We should have a list of first names which immigrants must use for their children under aged 5 or as yet unborn. France had someting like this for everybody, at one time.
That was a running gag at an old workplace. A particular manager would tell us to do something and after it failed to produce results for a reasonable time his solution was always to tell us to do the same thing with different words. His underlings would paraphrase this as [whatever the failed tactic was] HARDER.
Harder means you load up on repression. They don't try repression. Sometimes, integration only works when you combine it with repression and you target the right target.
What's the difference between French assimilation and British multiculturalism? The basic idea is the same, that the historic majority must not see nationhood in terms of a common culture like that of Japan, but in terms of Our Shared Values. If we cease to define ourselves in terms of understatement, soaring cathedrals and feeding the ducks, new arrivals will not define themselves in terms of aggressive speech, loathing tall buildings and eating the ducks. They will swiftly and eagerly assimilate to Our Shared Values.
I believe free expression has the advantage here. It is useful to know if parents expect their children to integrate or not. It is better not to force this information into hiding.
I agree. Indians seem pretty ethnocentric and a lot of first and second generation still marry other Indians. I have never met someone with two Indian parents (even if both are born here) with an Euro name, and when one parent is white they seem to split the difference on that front. There is still a ton of pressure to only marry other Indians.
In contrast I meet tons of Asian and Latino kids with very traditional American names. One of the ladies that cleans my house is from Central America and doesn’t speak a lick of English but she named her son Kevin.
Lynn and Vanhanen have India at average IQ 82, but I don't believe that, or maybe that number was reduced by then-endemic parasitic infestations. I would believe that in the case of the Roma, but that is a specific subpopulation.
The country as a whole is making big progress recently. They only started liberalizing the Licence Raj in 1991, but averaged around 6 per cent economic growth since then, and now the compounding is becoming really visible. They just electrified almost the entire railway network (almost 33 000 kms of rail) in just a few years, and they are testing their Gaganyaan human-rated spaceship right now - I wonder if it performs better than Boeing's?
I don't think you can do this with an average IQ of 82, even with a large population. 92 is much more plausible.
It could well be that India's genetic potential is higher than what was achieved under it's pretty awful culture. Like I said, MAGA immigrants to India would likely turn into egalitarian progressives.
I live next door to Poland and the difference between late-stage Communist Poland in the late 1980s (shops empty, cities shabby, drunkards lying everywhere) vs. today is just incredible.
We used to have a joke that if Communism triumphed in the Sahara, it would result in a shortage of sand soon.
The Soviet Union-inspired centrally managed economies were/are just awful anywhere they have been tried, including India.
IDK what government services you encountered, but Polish government is really good at building stuff. Railways, public buildings, multi-lane highways. They were able to get the usual NIMBY lobby under control, the environmental movement is nowhere nearly as strong as in German-speaking countries, and thus whatever takes 10 years in Germany will take 2 in Poland.
They also have a decent military.
I heard complaints about stuff such as "issuance of passports", though, and Czech railway managers complained about unwilingness of Polish authorities to co-operate when upgrading shared tracks (we have two railway lines that cross into Polish territory for a few km, and they are run under a special treaty regime. And given that no Polish citizens use them, Warsaw DGAF about their condition.)
Is the Czech before-Communism/after-Communism comparison as stark as in Poland? If not, why not? Czechs less defeated by Communism? Or less energized by liberty? Both?
How about Hungary and Slovenia? I think there was more destruction in those than in Czechia but less than in Poland. So maybe pre-/post-Communism differential was in between as well?
Slovenia is something completely different. Slovenia was a part of Yugoslavia that was part of Austria before WW1 (Croatia was part of Hungary). You probably meant Slovakia - next to Czechia but a part of Hungary before WW1 (Czechia was part of Austria).
Anyway, Czechia was a much more industrialized society than Poland, even before WW1.
Indians are great at making people from other cultures over-estimate them. The two items you mention sound impressive but experience suggests the details would be revealing. Anyway, you absolutely can install a bunch of tech invented long ago by other people on a short timeline if you have enough absolutely numbers of non-retarded people. There's a billion people in India.
if we assume US IQ average 105 India's average IQ of 82 puts them at about 1.5 standard Deviations below us. That's about 6.7% of 1.46 Billion people in India with the American average or greater (~97 Million). America's population is ~320 Million so we have about 160 million people of above average IQ. it's more but not drastically more.
> Lynn and Vanhanen have India at average IQ 82, but I don't believe that <
Lynn and Vanhanen's work was super-important. The existence of these wide HBD variances is the most critical information to understanding the world.
But that said, their actual numbers are like a "snapshot" of various societies at various levels of development. This is *not independent* of, but nonetheless *not the same* as actual genetic potential of the people.
As Steve mentions the conditions in India--absolute nutritional stunting, disease burden, poverty levels and crappy commitment to decent universal education--mean that these numbers are quite reduced from both
a) what Indians would achieve in conditions of the modern West (i.e. comparative genetic potential)
and
b) what Indians can achieve in India--in a society built by Indians themselves--when Indians finally get their act together
> I don't think you can do this with an average IQ of 82, even with a large population. 92 is much more plausible. <
My guess would be in-between.
But the absolutely critical thing to understand about Indians is that there is *no* "Indian people" the way there are "Englishmen" or "Germans" or "Swedes".
With Europeans there were really only two separate ethnic groups--the nation's people and Jews. Normal people had normal social classes. But even amongst those there was considerable gene flow. You have genetic lineages that go from "cute peasant girl" through the gentry and nobility to royalty in a few hundred years. And vice versa.
In India you have literally tens of thousands of essentially separate breeding populations for a couple thousand years. At one end you have Brahmin groups that have had a literate tradition--like rabbinic Judaism--and selection for it, for eons and at the other end forest tribals barely a notch above Adaman Islanders. (It is the most diverse nation on the planet--aside from modern "y'all come on down!" America.)
When the Chicoms get to the moon in the next decade or so, it will be because the Han Chinese are a smart "moon-capable" people and there are a billion plus of them. If Indians get to the moon--sometime in the later 21st century after I'm long dead and gone--it will because there is a small layer of sufficiently capable upcaste Indians sufficient to push this through when the government deemed it a priority.
