May 8, 2014

Gelman on "A Troublesome Inheritance" in Slate

Statistics professor Andrew Gelman reviews Nicholas Wade's A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History in Slate:
The paradox of racism is that at any given moment, the racism of the day seems reasonable and very possibly true, but the racism of the past always seems so ridiculous. ...
One of Wade’s key data points is the rapid economic growth of East Asia in the past half-century: “In the early 1950s Ghana and South Korea had similar economies and levels of gross national product per capita. Some 30 years later, South Korea had become the 14th largest economy in the world, exporting sophisticated manufactures. Ghana had stagnated.” Wade approvingly quotes political scientist Samuel Huntington’s statement, “South Koreans valued thrift, investment, hard work, education, organization, and discipline. Ghanaians had different values.” And Wade attributes these attitudes toward thrift, investment, etc., to the Koreans’ East Asian genes. 
But ... what if Wade had been writing his book in 1954 rather than 2014? Would we still be hearing about the Korean values of thrift, organization, and discipline? A more logical position, given the economic history up to that time, would be to consider the poverty of East Asia to be never-changing, perhaps an inevitable result of their genes for conformity and the lack of useful evolution after thousands of years of relative peace. We might also be hearing a lot about Japan’s genetic exclusion from the rest of Asia, along with a patient explanation of why we should not expect China and Korea to attain any rapid economic success.

A massive problem in contemporary intellectual discourse is that people don't remember the past well and don't have a critical attitude toward whatever is the latest conventional wisdom about the backwardness of the past. In the Obama Era, we see race and sex disparities all around us, and the only socially acceptable explanation for them is that the past was so incredibly racist/sexist until ... well, nobody can quite remember when, but it must have been practically the day before yesterday.

So, it's hard for contemporary intellectuals to put themselves back into the shoes of their predecessors. 

Let's stop and think about the perspective from 1954. Sure, South Korea was rural and underdeveloped at the time (and flattened). But the United States and its United Nations allies had just finished battling to a desperate draw with North Korea, which was much more industrialized than South Korea, and China in the 1950-53 Korean War. This included America's massive strategic bombing campaign against North Korea's hydroelectric dams, steel mills, bridges, and railroads, which led to famous dogfights between the jet fighters escorting the bombers and the interceptors.

In the previous decade, the U.S. had fought a horrifying war against Japan that had begun with Japan's state-of-the-art ambush of the U.S. Navy in Pearl Harbor.

The economic potential of China once it threw off its stultified Imperial government had been an obsession of American strategists since the late 19th Century. Keeping the Philippines after the 1898 Spanish-American War, for example, was justified as America's entryway to the fabled China Market. The current strength and future greatness of Republican China was routinely overrated by American Sinophiles such as FDR (who set in motion China becoming one of the five members of the United Nation's Security Council despite Chiang Kai-shek's desultory contributions to the war effort), and the China-born Henry Luce, owner of Time and Life. During the 1950s, a Republican slogan was "Unleash Chiang," based on the assumption of a Nationalist Chinese military juggernaut temporarily stuck on Taiwan.

Similarly, if you read traditional physical anthropology books of the era such as Carleton Coon's The Origins of Races (1961) and The Living Races of Man (1965), Northeast Asians, who have large skulls relative to their small stature, are viewed as quite equal intellectually to Caucasians.

Or consider the much denounced eugenics works of the post-Great War Era, such as Lothrop Stoddard's 1920 book The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy, which Tom Buchanan is more or less reading in The Great Gatsby. Stoddard was hardly dismissive of the potential of Northeast Asians. From Wikipedia:
In The Rising Tide of Color Stoddard blasted the ethnic supremacism of the Germans, blaming the "Teutonic imperialists" for the outbreak of the First World War.[3] He opposed what he saw as the disuniting of White/European peoples through intense nationalism and infighting. 
Some predictions made in The Rising Tide of Color were accurate; others were not. Accurate ones — not all of which were original to Stoddard or predicated on white supremacy — include Japan's rise as a major power; a war between Japan and the USA; a second war in Europe; the overthrowing of European colonial empires in Africa and Asia; the mass migration of non-white peoples to white countries; and the rise of Islam as a threat to the West because of Muslim religious fanaticism (Stoddard was an Islamic scholar and published the book, The New World of Islam in 1921.)[4][5]

An accurate understanding of historical ideas is increasingly unavailable to modern Americans due to the ever-growing demand that "history" (i.e., past racism/sexism) is the one and only cause of current disparities.
     

121 comments:

Anonymous said...

So Steve is also an anti-feminist?

Anonymous said...

Great comments, Steve. It struck me as well that Gelman's critique was based on cursory-to-nonexistent familiarity with what "racists" actually thought in the past.

Still, it seems like Wade's book is less the unstoppable dagger that many HBD types, licking their chops, assumed it would be.

I was particularly disappointed that he relies on the genetic-origins-of-the-industrialism argument in Clark's Farewell to Alms, which seems to be going the way of Levitt's abortion-cut-crime hypothesis. Too much counter-evidence.

Anonymous said...

An accurate understanding of historical ideas is increasingly unavailable to modern Americans due to the ever-growing demand that "history" (i.e., past racism/sexism) is the one and only cause of current disparities.

Whichever possible history best serves the cause of The Narrative.

The future is known - it is the past which is always in doubt.

a very knowing American said...

Some stereotypes change over time. You can find mid-twentieth century American science fiction that treated high birth rates among Chinese as a deeply rooted, maybe even congenital trait. This doesn't seem very plausible today. On the other hand, stereotypes about black Africans being less intelligent have been very stable going back to medieval Arabs. This doesn't prove racial IQ differences are genetic, but it's inconvenient for Gelman's argument.

Anonymous said...

"But ... what if Wade had been writing his book in 1954 rather than 2014? Would we still be hearing about the Korean values of thrift, organization, and discipline?"

Wade and Gelman are both missing the point.

True, South Korean economy was in the shits in 1954, not least because of the effects of the Korean War that laid the entire nation to waste.

But even BEFORE the modern economic rise of S. Korea, it had a 2000 yrs history of intellectual tradition(though a very narrow-minded one based on Chinese model). It had developed its own script. It had moments of moderate advancement in science and governance. And Koreans achieved this without Western influence.

In contrast, what did Ghana have prior to the arrival of the West? Even its economy in 1954 was the product of Western colonialism and investment.

So, even before Western influence, Koreans had one of the most advanced(relatively speaking of course) civilizations in the world despite its isolation from much of the world.

Ghananians, prior to the arrival of the West, didn't have much of anything. Sure, they had some wonderful wood carving and stone sculptures. And they had some kingdoms too, but nothing on the level of Europe, India, or Sinosphere world.

Indeed, even when we look at the miserable North Korea, its nuclear technology is far beyond the technological capabilities of free and democratic African nations. Gee, I wonder why that is. Why haven't any black African nation been able to build and operate nuclear reactors?

So, Wade needs to take a deeper look. Judging Korea by modern rise of its economy is misleading.
Similarly, it's misleading to judge Jewish achievement only by taking measure of Jewish achievements in science and math in the late modern era. The fact is EVEN BEFORE Jews had their own enlightenment and became Einsteins, they had a long tradition in literature, scholarship, business, and etc, all of which would have been unlikely if the average Jewish IQ had been 90.

Another thing. I don't see why Wade's point would disprove genetics?

Take sports. When blacks had been prohibited from participating in most major sports, they were poorly represented in American sports. But once they were given equal access, they came to dominate.

Gelman could argue.."but would you make a genetic case for black athletic superiority if you were in America back in the 1920s?"
After all, most sports were white-dominated back then.

But a careful observer back then would have made an argument in favor of black superiority back in the 1920s. He would noticed harder muscle on blacks and would have said, all things being equal, blacks will overtake whites.

Similarly, any careful observer back in 1954 would have bet on Koreans. After all, Koreans had a 2000 history prior before the arrival of the West. They had developed civilization and developed a cult of learning.
In contrast, Ghananian relied on an economy that had been built up by white colonialists.
Also, prior to the arrival of the West, Korea(like Japan) had unified into a political entity and maintained central government over the entire peninsula. Obviously a sign of ability of organization and management.
In contrast, the social organization of Ghana prior to the arrival of the West was primitive tribalism.

So, only a fool would have bet on Ghana in 1954.

See it this way. Israel back in 1948 was dirt poor. Jews fleeing from Europe had arrived in rags. But if you had to bet on Jews in Israel and Arabs in Yemen back then, who would you have chosen?
If you know anything about Ashkenazi Jews, you would have voted for them even if they were dirt poor.

This Gelman is a fool.

Anonymous said...

BTW, how did Cowen's blog become the go-to place for intelligent hereditarian discussion? Most of his commenters not only disagree with him, but roll their eyes at him like Lucille Bluth. A mostly-open borders libertarian blog makes for an odd habitat.

Anonymous said...

If Gelman were more informed and/or clever he would have wielded South Indians as an example. In contrast to white racialist thinking about Koreans and Chinese, consider what Steve noted about South Indians in 2002:

One of the least predicted phenomena of recent decades was the emergence of a huge number of people with brilliant technical skills in South India. As far as I know, nobody saw it coming. It doesn't fit either standard cultural theories (e.g., the "center" flourishes at the expense of the "periphery" - until recently, you couldn't get much more peripheral than Bangalore) or evolutionary theories (e.g., cold winters may select for high IQ, but South India is awfully warm).

http://isteve.blogspot.com/2002/03/why-are-south-indians-so-smart.html

AMac said...

