Category Archives: Scholarship

Otto Weininger on Males and Females

We have written about Otto Weininger before on here. His magnum opus, Sex and Character, was completed when he was only 23 years old. After he wrote it, he moved to Italy, waited five months to see the reception of the work, and when there was no reception, he moved back to Austria, rented a room in the building where Beethoven died, and late at night, Otto Weininger put a bullet through his heart.

After he died, the book caused quite a stir and was translated into most major European languages. No less than Wittgenstein praised it to the skies, but said it needed to be “negated.” After it was negated, a great truth would appear. Even Germaine Greer praised it, marveling that what she called a work of great genius had been written by a “mere boy.” Nevertheless, of course she disagreed with him on certain things.

Weininger is now reviled as a misogynist and an anti-Semite. Curiously, he described himself as a feminine Jew. Perhaps that was why he killed himself. Weininger is probably the king of the misogynists, and most of those promoting his work now are misogynists. Everyone else just blows it off. This is unfortunate, because there are many great truths here. For instance, Weininger marks humans as either M or F. Male for Masculine and F for feminine. Weininger makes it quite clear that a man can be feminine and a woman can be masculine.

After that, he lays out a duality that looks something like this. Only the first five are by Weininger. I added the last 50.

Characters      Masculine*   Feminine* 

Principles

Activity       Active        Passive
Consciousness  Conscious     Unconscious
Thinking       Objective     Subjective
Genius         Yes           No
Productivity   Productive    Nonproductive
Energy         Generative    Receptive
Mind           Thinking      Feeling
Emotion        Stoic         Moody
Tactile        Callous       Sensitive
Humor          Slapstick     Irony
Weather        Calm          Unsettled
Temperature    Cold          Warm
Graph          Linear        Scatter
Empathy        Poor          Rich
Pain           Inflict       Receive
Confrontation  Forward       Withdrawal
Reaction       Contemplative Reactive
Style          Deliberative  Unthinking
Intensity      Concentration Distraction
Denial style   Projection    Fantasy
Egotism style  Narcissism    Histrionic
Pathology      Sociopath     Borderline
Defense        Anger         Denial
Depression     Sublimation   Immersion
Reliance       Self          Others
Compassion     Little        Great
Wakefulness    Aware         Unaware
Alertness      Wide Awake    Sleepwalking
Planning       Methodical    Conspiring
Morality       Strict        Contingent
Aggression     Physical      Subterfuge
Violence       External      Internal
Warfare        Bully         Victim
Hierarchy      Dominant      Submissive
Force          Blunt         Subtle
Texture        Harsh         Smooth
Resistance     Extreme       Yielding
Linear         Straight      Jagged
Presentation   Forthright    Devious
Logic          Linear        Circular
Movement       Stiff         Flowing
Grain          Coarse        Fine
Instrument     Blunt         Subtle
Transport      Highway       Stream
Route          A to B        Roundabout
Flight         Soar          Flutter 
Truths         Multiple      Singular
Theory         Branching     Obsessive
Fact           Durable       Momentary
Manichean      Yes           Grey Area
Systematics    Categorizing  Noncategorizing
Science        Empirical     Intuitive
Philosophy     Tough         Dream State
Ubermensch     Common        Uncommon
Body           Hard          Soft
Tissue         Sinewy        Fatty

*Masculine = male
*Feminine = female

To me, 53 out of 55 of these dualities are simply true. I am uncertain about Genius, but much has been written about the dearth of female geniuses. I am going to pass on this very painful question at the moment. I will also pass on the very painful Productive/Nonproductive question.

The first principle, active and passive, has been remarked on by many great thinkers, including Aristotle, St Thomas Aquinas and Hume. It’s an old idea.

Ubermensch refers to the ability to rise above one’s base and basic or biological nature. Men can do this. Women often cannot. The woman is a forever prisoner in the gaol of her nature. Not only can she not transcend it, but she doesn’t even wish to in the first place, which is disappointing.

To females, everything is a grey area. The female does not even believe in the existence of great truths, because to believe that is to upset the fairy tale world that the female spends her life in. Therefore, most females make poor philosophers. The only good female philosophers probably have masculine minds.

This also accounts for much of the philosophical and theoretical chaos of feminine dominated disciplines like Modern Lit, Critical Studies, Sociology and Feminist Studies.

Hence the term “physics envy.” The feminine disciplines, by their nature and by the nature of those who study them, lack theoretical discipline. Thus some long for the hard and fast equation on a chalkboard of a good mathematical proof.

In the feminine disciplines, not only is it impossible to prove much of anything, but Postmodernism and Critical Theory imply, amazingly, that there is nothing to be proven anyway, as there are no hard and fast truths.

Why women are at pains to admit to great truths about life is unknown. The female principle is passive, and as such it absorbs all of the energy that is flowing around. Hence it is rather painful to be a woman, to paraphrase my own mother. Perhaps an avoidance of great truths is an effort to avoid any more pain than is present in merely being a woman.

