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I was having recently at a management dinner with an Indian colleague (interestingly I think he's a Christian, not a Hindu) who said "I don't want to live in pl

by ern 3y ago

I was having recently at a management dinner with an Indian colleague (interestingly I think he's a Christian, not a Hindu) who said "I don't want to live in place with lots of Muslims, they mess things up". It's interesting how brazenly open he was, and this was in a western country. I put forward a strong candidate for his team, who happened to have grown up in Saudi Arabia, and he was inexplicably rejected, although in retrospect it made sense. The article also brushes up against caste, but doesn't explore the role of caste networks in tech. If that's the "bridge to the west" that India is pushing, I hope some of those tendencies are stamped out, hard.

cscurmudgeon 3y ago
Do you have any pointers to data (not anecdotes) on prevalence of these issues?
butterNaN 3y ago
You demonstrate how important it is to stomp out the rightwing ultranationalism festering in India. It is not solely India's problem any more. There is irreparable damage being done to the Indian psyche, and it is not going to be contained (unlike, for example, if it was China). Especially considering the impending climate disaster is going to disproportionately affect India and neighbors, resulting in social disaster, mass migration of a scale not seen before. Indian problems are increasingly world problems.
- cscurmudgeon 3y ago
  The world's problems are the world's problems. We Indians migrating into other societies see issues that the societies don't see themselves: (asian-hate, white supremacy, sunni-shia violence, anti-semitism). But I am glad once again the world (ahem, the West) deigned to "fix" India before fixing themselves.
  - butterNaN 3y ago
    You make it sound like it's two separate buckets. The world and India can, strike that, have to work together. As an Indian myself, I will accept any help I get to fight rightwing bigotry. And I will help fight rightwing bigotry elsewhere. People need to stop thinking as if borders are natural phenomenon.
throw0101a 3y ago
> "I don't want to live in place with lots of Muslims, they mess things up". Devil's advocate: this actually may have more to do with culture generally than religion specifically. Muslim countries may still have more clan-based / tribal social structures: > Henrich’s ambition is tricky: to account for Western distinctiveness while undercutting Western arrogance. He rests his grand theory of cultural difference on an inescapable fact of the human condition: kinship, one of our species’ “oldest and most fundamental institutions.” Though based on primal instincts— pair-bonding, kin altruism—kinship is a social construct, shaped by rules that dictate whom people can marry, how many spouses they can have, whether they define relatedness narrowly or broadly. Throughout most of human history, certain conditions prevailed: Marriage was generally family-adjacent—Henrich’s term is “cousin marriage”—which thickened the bonds among kin. Unilateral lineage (usually through the father) also solidified clans, facilitating the accumulation and intergenerational transfer of property. Higher-order institutions—governments and armies as well as religions—evolved from kin-based institutions. As families scaled up into tribes, chiefdoms, and kingdoms, they didn’t break from the past; they layered new, more complex societies on top of older forms of relatedness, marriage, and lineage. Long story short, in Henrich’s view, the distinctive flavor of each culture can be traced back to its earlier kinship institutions. […] > Why, if Italy has been Catholic for so long, did northern Italy become a prosperous banking center, while southern Italy stayed poor and was plagued by mafiosi? The answer, Henrich declares, is that southern Italy was never conquered by the Church-backed Carolingian empire. Sicily remained under Muslim rule and much of the rest of the south was controlled by the Orthodox Church until the papal hierarchy finally assimilated them both in the 11th century. This is why, according to Henrich, cousin marriage in the boot of Italy and Sicily is 10 times higher than in the north, and in most provinces in Sicily, hardly anyone donates blood (a measure of willingness to help strangers), while some northern provinces receive 105 donations of 16-ounce bags per 1,000 people per year. * https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/10/joseph-henrich-weird-people/615496/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/10/joseph-... * https://archive.li/e7DJX https://archive.li/e7DJX * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WEIRDest_People_in_the_World https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WEIRDest_People_in_the_Wor... Look at the rates of (non-paid) blood donations, cousin marriage, and corruption, and you'll see high correlations: * https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Blood-donation-rates-per-thousand-population-From_fig3_44798117 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Blood-donation-rates-per... * https://vividmaps.com/global-rates-of-consanguineous/ https://vividmaps.com/global-rates-of-consanguineous/ * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index Eastern versus western regions of Turkey is interesting: * https://vividmaps.com/cousin-marriage/ https://vividmaps.com/cousin-marriage/
esalman 3y ago
I'd hope so too, buy my grad school experience says otherwise. Both Chinese CCP and Indian BJP recruit international students studying in the US for spreading propaganda. Maybe more- information gathering, spying... I don't know. I found average Chinese grads very tight lipped about their internal politics. While I didn't encounter any supposed Chinese recruit face to face, I saw Indians who, very amiable and friendly when met in person, would be sharing and posting misinformation and hate speech on social media on a regular basis.
morbidious 3y ago
As a Hindu I strongly condemn the burning of Quran in Sweden and Denmark.