Re: Andrew Gelman's review of Wade's book. It's worth recalling Charles Murray's prediction in his recent review:

--- begin fair-use extract ---

Mr. Wade explicitly warns the reader that [in his book's] latter chapters, [he] must speculate from evidence that falls far short of scientific proof. His trust in his audience is touching: "There is nothing wrong with speculation, of course, as long as its premises are made clear. And speculation is the customary way to begin the exploration of uncharted territory because it stimulates a search for the evidence that will support or refute it."

I fear Mr. Wade's trust is misplaced. Before they have even opened "A Troublesome Inheritance," some reviewers will be determined not just to refute it but to discredit it utterly—to make people embarrassed to be seen purchasing it or reading it. These chapters will be their primary target because Mr. Wade chose to expose his readers to a broad range of speculative analyses, some of which are brilliant and some of which are weak... The orthodoxy's clerisy will take [the route of] ransacking these chapters for material to accuse Mr. Wade of racism, pseudoscience, reliance on tainted sources, incompetence and evil intent. You can bet on it.

--- end fair-use extract ---

Gelman does better than attempting to "discredit it utterly." He does, however, skip over the heart of the book -- Wade's review of the genetic evidence for the reality of race. Moving to the speculative sections, Gelman doesn't shy from tarring Wade as a racist.

Score +0.8 for Murray's abilities as a soothsayer.

Anonymous said...

"Chiang Kai-shek's desultory contributions to the war effort"

New book on Chiang shows that 90% of Chinese troops who died fighting the Japanese were KMT. But leftist US reporters and officials spread the BS that commies did all the fighting while KMT just ran.

Chiang had a reason for retreating after losing so many men against Japan. He knew he had to face the commies after the war ended, and boy, did he turn out to be right. It was all the worse cuz that idiot FDR invited the Soviets to take over north China and hand it over to the commies.

"The current strength and future greatness of Republican China was routinely overrated by American Sinophiles such as FDR"

FDR was NOT a sinophile. He simply didn't care about China.

And the future greatness was not overrated. New revised studies of the Nanking Decade--that had fashionably been dismissed by leftist scholars--from 1927 to 1937 indicate that key achievements took place and if Japan hadn't messed things up royally for China by invading, China would indeed have steadily risen in power and wealth.

Chiang was no saint but he was never given enough credit. He did some great things. He finally unified much of China. He drove the commies all the way to Yenan, where they were all but finished. And he was finally planning on a course of national development. But Japan invaded, brought ruin to China, commies get a second life, then came the civil war, and decades of rule under Mao that were completely wasted yrs.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/23/AR2009042303315.html

Of course, in sheer greatness, it's hard to beat Ataturk, a man of enlightened values who could also be tough when necessary. A nationalist and a humanist.
If Mussolini and Hitler had been like him, 20th century would have belonged to the Right. Instead, Musso and shitler had to play god-men.

Anonymous said...

Couldn't the argument be made that war with Japan began when the U.S. sent pilot volunteers to China and shot down over 300 Japanese planes -- long before Pearl Harbor?

Pseudoerasmus said...

The simplest rejoinder to Gelman on his point about NE Asia and how it was probably viewed as permanently backward a century ago.... would be.... the amazingly prescient Francis Galton on China in 1873 ! http://galton.org/letters/africa-for-chinese/AfricaForTheChinese.htm

hardly said...

Steve, Gelman's argument is not a bad one. Just like Derbyshire said outrage is fractal, assessment of "civilizational achievements" is also fractal.
I've seen plenty of online liberals talking about the black Mansa Musa empire as a major historical achievement of blacks that proves that they had civilization equivalent to the Greeks.
The same goes for India. Macaulay thought all the literature of Hindostan wasn't worth a single library of England, but there are several who consider the Greek, Indian and Chinese to be the three most prominent intellectual traditions of the ancient world.

The argument that the current picture of the world cannot be taken as the only one is quite compelling. If you went back to 1200 AD the English and Germans were running around like the subsaharans do today, while China, Japan and India had advanced civilizations.
The other explanation could be that national IQs / personalities can change rapidly within a few generations.

Anonymous said...

Anonymous:"Couldn't the argument be made that war with Japan began when the U.S. sent pilot volunteers to China and shot down over 300 Japanese planes -- long before Pearl Harbor?"


Only if the Japanese had decided to declare war. they didn't.

Anonymous said...

"Couldn't the argument be made that war with Japan began when the U.S. sent pilot volunteers to China and shot down over 300 Japanese planes -- long before Pearl Harbor?"

Are you talking about the Flying Tigers? According to the WIKIPEDIA entry, they did not start flying combat missions until after Pearl Harbor:

"The group first saw combat on 20 December 1941, 12 days after Pearl Harbor (local time)." (WIKIPEDIA)

Lodovico said...

Some interesting quotes from Lothrop Stoddards "The Rising Tide of Color":

"For Asia's industrial transformation is destined to cause momentous reactions in other parts of the globe. If Asiatic industry really does get on an efficient basis, its potentialities are so tremendous that it must presently not only monopolize the home-markets but also seek to invade white markets as well, thus presenting the white world with commercial and economic problems as unwelcome as they will be novel."

"In Asia white hegemony rests solely on political bases, while the Asiatics themselves, browns and yellows alike, display constructive power and possess civilizations built up by their own efforts from the remote past. The Asiatics are today once more displaying their innate capacity by not merely adopting, but adapting, white ideas and methods. We behold an Asiatic renaissance, whose genuineness is best attested by the fact that there have been similar movements in past times.

None of this applies to Africa. The black race has never..."

Well, and then Stoddard goes on writing some nasty stuff about Blacks, which I presume Steve doesn't want to have in his comment section. Needless to say that Stoddard's forecast for Africa was rather pessimistic.

Anyway, these quotes illustrate quite nicely how far off Gelman is with his claim about the past's racism always looking so ridiculous.

Anonymous said...

hardly:"The argument that the current picture of the world cannot be taken as the only one is quite compelling. If you went back to 1200 AD the English and Germans were running around like the subsaharans do today, while China, Japan and India had advanced civilizations."

By AD 1200, the English and the Germans were in the High Middle Ages. Your comparison is, shall we say, imperfect.

Anonymous said...

'fractal'

the hell is that?

Anonymous said...

We might also be hearing a lot about Japan’s genetic exclusion from the rest of Asia, along with a patient explanation of why we should not expect China and Korea to attain any rapid economic success.


That's a pretty piece of conjecturing, but it falls apart if you look at what white people actually thought of Asians in the 1800's, never mind the 1950's. The Chinese, for example.

http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks05/0500681h.html

"This is the class of Chinese who, emigrating from the thickly-peopled south-eastern provinces of China, already possess a predominant share of the wealth of Borneo, Sumatra, Java, Timor, the Celebes and the Philippine Islands, Burma, Siam, Annam and Tonquin, the Straits Settlements, Malay Peninsula, and Cochin China. "There is hardly a tiny islet visited by our naturalists in any part of these seas but Chinamen are found." And it is this class of Chinese who have already driven us out of the Northern Territory of Australia, and whose unrestricted entry into the other colonies we must prevent at all hazards. We cannot compete with Chinese; we cannot intermix or marry with them; they are aliens in language, thought, and customs; they are working animals of low grade but great vitality. The Chinese is temperate, frugal, hard-working, and law-evading, if not law-abiding - we all acknowledge that. He can outwork an Englishman, and starve him out of the country - no one can deny that. To compete successfully with a Chinaman, the artisan or labourer of our own flesh and blood would require to be degraded into a mere mechanical beast of labour, unable to support wife or family, toiling seven days in the week, with no amusements, enjoyments, or comforts of any kind, no interest in the country, contributing no share towards the expense of government, living on food that he would now reject with loathing, crowded with his fellows ten or fifteen in a room that he would not now live in alone, except with repugnance. Admitted freely into Australia, the Chinese would starve out the Englishman, in accordance with the law of currency - that of two currencies in a country the baser will always supplant the better."


That's G.E. Morrison, Peking correspondent for "The Times", writing in 1895. He would not have been surprised by China's current position in the world.



Anonymous said...

Couldn't the argument be made that war with Japan began when the U.S. sent pilot volunteers to China and shot down over 300 Japanese planes -- long before Pearl Harbor?


They were not actually "volunteers" at all, that was all part of the ruse.


Only if the Japanese had decided to declare war. they didn't.


By that definition, the Korean and Vietnam wars (or should I say "wars"?) never actually happened.

Anonymous said...

One of the least predicted phenomena of recent decades was the emergence of a huge number of people with brilliant technical skills in South India.


I see zero evidence for the emergence of any "huge number of people with brilliant technical skills in South India".

The number of Indian IT workers imported into America has not been "huge" so far. And they are not actually all that "brilliant" either. Our rulers import them to drive down wages among the Americans, not because they possess "brilliant technical skills".

Anonymous said...

http://theden.tv/2014/05/08/all-tomorrows-politics-tech-moguls-throw-party-to-impress-obama/

Anonymous said...

Only if the Japanese had decided to declare war. they didn't.


Anonymous:"By that definition, the Korean and Vietnam wars (or should I say "wars"?) never actually happened."

Actually, the Korean War offers a direct parallel. To prevent the outbreak of war with the USSR, the USA did not officially recognize the presence of Russian pilots flying against the US Air Force.Nations play useful games like that all the time.

JayMan said...

My response to Gelman:

First Mainstream Notice of A Troublesome Inheritance | JayMan's Blog

Anonymous said...

The argument that the current picture of the world cannot be taken as the only one is quite compelling. If you went back to 1200 AD the English and Germans were running around like the subsaharans do today, while China, Japan and India had advanced civilizations.


That's what is technically known as a "crock". The Germans and English of 1200 were far more advanced than the subsaharans of today, and more advanced in many respects than the Chinese or Japanese of the same period. Western European architecture and metallurgy at the time were equal or superior to anything being produced anywhere else in the world.