At some point, most men can realize the hard realities of life. After they have matured a bit, most men can sit down with you, have a beer, and admit that life sucks, but so it goes. “If you have to eat a turd, eat it whole!” “Life is a shit sandwich, make it fancy, with lots of toppings, and eat it with a smile!” And on and on.

Men make peace with the painful and hopeless realities of life and just move on. Women can’t do that, so they live forever in denial and fantasy. The world is just too ugly for women. They deal with this fact by lying and saying that the world is not ugly at all, and that all ugly truths are in fact lies.

Weininger had some much pretty nasty things to say about women, but we will deal with those in another post. Some of these things have been haunting me lately. What haunts me most, as a lifelong lover and student of women, is, “Was he right?”

34 Comments

Filed under Gender Studies, Philosophy, Scholarship, Women

Very Nice New Piece on Race in Mexico

Here.

The site is actually named after me, which has me shaking my head in amazement.

The piece, and the site itself, was inspired by my site, in particular my pieces on race in Mexico and my piece on the major and minor races of man.

Most Mexicans are mestizos, but there are large minorities of more or less pure Europeans and Indians. He describes most of the significant White groups in Mexico and puts Whites at ~17% of the population, higher than some other recent estimates.

Although most Whites have Spanish roots, there are also significant French, Portuguese, German, Italians and Irish minorities. I met a young woman who is Mexican-American, but she is mostly Portuguese. The village she was born in in Mexico is made up of primarily Portuguese people! There are also quite a few Jews in Mexico.

More or less pure Indians make up ~12% of the population. This seems a bit lower than some other estimates. They are very different and speak up to ~90 different languages. In Yucutan, many Indians are actually mestizos, but they still speak Indian languages and identify as Indian.

Mestizos make up ~67% of the population, and are divided between Euro-mestizos, Indo-mestizos and pure mestizos. He has a nice map towards the end dividing Mexico by state on the basis of which of these 3 groups predominates in the state.

There are what he calls 3 occult roots in Mexico: Blacks, Asians and Arabs.

The first root, the Blacks, has its basis in African slaves who were brought to the east coast of Mexico. This affair did not last long as a slave who married a free Mexican had children who were free. So, slavery quickly went out and the Blacks disappeared via mixed breeding as slaves quickly took free, non-Black Mexicans as spouses.

The result was that pure Blacks nearly disappeared and the remainder are mostly mulattos, zambos (Indian-Black) and triracials. In addition, your average Mexican mestizo now is ~4-5% Black, although in general, it does not show up on phenotype. He has a photo of some Mexican Blacks that shows that they are heavily mulattoized. They also look quite attractive, I must say.

The next root is Asians. In the early days, quite a few Filipinos came to Mexico when it was part of Spain via the colony of the Philippines. By this time, they are heavily mixed with other races in Mexico. In the early 20th Century, many Chinese came to Mexico. Unfortunately, most were tossed out in the 1930′s in a wave of nativism, but in Mexico city and Mexicali, there are still quite a few Chinese and part-Chinese, as the Chinese also married heavily into the mix.

The last root is Arabs. Most of these Arabs are Christians from Mesopotamia, the Levant and Egypt. They came in response to anti-Christian attacks waged by the Ottoman Empire at the end of WW2. Since they came from the Ottoman Empire, many Mexicans referred to them as “Turks.” Carlos Slim, Mexico’s richest man, is Lebanese, as is Salma Hayek.

All three of these occult roots each make up ~1% of Mexico’s population.

There have been various studies of Mexico’s admixture, but they tend to come up with quite different results. I agree with the the author that the best studies show Mexico’s genome to be 52% White, 44% Indian and 4% Black. So Mexico is probably just barely a majority-White country, but it is best describes ad a White-Indian mixed race country.

Most self-identified Mexican Indians have some White in them, in addition to a bit of Black. Percentages range from 1% White, 1% Black among Guerrero Zapotecs to 37% White and Black among Huastecs.

The author notes that Mexican-Americans have traditionally been a lot Whiter than Mexicans, because they tend to come from the Whiter regions of Northern Mexico. Southwest Mexicans have usually tested out at 66% White and 34% Indian. California Mexicans have gone from 68% White, 30% Indian and 2% Black in 1984 to 47% White, 41% Indian and 12% Black in 2000. The reason for the high Black % is not known, but it should be clear to any Californian that the Mexicans in the state have gotten a lot darker recently. In recent years, many more Mexicans have come from further south, whereas in the past, they tended to come from the Whiter states near the border.

A photo on his site of Chicano gangbangers shows that they are mostly White, something we have always known here.

Towards the end he makes up a list of racial categories of Mexicans, following my lead in this piece, even adopting my formulae and marking scheme.

He lists five major races in Mexico – Whites, Indians, Mestizos, Blacks and Asians.