A super simple binary American model of India would be imagine 350 million whites and 1.1 billion blacks. Not quite South Africa, but not America either. A more advanced four-bean model would be something like 30m Jews, 170m whites, 850m Mexicans, 350m blacks. Indians can quibble about the numbers, but that's the rough picture. A lot of talent, but a whole lot of mediocrity. Probably takes something like 50-100 eigenvectors to craft a decently accurate population model of India. To nail actual India you probably a few thousand.
Yes, India is a subcontinent like Europe, not a country like France. Indian independence was rushed and bungled in so many ways. They would have been much better off as some kind of a confederacy or commonwealth of separate nations.
Indians are the closest "incoming!" we have to Jews--solid achievement, but separateness/hostility and feelings of superiority to the WhiteBread normies. It's a toxic brew.
As my best friend--Indian guy from grad school--put it: "Indians come here, live in million dollar houses and think they're oppressed."
The lone positive is it has no generational staying power. Indians are the most ethno-centric and least out-marrying of the Asian immigrant groups, but still out-marry at 50%. The 2nd generation kids think of themselves as "Indian", may want their Indian food and fancy wedding sari ... but on the whole they are just American kids. (Ex. Usha Vance.) It's hard to think there are going to be many serious 3rd gen rah-rah "Hindus" here.
Judaism was built/evolved to be a tribal identity cult--Jews worshipping their "chosen people" Jewishness--that kept them separate from the Christian host population. We've seen 2nd, 3rd, and now even 4th and 5th generation Jews rabidly screeching against and tearing down "white bread" America.
But Hinduism didn't evolve as an outgroup strategy. It's essentially built to support the feudal order in India, and outside of India has little staying power.
The main thing necessary to deal with Indians is the same, obvious, thing we need in general ... cut off the inflow. Do that and a few generations in they'll be gone.
Stop the immivasion now and avoid downloading Steve's "world's most important graph" and while we won't be America--and probably won't be competitive with China--we could still be a decent place for our posterity to live.
>Indians are the closest "incoming!" we have to Jews--solid achievement, but separateness/hostility and feelings of superiority to the WhiteBread normies.
The WhiteBread, no-college normies are starting to remind me of Jews, in that it's absolutely verboten to suggest they may have done anything to bring the hostility upon themselves.
Well at least you're honest about the effects of cutting off the inflow of elite immigration to this country. It likely means that we forfeit any chance of being competitive vis-a-vis China with respect to the commanding heights of the 21st century. But at least large swathes of America would revert back to what they were prior to 1965 or something.
However, I'm not nearly as sanguine as you are that America would be a decent place for its posterity to live in if we only got rid of mean non-whites like Vivek! Unlike China, which has broad strengths in numerous areas of hardware and high tech manufacturing, the American economy has basically gone all-in on AI and if the Chinese manage to pop that bubble, I'm guessing the effects for many heritage Americans probably wouldn't be all that great. And American AI is only a "bubble" in large part due to the outsized contributions of ethnic Indians and Chinese, as any picture of an X hackathon suggests or as many have noted with respect to Meta's recent Superintelligence hires.
The global scientific, technological and economic landscape has shifted significantly over the past 10-15 years or so, and I can't help but notice that white American well-being these days is disproportionately based on the AI "bubble" which is itself the disproportionate fruit of Asian Americans, be it ethnic Indians and Chinese who work in frontier American AI labs or ethnic Chinese in Taiwan powering advanced chip manufacturing in the US and consequently the entire AI sector.
Maybe in the late 1990s and early 2000s it was still possible to suggest that America could return to being a paradise if only those mean non-whites left heritage Americans alone. In the year 2025 however, I'm no longer sure that thesis is empirically plausible.
Well indians are creative an ambitious. The East Asians achieve less with respect to their technical skill. The AI revolution is mostly of western origin. For PC reasons the universities cannot discriminate East Asians enough, since the traditional measures somewhat fail to show their true potential with respect to actual achievement e.g they are technically virtuous but achieve less than their test result suggest. But this maybe nonsense since IQ is an universal measure of everything about intelligence without any sublities.
What comes to empire building that has already lost for the West. In EU the system as we know it now does not survive next election cycle. There are no good options left thanks to mass immigration. This is the most important point I want to make. There are no good options for the west anymore. The AI is a bubble. The China war is more likely than not. However, here in Europe e.g perirephy we care about Russian threat more. The rearming in EU alone will rise the tax burden more than 20 percent in top of the debt we use for rearming. The taxes and regulations made us left out of the AI train, which is a bubble, but still. In Europe system cannot survive for long, period. When men started to speak about peace plans in Ukraine Europeans were left out of the room like women and children.
Indian ceos of USA companies are moving jobs to India. Maybe at a certain point between USA jobs moved to India and India advancing economically, there won't be as many Indians moving to the US.
Trivial observation--I recently read Middlemarch, and Mr. Brooke (one of the characters) is constantly saying 'up to a point', or 'up to a certain point', which made me wonder if Waugh's usage in Scoop was a reference to George Eliot. However, Waugh thought Eliot to be a complete waste of time, so it's not likely that he stole the phrase from her. The phrase apparently was in common usage amongst newspaper men of the time, but whether it preceded Waugh's use or followed it is unclear.
I read it a few years ago, having put it off for several decades, even though I was an English major as an undergrad (I didn't get assigned it then). It's often in the top 10 -- sometimes even right at the top -- of those 'Greatest Novels Evah! lists, but although I found it Very Good, I'm not sure it's 'Great'. Too much virtuous empathizing for me, maybe.
I'm currently reading and re-reading all of Eliot's novels, and I would put Middlemarch at the top of the list (I haven't finished Daniel Deronda yet, but it's not as good as Middlemarch). Eliot was a committed intellectual type, and her novels have some appeal for me because I'm a university professor who teaches moral, legal, and political philosophy, which she considered to be her specialty. So, I enjoy her references to the intellectual controversies of the time. Like other great Victorian novelists, her most interesting characters were not the main ones, but the supporting cast, and she does these well. I also like that, on the one hand, her main characters are often not particularly likeable, and, on the other, her 'villains' are quite often not particularly malicious or one-dimensional. But you are correct about her virtuous empathizing, which is what made it obvious to many at the time that George Eliot was not a male writer.
