Author: Razib Khan

Toward a beige future

Update: They removed the slander on Vance. But it will happen again. There is clearly a strong demand for this judging by the reaction of liberal Twitter. End update


The Washington Post:

As border controls tighten, though, the links between pronatalism and nativism have once again become visible. Inspired by Steve Kingā€™s admiring remark about Geert Wilders, Ayla Stewart, creator of a popular white nationalist blog called Wife with a Purpose, issued a ā€œwhite baby challengeā€ that went viral in alt-right circles; the mother of six asked audience members ā€œto have as many white babies as I have contributed.ā€ Meanwhile, as replacement discourse enters the conservative mainstream, talk of birthrates comes along with it. ā€œOur people arenā€™t having enough children to replace themselves. That should bother us,ā€ J.D. Vance, author of the best-selling ā€œHillbilly Elegy,ā€ told his audience at the National Conservatism Conference last month; earlier this year, he described himself as ā€œappalledā€ by Democratsā€™ permissive attitudes toward abortion. Vance did not spell out exactly who was included in the word ā€œour.ā€ He didnā€™t need to.”

As I have noted on this weblog Vance’s wife is South Indian, his son is mixed-race. He also recently converted to Roman Catholicism. His life is a literal reflection of cosmopolitanism.

This piece goes into a long line of thinking whereby liberals think that they can infer things about conservatives. But the reality is many liberals don’t have the cultural competencies to do so. It’s like non-Muslims trying to understand the idioms and signs within Muslim subculture. We’d all acknowledge that something beyond what you might read in a newspaper is probably important in this case. But American liberals and conservatives don’t give each other this benefit of the doubt. Conservatives are racist. Liberals are socialists. You know what they really think….

(I strongly suspect most liberals have a model where white conservatives can’t marry and have children with non-white people, so the writer and publication didn’t bother to check)

The masses hitting the internet


Back in the mid-90s people on the newsgroups and message boards we would complain about people with AOL addresses. More recently, I think one reason Twitter is a problem today is that so many people are on the platform, and that means more stupid people are on the platform.

Another aspect I’ve noticed is the prominence of “Indian Twitter.” India is one of the top countries for the platform. Many of these people are quite dumb and inane…but most people are that way. The chart above shows how many people from India are on the internet. It strikes me that a bit of the “OMG AOL people are on the internet!” effect is going on. This too shall pass.

Note: In the last few years Bangladesh has apparently zoomed up the list of internet penetration due to various initiatives. The ranking surprised me, especially in light of the fact that Bangladesh sends very little traffic to this website even compared to Pakistan.

The Ummah for we, but not for thee

How geopolitics enabled Indiaā€™s gambit in Kashmir:

ā€œSaudi Arabia has traditionally been close to Pakistan, but over the past several decades India and Pakistan have diverged economically to where Indiaā€™s economy is now about eight times larger than Pakistanā€™s,ā€ he says. ā€œThe Saudis canā€™t ignore thatā€ for the sake of Kashmir.

The philosopher of science Rudolf Carnap once said that the distance from him to Karl Popper was small. But the distance from Popper to Carnap was large. What Carnap meant by this is that Popper perceived the distance to be much further between his position, and that of Carnap, than Carnap did.

I feel that the distance from Pakistanis to Iranians and Arabs, their “fellow Muslims”, is small. In fact, this may generalize to some extent to all South Asian Muslims (when I visited Bangladesh in 2004 random people would want to get into an argument about the Palestinians with me). But the distance and affinity from Arabs and Iranians to South Asians is large and minimal.

Here is what West Asians think of South Asians: Indian student went to join the Islamic State, but all he got was this lousy job cleaning toilets.

Brown down under

This Land Is a Sanctuary for Aboriginal Women. Bulldozers May Soon Come:

Mr. Djab Mara greeted them by burning cherry ballart leaves to cleanse their spirits. Then his partner, Ms. Mahomet, an Arrernte woman, invited the young visitors to view the same tree Ms. Jakobi had unknowingly driven by all her life.

The Arrernte are a group which occupies the center of Australia. How’d she get the name “Mahomet.” I’m 99% sure I know, Afghan cameleers in Australia:

A fourth-generation descendant of a Baluch cameleer who settled in Geraldton, Western Australia, set up a sheep station and married an Aboriginal woman, is proud of her heritage on both sides. She says that it was difficult for her ancestor to acquire permanent residence and permission to marry, but the Afghans were honourable men who preferred to marry rather than rape local women.

Taking sides when good and evil is unclear

One of the things that I admitted when reflecting on where I’ve been wrong, is that my default stance is to be somewhat isolationist because international entanglements are so complex. Some critics always wonder why I use such a simple heuristic, why not evaluate on a case by case basis?

At the extreme, this is obviously what would happen. But most cases are not at the extreme. The reality is I know more about history and geography than the vast majority of people, and I just don’t feel comfortable offering definitive judgment on many issues.

In the USA today the Right is pro-Israel to a default, to such an extent that it strikes me that they are as pro-Israel as they are pro-American. At least their in their rhetorical posture. Similarly, the Left is now pro-Palestine to a very great extent.

We could conclude that both the Right and Left have thought through their positions deeply and come to a reasoned position, but the reality is that these are just tribal politics. A subset of the Right adheres to a philo-Israeli theological position that has emerged in the last few decades, and these dictate the terms for the broader Right. Similarly, a small group of activists have kept and amplified the fire of 1970s Left nationalism which aligned with Palestine, and merged with more mainstream “social justice” views so that the pro-Palestinian position is now the Left position.

This is the case with many issues. Tribal politics and coalitional affinities drive solidarity and opinions. When your enemy was the Nazis, things get much easier. But these are very rare cases. Reality is more complex.

Which gets to why I used Ilhan Omar and Sarah Palin to illustrate this post. Both are very sincere and very stupid. So they have strong unnuanced opinions on foreign affairs, even if they could barely navigate a map. They are the best models for “hash tag activists.”

This is your independence day!


Twitter tells me that this is India’s independence day. Since I didn’t know that this was the case until this morning, I obviously have nothing deep to say. Except let me enjoin the people of India and its leadership class to one thing: do not be haunted by the past, look to the future.

The 2004 film Troy emerged in the wake of the sword & sandals boomlet triggered by Gladiator. It won’t be remembered for much longer, but there is a speech that Brad Pitt’s Achilles make to his soldiers. He tells them that immortality is there for the taking, but they need to grasp it.

Though there are clearly broad forces of history at work in which individuals, and even nations, swim, there is still agency. The world is what we make of it within the boundaries of reason. We must all grasp our agency, and shake off the dead weight of the past at some point…

America does a good job assimilating immigrants


If you are lucky, you are not aware that Priyanka Chopra got “called out” by a young Pakistani woman for “encouraging nuclear war against Pakistan.”

On the face of it seems very unlikely that Chopra was doing anything more than making a vanilla patriotic statement during a very tense time (I assume literally no one except for insane people would have wanted nuclear war in any case or even a conventional war!).

Though the initial stories referred to a “Pakistani woman”, you can tell by the accent that she was raised in the USA. In fact, she was naturalized as an American citizen at a very young age (she posted the certificate on her Facebook page). To be honest, even when I heard her referred to as Pakistani (she refers to herself as such), I was a bit skeptical and suspected perhaps she was actually American because this sort of self-righteous grandstanding is what America teaches the current generation.

Ayesha Malik is self-centered, ignorant, and milking an issue of genuine geopolitical concern to elevate her own individual profile as a beauty vlogger. Very American.

Brown Pundits