Anonymous said...




"By that definition, the Korean and Vietnam wars (or should I say "wars"?) never actually happened."

Both "wars" were Lewis Carroll-esque exercises in legal legerdemain. China intervened massively, but the USA and China did not declare war on one another. The USA did not invade China in response. Russian pilots flew combat missions against the USA, but the USSR and the USA did not go to war. During the Vietnam war, the USA did not invade the North. Doing so would have meant war with China, etc.

For that matter, look at WW2. Japan did not declare war on the USSR after the Germans invaded. But Hitler, in contrast, decided to declare war on the USA.

Countries pick and choose what counts as a casus belli.

Anonymous said...

I don't know if this has ever come up on iSteve, but one thing shared by European and Asian cultures that has been vital for their economic and technological development is the presence of a monastic tradition. Monasticism trains people to resist and control their physical appetites for the sake of achieving objectives that are spiritual in nature. The spiritual disciplines and communal habits fostered by monastic orders have proven conducive to scientific achievement and economic development. For they teach not only the monks but also all other members of society that there is a higher order of values than the pursuit of money, power, and pleasure. The eremite strives for a position outside of society and resists the pressures of social conformity, enabling him to rise above the beliefs of the common people.

Islam lacks a monastic tradition, which may account in part for its lack of achievement in science and culture since the Middle Ages. Practices of self-denial do not seem to have much of a foundation in African cultures, either. But perhaps monastic disciplines could go a long way towards making up the differences and disparities associated with genetics.

Anonymous said...

I'd just like to add that the Korean's held out against the Mongols for over 80 years.

Pretty sure some of the European nations at the time fell faster then that.

Anonymous said...

If you went back to 1200 AD the English and Germans were running around like the subsaharans do today, while China, Japan and India had advanced civilizations.

On what planet are the Northern Europeans who employed mangonels, trebuchets and other siege engines against stone fortresses in the Holy Land, running around in loincloths always in fear of predatory animals, like sub-Saharan Africans? Europeans (and much of the civilized world) had by then more or less exterminated most of the large land predators that used to share their living spaces. Africans were still living among them and dealing with day-to-day predation upon humans. And this is just one of huge numbers of differences between European (and Oriental) civilization and the primitivism of the sub-Saharan Africans.

Anonymous said...

"The black race has never.."

The Great Sphinx of Giza is 4500 years old and has a subsaharan african face. Northern europeans remained barbarians for 3000 years after the Sphinx was built. Confucius, Lao Tzu and the Great Wall of China came over 2000 years after the Sphinx. How do you all reconcile that with your racial heirarchy?

Anonymous said...

"Islam lacks a monastic tradition, which may account in part for its lack of achievement in science and culture since the Middle Ages"

So what accounts for the muslim world's leadership over monastic Europe in science, philosophy etc before the Middle Ages?

Anonymous said...

"The Great Sphinx of Giza is 4500 years old and has a subsaharan african face."

I think there's some interesting history there with Nubian dynasties in Egypt and possibly some lost history buried under the Bantu expansion.

"Northern europeans remained barbarians for 3000 years after the Sphinx was built."

However I think a lot of civilization actually started around the Black Sea and was displaced to the near east and Egypt rather than the other way round.

Not really northern Europe but Europe.

.


"I'd just like to add that the Korean's held out against the Mongols for over 80 years.

Pretty sure some of the European nations at the time fell faster then that."

But most didn't fall at all.

(Although to be fair that was probably largely due to later agriculture and subsequently more surviving forest as a barrier.)

hanktheheretic said...

"The Great Sphinx of Giza is 4500 years old and has a subsaharan african face. Northern europeans remained barbarians for 3000 years after the Sphinx was built. Confucius, Lao Tzu and the Great Wall of China came over 2000 years after the Sphinx. How do you all reconcile that with your racial heirarchy?"

Come on buddy, this was just wiki bait.

The "sub-saharan african face?" Well, apparently the statue was supposed to look like this guy:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khafra

I know a lot of Afrocentric types really, really want ancient Egypt to be their "thing," but it ain't going to happen. Now, I won't go out and say ancient Hellenic peoples created the entire thing, but the idea that Obama's sons made one of humanity's first civilizations is pushing it.

Anyways, do Africans really want the great monuments of Egypt to be their stunning achievement in civilization? Talk about having your "best days behind you."

Anonymous said...

The Great Sphinx of Giza is 4500 years old and has a subsaharan african face.

14% of the DNA of today's Egyptians is sub-Saharan African in origin.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_history_of_Egypt

Harold said...

Another old quote (I found at Jonathan Katz’s site):

English explorer Francis Younghusband said in his book ``The Heart of a Continent'' (1896) recounting his explorations of Central Asia (p. 396): ``In mere brain-power and intellectual capacity there seems no great difference between the civilized European and, say, the rough hill-tribesman of the Himalayas; and, in regard to the Chinaman, I should even say the advantage lay on his side.''

Anonymous said...

"" Anonymous said...
"The black race has never.."

The Great Sphinx of Giza is 4500 years old and has a subsaharan african face. Northern europeans remained barbarians for 3000 years after the Sphinx was built. Confucius, Lao Tzu and the Great Wall of China came over 2000 years after the Sphinx. How do you all reconcile that with your racial heirarchy?""

I am not sure what your point it is. According to DNA from mummies, at the very least the ruling class of Egypt derived from Western Asia. So why would they make a monument to Sub-Saharan Africans. I guess you can argue about your personal interpretation of what the face looks like, but the DNA evidence does not support an African origin for the pharaohs. Maybe you have a more recent reference than the 2013 Nature paper....

Banist Would said...

"(who set in motion China becoming one of the five members of the United Nation's Security Council despite Chiang Kai-shek's desultory contributions to the war effort)"

I have seen an art exhibition of WWII posters, some of which showed the United Nations just composed of 16 countries, South Africa included.

Anonymous said...

If you went back to 1200 AD the English and Germans were running around like the subsaharans do today, while China, Japan and India had advanced civilizations.

You mean 1200 BC, not 1200 AD.

hardly said...

I said subsaharan africans TODAY.
My point merely is that before the 1200s or so there wasn't much to expect anything special from Northern europeans.
Even if you feel the carolingian empire was superior to great Zimbabwe, it doesn't explain why non-white civilizations like Egypt, the Incas and Mayans achieved so much in spite of the low IQs found in those regions these days.
Looking at the mestizos today, no one would expect that their ancestors had fairly advanced civilizations, comparable to many white civilizations of the time.

Steve Sailer said...

People these days are kind of unaware of the gothic cathedrals that Europeans started putting up around 1100 AD. It's not the kind of thing that Dawkins or Pinker would emphasize, but they are astonishing accomplishments.

Giles said...

re: mestizos

Peru has been doing well at various math olympiads in recent years. Same for international chess.

In 2011, they placed #4 at the Asian Pacific Math Olympiad, ahead of countries like Japan, Russia, Canada, Singapore, and Australia:

http://daryn.kz/apmo/files/apmo2011_res.pdf

In 2012, Peru placed #7:
http://daryn.kz/apmo/files/apmo2012_res.pdf

At the International Math Olympiad...

Ranked #17 in 2008: tied with Romania and ahead of Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom, Australia, Italy, France, Serbia, Israel, Singapore, India...

http://www.imo-official.org/year_country_r.aspx?year=2008&column=total&order=desc

Ranked #18 in 2010: ahead of Taiwan, the United Kingdom, Poland, France, Singapore, Ukraine, Israel, Hong Kong, India...

http://www.imo-official.org/year_country_r.aspx?year=2010&column=total&order=desc

Ranked #16 in 2012: ahead of Japan, Germany, Poland, the United Kingdom, Italy, Hungary, France, Ukraine, Hong Kong, Belarus, Israel, Australia...

http://www.imo-official.org/year_country_r.aspx?year=2012&column=total&order=desc

I'll also note that exactly 1/3 of Peru's top chess players are under the age of 25, and already includes a few Grand Masters and International Masters:

http://ratings.fide.com/topfed.phtml?ina=1&country=per

I doubt these are performances most commentators here would've predicted a mere 10 years ago.

Anonymous said...

It's mystifying how widespread this "Europe was a primitive backwater until the Renaissance" stuff is. My guess is that it's tied into the whole Protestant thing - most of our English speaking culture has Protestant roots and is prone to thinking that civilization in Europe started right around 1517.

Chartres Cathedral is far more impressive than anything the Chinese or Japanese were building in 1200 AD. And it's not a one-off, Well's Cathedral was going up in England at the same time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartres_Cathedral

Anonymous said...

Steve, the gothic cathedrals are major stumbling blocks in the Seth Mcfarlane version of history where evil priests were out burning books and not making advances in the arts and sciences.

So in that light its unsurprising they'd be ignored. Notre Dame was amazing.

Anonymous said...

"Peru has been doing well at various math olympiads in recent years. Same for international chess. I doubt these are performances most commentators here would've predicted a mere 10 years ago."

What exactly is the racial makeup?

Hispanic, mestizo, or Indian?

If native, it need not be controversial. Peru did have a notable civilization before the whites came. They have distant ancestry in Asia. Many are temperamentally calm, which means that they can be trained and educated like Asians.

Long Spanish rule kept them ignorant and poor. Maybe they are showing signs of progress under a new system, which is good.

My guess is, just like there's difference between Chinese IQ and Malaysian IQ or between Jewish IQ and Arab IQ, there is difference between the IQs of various native groups in the Americas.

Maybe Peruvian natives inherited the genes of the Incas. They were smarter than others, surely more than Amazonian Indians.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inca_Empire

Steve Sailer said...