No major disagreement there.

I have been regarded as a mad splitter in my piece above. One critic said that if Lindsay doesn’t stop soon, he’s going to have as many races as there are languages. This criticism, in addition to endless bashing by race deniers, hurt my feelings, as a result, I have made few new updates to my races of man post.

However, the author is much worse of a splitter than I have ever been, splitting off all sorts of groups that I probably would not have split off. Hence, his scheme is better seen as a view towards Mexican ethnies or ethnic groups than races per se. For instance, he divides Mexican mestizos and Mexican Whites into quite a few different races, on what basis I am not sure. Are they ethnies? Quite possibly. Races? Dunno about that.

In my scheme, I actually adopted a conservative scheme in which I tried not to split off new races unless I could help it. I wanted some significant genetic distance between a group or ethny before I would split them off. Hence, I lumped most Europeans into a single race because there isn’t much genetic distance between them. I am wondering if the author has any genetic data to back up splitting many of these groups into different races, because I only split based on hard genetic data.

At the end, I think we have two different schemes here. One is dividing races based on hard genetics and the other is splitting racers and also ethnies on the basis of partly genetics but also subjective factors. On the other hand, there probably is not much genetic data on the various different Mexican mestizos and Whites.

All in all, a very commendable piece, the fruit of long research. By the way, the photos are excellent. Make sure to check them out.

6 Comments

Filed under Americas, Amerindians, Arabs, Asians, Black-White (Mulattos), Blacks, California, Chinese (Ethnic), Christianity, Europeans, Filipinos, French, Genetics, Germans, Hispanics, Irish, Italians, Jews, Latin America, Lebanese, Mestizos, Mexicans, Mexico, Mixed Race, North America, Portuguese, Race/Ethnicity, Regional, Religion, Scholarship, SE Asians, USA, West, Whites, Zambos

More Lies of the Hindus

I’m really starting to despise Hindus. They seem like they are some of the worst people on Earth. Once they quit telling so many damned lies, I might start liking them more.

Here is an excerpt from a recent appalling academic “conference” held at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. Incredibly, this pseudoscience conference was sponsored by the Indic Studies Department at U Mass Dartmouth.

This is getting frightening. Anti-scientific Hindu fascists now hold great power over Indian culture. Increasingly, their views are widely accepted among overseas Hindus.

In the next 20-30 years, we will increasingly have to deal with the effects of Hindu fascism in India and among the diaspora. Indian “scholarship” in many academic realms, will decline to pitiful levels. And Indian academics outside will be increasingly infected with fascist and anti-scientific views, which means we must more and more look dubiously on Hindu academics in the West, denying them degrees, jobs and tenure when we uncover evidence of their fascist and anti-scientific beliefs.

The following is an excerpt from the conference:

Comprehensive population genetics data along with archeological and astronomical evidence presented at June 23-25, 2006 conference in Dartmouth, MA, overwhelmingly concluded that Indian civilization and its human population is indigenous.

In fact, the original people and culture within the Indian Subcontinent may even be a likely pool for the genetic, linguistic, and cultural origin of the most rest of the world, particularly Europe and Asia.

Leading evidences come from population genetics, which were presented by two leading researchers in the field, Dr. V. K. Kashyap, National Institute of Biologicals, India, and Dr. Peter Underhill of Stanford University in California. Their results generally contradict the notion Aryan invasion/migration theory for the origin of Indian civilization.

Underhill concluded “the spatial frequency distributions of both L1 frequency and variance levels show a spreading pattern emanating from India”, referring to a Y chromosome marker. He, however, put several caveats before interpreting genetic data, including “Y-ancestry may not always reflect the ancestry of the rest of the genome”

Dr. Kashyap, on the other hand, with the most comprehensive set of genetic data was quite emphatic in his assertion that there is “no clear genetic evidence for an intrusion of Indo-Aryan people into India, [and] establishment of caste system and gene flow.”

Michael Witzel, a Harvard linguist, who is known to lead the idea of Aryan invasion/migration/influx theory in more recent times, continued to question genetic evidence on the basis that it does not provide the time resolution to explain events that may have been involved in Aryan presence in India.

Dr. Kashyap’s reply was that even though the time resolution needs further work, the fact that there are clear and distinct differences in the gene pools of Indian population and those of Central Asian and European groups, the evidence nevertheless negates any Aryan invasion or migration into Indian Subcontinent.

Witzel though refused to present his own data and evidence for his theories despite being invited to do so was nevertheless present in the conference and raised many questions. Some of his commentaries questioning the credibility of scholars evoked sharp responses from other participants.

Rig Veda has been dated to 1,500 BC by those who use linguistics to claim its origin Aryans coming out of Central Asia and Europe. Archaeologist B.B. Lal and scientist and historian N.S. Rajaram disagreed with the position of linguists, in particular Witzel who claimed literary and linguistic evidence for the non-Indian origin of the Vedic civilization.