by ern 3y ago

cscurmudgeon 3y ago

Do you have any pointers to data (not anecdotes) on prevalence of these issues?

butterNaN 3y ago

You demonstrate how important it is to stomp out the rightwing ultranationalism festering in India. It is not solely India's problem any more. There is irreparable damage being done to the Indian psyche, and it is not going to be contained (unlike, for example, if it was China). Especially considering the impending climate disaster is going to disproportionately affect India and neighbors, resulting in social disaster, mass migration of a scale not seen before. Indian problems are increasingly world problems.

cscurmudgeon 3y ago
The world's problems are the world's problems. We Indians migrating into other societies see issues that the societies don't see themselves: (asian-hate, white supremacy, sunni-shia violence, anti-semitism). But I am glad once again the world (ahem, the West) deigned to "fix" India before fixing themselves.
- butterNaN 3y ago
  You make it sound like it's two separate buckets. The world and India can, strike that, have to work together. As an Indian myself, I will accept any help I get to fight rightwing bigotry. And I will help fight rightwing bigotry elsewhere. People need to stop thinking as if borders are natural phenomenon.

throw0101a 3y ago

> "I don't want to live in place with lots of Muslims, they mess things up". Devil's advocate: this actually may have more to do with culture generally than religion specifically. Muslim countries may still have more clan-based / tribal social structures: > Henrich’s ambition is tricky: to account for Western distinctiveness while undercutting Western arrogance. He rests his grand theory of cultural difference on an inescapable fact of the human condition: kinship, one of our species’ “oldest and most fundamental institutions.” Though based on primal instincts— pair-bonding, kin altruism—kinship is a social construct, shaped by rules that dictate whom people can marry, how many spouses they can have, whether they define relatedness narrowly or broadly. Throughout most of human history, certain conditions prevailed: Marriage was generally family-adjacent—Henrich’s term is “cousin marriage”—which thickened the bonds among kin. Unilateral lineage (usually through the father) also solidified clans, facilitating the accumulation and intergenerational transfer of property. Higher-order institutions—governments and armies as well as religions—evolved from kin-based institutions. As families scaled up into tribes, chiefdoms, and kingdoms, they didn’t break from the past; they layered new, more complex societies on top of older forms of relatedness, marriage, and lineage. Long story short, in Henrich’s view, the distinctive flavor of each culture can be traced back to its earlier kinship institutions. […] > Why, if Italy has been Catholic for so long, did northern Italy become a prosperous banking center, while southern Italy stayed poor and was plagued by mafiosi? The answer, Henrich declares, is that southern Italy was never conquered by the Church-backed Carolingian empire. Sicily remained under Muslim rule and much of the rest of the south was controlled by the Orthodox Church until the papal hierarchy finally assimilated them both in the 11th century. This is why, according to Henrich, cousin marriage in the boot of Italy and Sicily is 10 times higher than in the north, and in most provinces in Sicily, hardly anyone donates blood (a measure of willingness to help strangers), while some northern provinces receive 105 donations of 16-ounce bags per 1,000 people per year. * https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/10/joseph-henrich-weird-people/615496/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/10/joseph-... * https://archive.li/e7DJX https://archive.li/e7DJX * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WEIRDest_People_in_the_World https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WEIRDest_People_in_the_Wor... Look at the rates of (non-paid) blood donations, cousin marriage, and corruption, and you'll see high correlations: * https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Blood-donation-rates-per-thousand-population-From_fig3_44798117 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Blood-donation-rates-per... * https://vividmaps.com/global-rates-of-consanguineous/ https://vividmaps.com/global-rates-of-consanguineous/ * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index Eastern versus western regions of Turkey is interesting: * https://vividmaps.com/cousin-marriage/ https://vividmaps.com/cousin-marriage/

esalman 3y ago

I'd hope so too, buy my grad school experience says otherwise. Both Chinese CCP and Indian BJP recruit international students studying in the US for spreading propaganda. Maybe more- information gathering, spying... I don't know. I found average Chinese grads very tight lipped about their internal politics. While I didn't encounter any supposed Chinese recruit face to face, I saw Indians who, very amiable and friendly when met in person, would be sharing and posting misinformation and hate speech on social media on a regular basis.

morbidious 3y ago

As a Hindu I strongly condemn the burning of Quran in Sweden and Denmark.