Pre-Columbian civil engineering in Peru was impressive and the place had definitely gone through Wade's "Malthusian wringer" -- there are ancient terraces all over the mountainsides that are no longer used to grow food.

Anonymous said...

"Even if you feel the carolingian empire was superior to great Zimbabwe, it doesn't explain why non-white civilizations like Egypt, the Incas and Mayans achieved so much in spite of the low IQs found in those regions these days."

Civilization is about few smart people making lots of dumb people obey and follow orders.
So, none of it should be surprising.

Also, civilization is not only about what you do but you don't do.
Even if you don't build much, as long as you don't destroy stuff, social order will remain for a long time.

Problem with blacks is they just like to tear things apart.
Even if blacks don't build much, if they don't destroy so much, they would be much better off.
But blacks like to lay things to waste. Burn baby burn.

Even if blacks don't build much in Detroit or Haiti, as long as they behave better and maintain stuff, things would be okay and tolerable. But they just love to loot and holler and shoot and run around and boogie woogie.




Anonymous said...

Totally tangential to the main thread, but Americans in the AVG (Flying Tigers) were not the only "volunteer" pilots fighting in China.

The Soviets had a large Volunteer Group. One of the more interesting exploits of this group was on 23-Feb 1938 flying about 40 Tupolev SB bombers to the extreme limits of their range to attack Japanese air fields in Taiwan (maybe around 30 actually made it to the attack). The Japanese were assembling a large order of new Italian Fiat BR.20 bombers for use in China (this model of bomber was later used very unsuccessfully by Italy to attack England during the Battle of Britain). About 40 Japanese aircraft were destroyed to no direct losses and the Japanese commander committed suicide. None of the BR.20s made it to China. (another link).

One wonders about the impact of this on Japanese thinking regaring Pearl Harbor.



From the wikipedia:

"On 23 February 1938, to celebrate Soviet Army Day, Soviet SBs carried out a long range attack on Japanese airfields on Taiwan, claiming 40 Japanese aircraft destroyed on the ground."

Not widely known history.

Steve Sailer said...

Thanks, I'd never heard of that 1938 air battle.

Anonymous said...

It's mystifying how widespread this "Europe was a primitive backwater until the Renaissance" stuff is. My guess is that it's tied into the whole Protestant thing - most of our English speaking culture has Protestant roots and is prone to thinking that civilization in Europe started right around 1517.

Chartres Cathedral is far more impressive than anything the Chinese or Japanese were building in 1200 AD. And it's not a one-off, Well's Cathedral was going up in England at the same time.


As golden calves go, it's a beautiful structure. Can't speak to the Japanese, but 1700 years before France's edifice of rock was erected, the Chinese built an irrigation canal a hundred miles long. Nowhere as pretty as a monument to Christian clerics, but sufficient to maintain a population far above what would normally be possible in the arid lands of North China. And a major engineering feat for the time.

Anonymous said...

I think it's misleading to see all subsaharan blacks as one race.

I think Ethiopians are as different from Nigerians as East Asians are from Europeans.

Africa is HUGE. Also, Xhosa people seem different in race from the Bantus.

Anonymous said...

"The Great Sphinx of Giza is 4500 years old and has a subsaharan african face."

Egypt had some blacks.
Just like America.
We have the Bouncer on the Mall aka MLK statue, and Obama is pharaoh.

But still, America is what it is because of Anglo founding.

If Egypt were all Caucasian like Greece, Babylonia, Libya, or Sumeria, it still would have been great.
But if it were all black, probably not.

Anonymous said...

"So why would they make a monument to Sub-Saharan Africans. I guess you can argue about your personal interpretation of what the face looks like, but the DNA evidence does not support an African origin for the pharaohs."

It depends on which Pharaohs.
There is no doubt that Egypt had a substantial black population and there were many with mixed blood.

King Tut may have been caucasian but he had Negro lips.

Nasser and Sadat could pass for black in America. Indeed, many Egyptians would have been black by the one drop rule.

Negro lips:

http://griffinworldgeo.edublogs.org/files/2014/01/SuperStock_900-708-x1o8dk.jpg

Negroish

http://www.dogstarnyc.com/2009/08/michael-jackson-egyptian-sculpture.html

Bro-ish

http://www.artfromancientlands.com/images/EgyptianDioriteStatueX0012.jpg

Bigass lips

http://www.personal.psu.edu/cdg5049/assignment6/3013.jpg

Anonymous said...

OK, the superlips pharaoh seems to be brogus fake.

http://www.personal.psu.edu/cdg5049/assignment6/3013.jpg

http://www.egyptsearch.com/forums/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=reply;f=8;t=008813

"yet here this company, Ancient Sculpture Gallery seems to be trying to take borrow from the below Tutankhamun item below, make the lips very big and add an African looking necklace and then call it Thutmose III. It seems to be an attempt to market to people of West African descent, probably Americans. It's patronizing and phoney. It's nice looking but I don't like the motive behind it and the fact they are mixing replicas up with these racially enhanced creations and then tagging it with "Egyptian Museum, Cairo".
They should have just made an Amenhotep III replica"

Simon in London said...

Great knock-down. Arguments like Gelman's have fooled me in the past. I'll be warier in future after reading this.

Simon in London said...

anon:
"I was particularly disappointed that he relies on the genetic-origins-of-the-industrialism argument in Clark's Farewell to Alms, which seems to be going the way of Levitt's abortion-cut-crime hypothesis. Too much counter-evidence."

HBD Chick's bottom-up Manorialism theory (selection for responsible peasants by the Lord of the Manor) seems stronger than Clark's fast-breeding aristocrats theory.

A big problem for Clark's theory is that it doesn't seem to fit the facts: aristocrats succeeded through a propensity to successful violence, whereas bourgeois values were a feature of the middle class. But the middle class were concentrated in low-fertility urban environments; towns & cities were population sinks until the 19th century, just as they are again today (for different reasons). Whereas the rural manors were population pumps.

Simon in London said...

>>Steve Sailer said...
People these days are kind of unaware of the gothic cathedrals that Europeans started putting up around 1100 AD. It's not the kind of thing that Dawkins or Pinker would emphasize, but they are astonishing accomplishments.<<

The French ones are really really amazing, far more impressive than our English cathedrals.

Anonymous said...

"So what accounts for the muslim world's leadership over monastic Europe in science, philosophy etc before the Middle Ages?"

You mean the timespan between the collapse of roman civilization in Europe and the slow rebuilding of a new civilization during the Middle Ages?

I think a much better question would be:

Why did the European comeback take so long?

bleach said...

South Indians aren't smart, there are just a lot of smart people who emigrate from there to the west. But they were/are a drop in the bucket of India's population.

JohnSmith said...

About 20 years ago I stopped into a liquor store in a very black neighborhood in Berkeley. Amongst the Afrocentric garb (age) they were selling were t-shirts with the famous bust of Nefertiti, except here skin was darkened and her features were negrified. I almost laughed out loud.

Anonymous said...

It's mystifying how widespread this "Europe was a primitive backwater until the Renaissance" stuff is.

And what was the Renaissance? Rebirth. Rebirth of what? Classical civilization, Greece and Rome. I wonder what continent / civilizational sphere housed Greece and Rome.

Anonymous said...

1200 AD the English and Germans were running around like the subsaharans do today, while China, Japan and India had advanced civilizations.

Europe was flourishing in 1200. Things had been pretty grim in 900, but that was due to a century of invasions by Norse, Magyars and Saracens; it wasn't the settled state of things as in SS Africa.

Anonymous said...

"...people get as outraged by Transphobia today as they did about slavery 300 years ago."

I take your point, but you mean 200 years ago, not 300.

Anonymous said...

"It's mystifying how widespread this 'Europe was a primitive backwater until the Renaissance' stuff is."

Not mystifying at all since it was Euros who first perpetrated it.

There are three components to this 'prejudice'.

1. Southern European denigration of Northern Europe as the South had a longer, richer history.
According to this view, the south tried to civilize the northern barbarians but the barbarians sacked rome.

2. Christian denigration of northern paganism. As Christian civilization had to justify itself in the north, the idea was that prior to the coming of the Faith, northerners were wild loonies.

3. The rebirth of humanist reason with rediscovery of classic texts and art.
So, the humanists tended to denigrate old cathedrals as 'gothic' though they weren't built by the goths.
Neo-classicism looked down on Gothic cathedrals as ugly and monstrous, lacking in the clarity and beauty of classic forms.

Anonymous said...

Steve, buried in 1493 by Mann is a section where he describes the silver flow from the Americas to China.

As part of that, he is citing Spanish colonial documents from the 1500s(!) complaining about cheap, superior Chinese imports harming the colonial and Spanish economies.

I don't have the book to hand to cite unfortunately.

hardly said...

I was looking through the Peru mathematical olympiad data and it is indeed astonishing. They perform really well for such a small country. And the team is almost entirely composed of people with significant mestizo ancestry. It isnt an Asian team masquerading as something else.
Perhaps there is something to the fact that civilization and IQ go together. I wonder if similar findings will be noted in areas with Aztec or Maya history.

Anonymous said...

"HBD Chick's bottom-up Manorialism theory (selection for responsible peasants by the Lord of the Manor) seems stronger than Clark's fast-breeding aristocrats theory.

...

Whereas the rural manors were population pumps."

Agreed. It's basically the same mechanism as Clark but middle sideways rather than top down.

.

"but 1700 years before France's edifice of rock was erected, the Chinese built an irrigation canal a hundred miles long."

A bit like the Corinth canal then.

The thing is Europe (mostly south) *was* very advanced and then it collapsed not that it was never advanced.