Dr. Narahari Achar, a physicist from University of Memphis clearly showed with astronomical analysis that the Mahabharata war in 3,067 BC, thus poking a major hole in the outside Aryan origin of Vedic people.

Interestingly, Witzel stated, for the first time to many in the audience, that he and his colleagues no longer subscribe to Aryan invasion theory.

Dr. Bal Ram Singh, Director, Center for Indic Studies at UMass Dartmouth, which organized the conference was appalled at the level of visceral feelings Witzel holds against some of the scholars in the field, but felt satisfied with the overall outcome of the conference.

“I am glad to see people who have been scholarly shooting at each other for about a decade are finally in one room, this is a progress”, said Singh.

The conference was able to bring together in one room for the first time experts from genetics, archeology, physics, linguistics, anthropology, history, and philosophy. A proceedings of the conference is expected to come out soon, detailing various arguments on the origin of Indian civilization.

The conference was sponsored by the Center for Indic Studies at UMass Dartmouth (www.umassd.edu/indic) with co-sponsorship from Educator’s Society for the Heritage of India (www.eshiusa.org).

That “India” was a pool for the genetics of the world outside of Africa is quite dubious, as is the claim that humans moved outside of Africa to settle in India, where they developed culturally. Yes, Negritos moved out of Africa along the coast of the India Ocean. India was one of the stops along the way. The Negritos did not stop in India and develop culturally and then spread across the world. Negrito types only spread throughout Asia, not Europe or the Americas, and there is no evidence for a Negrito homeland in India.

The homeland of the Asians is in northern Vietnam. That homeland goes back 53,000 YBP. The Japanese and northern Chinese people also have very ancient pedigrees, going back similar lengths of time.

Japan was populated out of Thailand originally.

SE Asia was populated most recently out of Southern China.

Indonesians came out of Southern China 15,000 YBP.

Amerindians came out of Siberia 13,000 YBP and sooner.

Iranians came out of Central Asia, not India.

The Dravidians may have come from the Middle East 18,000 YBP, not the other way around.

The Berbers are more or less indigenous to North Africa.

The origin of the Arabs is unknown and may be very ancient.

Europeans came out of Southern Russia. Before that, it is not known where they came from, bu 12,000 YBP, the European population derived from the Middle East. Europeans may also have derived from Berbers.

Afghans have an origin in Central Asia.

The people of the Stans have an origin from Central Asia and then later from China.

Koreans come from Mongolia.

Filipinos come from Southern China as Negritos, then later from Taiwan.

There is little to no evidence that Europeans or most Asians derive from India, at least not in recent times. Going back a very long time, it is hard to say.

In short, it increasingly appears that few, if any, modern populations derive from India. However, in the early history of the Caucasians from 20,000-40,000 YBP, there were movements back and forth between the major Caucasian homelands of North Africa, the Middle East and India. The Aborigines appear to be derived in part from southern Indians. An ancient group of Thais called Senoi appear to be related to Veddas of India, however, the Senoi came from southern China 5,000 YBP.

The notion that India is the center of human language is preposterous. However, the Austroasiatic languages of SE Asia seem to be Indian derived. Dravidian languages came from outside India, as did Indo-Aryan languages.

India as a center of world culture is a rather bizarre claim to make, although there may have been an early agricultural culture there, and many domesticated plants and animals may have spread out from there.

B.B. Lal’s position is fringe in archeology.

N.S. Rajaram is an engineer who is widely regarded as crack and a kook.

It is true that at the moment there is no hard evidence of an Aryan intrusion into India, however, this does not discount the theory, which has long been proven on linguistic grounds.

Astronomical evidence from the Vedas is virtually worthless, especially when it is contradicted by mounds of other evidence.

43 Comments

Filed under Aborigines, Afghans, Amerindians, Anthropology, Arabs, Asia, Asian, Asians, Berbers, Central Asians, Chinese (Ethnic), East Indians, Europeans, Fascism, Filipinos, Genetics, Hinduism, History, India, Indonesians, Iranians, Japanese, Koreans, Linguistics, Near Easterners, Negritos, North Africans, Northeast Asians, Physical, Political Science, Race/Ethnicity, Regional, Religion, Scholarship, SE Asians, South Asia, South Asians

The Aryan Migration Theory: Last Word

It has been known for 150 years now that the Indo-Aryan languages came from outside of India. The evidence is overwhelming, primarily linguistic, but there is also some archeological evidence. In scholarly circles, there is no debate on the Aryan Migration Theory (AMT) and there has been little debate for 150 years. It is only among Indian nationalists and a few hacks and kooks that it is not accepted.

1. There is a substrate of a language that looks like a Munda language in the Rig Vedas. A Munda language was probably spoken in the Punjab when the Aryans migrated there. About 4% of the words in Rig Vedas are these early Munda loans. None of these Munda loans are found outside of Indic.