The barely concealed hatred for rank and file White conservatives by right wing intellectuals never ceases to amaze me. They just can’t seem to stop themselves from insulting them by calling them NASCAR watching, burger eating, gun toting MAGA rednecks. This applies to everyone from Bill Krystal to Ross Douthat and, unfortunately, our esteemed host. However, I never see them criticizing the even more downmarket Latinos I see everywhere. I hope some of them live to see the awesome America that will surely be built once all the awful White MAGA people are gone.
We in the U.S. have spent the past 50 years making any negative observations about people of other races and cultures so unacceptable that criticizing the lower classes of white Americans is all that’s left for satisfying the innate human need to feel superior to someone else. You can giggle at rude comments about white rubes, but nothing will shut down your social acceptability and career prospects faster than openly showing disdain for ghetto culture or the guys hanging out in the Home Depot parking lot. I myself am no fan of many aspects of redneck culture, but the hypocrisy is stunning.
>The barely concealed hatred for rank and file White conservatives by right wing intellectuals never ceases to amaze me. They just can’t seem to stop themselves from insulting them by calling them NASCAR watching, burger eating, gun toting MAGA rednecks. This applies to everyone from Bill Krystal to Ross Douthat and, unfortunately, our esteemed host.
Don't forget Richard Spencer and Nick Fuentes. But let me guess, James, everyone else but rank and file White conservatives are the problem, right?
The Hanania acolyte has entered the chat. I never said that everyone but White conservatives are the problem, and calling Fuentes and Spencer intellectuals is ridiculous. What I’m saying is that Sailer, like other, more mainstream pundits, has always shown some disdain for White southerners (I’ve read his line “You don’t want them as your neighbors but you do want them in your foxhole” a lot over the years). He finally has something to say about the Indian takeover, a topic he has avoided despite its importance even though he has written about in the past, and while it was funny, I felt that equating MAGA with the ultranationalist, lower IQ Indians he says we are getting was unnecessary.
I saw your other post that compared lower class Whites to Jews in that neither group can be criticized. It was the funniest thing I’ve read all day. Also, Richard is gay.
Why do idiots like you who’ve never set foot in India think you understand the country? You want MAGA immigrants to India naming their kids American style? No one would bat an eye. No wonder low IQ fools like you tarnish your country’s reputation.
My favorite, probably apocryphal story about India is the Nehru govt polling the people's attitude to independence. They kept hearing "Who are the British?"
> In the very long run, India won’t be such a dump anymore and emigration of Indians to America will tail off.
But when?
2125? 2225? <
LOL. You really are a wild-eyed optimist Steve.
Life is actually ridiculously comfortable for successful upcaste Indians. Nice marble floored houses, servants at beck and call. Yet the top graduates still on average try and head to the US for a life in UMC suburbia and fetching their own stuff at Costco.
For another 1.3 billion--that's *billion* with nine zeros--Indians, life in the US even doing working class labor would be a huge upgrade. That's why we've got border hopping, California licensed, truck driving Sikh illegals murdering Americans spectacularly every month on our highways.
> In the very long run, India won’t be such a dump anymore and emigration of Indians to America will tail off.
But when?
2125? 2225?
The key thing is to prevent America and India from converging by letting the quality of life in America not stay way ahead of India. <
Steve, this is simply a great post. While focused on "the Indian question"--our new replacement Jews--you are hitting on the critical big broad issues that bedevil America/the West today.
With your end wrap, you strip naked the core logic of these "nation of immigrants" genocidal loons:
"Nation of immigrants" == "We'll keep flooding your nation with foreigners till it is so crowded, unpleasant and shitty that even people from Haiti and Niger don't want to come."
It would have been interesting to get Waugh’s thoughts on India. Brits of his generation seemed pretty bored with the Subcontinent, which only figures in his stories as a place of employment for middling government functionaries like his maternal uncles, so he travelled instead in North Africa and the Amazon, and seems only to have stopped in coastal ports like Goa and Ceylon.
It’s forgotten now, but one of the many quixotic causes over which Winston Churchill made himself so fantastically unpopular in the 1930s was his fanatical opposition to Indian independence, which (unlike Ireland) was not a subject which commanded any popular domestic support.
And like Douglas Murray, he'd actually BEAN to India, with the Army, so he should have known it wasn't worth the trouble. OTOH, once India went, the rest were sure to follow, and they did.
I've been amazed by the hysterical anti-India bashing on X ever since Vivek sent out that tweet last December lambasting native born white American culture. Now it seems like we're endlessly inundated with angry white guys on X telling us how the average IQ of India is supposedly in the mid 70s to low 80s. I'm not an expert on genetics by any means, but I was always under the impression that India was highly racially heterogenous with significant differences in intelligence by caste. Thus, adopting a mental model where the average IQ of India is at best in the low 80s with some fixed standard deviation fails to account for the obviously high achievements of diaspora South Asians.
There's plenty of evidence that we've gotten very high end immigration from India in this country, as Jason Richwine noted back in 2009. Richwine for instance estimates that Indian American IQ is roughly 112 relative to the white normed average of 100, comparable to that of Ashkenazi Jews. Even if the underlying racial dynamics of India are messy and complicated, it seems obvious that the disproportionate success of South Asian Americans belies any claim that that immigrant group is somehow low in average IQ.
For what it's worth, I found neither Vivek's tweet last December nor his most recent one to be all that objectionable. I mean didn't Tiger Mother basically write an entire book on lax western parenting and cultural values? I don't recall Amy Chua getting nearly the same heat back then that Vivek is getting now, although admittedly the political environment during the second Trump administration is rather different than the zeitgeist during the early 2010s.
As for Vivek's claim that America is a creedal nation, personally I'm highly sympathetic to the alternative perspective espoused by the late Samuel Huntington, who articulated in his book Who Are We the distinction between a nation united by ethnicity and culture and a nation-state as a political entity governing a large group of individuals.
I've always been struck by the claim made in Who Are We and other books like Alien Nation by Peter Brimelow that if immigration had completely ceased after 1790 that the American population even as recently as 1990 would've been around half of its actual size at that time. A sizable portion of white Americans can in fact trace their heritage back to the original colonial stock.