In fact the earliest signs of civilization - script, metal working - were in Europe around the Black Sea long pre-dating Egypt.

.

"My point merely is that before the 1200s or so there wasn't much to expect anything special from Northern europeans."

Northern Europe was behind for a long time because high density agriculture hadn't become viable that far north yet. However Europe as a whole had been well ahead for a long time until the Roman collapse.

.

"I know a lot of Afrocentric types really, really want ancient Egypt to be their "thing," but it ain't going to happen."

IIRC there was a time when some people messed up the Egyptian religion and there was a reconquista type event from Nubia leading to some African dynasties.

.

"Why did the European comeback take so long?"

Constricted money supply.

If economic potential is x but the money supply is only 0.1x then the economy is limited to 0.1x also.

Anonymous said...

You mean the timespan between the collapse of roman civilization in Europe and the slow rebuilding of a new civilization during the Middle Ages?

There was no "slow rebuilding of a new civilization during the Middle Ages" because civilization was never lost.

Why did the European comeback take so long?


What makes you think that was a "comeback" and that it "took so long"?

Anonymous said...

"Chartres Cathedral is far more impressive than anything the Chinese or Japanese were building in 1200 AD. And it's not a one-off, Well's Cathedral was going up in England at the same time."

As golden calves go, it's a beautiful structure.


Cool, we have another vote for the theory that the myth of the "Dark Ages" came about due to Protestant bigotry. Chartres Cathedral is much more than merely a beautiful structure, it's an example of the sort of engineering prowess which made Europeans masters of the world a few centuries later. The Chinese never built anything that sophisticated.

1700 years before France's edifice of rock was erected, the Chinese built an irrigation canal a hundred miles long.


Digging a hole in the ground, even quite a large one, is not actually all that impressive an engineering feat. It takes a lot of labor, but not a lot of intellectual effort.

bleach said...

Clark DOES NOT SAY that aristocrats were fast breeding, in fact he says they barely maintained replacement level fertility thanks to their violent lifestyles. Did either of you blowhards even read his paper?

Anonymous said...

"Peru has been doing well at various math olympiads in recent years. Same for international chess. I doubt these are performances most commentators here would've predicted a mere 10 years ago."


I'd have to know the names of the Peruvians in question to say for sure, but I suspect the individuals in question are either members of Peru's long-standing Japanese minority, or Caucasians.

HandsomeWhiteDevil said...

"I have seen an art exhibition of WWII posters, some of which showed the United Nations just composed of 16 countries, South Africa included."

"United Nations" was how the Western Allies referred to themselves during WWII.

Entirely separate from the nest of Third World socialist tapeworms on the East River...

Anonymous said...

what was the Renaissance?


That's a complicated question with a complicated answer. I suppose it could be boiled down to "The Renaissance was a widespread feeling that things were getting better".

Since the generally accepted time for the start of "the Renaissance" (the end of the 14th century) perfectly coincides with the end of the "Black Death", which killed off nearly half the population of Europe, you can understand why people would feel that way.

The notion that "the Renaissance" was some sort of intellectual rebirth in a previously barbaric part of the world is simply false, as would be obvious to anyone with even a casual knowledge of history.

The first cathedrals were associated with the first universities. Although in the version of "pop history" we've all absorbed by osmosis the priests were wicked, fools, or both, the first universities were religious centers of learning.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University

Many historians state that universities and cathedral schools were a continuation of the interest in learning promoted by monasteries.


The first universities in Europe with a form of corporate/guild structure were the University of Bologna (1088), the University of Paris (c. 1150, later associated with the Sorbonne), the University of Oxford (1167), the University of Modena (1175), the University of Palencia (1208), the University of Cambridge (1209), the University of Salamanca (1218), the University of Montpellier (1220), the University of Padua (1222), the University of Naples Federico II (1224), and the University of Toulouse (1229).

In the broad sweep of European history "the Renaissance" does not stand out as distinct event, it was just a continuation of progress already well under way.

Pat Boyle said...

It could be that you too don't remember the past all that well.

Coon wasn't 'traditional physical anthropology' when I first read 'The Origen of Races' in the mid sixties. He was highly controversial. There were forces trying to kick him out of anthropology.

I took a class in 'development' in the School of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences in the sixties. Korea was indeed a very poor nation at the time but it was ignored as were the Asian Tigers and the later Celtic Tiger. At that time, in that class, I was exposed to the latest thinking on world poverty and nation building. The whole thing was in retrospect a 'Silver Blaze' phenomenon. There were no dogs barking - that was the lesson.

At that time it was thought that coming up from a third world poverty status into a developed status was something that just happened to you when your economy matured enough. You one ever suggested that race had anything to do with it.

I argued with my buddy Calvin about this. I told him that Africa wasn't likely to go anywhere because of the limitations of the people. But Calvin was recognized as the campus Africa expert. He had been to Africa. He has seen Africa developing with his own eyes. What did I know?

Well I knew enough to stay out of Africa. Calvin was last seen heading to Uganda to meet up with Idi Amin. I don't really know what happened to him but I've always suspected that he ended up literally in a stew pot.

That's wasn't the way I wanted to win the argument.

Pat Boyle

Anonymous said...

"1200 AD the English and Germans were running around like the subsaharans do today, while China, Japan and India had advanced civilizations." - No. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/12/101205234308.htm

Anonymous said...

"I said subsaharan africans TODAY." - And you're still wrong.

Anonymous said...

Europe was flourishing in 1200. Things had been pretty grim in 900, but that was due to a century of invasions by Norse, Magyars and Saracens; it wasn't the settled state of things as in SS Africa.

Don't discount Millennium Fever. It gripped Christendom between 900 and 1100 - along with the problems they had with Norse, Magyars, and "Saracens". Saracens properly refers to Muslims during the Crusades, which started in 1096. Perhaps O.P. mean Moors?

Anonymous said...

"I'd have to know the names of the Peruvians in question to say for sure, but I suspect the individuals in question are either members of Peru's long-standing Japanese minority, or Caucasians."

this guy does look honkish

http://www.peruthisweek.com/news-peruvian-resolves-271-year-old-math-puzzle-14051

But others may not.

Bill said...

So what accounts for the muslim world's leadership over monastic Europe in science, philosophy etc before the Middle Ages?

For the most part, there is nothing to explain. The Arabs were not noticeably superior to the Byzantines---Europeans with a monastic tradition. It's only the Western Europeans they were superior to.

The Arabs conquered big chunks of the Byzantine and Persian Empires. Those two empires had lotsa smart guys and accumulated knowledge, much of it in the form of Greek texts. The Baghdad/Abbasid Caliphes thought this stuff made them look good for a while, so they funded Arabic translations of it.

The amazingly durable "Islamic Golden Age of Science" myth got started because Eastern and Western Europe fell out of touch at roughly the same time that Westerners lost most of the accumulated patrimony of Greece.
That happened because the Western Roman Empire collapsed, barbarians went wild, and then Muslims invaded. Plus at least one big plague. It was a shitty few centuries. So, when the Arabic translations (of bog-standard Byzantine texts, but texts unknown to W Europeans) started showing up in Western Europe, the Arabs looked real smart. They weren't, though.

Substantively, the Islamic Golden Age is pretty much a dud. Some speculation on optics. Some improvements in the Astrolabe. Some commentaries on translated Greek texts. Some application of Byzantine engineering techniques with some additional developments. And, once the conquered people were fully incorporated into the Dar-al-Salaam, nothing more.

Anonymous said...

But these kids look native:

http://www.fredoneverything.net/Peru.shtml

Anonymous said...

These Peruvian kids look pretty native.

http://www.imo-official.org/participant_r.aspx?id=21812
http://www.imo-official.org/participant_r.aspx?id=19514
http://www.imo-official.org/participant_r.aspx?id=17581
http://www.imo-official.org/participant_r.aspx?id=17590
http://www.imo-official.org/participant_r.aspx?id=17591
http://www.imo-official.org/participant_r.aspx?id=20963
http://www.imo-official.org/participant_r.aspx?id=19524
http://www.imo-official.org/participant_r.aspx?id=18603
http://www.imo-official.org/participant_r.aspx?id=19523
http://www.imo-official.org/participant_r.aspx?id=21818
http://www.imo-official.org/participant_r.aspx?id=21819
http://www.imo-official.org/participant_r.aspx?id=17593
http://www.imo-official.org/participant_r.aspx?id=20956
http://www.imo-official.org/participant_r.aspx?id=8525
http://www.imo-official.org/participant_r.aspx?id=17607
http://www.imo-official.org/participant_r.aspx?id=17592
http://www.imo-official.org/participant_r.aspx?id=9099
http://www.imo-official.org/participant_r.aspx?id=19518
http://www.imo-official.org/participant_r.aspx?id=8538
http://www.imo-official.org/participant_r.aspx?id=19517
http://www.imo-official.org/participant_r.aspx?id=9200
http://www.imo-official.org/participant_r.aspx?id=18601
http://www.imo-official.org/participant_r.aspx?id=20964
http://www.imo-official.org/participant_r.aspx?id=9100

Anonymous said...

Looking at the mestizos today, no one would expect that their ancestors had fairly advanced civilizations, comparable to many white civilizations of the time.


You're making a number of faulty assumptions. You're assuming that "the mestizos today" are uniformly descended from the the Inca and Mayan tribes. That's rather like assuming that all Europeans are the descendents of the Greeks of the Golden Age.

You're also greatly overstating how "advanced" the Mayan and Inca civilizations were. They were roughly at the level of the Egyptians of 3000 BC. If the Inca's had actually possessed a civilization comparable to the advanced white civilizations of the time (Spain, for instance) then the Inca Empire would not have been conquered by less than two hundred Spaniards.

hardly said...