They would be found all through IE if the Out of India Theory (OIT) was true. The OIT holds that Aryans inhabited North India for 8,000 years, all the while the Dravidians were in South India and Munda tongues were in East India. Obviously, the Aryans came into Punjab and there mass language shift from a Munda language to Indo-Aryan (IA). The language shift is evident in the sparse Munda loans into Vedic Sanskrit.

There are also a few place names left in North India from the original Munda language of the Greater Punjab area. There are some river names left in Eastern Punjab and Haryana where the local Indus Valley Civilization (IVC) continued for some time after the arrival of the Aryans. These names would not be there if the OIT was true.

There are a large number of IA words for local plants and animals and for agriculture that have been borrowed from the Munda language of Punjab. There would be no reason for the IA people to borrow these terms if the IA people were native to Punjab. Instead, this borrowing is precisely what we would expect to see when pastoralists from Central Asia move into the tropics, encounter new plants and animals and start farming – they borrow the terms for these new living things and technologies from the locals.

This is particularly so in the case of farming, which was left to the local people – the Sudra caste. The IA people only brought a few farming related words with them from Central Asia – the remainder were borrowed from the new locals.

40% of Hindi agricultural words still derive from an unknown pre-Munda language of the Indo-Ganges Plains. Nahali, a small language in Madhya Pradesh, at successively lower levels of its vocabulary, displays high levels of borrowing from earlier tongues. 36% of vocabulary is of Kurku (Munda) origin and 9% is Dravidian. At the oldest level, 24% have no cognates in any known language and appear to have derived from the oldest language known from India.

2. There is an old set of shared loans between proto-Indo-Aryan and proto-Iranian for a number of agricultural and other cultural items that appeared in the Bactria-Margiana (BMAC) 3700-4200 YBP. The BMAC is located more or less in present day Turkmenistan. Obviously, these shared loans were picked up by the proto-Indo-Iranian people as they moved down from the steppes of Kazakhstan and Russia into the BMAC, conquering the people who lived there.

There are references in the Rig Vedas to the conquest of the BMAC peoples by the Arya. For this sequence of events to have occurred, the Indo-Aryans would have had to have moved through the BMAC during this time period and later moved into Iran and India, not the other way around. The language of the loans is not known, but it is apparently the language of the BMAC people.

So there is a BMAC or Central Asian substrate in Indo-Iranian. A possible guess for the language of the BMAC people might be a relative of the Burushaski language of northern Pakistan.

The substrate of the Rig Vedas is a Munda language. The substrate of the earlier Proto-Indo-Iranian language is the language of the BMAC. This sequence is not possible under the OIT and is only possible under the AMT.

3. There are early Indo-Aryan loans into the Caucasian language of the Mittani, who lived in northern Iraq and Syria. These loans are dated to ~3400 YBP. These loans are from an earlier form of Indo-Aryan than is used in the Vedas. Therefore, the Vedas must have been composed 3000-3500 YBP and could not have been composed any earlier.

Also, the Mittani could not possibly have come out of India as the OIT demands, since the IA loans do not show any Indic influences. Nor could the loans have come from Iran, as there are numerous IA Gods in the Mittani texts who are marginalized or do not exist in Iran. The loans must have come from somewhere else, apparently the north.

4. We have numerous references in the Vedas to battles between the Arya with their stone forts, metals, horses and chariots against the more sedentary peoples living in South Asia at the time.

5. There are pottery shards in the BMAC that resemble that shards found in the steppe culture to the north. This indicates that there is cultural resemblance between the two cultures. The suggestion is that the shards are Indo-Aryan and appear first on the steppes and then again in the BMAC with its conquest by the Aryans.

6. The chariot appears in the Urals 4000 YBP and then spreads rapidly in many directions with the spread of IE languages, to Europe, to China via the Tocharians and of course to India and Iran via the Aryans. The horse also appears in South Asia (Pakistan) 3700 YBP in conjunction with the chariots. The modern horse is not native to South Asia, so obviously it came from outside, obviously from the Aryans. The indigenous horse of South Asia, the Siwalik horse, was long since extinct.

7. There are specific Punjabi and Uttar Pradesh loans in Vedic Indic that are not found in Iranian. Therefore, Iranian could not possibly have come from Indic as the OIT demands. The languages must have split in the BMAC, one line going to Iran and another line going to India.

8. The Soma ritual originates in the high mountains of Central Asia  – the mountains of Iran, the Himalayas and the Pamirs – with the proto-Indo-Iranian peoples. The original name for the plant is a Central Asian term amsu . This term is borrowed into Indo-Iranian and eventually becomes soma, etc. Later, it moves down into Iran and India and appears in the Vedas. Therefore, the Aryans brought the Soma ritual with them from Central Asia to Iran and India.

9. There is tremendous evidence for a common Indo-Iranian language, mythology and ritual. This shared heritage is not possible with the OIT. It is only possible if there was an Indo-Iranian people, who then split into the Iranian and Indic branches.