That being said, I think many people missed the point of Vivek's tweet. He followed up his initial comment by clarifying that he wasn't advocating for unfettered immigration, but rather was arguing against the notion of adopting a caste system to rank Americans based on their ethnic heritage. While we certainly can be selective about whom we let become American citizens, the idea of a heritage citizen above and beyond any other American is ultimately counterproductive. What would be the end goal of such a distinction? Would it be to create different rights based on the grade of American one was deemed to be?
Ultimately, as Vivek argued and as I also believe, we can recognize America's ethnic history and heritage without becoming captive to it. Isn't it deeply ironic that the same MAGA that shits all over India and Indians essentially wants some sort of quasi-caste system in this country for ranking Americans?
"Recent Indian immigrants tend to be ethnocentric Hindu Nationalists who see little reason to assimilate or even to try hard to pretend to admire their host countries."
I guess Vivek's great sin was to suggest that in order to better compete against China in the geopolitical contest over the commanding heights of the 21st century, Americans should embrace a more intellectual culture, and also that although we should be selective about whom we let in to this country, having a caste system for ranking Americans probably isn't a great idea. Since many have noted that South Asian Americans are now basically the new Jews, I guess we need native born white American oppositional culture to push back at every opportunity against the highly successful cultural traits of our new overlords haha.
VR could be afraid the urge to deport will extend to legal immigrants. Many of us look at the UK's govt-enabled problems with Pakistanis and ours with a few Somalis and worry.
Singapore seems to be doing well being run by Han supremacists. Israel does well being run by Jewish supremacists. America did quite well all the way into the 1990s basically being run by Anglo-Americans who, if not overtly supremacist, clearly thought of the place as "their" country. The Hindu cognitive elite can stay in India and make their own country great. Maybe figure out how to clean up the sacred Ganges.
Only an uneducated idiot would think Singapore is run by Han supremacists. Singapore has gone out of its way to be multicultural, which is the reason for its success.
There's only ever room for one sheriff in town. Singapore is run by its 75% Han majority who have no intention of letting their Malay or Hindu minorities wag the dog. Refugees are not allowed, drug dealers are subject to execution, corporal punishment is still practiced, and immigrants must demonstrate self-sufficiency or they are evicted.
Singapore is multicultural like the Arab monarchies are multicultural.
The other 25% of the minorities also have no intention of letting the Han majority wag the dog. Which is why the Han majority’s population share remains frozen since its independence, resulting in the country remaining multicultural since its inception.
I agree that the reaction to what Vivek said last year was overblown, a lot of White people do need to try harder. Anecdotally I see a lot of White kids major in useless subjects in college like communication and music, rather than the stem majors that Asians go for. I’ve worked in IT for a long time and Indian tech workers aren’t as bad as people say, while a lot of White tech workers can be arrogant, lazy, and entitled, particularly around work/life balance and constant resistance to management. I think these problems are becoming acute because a lot of Whites still don’t realize they’re now competing with people from all over the world for everything in their own country and they need to step it up or risk being left behind. But the objection to Vivek is that he and people like him want to take over and I do not belive they will follow a colorblind, meritocratic system. I believe they are ethnic chauvinists who will favor their own once in power, and that his call for a creedal nation is a self-serving lie. The real issue is this was a country built by Whites for Whites but it has been given away to foreigners, and some Whites are finally waking up to the disaster we’ve created for ourselves.
Fabian socialism among South Asian immigrants? Interesting. It was strong in my chosen hometown of Ruskin, Florida. I lived on the former college campus (the third that burned down) of Ruskin College (Hearts, Hands, Minds), in a town based on Ruskin's philosophy. What that meant is as mysterious now as it was then.
Had it worked, it would work well now. Classical learning, hard labor, no fees. Shakespeare performed in old turpentine camps. Desdimona on the stumps, wearing wool undergarments in the Florida summer to avoid fleas or being killed by yellow fever.
I now live in a county with the fastest growing increase of Brahmin Indians in the nation. In five years, they have gone from less than 2% of the population to more than 16.5%. The displacement is phenomenal. If they were less tribal, more good would come of it. The public schools, flooded with Brahmin Indians, are now the best in the state. But the locals are both left behind and generally mocked. Medical care, displaced entirely by Brahmin doctors, is in some small ways technically better, but it is worse in terms of relationships and culture, which is enormously important.
I had an upper-class, Mexican-trained doctor from Portugal for 25 years in Atlanta, and we understood each other. Thanks, Obamacare, for not letting me have him anymore.
You can't radically shift a culture this way. I like a lot of these people. But it is so expensive now that the children of the farmers who were here for generations can't even buy a mobile home near their relatives; zoning has been changed to accommidate the wealthy in ways that have dramatically diminished prior extended family compounds, and we will soon turn from red to blue electorially. The newcomers live severely conservatively among themselves but take advantage of their minority status and all vote blue.
They need to make the effort to assimilate. But they'll just take over. They are so class-bound that the illegal Mexicans are their slaves now, and so they win, we lose. Everything.
We should have a list of first names which immigrants must use for their children under aged 5 or as yet unborn. France had someting like this for everybody, at one time.
We British tried multi-culturalism and it didn’t work, France tried integration and it didn’t work. Lesson?
France didn't try integration hard
• 30% aliens
• racial classification forbidden by law
• mandatory French language and French culture
What part of integration did they miss?
That it doesn't work that way. Large parts of French cities are no-go areas for the police.
So you're saying the missing ingredient for integration was
• ruthless enforcement of conformity by armed and chauvinist police
?
Plus a sufficient degree of islamophobia, maybe
Or have you recently seen democracy and liberal rule of law flourishing in Iraq and Afganistan? Or Iran and Pakistan, for that matter?
That was a running gag at an old workplace. A particular manager would tell us to do something and after it failed to produce results for a reasonable time his solution was always to tell us to do the same thing with different words. His underlings would paraphrase this as [whatever the failed tactic was] HARDER.
It was an an occasionally funny gag.
Harder means you load up on repression. They don't try repression. Sometimes, integration only works when you combine it with repression and you target the right target.