Well the consensus among the European-derived commenters here seems to be that Europe has been the center of world civilization and achievement since the beginning of recorded history.

And there is no way to effectively argue against it, given that blacks seem to think Ancient egypt was black, the Chinese think they have always been the central kingdom of the world, and the hindus think anything and everything of importance was mentioned in the Vedas 3000 years ago.

Only a concrete example of another culture attaining supremacy will convince you that your people too are fallible. China, Islam and India have already had that phase over the last 200 years, I expect the next 200 will produce the same effect on the West.

Hard to claim yourself a dispassionate scientific observer of HBD if you think HBD means your race is best in everything for ever and ever.

And to one of the commenters above: I looked at the Peruvian olympiad contestants. Nearly all are mestizo, no Caucasians or Japs among them. The descendants of the Inca really are almost intellectually on par with the best in the world.

Avebury Arrowman said...

Stonehenge is about as old as the oldest Pyramids. Not bad going really. There are other stone monuments in the British Isles.

william The Bastard said...

Is this plonker for real?

If you look at the Normans you have a very aggressive technically gifted and warlike posse that dominates Northern France, Britain, Sicily and Greece. This isn't decline. These people also invaded Byzantium reconquered Syria and sacked Jerusalem.

Northern Men. Their cousins very nearly settled North America after heroic sea travels.



Anonymous said...

"Cool, we have another vote for the theory that the myth of the "Dark Ages" came about due to Protestant bigotry."

Total nonsense. The Dark Ages were an economic dark age and self-evidently so.

.

"There was no "slow rebuilding of a new civilization during the Middle Ages" because civilization was never lost."

Yes it was - self-evidently. Just because a few monasteries managed to salvage some of the books of that lost civilization doesn't mean it wasn't lost.

There is no comparison between the Roman level of civilization and the Dark Ages. They're not even remotely in the same league for at least 600 years.

Europe came to life again, trade restarted, towns began to reappear etc hundreds of years later with an economic revival - an economic revival which **funded** the Renaissance of that lost civilization (using the books salvaged and preserved in those monasteries).

The Renaissance was economic.

Anonymous said...

"1200 AD the English and Germans were running around like the subsaharans do today, while China, Japan and India had advanced civilizations."

More true of 200 AD than 1200 AD.

It's plainly correct that northern Europeans were late to the party for climate reasons (same as SSA) but southern Europe kept pace with the other mid-latitude regions till the collapse of Rome (or Byzantium later).

Anonymous said...

Another word in defense of Chiang's "desultory" war effort. The Chinese lost somewhere between 2 million and 3.5 million (estimates vary) soldiers during the war. The large majority of those were in Chiang's army; relatively few in Mao's. They killed something like 400,000 to 500,000 Japanese soldiers (again, mostly by Chiang's army, not Mao's). There were as many Japanese troops facing the Chinese as the Americans, British and Australians. Somewhere from 5 million to 25 million Chinese civilians died. (Estimates again vary widely.) That's not an insignificant effort by Chiang.

The Chinese were tenacious in defense, and the Japanese, despite several big pushes, were unable to make significant headway against them during the period 1941-45. The problem is that the Americans had a fantasy that the grossly under-equipped Chinese ought to mount an offensive against the Japanese, presumably by human wave attacks against machine guns, tanks, artillery and airplanes that the Chinese could not hope to match. This, Chiang steadfastly, albeit with many smiles and promises to the contrary, refused to do. An offensive like that would have been a bloodbath for the Chinese and would have done nothing to shorten the war.

Anonymous said...

"Islam lacks a monastic tradition, which may account in part for its lack of achievement in science and culture since the Middle Ages"

Islam is very big about denying yourself pleasure. It doesn't neet a "monastic tradition" because in Islam, every one is supposed to have the discipline of a monk.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nafs

Btw, would you say that Islamic people had comparable architecture to Europe?

Further, why was Japan "destined" to fight a war against the US in his opinion?

Anonymous said...

Islam is very big about denying yourself pleasure. It doesn't neet a "monastic tradition" because in Islam, every one is supposed to have the discipline of a monk.

Islam has no such thing. It has a very realistic and rational view of human nature, pleasure, and selfishness vs. duty. More so than Christianity, esp. Protestantism. Let's put it this way. In Islam, it is never a crime for a man to act like a man - unlike feminized Christianity.

Anonymous said...

"1200 AD the English and Germans were running around like the subsaharans do today, while China, Japan and India had advanced civilizations." - No. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/12/101205234308.htm"

Permit me a little web formatting:

"Medieval England twice as well off as today’s poorest nations":

" ...medieval England was not only far more prosperous than previously believed, it also actually boasted an average income that would be more than double the average per capita income of the world's poorest nations today.

...including the following (...in 1990 dollars).

Zaire $249
Burundi $479
Niger $514
Central African Republic $536
Comoro Islands $549
Togo $606
Guinea Bissau $617
Guinea $628
Sierra Leone $686
Haiti at $686
Chad $706
Zimbabwe $779
Afghanistan $869


...Britain after the Norman conquest was a literate and numerate society that generated substantial written records, many of which have survived....

...the path to the Industrial Revolution began far earlier than commonly has been understood..."


This is from a U.Warwick press release. The original paper (70 page final report, about half interesting data and plots) is at:

"BRITISH ECONOMIC GROWTH, 1270-1870", Stephen Broadberry, Bruce Campbell, Alexander Klein, Mark Overton, Bas van Leeuwen, 19 August 2010.

The Norman conquest happened in 1066. (I read somewhere that the Catholic Church "bet" on Norman success as being instumental in extracting the West from the dark ages, which may have been one reason for the state of the Norman state.) Clark's work is explicitly mentioned. The final sentence of the conclusion:

" Contrary to the claims of the California School, Western Europe was on a very different path of development from Asia long before the Great Divergence, characterized by high value added, capital intensive and non-human energy intensive production."

Is it still so?

Anonymous said...

The middle ages and even the dark ages were a time of politcal and social regression, but not technical regression. Here's one random guy's random list of the top 10 inventions of the middle ages:

1. The Heavy Plough 5th Century AD
2. Tidal Mills 7th Century AD
3. The Hourglass 9th Century AD
4. Blast Furnace 12th Century AD
5. Liquor 12th Century AD
6. Eyeglasses 13th Century
7. The Mechanical Clock 13th Century AD
8. Spinning Wheel 13th Century AD
9. Quarantine 14th Century AD
10. The Printing Press of Gutenberg 15th Century AD

Blast furnaces (to make iron) first appeared in the West in Switzerland and Sweden between 1100 and 1150 (the 12th century). The Cistercian monks were the likely primary developers; they played the closest thing to technical research institutions at the time. They essentially terra-formed much of Western Europe during the middle ages. Also, "...The Cistercians became the leading iron producers..."

There's an argument to be made that the mechanical clock really changed the West (there are clocks still around made in the 1380s).

Oh course, water mills provided a near-constant source of mechanical power. England was famous for having many more water wheels than anywhere else, or so it is claimed.

The rudder was invented in Europe in the 1100s.

A bit surprising, the horse collar, the horse shoe, and the stirrup also came into use in the dark and middle ages, not long prior. Horse collars were needed for those heavy iron plows and allowed horses to replace oxen. The stirrup was introduced in the West between 500 and 600 (and enabled knights to fight on horseback). The iron, nailed horse shoe was a big deal:

"Around 1000 AD, cast bronze horseshoes with nail holes became common in Europe. ...

...the 13th and 14th centuries brought the widespread manufacturing of iron horseshoes. By the time of the Crusades (1096–1270), horseshoes were widespread...

...due to the value of iron, horseshoes were even accepted in lieu of coin to pay taxes."


Now there's a thought.

Anonymous said...

The Heavy Plough 5th Century AD

What about the moldboard plough?

Anonymous said...

"What about the moldboard plough?"


"To grow crops regularly in less fertile areas, the soil must be turned to bring nutrients to the surface. A major advance for this type of farming was the mouldboard plough...

The mouldboard plough greatly reduced the amount of time needed to prepare a field, and as a consequence, allowed a farmer to work a larger area of land... ...ridges in the soil forms water channels... ...In areas where snow buildup is an issue, this lets farmers plant the soil earlier, as the snow runoff drains away more quickly.

...Mouldboards are known in Britain from the late 6th century on."


So sometime in the 500s in England.

map said...

"So what accounts for the muslim world's leadership over monastic Europe in science, philosophy etc before the Middle Ages?"

The Islamic "Golden Age" was the twilight of the civilizations they conquered. The Islamic achievements were not Islamic at all.

When the supply of educated slaves died off, Islam regressed to the mean.

hardly said...

my perception of the rise and fall of civilizations, in very rough terms:
4000BC: Mesopotamia, Egypt, West India rose
Then 1000 years later add China, 2000BC India declined
500BC Greece/Rome rose, India rose, Persia rose, China steady
500 AD Greece/Rome collapse, India collapsed, Persia collapsed, China steady, Arabs/Islam rose
1500AD Northern Europe rose; China, Islam, Persia began gradual decline, India never recovered

Mesopotamia/Egypt/Persia are technically the same regions where the Islamic Golden Age occurred. So I wouldn't say it is far fetched that the people there were highly capable during Muhammad's time. If the Peruvian descendants of the Inca can do so well in the math olympiad, anything is possible.
Civilization seems to happen in waves. Just because you are on a crest right now doesnt mean a trough wont come sometime.

Anonymous said...

"The Germans and English of 1200 were far more advanced than the subsaharans of today, and more advanced in many respects than the Chinese or Japanese of the same period. Western European architecture and metallurgy at the time were equal or superior to anything being produced anywhere else in the world."