10. The Vedic branch of IA becomes innovated and Indianized (in particular, the retroflex consonants) after its arrival in Punjab, while the Iranian branch escapes this development because it did not enter the subcontinent then. In addition, Iranian lacks any specific Indic terms. According to the OIT, the Iranian branch must be Indianized too, or else all of the Indic terms were somehow lost in Iranian.

Since it is not, both branches came from outside India, to the northwest. Iranian languages cannot possibly have come from the Punjab. An early date for Iranian to leave India is preposterous, and Old Iranian (Avestan) is too archaic to have left India after the Vedas. All this means that Iranian and Indic must have split before the Vedas and thus, not inside India. The OIT for Iranian lies in ruins.

11. Zero specifically Indic words are found in IE languages outside of India. For the OIT to be correct, many Indic terms should be found in all the other branches of IE. After all, the Gypsies left India 1000 years ago and took a large specifically Indic set of terms with them to Europe and beyond.

12. Retroflexion. According to the OIT, all branches of IE would have had to have lost their retroflexion after they left India. How likely is that? What we do find, though, is that those branches of Iranian which move east to abut the Indic languages do acquire retroflexion. Since retroflexion is in general not present outside Indic or languages abutting Indic, it must be a late development in IE specific to Indic and cannot have been part of the original IE language as required by the OIT.

Retroflexion only effects those moving into the Indic plain and the eastern Iranian lands, but everyone moving out of South Asia somehow loses it. This does not make sense.

13. Chariots. For the OIT to make sense, chariots must be exported from India 7,000 YBP. However, chariots only appear 4000 YBP in the Urals and NW Kazakhstan and from there spread from Ukraine to Mongolia. The western IE languages retain an IE root rotho for wheel because they had already moved away before the chariot had actually been developed in the Urals. Everyone to the east uses the IA form ratha. This could only be the case if the IA languages moved south from Urals.

Further, according to the OIT, chariots that appear in the Rig Vedas must show up in the text before they have even been invented. Linguistics shows that the word must have been innovated in proto IA at the Urals, for it is present in both branches of IA. This word, along with its invention, can be proved to have been innovated in the steppes and and then carried into India and vice versa could not possibly be the case.

14. Lack of tropical core vocabulary in IE. The core vocabulary of IE shows that the IE homeland was a temperate or even cold place. The plants and animals in the IE language include such cold weather animals, plants and weather words as the otter, beaver, wolf, bear, lynx, salmon, elk, red deer, hare, hedgehog, mouse, birch, willow, elm, fir, ash, oak, beech, juniper, poplar, apple, maple, alder, hazel, nut, linden, hornbeam, and cherry in addition to snow.

A few of these are found in South Asia, but most are not. There are no specific Indic plant and animal names found outside of India, even where these plants do occur outside of India. The OIT would assume retention of at least some of these terms, would it not? Instead, what we find is that a few core IE terms are modified inside India to apply to new plants and animals.

For instance, IE beaver bheber is adopted for the mongoose in South Asia, since beavers do not exist there. IE willow becomes reed, cane in India. So we see that IE temperate plant and animal terms are adopted for the newly encountered tropical living things in India. The flow is into India, not out of India.

For the OIT to be right, the IE languages would have had to have coined these terms after they left India. However, this is not what happened. Instead, the words were IE words from the core IE language itself, which, according to the OIT, was only spoken in India. But these plant and animal names could not possibly have been created in India because most don’t even exist there.

For the OIT to be correct, IE core vocabulary should indicate a tropical climate.

15. Early loans in very early IE. The earliest loans in IE are from Semitic languages of the Middle East. This is possible with an IE homeland in SW Russia or Anatolia, but not possible if the IE homeland is in India, as the OIT requires.

16. Typological features of IE. The typological features of IE are between Kartvelian in Georgia and Uralic in the Urals, as we would expect with an IE homeland in SW Russia, and unlikely with an IE homeland in India.

17. Skeletons. Where are the Indian bones? The OIT requires not a trickling out of India, but a massive migration out of the Punjab. Yet Indian bones look remarkably different from Middle Eastern and European bones. With the massive migration out of India required by the OIT, we should find Indian bones in all of the branches of IE. One would have to argue that the IE speakers who left India did not look like the rest of the Indian people.

18. Facial characteristics. DNA analyses of burials in the Kurgan area near the IE homeland 6000 YBP shows that 60% of the early IE people there had light hair and green or blue eyes. How many Indians, even North Indians, have light hair and light eyes? Almost none. Clearly, the Kurgan peoples were a European type of people. They moved down into Iran and India and mixed with the darker folks already there, creating the present day swarthy peoples of South and Central Asia.