What's the difference between French assimilation and British multiculturalism? The basic idea is the same, that the historic majority must not see nationhood in terms of a common culture like that of Japan, but in terms of Our Shared Values. If we cease to define ourselves in terms of understatement, soaring cathedrals and feeding the ducks, new arrivals will not define themselves in terms of aggressive speech, loathing tall buildings and eating the ducks. They will swiftly and eagerly assimilate to Our Shared Values.
Or do we share them? And will they?
I believe free expression has the advantage here. It is useful to know if parents expect their children to integrate or not. It is better not to force this information into hiding.
I agree. Indians seem pretty ethnocentric and a lot of first and second generation still marry other Indians. I have never met someone with two Indian parents (even if both are born here) with an Euro name, and when one parent is white they seem to split the difference on that front. There is still a ton of pressure to only marry other Indians.
In contrast I meet tons of Asian and Latino kids with very traditional American names. One of the ladies that cleans my house is from Central America and doesn’t speak a lick of English but she named her son Kevin.
White trash neo-Confederates like yourself are actually the biggest parasites in America.
I am sorry you are this way. Get well soon.
How do you psychopaths feign normal human behavior so easily?
It’s because they’re psychopaths.
In other words, shut up, we said.
Let’s be like France 😆
Lynn and Vanhanen have India at average IQ 82, but I don't believe that, or maybe that number was reduced by then-endemic parasitic infestations. I would believe that in the case of the Roma, but that is a specific subpopulation.
The country as a whole is making big progress recently. They only started liberalizing the Licence Raj in 1991, but averaged around 6 per cent economic growth since then, and now the compounding is becoming really visible. They just electrified almost the entire railway network (almost 33 000 kms of rail) in just a few years, and they are testing their Gaganyaan human-rated spaceship right now - I wonder if it performs better than Boeing's?
I don't think you can do this with an average IQ of 82, even with a large population. 92 is much more plausible.
It could well be that India's genetic potential is higher than what was achieved under it's pretty awful culture. Like I said, MAGA immigrants to India would likely turn into egalitarian progressives.
Culture/system matters a lot.
I live next door to Poland and the difference between late-stage Communist Poland in the late 1980s (shops empty, cities shabby, drunkards lying everywhere) vs. today is just incredible.
We used to have a joke that if Communism triumphed in the Sahara, it would result in a shortage of sand soon.
The Soviet Union-inspired centrally managed economies were/are just awful anywhere they have been tried, including India.
2025 Poland seems to be terrific at capitalism and lousy at government service jobs.
"lousy at government service jobs."
IDK what government services you encountered, but Polish government is really good at building stuff. Railways, public buildings, multi-lane highways. They were able to get the usual NIMBY lobby under control, the environmental movement is nowhere nearly as strong as in German-speaking countries, and thus whatever takes 10 years in Germany will take 2 in Poland.
They also have a decent military.
I heard complaints about stuff such as "issuance of passports", though, and Czech railway managers complained about unwilingness of Polish authorities to co-operate when upgrading shared tracks (we have two railway lines that cross into Polish territory for a few km, and they are run under a special treaty regime. And given that no Polish citizens use them, Warsaw DGAF about their condition.)
Is the Czech before-Communism/after-Communism comparison as stark as in Poland? If not, why not? Czechs less defeated by Communism? Or less energized by liberty? Both?
No, the contrast in CZ wasn't that big, for two reasons:
a. Czech lands were highly industrialized before WWII, so there was a lot of material wealth inherited by the Communist regime.
b. Poland was very thoroughly destroyed by the war and the Holocaust, plus the Nazis deliberately targeted educated Poles for extermination.
How about Hungary and Slovenia? I think there was more destruction in those than in Czechia but less than in Poland. So maybe pre-/post-Communism differential was in between as well?
Slovenia is something completely different. Slovenia was a part of Yugoslavia that was part of Austria before WW1 (Croatia was part of Hungary). You probably meant Slovakia - next to Czechia but a part of Hungary before WW1 (Czechia was part of Austria).
Anyway, Czechia was a much more industrialized society than Poland, even before WW1.
Don't the Soviets get any credit for exterminating educated Poles, e.g., at Katyn?
compared to the Germans, the effect was miniscule
Indians are great at making people from other cultures over-estimate them. The two items you mention sound impressive but experience suggests the details would be revealing. Anyway, you absolutely can install a bunch of tech invented long ago by other people on a short timeline if you have enough absolutely numbers of non-retarded people. There's a billion people in India.
if we assume US IQ average 105 India's average IQ of 82 puts them at about 1.5 standard Deviations below us. That's about 6.7% of 1.46 Billion people in India with the American average or greater (~97 Million). America's population is ~320 Million so we have about 160 million people of above average IQ. it's more but not drastically more.
Maybe they have a shallow curve
> Lynn and Vanhanen have India at average IQ 82, but I don't believe that <
Lynn and Vanhanen's work was super-important. The existence of these wide HBD variances is the most critical information to understanding the world.
But that said, their actual numbers are like a "snapshot" of various societies at various levels of development. This is *not independent* of, but nonetheless *not the same* as actual genetic potential of the people.
As Steve mentions the conditions in India--absolute nutritional stunting, disease burden, poverty levels and crappy commitment to decent universal education--mean that these numbers are quite reduced from both
a) what Indians would achieve in conditions of the modern West (i.e. comparative genetic potential)
and
b) what Indians can achieve in India--in a society built by Indians themselves--when Indians finally get their act together
> I don't think you can do this with an average IQ of 82, even with a large population. 92 is much more plausible. <
My guess would be in-between.
But the absolutely critical thing to understand about Indians is that there is *no* "Indian people" the way there are "Englishmen" or "Germans" or "Swedes".
With Europeans there were really only two separate ethnic groups--the nation's people and Jews. Normal people had normal social classes. But even amongst those there was considerable gene flow. You have genetic lineages that go from "cute peasant girl" through the gentry and nobility to royalty in a few hundred years. And vice versa.
In India you have literally tens of thousands of essentially separate breeding populations for a couple thousand years. At one end you have Brahmin groups that have had a literate tradition--like rabbinic Judaism--and selection for it, for eons and at the other end forest tribals barely a notch above Adaman Islanders. (It is the most diverse nation on the planet--aside from modern "y'all come on down!" America.)