Paul Kennedy in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers pointed out that eleventh-century China’s iron output (to support an army of a million men) was 125,000 tons a year, not surpassed by the UK til around 1830. "To readers brought up to respect "Western science" the most striking feature of Chinese civilisation must be its technological precocity."

"If the Inca's had actually possessed a civilization comparable to the advanced white civilizations of the time (Spain, for instance) then the Inca Empire would not have been conquered by less than two hundred Spaniards."

The Inca Empire was in physical terms easily capable of crushing Cortez, just as 1066 England was capable of crushing William I. There may be cultural factors (disunity above all) which render an otherwise strong people incapable of defeating those of a different, more unified culture despite massive physical superiority. India and the British 1700-1800, UK and the US 1950-2000?

Sean said...

Japan defeated Russia in 1905, then it did remarkably well in WW2. Koreans did very well in the Korean war against US troops ). Vietnam, nuff said.

So, while many in the US might have underestimated east Asians as late as 1950 (and still do according to Mearsheimer) in reality it was not warranted by the historical record. Napoleon knew what was coming.


Indians were not underestimated. Some people like Curzon attibuted the stopping of the German advance in 1914 to the Indian troops that held 30% of the line.

Anonymous said...

"Islam lacks a monastic tradition, which may account in part for its lack of achievement in science and culture since the Middle Ages"


Islam is very big about denying yourself pleasure. It doesn't neet a "monastic tradition" because in Islam, every one is supposed to have the discipline of a monk.


Non sequitur, unless you think that denying yourself pleasure leads directly to achievement in science and culture. The Christian orders of monks provided centers of science and learning.

Anonymous said...

Total nonsense. The Dark Ages were an economic dark age and self-evidently so.


I guess "self evidently" is short hand for "I'm now going to throw around some completely unsubstantiated assertions".

Real historians don't even talk of the so-called "Dark Ages" any more, because when they take a closer look at the time in question it's simply not "dark". As has already been documented here, "Medieval England was twice as well off as today’s poorest nations".


"There was no "slow rebuilding of a new civilization during the Middle Ages" because civilization was never lost."


Yes it was - self-evidently.


Ha ha, you did it again. You're "self-evidently" incapable of carrying on any sort of intelligent discussion.


Europe came to life again, trade restarted


Trade never stopped in Europe. There may have been brief disruptions in some parts of Europe, but that's not the same as Europe being dead. In England international trade was going strong by the 600's AD, just 200 years after the fall of Rome. And England was on the far periphery of Europe.

Anonymous said...

Well the consensus among the European-derived commenters here seems to be that Europe has been the center of world civilization and achievement since the beginning of recorded history.

Well, the Asian commenters here seem to struggle hugely with facts, reading comprehension, and simple logic. I suppose that's why you have to resort to such preposterous strawman arguments.


Hard to claim yourself a dispassionate scientific observer of HBD if you think HBD means your race is best in everything for ever and ever.


Oh, look, another incredibly pathetic strawman argument.

The claim was made that Europe in medieval times was a poor, backwards and barbaric place. That claim has been demonstrated to be false.

Anonymous said...

hardly: If you went back to 1200 AD the English and Germans were running around like the subsaharans do today, while China, Japan and India had advanced civilizations.


This absurd claim has been thoroughly debunked. Rather than admit you were wrong, you fall back to making further nonsensical claims, such as "the consensus among the European-derived commenters here seems to be that Europe has been the center of world civilization and achievement since the beginning of recorded history".

if you have any facts to contribute to the debate, feel free to do so. But stop your petulant whining.

Anonymous said...

Looking at the mestizos today, no one would expect that their ancestors had fairly advanced civilizations, comparable to many white civilizations of the time.


Ummm, some of their ancestors were white and had "advanced civilizations". That's what "mestizo" means - people of mixed white and Amerindian ancestry.

Anonymous said...

These Peruvian kids look pretty native.


If you think those guys looks "native", then I expect you also think Halle Berry and Mariah Carey look "black". They don't look native, they look like mestizos. In other words, they look like people with mixed European and "native American" ancestry, with more of the former than the latter.

Anonymous said...

Of course, this is not the whining of a Christian/Western chauvinist that cannot stomach the fact that his precious "superior" religion/civilization was at best equal (if that) to muslims back in the day.

Chauvinist troll not chauvinist because not white.

Anonymous said...

my perception of the rise and fall of civilizations, in very rough terms:
4000BC: Mesopotamia, Egypt, West India rose
Then 1000 years later add China, 2000BC India declined
500BC Greece/Rome rose, India rose, Persia rose, China steady
500 AD Greece/Rome collapse, India collapsed, Persia collapsed, China steady, Arabs/Islam rose
1500AD Northern Europe rose; China, Islam, Persia began gradual decline, India never recovered


Greece didn't "collapse" until 1500AD.

Northern Europe "rose" in 1000AD. What happened in N Europe in 1500AD on was not equivalent to previous "rises." It culminated with a man on the Moon, not another big building.

Anonymous said...

The excessive inbreeding vs outbreeding of Euros is far more likely to be the reason for recent western superiority.

Wouldn't there be excessive and noticable mestizo accomplishment, as entire populations, everywhere, if this was the case?

And didn't almost all people in the West marry people who lived within walking distance, almost up to today?

More likely that the ice age isolated many small proto-western populations in small pockets where there was significant evolutionary divergence. This resulted in a wider range of characteristics in these populations as a whole than in others that hadn't gone through similar isolation. Probably also did make these populations much more likely to favor outbreeding with other such small populations that they encountered. This diversity might have little relation to western technical supperiority though, green eyes, blue eyes, and gray eyes probably isn't a contributing factor.

Anonymous said...

"The middle ages and even the dark ages were a time of politcal and social regression, but not technical regression. Here's one random guy's random list of the top 10 inventions of the middle ages:

1. The Heavy Plough 5th Century AD

So sometime in the 500s in England."

The heavy plow was the critical element imo and was the foundation for the rest.

The heavy plow allowed higher population density in the north and the other features of civilization require high density first.

However that couldn't happen overnight. The population increase that started with the heavy plow took time and a lot of forest cutting.

.

@hardly

"Civilization seems to happen in waves. Just because you are on a crest right now doesnt mean a trough wont come sometime."

It seems to me like the centers of innovation move northwards over time almost as if civilization has a tendency to reduce drive over time. So you get a repeating pattern of:

civilization
-> innovation
-> stagnation
moving through the latitude bands.

Anonymous said...

The Inca Empire was in physical terms easily capable of crushing Cortez,


I don't know what you mean by that, and I suspect you don't even know yourself. If you mean that "Given their enormous numerical superiority the Inca's should have been able to defeat the handful of Spanish intruders", well, sure. But that just goes back to the the fact that the Inca civilization was not as advanced as the Spanish one.


There may be cultural factors (disunity above all) which render an otherwise strong people incapable of defeating those of a different, more unified culture


There may be all sorts of things in the world at large, but none of those things apply to why the Inca's were conquered by the Spanish. A society which saw itself as the most advanced in the known world came into contact with an aggressive and vastly more advanced people from beyond the borders of the known world. Their collapse was psychological as much as anything else.

The Spanish defeat of the Inca's is well documented, and it was not due to disunity among the Inca's.

Mr. Anon said...

"Anonymous said...

The Great Sphinx of Giza is 4500 years old and has a subsaharan african face."

It is not a european face, certainly - but that doesn't mean it has a sub-saharan african face either. It should also be noted that the Sphinx is a creature. In greek legend, it was a monster. So the sculptors would not necessarily have made it's face look like the typical face of their own people.

In any event, if your trying to push the line that ancient Egyptian civilization was the work of blacks......no sale. That afrocentric bulls**t is not believed by anyone who knows anything.

Mr. Anon said...

"Anonymous said...

The middle ages and even the dark ages were a time of politcal and social regression, but not technical regression."

This sentence makes no sense and betrays a lack of understanding of the history of that era. It implies that the middle ages were more backward than the dark ages, whereas the reverse was the case. The dark ages were a time of social regression, compared to what went before (the classical era) and what came after (the middle ages). The middle ages may appear more backward to us than classical civilization, but that is merely an aesthetic opinion, in many ways, although it was objectively backward in some key areas - art and political organization, for example.

The notion that the middle ages in Europe was some kind of inexplicably dark and backward era in the history of the world is just wrong. Was it backward compared to the present day? Sure. But compared to 5,000 B.C.? Probably not.

You are right about technical progress, however, which continued even during the dark ages, at least in isolated technologies.

Anonymous said...

The House of Wisdom in Baghdad was at the time the leading "scientific" Islamic intellectual center. As noted above it played a crucial role in saving and translating early Greek scientific works and building on them.

So, the Muslims saved Greek scientific knowledge. Saved it from what? From being lost in the destruction of Graeco-Roman civilization. Which was destroyed by whom? The Muslims.

Anonymous said...

Greece didn't fall until 1500 AD.

Europe "rose" (again) 1000AD, not 1500. In 1500AD Europe did something else that requires new word to reflect fact that it culminated in men on the Moon, not another big building.

Anonymous said...

"So, the Muslims saved Greek scientific knowledge. Saved it from what? From being lost in the destruction of Graeco-Roman civilization. Which was destroyed by whom? The Muslims."

You darn fool. Rome was sacked by Germanics, and Byzantine didn't fall until 15th century.

hardly said...

I cannot quantify pure Native american vs varying degrees of Euro admixture based on these photos. Hence mestizo has to serve as a stand-in term for majority-native. But these kids dont look too different from the sort of underclass mexican immigrants you see in the hispanic ghettos of large american cities. And Richard Lynn of IQ fame agrees with me, in his book IQ and the Wealth of Nations (check it out on Google books) he clubs Native Americans and Mestizos together as forming 88% of the population.