19. Very early Proto IA loans in Finno-Ugric. The homeland of the Finno-Ugric people is somewhere in the Urals. The homeland of the Proto Indo-Aryan people is also somewhere in Urals, especially at the very southern end. The only way for these early PIA loans to get into Finno-Ugric is if the PIA homeland is in the Urals. It’s not possible with the OIT, which generally makes a separate Indo-Aryan branch impossible anyway.

20. Vedic is later than Hittite. For the OIT to be correct, Vedic must be the most ancient branch of IE of them all, very close to Proto IE itself. Yet Hittite, attested from 4000 YBP, is earlier than Vedic. In fact, it is later than Eastern IE, Proto IA, and even pre-Vedic, so Vedic must be a fairly late development in IE. In fact, Vedic is even later than the early forms present in Mittani 3400 YBP.

21. Sanskrit is the most ancient language in all of IE and looks a lot like the original IE language. This is the OIT claim. In fact, IE does not look much like Sanskrit at all. And Sanskrit is not even the oldest attested IA language. Vedic comes first, then Epic Sanskrit and then Classical Sanskrit, and Vedic itself cannot possibly be older than 3500 YBP. The IE language is dated to 6500-8000 YBP (I favor the earlier date). Epic Sanskrit appears only 2500 YBP and Classical Sanskrit comes even later.

22. Lack of IA archeological sites. This is a classic OIT argument. Actually, we do have quite a few site. From the original Proto-Indo-Iranian sites in Sintashta southeast of Urals to the BMAC in Turkmenistan to the Yaz Culture in northeast Iran to the Swat Culture in the Swat Valley of Pakistan to the Cemetery H Culture in Punjab to the Copper Hoard Culture to the south, to the Painted Grey Ware Culture to the south and east, we have a long stretch of cultures that have long been associated with the AMT by archeologists.

Cemetery H in particular shows a possible move away from IVC culture. While the pottery is of course the same, there is a new design on the pottery. On funeral urns we see a small picture of a man with a bird inside of him. This seems to indicate the Vedic belief that the souls of men could fly like birds. Cemetery H also shows a new burial style – cremation and deposit of remains in burial urns. These changes in culture are probably due to Aryan influence.

The ideal Aryan archeological site, however, has typically not yet been found. The ideal site would have the remains of horses and their furnishings, chariots, A Vedic ritual site with three fireplaces west of a river, a flimsy and primitive building pattern of bamboo huts, tools made of stone, copper and bronze, gold and silver ornaments, food consisting of barley, milk products and the meat of cows, sheep and goats. However, the pottery style would remain local, as the Aryans did not innovate pottery.

Such a site has continued to elude searchers, but one has been found in Swat. Swat is mentioned in the Vedas as Aryan territory – suvastu.

23. No Aryan bones. Another OIT argument. It’s quite common for migrations to not be represented by skeletal remains. The remains of the Huns, a large force of proven invaders who conquered Hungary have only just been found in the past 20 years. The most recent research indicates that the Aryans left language, but few genes, in India.

This is reasonable and is often the case with many migrations and invasions. The Huns left as little genetic imprint on the Hungarians as the IA people did on Indians. The Magyars also left their language in the Danube, as the IA people left their IA language in India.

24. European appearance of Indo-Iranian peoples. There is no getting around it. The speakers of Indo-Iranian (II)languages often look strikingly European. This is particularly the case of Iranians, who consider themselves White, or Europeans outside of Europe. The speakers of II languages in Afghanistan often look very European. People in northern Pakistan are some of the most European looking people in the region. Punjabis often look very European, and they look much different from the South Indians to the south.

For the OIT to be correct, this should not be the case. All across the region, all II speakers should look like South Indians, and so should the Punjabis of North India. That II speakers look so European is evidence that they are partly descended from the very European looking peoples of the Kurgan culture of southern Russia. They moved south and east into Central and South Asia, bred in with darker locals, but still retain a strong resemblance to their European roots.

25. LANDSTAT photos indicate the drying up of the Sarasvati River 3900 YBP. A stable of the OIT argument. Since the Sarasvati is mentioned as “the great river” in the Vedas, this proves that the Vedas are much older than 4000 YBP, despite the copious linguistic evidence. The problem is that LANDSTAT photos cannot indicate geographic times.

Further, the Sarasvati River situation is very tricky. The situation as represented in the Vedas is the same situation as exists today. The upper Sarasvati is a significant river, and this is where the settlements were. The lower Sarasvati had already begun to dry up, and by the time of the Vedas it emptied into an inland lake. In a few places, the lower river goes underground in the alluvial Punjabi plains and disappears.

Archeological investigation indicates that settlements along the lower river were abandoned as the river dried up around this time. As you can see, the “Sarasvati River dried up” meme is a huge red herring.

26. No memories of an Aryan migration. Another OIT line. First of all, it is quite typical of most people to have no memories or false memories of wherever they came from. The Romans said they came from Greece. The Gypsies say they came from Egypt.

