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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.

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Just for the sake of rigour:

What makes anyone think that this is another other than more Chinese robbers? That it isn't just two hours of misleading vividness?

There are one and a half billion Indians. It is the largest country in the world. Do I believe that a dedicated troll could find two hours of footage of Indians being disgusting or immoral? Certainly. I would be shocked if that weren't the case. I am sure you could easily do the same thing for China or the United States or Egypt or any country of reasonable size.

Meanwhile let's make a quick sanity-check. If we believe this premise, the Indians as a whole are incompetent, self-destructive, and generally pathetic, whereas the Han Chinese, with their statistically higher IQs, should be far more successful. Yet if we do a quick comparison of India and China - it doesn't seem like the Chinese are outdoing the Indians by that much. They have the edge in a few places, but it's not a massive or universal advantage. This is even more the case if we look at history. Broadly speaking, which country has been more productive, in terms of art, science, religion, philosophy, engineering, or any similar field? If there's a Chinese advantage, it doesn't look immediately overwhelming, to me. India and China look pretty comparable.

Why should we take this seriously? We ought to predict that such a film could be made regardless of whether its general claims about Indians are true or not. Knowing that, the film presents no compelling reason to believe that its general claim is true.

They have the edge in a few places, but it's not a massive or universal advantage.

A few places? Where's the Indian space station, where's the Indian navy, the Indian air force, the Indian high-tech industries in comparison to China? Where are the robotized gigafactories?

Xiaomi car factory: https://youtube.com/watch?v=a5KhnLLpoQ0

High quality scientific papers by country: https://www.nature.com/nature-index/annual-tables/2022/country/all/all

India is apparently less scientifically productive than Australia, albeit improving. The population of Australia is 26.6 million. There's an absolutely monstrous gap between India and China. China makes 5x more cars than India, they're so far ahead in AI and computing it's incomparable. In China big cities have this cyberpunk aesthetic - during COVID lockdowns they had drones flying around saying "Please restrain your soul's desire for freedom. Do not open the window or sing." I don't want to live there - I want freedom and artistic expression. Even so, the aesthetic is pretty good!

Shanghai: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Bw3yXaVHuLs

Big Indian cities have a Malthusian slum aesthetic - a totally different kind of dystopia. When it comes to cybercrime, Indian thieves tend to prefer scamming credulous octogenarians with gift cards - Chinese hackers steal 5G tech, turbines, sensitive and secret documents. When it comes to climate change, China builds all the solar panels and wind turbines, India asks for climate finance. There's a qualitative difference between India and China.

Mumbai: https://youtube.com/watch?v=gV5EU6daoVI

Even in history, India was conquered by the British - China got wrecked but not colonized. They fought bravely and desperately against all comers rather than rolling over. China was if not one of the Big Three in WW2, at least the Fourth of Roosevelt's Four Policemen. They got their UNSC veto, India begs for one. Postwar, China fought the US to a stalemate in Korea, skirmished with the Soviet Union and Vietnam. India just clobbered Pakistan a couple of times and lost a skirmish with China.

Even in history, India was conquered by the British - China got wrecked but not colonized. They fought bravely and desperately against all comers rather than rolling over.

India wasn't an unified entity when the British first showed up. The very concept of India, as a coherent ethno-lingual entity, was created both for civic convenience by the Colonial administration, and embraced by the leaders of the Independence movement.

It had the then decadent Mughal empire dominating the north, and a few of its rump states to the east and west, and multiple independent and flourishing kingdoms that were quite successful in holding off initial Portuguese colonial endeavors.

What the British did was a combination of enormous shrewdness and gunboat diplomacy (in the metaphorical sense, most of the country is too far inland for naval supremacy to particularly matter). They first established a beachhead by subverting then conquering Bengal, a vassal of the Mughals, and then steadily, over the course of decades, fought their way west and south. They were temporarily stymied by the Rajputs and the southern rulers, who had been giving the Mughals a headache, and heavily relied on friendly local powers they played off each other, as well as the massive Sepoy forces they raised to supplement the relatively minuscule number of beef-fed Britons who managed to survive in the those climes. (The beef fed bit contributed to the Sepoy Revolt, but that's a long story)

And complete conquest took, I don't recall, but a couple centuries I'd wager, at least one. And even then, colonial control was mostly through systems of vassalage, with many rulers, big or small, retaining a great deal of local power until they grew complacent and then had their demesnes snatched on technicalities (the most memorable example was a ruler who was infertile, and hence adopted a child when his death was imminent. The British rejected the heir and declared their intent to annex his territory, and when he passed away, his queen took up arms in his name to fight, not that they won)

China was a unified state, and has been for millenia. They're rightfully proud of it.

I can't critique the rest of your post since you're correct that India is far behind China when it comes to development and human capital, and not all of it can be blamed on late liberalization either. I accept that reality, and besides, I'm getting out. However, it wasn't a pushover, the British paid quite dearly to take the whole subcontinent.

It's also relevant, to the best of my knowledge, that the British didn't even try to conquer China in a similar way to India. They wanted Chinese goods, and for China to be subject to their power, certainly, but when British contact with China really started ramping up in the 19th century, they did not want another India. They explicitly didn't want a second India. One subcontinental Asian empire was enough, and the burdens of trying to directly govern and administer China were more than anyone wanted to assume - especially not when it was viable to instead get everything they wanted from China through less extreme means, going through a subject Chinese government.

There are plenty of reasons why the British didn't conquer China the way they did India, but in addition to China being a unitary reasonably powerful country rather than feuding states, and reaching China almost two centuries after reaching India, I think we have to add the fact that they, as a matter of policy, chose not to try. The expense that would have been involved in trying to conquer China just wasn't worth the potential gain, and that's even before we factor in the other European empires with stakes in China that might have objected. It doesn't seem like we need to rush to racial explanations.

This isn't to say that I am rejecting out of hand the idea that there might be genetic differences between Indians and Chinese. Heck, I'm sure there are lots of genetic differences within each category as well - both 'Indian' and 'Chinese' (even if we restrict ourselves to Han!) include a lot of historically divided subgroups. Rather, I just mean that conquest of one but not the other seems plenty explainable by contingent, non-racial factors.

I appreciate the additional context you provided, wasn't aware of it myself!