When the Chicoms get to the moon in the next decade or so, it will be because the Han Chinese are a smart "moon-capable" people and there are a billion plus of them. If Indians get to the moon--sometime in the later 21st century after I'm long dead and gone--it will because there is a small layer of sufficiently capable upcaste Indians sufficient to push this through when the government deemed it a priority.
A super simple binary American model of India would be imagine 350 million whites and 1.1 billion blacks. Not quite South Africa, but not America either. A more advanced four-bean model would be something like 30m Jews, 170m whites, 850m Mexicans, 350m blacks. Indians can quibble about the numbers, but that's the rough picture. A lot of talent, but a whole lot of mediocrity. Probably takes something like 50-100 eigenvectors to craft a decently accurate population model of India. To nail actual India you probably a few thousand.
Yes, India is a subcontinent like Europe, not a country like France. Indian independence was rushed and bungled in so many ways. They would have been much better off as some kind of a confederacy or commonwealth of separate nations.
“Up to a point, Lord Copper” is a family expression trotted out for howlers
Indians are the closest "incoming!" we have to Jews--solid achievement, but separateness/hostility and feelings of superiority to the WhiteBread normies. It's a toxic brew.
As my best friend--Indian guy from grad school--put it: "Indians come here, live in million dollar houses and think they're oppressed."
The lone positive is it has no generational staying power. Indians are the most ethno-centric and least out-marrying of the Asian immigrant groups, but still out-marry at 50%. The 2nd generation kids think of themselves as "Indian", may want their Indian food and fancy wedding sari ... but on the whole they are just American kids. (Ex. Usha Vance.) It's hard to think there are going to be many serious 3rd gen rah-rah "Hindus" here.
Judaism was built/evolved to be a tribal identity cult--Jews worshipping their "chosen people" Jewishness--that kept them separate from the Christian host population. We've seen 2nd, 3rd, and now even 4th and 5th generation Jews rabidly screeching against and tearing down "white bread" America.
But Hinduism didn't evolve as an outgroup strategy. It's essentially built to support the feudal order in India, and outside of India has little staying power.
The main thing necessary to deal with Indians is the same, obvious, thing we need in general ... cut off the inflow. Do that and a few generations in they'll be gone.
Stop the immivasion now and avoid downloading Steve's "world's most important graph" and while we won't be America--and probably won't be competitive with China--we could still be a decent place for our posterity to live.
>Indians are the closest "incoming!" we have to Jews--solid achievement, but separateness/hostility and feelings of superiority to the WhiteBread normies.
The WhiteBread, no-college normies are starting to remind me of Jews, in that it's absolutely verboten to suggest they may have done anything to bring the hostility upon themselves.
Well at least you're honest about the effects of cutting off the inflow of elite immigration to this country. It likely means that we forfeit any chance of being competitive vis-a-vis China with respect to the commanding heights of the 21st century. But at least large swathes of America would revert back to what they were prior to 1965 or something.
However, I'm not nearly as sanguine as you are that America would be a decent place for its posterity to live in if we only got rid of mean non-whites like Vivek! Unlike China, which has broad strengths in numerous areas of hardware and high tech manufacturing, the American economy has basically gone all-in on AI and if the Chinese manage to pop that bubble, I'm guessing the effects for many heritage Americans probably wouldn't be all that great. And American AI is only a "bubble" in large part due to the outsized contributions of ethnic Indians and Chinese, as any picture of an X hackathon suggests or as many have noted with respect to Meta's recent Superintelligence hires.
https://x.com/deedydas/status/1946597162068091177
The global scientific, technological and economic landscape has shifted significantly over the past 10-15 years or so, and I can't help but notice that white American well-being these days is disproportionately based on the AI "bubble" which is itself the disproportionate fruit of Asian Americans, be it ethnic Indians and Chinese who work in frontier American AI labs or ethnic Chinese in Taiwan powering advanced chip manufacturing in the US and consequently the entire AI sector.
Maybe in the late 1990s and early 2000s it was still possible to suggest that America could return to being a paradise if only those mean non-whites left heritage Americans alone. In the year 2025 however, I'm no longer sure that thesis is empirically plausible.
Well indians are creative an ambitious. The East Asians achieve less with respect to their technical skill. The AI revolution is mostly of western origin. For PC reasons the universities cannot discriminate East Asians enough, since the traditional measures somewhat fail to show their true potential with respect to actual achievement e.g they are technically virtuous but achieve less than their test result suggest. But this maybe nonsense since IQ is an universal measure of everything about intelligence without any sublities.
What comes to empire building that has already lost for the West. In EU the system as we know it now does not survive next election cycle. There are no good options left thanks to mass immigration. This is the most important point I want to make. There are no good options for the west anymore. The AI is a bubble. The China war is more likely than not. However, here in Europe e.g perirephy we care about Russian threat more. The rearming in EU alone will rise the tax burden more than 20 percent in top of the debt we use for rearming. The taxes and regulations made us left out of the AI train, which is a bubble, but still. In Europe system cannot survive for long, period. When men started to speak about peace plans in Ukraine Europeans were left out of the room like women and children.
Indian ceos of USA companies are moving jobs to India. Maybe at a certain point between USA jobs moved to India and India advancing economically, there won't be as many Indians moving to the US.
Trivial observation--I recently read Middlemarch, and Mr. Brooke (one of the characters) is constantly saying 'up to a point', or 'up to a certain point', which made me wonder if Waugh's usage in Scoop was a reference to George Eliot. However, Waugh thought Eliot to be a complete waste of time, so it's not likely that he stole the phrase from her. The phrase apparently was in common usage amongst newspaper men of the time, but whether it preceded Waugh's use or followed it is unclear.
Congrats for getting through Middlemarch.
I read it a few years ago, having put it off for several decades, even though I was an English major as an undergrad (I didn't get assigned it then). It's often in the top 10 -- sometimes even right at the top -- of those 'Greatest Novels Evah! lists, but although I found it Very Good, I'm not sure it's 'Great'. Too much virtuous empathizing for me, maybe.
What did you think?
