directly proportional to genetic closeness to the people who conquered the horrible place. (horrible because it's hot, full of bugs and worse)

Sure the stupid insistence on vegetarianism is probably lowering IQ by a few points. But genetically Indians apart from maybe Brahmins are far below snow people mean. You can probably even find hard data on that today, what with polygenic risk scores for education.

What do you mean by white admixture? As far as I know, the history of the various physical features that are typically thought of as white is pretty heavily debated and there is no clear understanding of it. People aren't even sure if proto-Indo-European speakers were white by typical modern definitions of whiteness.

If you mean relatively light skin, narrow noses, and so on... well, I'm not sure it is actually known that the IQ of Indians correlates with those features. Certainly it is easy to find many counterexamples, and I'm not sure that a trustworthy quantitative study of this topic has ever been carried out.

People aren't even sure if proto-Indo-European speakers were white by typical modern definitions of whiteness.

Late PIE speakers were almost certainly white-looking in the sense of having European features, although in practice the definition of "white" in western countries seems to be "belongs to a historically-Christian ethnic group with light skin and doesn't have any noticeable admixture from other groups", hence the exclusion of Turks, Azeris, Kazakhs, etc, and the PIE speakers were definitely not Christian.

India was conquered by the same people who conquered Europe. Steppe pastoralists, first people to develop horse chariots, a pastoral nomadic lifestyle and thus thrive in the trackless wastes.

This gave them a huge boost, they took over the entire steppe in 300 years and then went on to topple every adjacent civilization, ushering in a centuries long dark age, out of which we got the classical era.

They were likely proportionately a far smaller population than in Europe, and it's also unclear whether in India they practiced genocidal policies like in Europe. E.g. from grave DNA it seems for several generations after the conquest, men from the conquered populations weren't procreating much, or at all.

The info-Europeans had already expanded off the steppe by the Bronze Age collapse- both Hittite and Greek indo-European writing survives from the Bronze Age proper.

Yeah, I got pwned by Khan who for some reason claimed steppe herders caused a dark age and my sleep-deprived self messed it up.

There was nothing worth writing about going on in Europe before the classical era except maybe Minoans who probably haven't even noticed anything having happened. Nevertheless, it must have been traumatic, getting conquered, enslaved and cucked for generations. Still, not a dark age.

The various invasions by steppe herders were finished mostly in the early bronze age.

There’s no actual strict definition of either subspecies or race(and for that matter species doesn’t have a particularly strict definition in practice, either).

Referring to blacks or East Indians as a different subspecies would mark you out as an absurd racist(and kulak is, to be fair, pretty racist). But that’s not because the idea is scientifically absurd(although I suspect the most scientifically supported subspecies would not match cleanly onto typical racial groupings). It’s because the very statement is a political one.

If zoologists classified humans anything close to the way they classified animals there would definitely be multiple subspecies. Zoologists will classify two morphologically identical species of fish that can interbreed as different subspecies because the fish in Pond A has a spot on its dorsal fin and the fish in Pond B does not.

Zoologists don't seem to classify subspecies in a consistent way, at least not in a consistent way that conforms to obvious large physical differences. For example, generally zoologists do not consider chihuahuas and Great Danes to be members of two different subspecies.

I talked about this in the thread I originally linked -- I think zoologists are trying to classify based on something like relative distance between overall genomes, whether or not that corresponds to obvious phenotypic differences. They're trying to make it more consistent than old-school 'natural history', and that makes their definition diverge from popular use.

I'd say this just highlights how the stuff the zoologists are interested in among other animal species doesn't correspond well to what's politically relevant in an HBD sense, and it's an unhelpful veneer of scientism to try to apply the zoologists' "subspecies" label to human races.

The real argument is to show that politically-relevant behavior relevantly originates in genes that distribute unevenly across politically-characterized racial categories. That can probably be done, but it shouldn't be confused with what the zoologists are doing with other species.

I’m not even referring to any of the HBD stuff, I think the observed physical distinctions would be enough.

"subspecies" is not a well-defined concept, so arguing about whether human races are subspecies or not is meaningless. If someone wants to score political points by either refusing to say that human races are different subspecies or by trying to convince people that human races are different subspecies, they're free to do so. But in either case, it's a political argument with no scientific basis.

As for people who argue that the concept of race is unscientific, in my experience they're usually either just ignorant of the topic and repeating opinions they have read elsewhere, or they misunderstand the relevant topics and for some reason believe that just because many frequently recognized human races are not cladistically monophyletic and all human beings are part of a genetic spectrum, it means that genetic variation between humans has no recognizable clusters.

For example, it is certainly true that "sub-Saharan Africans" is not a monophyletic group and its meaningfulness as a well-defined concept on the level of genetics is very questionable. But that does not mean that human genetic diversity is an undifferentiated distribution where every single individual is equally distant from every other individual. In reality there are recognizable patterns of various kinds in the distribution. It's just that the real patterns don't necessarily map well onto the typical racist's notion of what races are.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats