It’s 2020. 2050 is close enough that population projections out to 2050 are going to be feasible and you can trust the projections.
In 1950 Europe & its offshoots, North and South America and Oceania, were 35% of the world’s population. In 2050 they will be 20%. It will be an Afro-Asian world.
Thread to talk about whatever you want. What’s going in under lockdown???
Another BP Podcast is up. You can listen on Libsyn, Apple, Spotify, and Stitcher (and a variety of other platforms). Probably the easiest way to keep up the podcast since we don’t have a regular schedule is to subscribe to one of the links above!
You can also support the podcast as a patron. The primary benefit now is that you get the podcasts considerably earlier than everyone else. This website isn’t about shaking the cup, but I have noticed that the number of patrons plateaued a long time ago.
I would though appreciate more positive reviews! Alton Brown’s “Browncast” has 30 reviews on Stitcher alone! Help make us the biggest browncast! At least at some point.
This week talked to Amrut Pati about his new project, Swab for India. Amrut’s father Mahesh was diagnosed with leukemia and needs stem cells from a HLA match. But, because there aren’t many people from the Indian subcontinent in the databases the odds are long. This is contrast with the copious matches for people of European background.
Amrut has now made Swab for India his fulltime job.
Thinking about the Harsh Gupta podcast and what “civilization” is. What is this identity? how does it form and cohere?
In The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order Samuel Huntington emphasizes religion. This makes total sense to a person from South Asia. Religion has become the major fault-line in the Indian subcontinent. But is it justified? I think it is. The ecologist-turned-quantitative-historian Peter Turchin has suggested that “higher religion” is a “meta-ethnic” identity. That is, an identity that transcends tribe, ethnicity, and race.
Contrary to what racial nationalists like to think, historically race has not been a major cleavage. Fair-skinned Frankish Crusaders intermarried extensively with the Christian Armenian nobility of the Near East when they arrived. No matter that genetically Armenians are very similar to peoples of the northern Levant.
These bonds are abstract and higher-order. They are not visceral and concrete. Aside from the most extreme goat-beards growing up in the United States as a Muslim of South Asian origin we never saw Muslims of other ethnicities outside of religious festivals. Arab contempt for non-Arabs was palpable. Persian superiority toward non-Persians was palpable. Rather, it was common to socialize across religious divisions for people of the same regional-ethnic background. And yet if you pinned my father down he would aver that his ultimate loyalty was to the co-religionists of different nationalities with whom he literally never broke bread.
Similarly, Indian Americans have a soft spot for Tulsi Gabbard, because she is a Hindu.
But East Asian society is different. Religion and religious identity has never been at the center of those societies. The insights from one culture are not generalizable to another.
Another BP Podcast is up. You can listen on Libsyn, Apple, Spotify, and Stitcher (and a variety of other platforms). Probably the easiest way to keep up the podcast since we don’t have a regular schedule is to subscribe to one of the links above!
You can also support the podcast as a patron. The primary benefit now is that you get the podcasts considerably earlier than everyone else. This website isn’t about shaking the cup, but I have noticed that the number of patrons plateaued a long time ago. This month has been our biggest traffic month ever, and I think our corona-casts have been popular (patrons also get access to one that you can’t find on the public feed).
I would though appreciate more positive reviews! Alton Brown’s “Browncast” has 30 reviews on Stitcher alone! Help make us the biggest browncast! At least at some point.
This week I talked to Phillipe Lemoine about his blog post Are we headed toward an unprecedented public health disaster? A philosopher by training, Phillipe is now working as a data scientist, and he has been looking a the patterns of fatality in Europe for the past several weeks.
Islamic State Attacks Sikh Temple in Kabul, Killing 25:
An Islamic State militant stormed a Sikh temple in the heart of Kabul, killing 25 worshipers and taking dozens of people hostage in a prolonged siege that once again exposed the ability of insurgents to carry out attacks in the Afghan capital.
Dozens of Sikh worshipers were gathering for morning prayers on Wednesday when a gunman stormed the temple, according to the Interior Ministry. Men, women and children scrambled out of the compound as the attacker moved through the temple. An Afghan security official initially said there were two gunmen, but the investigation later concluded there was only one.
Even in the time of pandemic they still stick to their old script…
I have a post where I analyze the idea that weather has an effect on the spread of coronavirus. One thing to note is that the best models focus on absolute humidity. This means that coastal Karachi is much better placed than inland Lahore, because Lahore often has low humidity. Mumbai shouldn’t be well suited for the spread of coronavirus at any time of the year (absolute humidity too high).
The major confound here: air conditioning. This creates a bubble of low absolute humidity, so coronavirus could spread very well in these environments. If you believe these results, one might want to turn off air conditioning in offices.
A couple years back, I spent my down time playing a video game called Plague Inc. The game starts off with you playing as a bacteria, parasite, fungus, or of course as a virus. Your objective is to spread yourself across the globe infecting as many humans as possible, eventually leading to the culling of all of humanity. To win, you must silently evolve and spread, careful to not alert too many humans nor remain too isolated. On the way, you cause travel bans, mass hysteria, political clashes, etc… Sound familiar?
Now, we are seeing an eerily recognizable reality to the fantasy of that game. Coronavirus-19 has become the modern plague of our times. And while it is no where near the level of Plague Inc’s apocalyptic end game, COVID-19 threatens to upend many of our society’s given structures and force the world down a new path.
For whatever reason, Facebook recently thought I might be interested in the subscription South Asian themed webzine and newsletter The Juggernaut. I don’t mind paying for media. I pay for The New York Times, Bloomberg, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. But why should you pay for The Juggernaut? Here’s a snippet from their about page:
It’s like your other email briefings. But browner. Join thousands and get the newsletter that curates the best global news on South Asia(ns) every Sunday. We also send updates on events, giveaways, our original reporting, and more. Unsubscribe anytime.
There are some good stories in The Juggernaut. I especially liked “Not Indian Enough” by Sabrina Malhi, a Guyanese American of East Indian ethnicity. This is a good piece of journalism because it shines the light on a topic and experience that’s underexposed, the liminality of being of Caribbean East Indian background. I learned a lot.
But the problem with The Juggernaut is that it strikes a pose as “South Asian,” which like “Social Justice” or “Family Values” is innocuous on the face of it, but connotes particular affinities, identities, and preoccupations, which are exclusionary of vast swaths of its potential audience. Back when the Sepia Mutiny blog was a thing I went to some meet-ups, and one thing that I noticed is that despite the focus on inclusive South Asian language on the internet, privately most people were conventionally nationalistic in regards to where their parents came from.
People didn’t talk about Desi or South Asian, they talked about Indian identity.
Since then the political and social cleavages have polarized. The Juggernaut is a pretty conventional distillation of progressive Diasporic poses. It focuses a great deal on marginalized elements of the brown experience and is lockstep with the global Left in a deep skepticism of Hindu nationalism.
There is nothing wrong with that. But it’s just one viewpoint and a viewpoint that seems extremely overrepresented among the Diasporic media class. There are potential readers who are somewhat outside of this progressive South Asian American exoteric box. I wish publications like The Juggernaut had enough viewpoint diversity to reflect and attract them.
– An Italian in the time of coronavirus. From 5 days ago in Verona in Veneto.
– British scientist in Shanghai talks coronavirus. A British geneticist I know who works and lives in Shanghai. Two days ago.
Patreon here, but perhaps more important share the podcasts.