I'm currently reading and re-reading all of Eliot's novels, and I would put Middlemarch at the top of the list (I haven't finished Daniel Deronda yet, but it's not as good as Middlemarch). Eliot was a committed intellectual type, and her novels have some appeal for me because I'm a university professor who teaches moral, legal, and political philosophy, which she considered to be her specialty. So, I enjoy her references to the intellectual controversies of the time. Like other great Victorian novelists, her most interesting characters were not the main ones, but the supporting cast, and she does these well. I also like that, on the one hand, her main characters are often not particularly likeable, and, on the other, her 'villains' are quite often not particularly malicious or one-dimensional. But you are correct about her virtuous empathizing, which is what made it obvious to many at the time that George Eliot was not a male writer.
The barely concealed hatred for rank and file White conservatives by right wing intellectuals never ceases to amaze me. They just can’t seem to stop themselves from insulting them by calling them NASCAR watching, burger eating, gun toting MAGA rednecks. This applies to everyone from Bill Krystal to Ross Douthat and, unfortunately, our esteemed host. However, I never see them criticizing the even more downmarket Latinos I see everywhere. I hope some of them live to see the awesome America that will surely be built once all the awful White MAGA people are gone.
We in the U.S. have spent the past 50 years making any negative observations about people of other races and cultures so unacceptable that criticizing the lower classes of white Americans is all that’s left for satisfying the innate human need to feel superior to someone else. You can giggle at rude comments about white rubes, but nothing will shut down your social acceptability and career prospects faster than openly showing disdain for ghetto culture or the guys hanging out in the Home Depot parking lot. I myself am no fan of many aspects of redneck culture, but the hypocrisy is stunning.
>The barely concealed hatred for rank and file White conservatives by right wing intellectuals never ceases to amaze me. They just can’t seem to stop themselves from insulting them by calling them NASCAR watching, burger eating, gun toting MAGA rednecks. This applies to everyone from Bill Krystal to Ross Douthat and, unfortunately, our esteemed host.
Don't forget Richard Spencer and Nick Fuentes. But let me guess, James, everyone else but rank and file White conservatives are the problem, right?
The Hanania acolyte has entered the chat. I never said that everyone but White conservatives are the problem, and calling Fuentes and Spencer intellectuals is ridiculous. What I’m saying is that Sailer, like other, more mainstream pundits, has always shown some disdain for White southerners (I’ve read his line “You don’t want them as your neighbors but you do want them in your foxhole” a lot over the years). He finally has something to say about the Indian takeover, a topic he has avoided despite its importance even though he has written about in the past, and while it was funny, I felt that equating MAGA with the ultranationalist, lower IQ Indians he says we are getting was unnecessary.
I saw your other post that compared lower class Whites to Jews in that neither group can be criticized. It was the funniest thing I’ve read all day. Also, Richard is gay.
Why do idiots like you who’ve never set foot in India think you understand the country? You want MAGA immigrants to India naming their kids American style? No one would bat an eye. No wonder low IQ fools like you tarnish your country’s reputation.
The majority of India has yet to gain Internet access Steve, I believe it's at 62% without. None of us will make it if Modi gives it to them.
My favorite, probably apocryphal story about India is the Nehru govt polling the people's attitude to independence. They kept hearing "Who are the British?"
> In the very long run, India won’t be such a dump anymore and emigration of Indians to America will tail off.
But when?
2125? 2225? <
LOL. You really are a wild-eyed optimist Steve.
Life is actually ridiculously comfortable for successful upcaste Indians. Nice marble floored houses, servants at beck and call. Yet the top graduates still on average try and head to the US for a life in UMC suburbia and fetching their own stuff at Costco.
For another 1.3 billion--that's *billion* with nine zeros--Indians, life in the US even doing working class labor would be a huge upgrade. That's why we've got border hopping, California licensed, truck driving Sikh illegals murdering Americans spectacularly every month on our highways.
> In the very long run, India won’t be such a dump anymore and emigration of Indians to America will tail off.
But when?
2125? 2225?
The key thing is to prevent America and India from converging by letting the quality of life in America not stay way ahead of India. <
Steve, this is simply a great post. While focused on "the Indian question"--our new replacement Jews--you are hitting on the critical big broad issues that bedevil America/the West today.
With your end wrap, you strip naked the core logic of these "nation of immigrants" genocidal loons:
"Nation of immigrants" == "We'll keep flooding your nation with foreigners till it is so crowded, unpleasant and shitty that even people from Haiti and Niger don't want to come."
It would have been interesting to get Waugh’s thoughts on India. Brits of his generation seemed pretty bored with the Subcontinent, which only figures in his stories as a place of employment for middling government functionaries like his maternal uncles, so he travelled instead in North Africa and the Amazon, and seems only to have stopped in coastal ports like Goa and Ceylon.
It’s forgotten now, but one of the many quixotic causes over which Winston Churchill made himself so fantastically unpopular in the 1930s was his fanatical opposition to Indian independence, which (unlike Ireland) was not a subject which commanded any popular domestic support.
And like Douglas Murray, he'd actually BEAN to India, with the Army, so he should have known it wasn't worth the trouble. OTOH, once India went, the rest were sure to follow, and they did.
Strong antagonistic cultures are only a problem for America if they come over here. I am perfectly content with fervent Hindu nationalists in India.
I've been amazed by the hysterical anti-India bashing on X ever since Vivek sent out that tweet last December lambasting native born white American culture. Now it seems like we're endlessly inundated with angry white guys on X telling us how the average IQ of India is supposedly in the mid 70s to low 80s. I'm not an expert on genetics by any means, but I was always under the impression that India was highly racially heterogenous with significant differences in intelligence by caste. Thus, adopting a mental model where the average IQ of India is at best in the low 80s with some fixed standard deviation fails to account for the obviously high achievements of diaspora South Asians.
https://www.aei.org/articles/indian-americans-the-new-model-minority/
There's plenty of evidence that we've gotten very high end immigration from India in this country, as Jason Richwine noted back in 2009. Richwine for instance estimates that Indian American IQ is roughly 112 relative to the white normed average of 100, comparable to that of Ashkenazi Jews. Even if the underlying racial dynamics of India are messy and complicated, it seems obvious that the disproportionate success of South Asian Americans belies any claim that that immigrant group is somehow low in average IQ.