It is unlikely that this demonstrable intellectual ability of modern Peruvians comes from Spaniard blood. Spain's performance in the mathematical olympiad is far inferior to Peru's, in spite of its all-Caucasian genetic makeup, and a GDP per capita which is 5 times that of Peru's.

Second point- I don't see why conquest needs to indicate anything about the conquering culture being superior to the defeated one. The Germanics sacked Rome, the Vikings sacked Southern Europe, the Arabs sacked Persia, the Mongols sacked Baghdad and China. Mere superiority in the organized application of violence does not indicate "civilizational superiority" in the sense we are discussing on this board. The Nazi fascination for Norsemen was probably more from the fact that they won their battles, rather than any civilizational achievement. In that sense it is on par with Uzbekistan celebrating Tamerlane, and Mongolia celebrating Genghis Khan. Neither of those were particular high points in the history of civilization. They were just good at conquering other people. Of course, it could be argued that victory is the only thing that matters, but that would lead us into all sorts of contradictions.

And finally, my use of 1200AD was merely a marker for pre-renaissance Europe. I didn't mean it as a hard-and-fast date. Let's take it 3 or 400 years earlier, if you are not willing to accept that 1200's England or Germany was nothing significant in comparison to the magnificence that was China.

How about 900AD? 700AD? 500AD? At some point in the not-very-distant past you must admit that Northwestern Europe was a backwater filled with barbarians. The Runestones used by Norsemen in 600AD are uncouth and ugly in comparison to Egyptian hieroglyphs created 4000 years ago, to say nothing of the exquisite intricacy of Chinese script.

Buddhism, which is fast becoming the philosophy of choice among SWPL intellectuals in NYC and LA, was merely one fragment of the Indian intellectual tradition between 500BC and 500AD. Did the Germans and Norsemen and Angles and Saxons have anything even mildly comparable in that time? (Greece certainly did, but our discussion here seems to be dealing with Northwestern Europe, which many of the commenters seem to think was the Eternal capital of world civilization. My contention is that it was not, and that the rise of NW Europe is a recent event)

The historical evidence seems to indicate that NW Europe rose rapidly over the last 1000 years. Before that the place was just a collection of migratory tribes, much like the Gypsies today. Now, whether this sudden improvement was from the avoidance of inbreeding, or manorialism, or whatever other theories there are out there, is not something I can state with confidence.

Anonymous said...

@hardly
"How about 900AD? 700AD? 500AD?"

I'd say somewhere between 1000AD and 1100AD was the turning point but no doubt a lot would argue different.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Ages#High_Middle_Ages

"The High Middle Ages saw an expansion of population. The estimated population of Europe grew from 35 to 80 million between 1000 and 1347, although the exact causes remain unclear"

(heavy plow imo)

so 1200AD was close

Anonymous said...

"Non sequitur, unless you think that denying yourself pleasure leads directly to achievement in science and culture."

He said Islam lacks a monastic tradition which is factually inaccurate.

Anonymous said...

I cannot quantify pure Native american vs varying degrees of Euro admixture based on these photos. Hence mestizo has to serve as a stand-in term for majority-native

The conclusion stated in the second sentence cannot logically be justified based on what you say in the first one.


Richard Lynn of IQ fame agrees with me, in his book IQ and the Wealth of Nations (check it out on Google books) he clubs Native Americans and Mestizos together as forming 88% of the population.

Agreeing that Native Americans and Mestizos together form 88% of the population is not the same thing as agreeing that Mestizos are the same thing as Native Americans.


this demonstrable intellectual ability of modern Peruvians


What "demonstrable intellectual ability or modern Peruvians"? Peru's national IQ is about 80. The country operates pretty much as you'd expect from such a place. You're carrying on like it's Switzerland.

Spain's performance in the mathematical olympiad is far inferior to Peru's, in spite of its all-Caucasian genetic makeup, and a GDP per capita which is 5 times that of Peru's.


An intelligent person would conclude from this that your much cherished mathematical olympiads are simply a very poor proxy for national ability or national IQ.

Anonymous said...

my use of 1200AD was merely a marker for pre-renaissance Europe. I didn't mean it as a hard-and-fast date. Let's take it 3 or 400 years earlier, if you are not willing to accept that 1200's England or Germany was nothing significant in comparison to the magnificence that was China.


You're making a rather large category error. I'll assume it was unintentional rather than deliberate.

"China" is being used by you as a stand-in term to describe a lot of different people living in different (frequently warring) countries and speaking different languages. An analogy would be to "Europe" and not to "England".

You've already made your lack of knowledge of European history clear. Now you're starting to do the same for Chinese history.

hardly said...

Yeah, you need to stop nitpicking on the small points of my posts and focus on the overall argument. Otherwise you are merely like those hostile reviewers whom Charles Murray predicted would focus on little details to tear apart Wade's book.

The Peruvian IQ mentioned in Lynn's book is broken down as mestizo+native vs Whites. Your requirements for my posts are that I be even more precise in my IQ debates than Richard Lynn himself.

If the mathematical olympiads are a poor proxy for IQ, why do east Asians dominate the upper levels? We know their mathematical IQs are higher than Whites and Jews. And why are there practically no blacks whatsoever?

You can't get out of this by claiming the Koreans cheat, or the Chinese cheat (which seems to be the excuse used by a lot of White HBDers to explain away East Asian Intelligence - otherwise it would threaten their self image).

My contention is that the Olympiads are assessing only quantitative IQ, while "IQ" tests also check for verbal, visuospatial and so many other parameters. Perhaps Peruvians have a differentiated IQ structure within their population, like India's caste system, making mean values less informative as opposed to the same in homogenous European or Chinese societies.

Look at the website and the trend over the last couple of decades for Team China. And then follow up with the trends for Taiwan, Singapore, Japan, Korea, Vietnam. You see occasional achievements by the US and UK, but those need to be taken with the understanding that East Asians comprise the major chunk of the teams from the US and UK.

I think the Olympiad is a magnificent and beautiful example of HBD in action, where the predictions made by HBD scientists are actually borne out by reality. The results are exactly what someone like Rushton might have predicted. It blows my mind that a five-member team from little Macau's 600K East Asians can perform better than similar teams from Nigeria's 170 million blacks and Uganda's 35 million blacks.

===========================================

Secondly - When I say China, I refer primarily to the pan-Chinese Empires. There have been large periods of Chinese history when they were united under one ruler, as opposed to Europe. Several Chinese dynasties have ruled over almost ALL the territory currently occupied by Chinese speakers in the PRC, while NO European dynasty has achieved anything remotely comparable. Europe's political fragmentation is far more comparable to India's.

In spite of the fashionable trend these days being to call Chinese a bunch of different languages, and the Chinese people a bunch of different civilizations, any disinterested observer can easily tell you that the Chinese have a cultural unity that you simply cannot see in India or Europe. And this has been the case for nearly 1000 years. Even the communists are not strong enough to force hundreds of millions of people to speak a foreign language in just fifty years. The Russians couldnt homogenize the USSR, I doubt Mao was responsible for the homogenizing of China.

And I repeat, I am from India, I have no vested interest in promoting Chinese people or bashing Whites. I just tell it like I see it.

Anonymous said...

It blows my mind that a five-member team from little Macau's 600K East Asians can perform better than similar teams from Nigeria's 170 million blacks and Uganda's 35 million blacks.

Why doesn't it blow your mind to see tiny Singapore heavily outperforming the 1200 million black and brown skinned indians in the last Olympiad?

Countries like Peru, Mexico, Thailand, Vietnam, Iran also outperform India. Iran actually won the Olympiad once, India has never even come close.

Anonymous said...

Nice try. But that is implied in my comment.

How is India's sorry record in the Math Olympiad implied in your comment about the abysmal record of a couple african countries? All it implied to me was that you were trying to endear yourself to the HBD crowd after annoying them with your northern euro bashing.

And you are doing the same again now by remarking on the ugliness of the other race that every HBDer loves to pile on: australian aborigines. You could have compared the ugliness of indians to that of persians instead...

After all if you are openminded enough to be OK with the intellectual inferiority of indians compared to east asians, whites, peruvians and others you should be OK with indian inferiority in the superficial looks department.

hardly said...

It was implied in the sense that if I thought the olympiad was a proxy for intellectual ability, then India's poor performance in comparison to little countries like Singapore or Taiwan or Korea (which I did mention in my previous comment) is grounds to think that the Indian population may lack mathematical IQ in the same high range as East Asian countries. But it is still better than the blacks of Africa.

And your second comment is clearly a poorly-thought out attempt to get under my skin. India is NOT ranked quite as low in attractiveness as it is on IQ. Indian men are less attractive than Persians, but Indian women are arguably more attractive, less hairy and have finer features than Persian women. Not to mention Indian women have won the third highest number of Miss World contests after Venezuela and the UK. Heck even Miss America is an Indian, though I don't find her particularly attractive.

So your contention is incorrect. At the maximum you might say that Indian men aren't as attractive as persian men. But we all know the distribution of attractiveness, with black women and Chinese men consistently rated the least attractive (because Aborigines arent studied much), and this pattern borne out by real world data of who doesnt get wives/husbands/hookups in the sexual marketplace.

And let me admit here that I myself have high IQ but below average looks. India's overall genetic makeup makes no difference to me personally. Would I prefer to have been born hotter and dumber? Yes, for sure. But I can't change what I've been given to work with.

Finally, stop boiling with resentment that your precious White race is not accepted as being tops at everything. This isn't high school, learn to live with other people's success.