For what it's worth, I found neither Vivek's tweet last December nor his most recent one to be all that objectionable. I mean didn't Tiger Mother basically write an entire book on lax western parenting and cultural values? I don't recall Amy Chua getting nearly the same heat back then that Vivek is getting now, although admittedly the political environment during the second Trump administration is rather different than the zeitgeist during the early 2010s.
As for Vivek's claim that America is a creedal nation, personally I'm highly sympathetic to the alternative perspective espoused by the late Samuel Huntington, who articulated in his book Who Are We the distinction between a nation united by ethnicity and culture and a nation-state as a political entity governing a large group of individuals.
I've always been struck by the claim made in Who Are We and other books like Alien Nation by Peter Brimelow that if immigration had completely ceased after 1790 that the American population even as recently as 1990 would've been around half of its actual size at that time. A sizable portion of white Americans can in fact trace their heritage back to the original colonial stock.
That being said, I think many people missed the point of Vivek's tweet. He followed up his initial comment by clarifying that he wasn't advocating for unfettered immigration, but rather was arguing against the notion of adopting a caste system to rank Americans based on their ethnic heritage. While we certainly can be selective about whom we let become American citizens, the idea of a heritage citizen above and beyond any other American is ultimately counterproductive. What would be the end goal of such a distinction? Would it be to create different rights based on the grade of American one was deemed to be?
Ultimately, as Vivek argued and as I also believe, we can recognize America's ethnic history and heritage without becoming captive to it. Isn't it deeply ironic that the same MAGA that shits all over India and Indians essentially wants some sort of quasi-caste system in this country for ranking Americans?
"Recent Indian immigrants tend to be ethnocentric Hindu Nationalists who see little reason to assimilate or even to try hard to pretend to admire their host countries."
I guess Vivek's great sin was to suggest that in order to better compete against China in the geopolitical contest over the commanding heights of the 21st century, Americans should embrace a more intellectual culture, and also that although we should be selective about whom we let in to this country, having a caste system for ranking Americans probably isn't a great idea. Since many have noted that South Asian Americans are now basically the new Jews, I guess we need native born white American oppositional culture to push back at every opportunity against the highly successful cultural traits of our new overlords haha.
VR could be afraid the urge to deport will extend to legal immigrants. Many of us look at the UK's govt-enabled problems with Pakistanis and ours with a few Somalis and worry.
Singapore seems to be doing well being run by Han supremacists. Israel does well being run by Jewish supremacists. America did quite well all the way into the 1990s basically being run by Anglo-Americans who, if not overtly supremacist, clearly thought of the place as "their" country. The Hindu cognitive elite can stay in India and make their own country great. Maybe figure out how to clean up the sacred Ganges.
Only an uneducated idiot would think Singapore is run by Han supremacists. Singapore has gone out of its way to be multicultural, which is the reason for its success.
There's only ever room for one sheriff in town. Singapore is run by its 75% Han majority who have no intention of letting their Malay or Hindu minorities wag the dog. Refugees are not allowed, drug dealers are subject to execution, corporal punishment is still practiced, and immigrants must demonstrate self-sufficiency or they are evicted.
Singapore is multicultural like the Arab monarchies are multicultural.
The other 25% of the minorities also have no intention of letting the Han majority wag the dog. Which is why the Han majority’s population share remains frozen since its independence, resulting in the country remaining multicultural since its inception.
I agree that the reaction to what Vivek said last year was overblown, a lot of White people do need to try harder. Anecdotally I see a lot of White kids major in useless subjects in college like communication and music, rather than the stem majors that Asians go for. I’ve worked in IT for a long time and Indian tech workers aren’t as bad as people say, while a lot of White tech workers can be arrogant, lazy, and entitled, particularly around work/life balance and constant resistance to management. I think these problems are becoming acute because a lot of Whites still don’t realize they’re now competing with people from all over the world for everything in their own country and they need to step it up or risk being left behind. But the objection to Vivek is that he and people like him want to take over and I do not belive they will follow a colorblind, meritocratic system. I believe they are ethnic chauvinists who will favor their own once in power, and that his call for a creedal nation is a self-serving lie. The real issue is this was a country built by Whites for Whites but it has been given away to foreigners, and some Whites are finally waking up to the disaster we’ve created for ourselves.
😂😂😂 Thanks for the comedy brother! For what it’s worth you’re far too dumb to be anywhere but at the bottom, so best of luck haha.
Fabian socialism among South Asian immigrants? Interesting. It was strong in my chosen hometown of Ruskin, Florida. I lived on the former college campus (the third that burned down) of Ruskin College (Hearts, Hands, Minds), in a town based on Ruskin's philosophy. What that meant is as mysterious now as it was then.
Had it worked, it would work well now. Classical learning, hard labor, no fees. Shakespeare performed in old turpentine camps. Desdimona on the stumps, wearing wool undergarments in the Florida summer to avoid fleas or being killed by yellow fever.
I now live in a county with the fastest growing increase of Brahmin Indians in the nation. In five years, they have gone from less than 2% of the population to more than 16.5%. The displacement is phenomenal. If they were less tribal, more good would come of it. The public schools, flooded with Brahmin Indians, are now the best in the state. But the locals are both left behind and generally mocked. Medical care, displaced entirely by Brahmin doctors, is in some small ways technically better, but it is worse in terms of relationships and culture, which is enormously important.
I had an upper-class, Mexican-trained doctor from Portugal for 25 years in Atlanta, and we understood each other. Thanks, Obamacare, for not letting me have him anymore.
You can't radically shift a culture this way. I like a lot of these people. But it is so expensive now that the children of the farmers who were here for generations can't even buy a mobile home near their relatives; zoning has been changed to accommidate the wealthy in ways that have dramatically diminished prior extended family compounds, and we will soon turn from red to blue electorially. The newcomers live severely conservatively among themselves but take advantage of their minority status and all vote blue.
They need to make the effort to assimilate. But they'll just take over. They are so class-bound that the illegal Mexicans are their slaves now, and so they win, we lose. Everything.
The taking over part is the main complaint I read on X about H1Bs and Indians.