However, the Vedas do contain vague references to former habitations, such as what appears to be the BMAC and there are references to journeys over mountains and mountain passes. Many place names in Afghanistan are from proto-II words from Central Asia and often lead back to ancient Central Asian enemies of the Arya referred to in the Vedas. One of these is the Parni, associated with the BMAC and later with a northern Iranian group. They had stone forts and well-built cow stables in northern Iran that look a lot like earlier BMAC structures.

The route of migration did not take place over the high passes of the Himalayas and the Pamirs. Few groups have migrated over these treacherous mountains in the last 2000 years. Instead, the migration went from the BMAC down through northern Iran to Herat in West Afghanistan to the Gomal River in near Ghazni in East Afghanistan to the Swat Valley.

There are frequent references in the Vedas to southward and eastward movements of various groups of Arya. There are no references to westward groups as would be required by the OIT. Some of these movements to the south and east are described in military terms as victorious conquests. There are also references in the late Vedas of movements of the Arya east from the Afghan/Pakistan border to Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and all the way to Bihar.

27. Archeoastronomy. OIT proponents like to push this theory. Supposedly, the positions of stars are mentioned in the Vedas. By analyzing the positions of stars in the Vedas, we can make claims about when the Vedas were written via tracking the movements of stars in ancient days.

However, archeoastronomy is a field in poor standing. All we can learn for sure from archeoastronomy is that the Vedas were written some time in the past 8,000 years. All else is up in the air.

The Indian Astrophysicist Rajesh Kochhar has clearly mentioned that the astronomical data in the Vedas is not reliable.

28. The association of Andronovo culture with Indo-Iranians is controversial. So say the OIT proponents. This is not true.

Andronovo is a culture associated with the proto Indo-Iranians that stretched, in its formative location, around northern Kazakhstan and and west into Russia to near Samara, then down to the Caspian Sea, covering most of the northwest quadrant of Kazakhstan.

Later its borders enlarged. At maximum, its northern boundary was from Samara in the Volga Basin east to Anzhero Sudzhensk northeast of Novosibersk in southern Siberia.

The eastern boundary bordered on the Afansevo Culture in eastern Kazakhstan, southern Siberia and Xinjiang. Andronovo did include part of Xinjiang in the far north where the Altai Mountains come down.

The eastern border then encompassed most of eastern Kazakhstran except the area east of Balquash Koli, moving down to the border with Kyrgyzstan in the south, encompassing most of Uzbekistan except the far south, the northern half of Turkmenistan all the way to the the southeastern shore of the Caspian Sea. The Aral Sea was the realm of the Andronovo People.

The relation of Andronovo to the Indo-Aryan people in particular, as opposed to Indo-Iranians in general, is more controversial, but has been suggested by some experts.

29. Chariots could not go over the Hindu Kush. Another OIT argument. But as noted above, the Aryans did not move down through the Hindu Kush; instead, they came east from the BMAC through northern Iran to Herat in west Afghanistan east to around Ghazni over to the Bannu region in the NWFP of Pakistan. That’s a much easier route than the Hindu Kush.

30. There was no invasion. The invasion scenario has been replaced in the past 40 years to a migration scenario. It seems more likely that instead of defeating the Dravidian people and pushing them to the south, or destroying the IVC, instead the Aryans merely profited from the collapse of the IVC that was already underway.

31. There was no genocide of the Dravidian people, all Indians look alike genetically. No one ever said there was a genocide of the Dravidians by the Aryans. Instead, the Aryans moved in, and there was intermingling and intermarriage with the Dravidians, the combined result being the culture of the Vedas.

32. The linguistic evidence. The case for the AMT and the total non-case for the OIT is made by the linguistic evidence. Everything else is secondary. The case was clinched by Hock 1999 (see references).

33. Indians descend overwhelmingly from the Paleolithic population of India. It’s true that 80% of Indian genes go all the way back to the Paleolithic era. But 80% of European genes go all the way back to the Paleolithic too. Same in Britain. Therefore, Europe and Britain has never experienced any migrations of invasions in the past 10,000 years. The Aryan genetic footprint on Indian genes, if it exists, is doubtless less than 10% of the total. It’s well known by now that the Aryans left language, but few genes, in India. Identifying genetic history with linguistic history is naive.

Keep in mind that the Aryans were probably installed a superstrate over the existing Dravidian population. The Aryans were probably no more than 10-15% of the population genetically, and the remaining 85-90% were Dravidians.

34. How could a more primitive people like the Aryans replace the language of the more civilized people, the IVC Dravidians? So ask the OIT theorists. However, let us note that Greek speakers in the Levant, Aramaic speakers in Mesopotamia, Coptic speakers in Egypt and Romans in northern Africa all got their languages replaced by the culturally inferior Bedouins of Arabia. This sort of thing happens all the time.

35. There is no solid proof an Aryan migration to India in archeological terms. This is true as far as it goes, but all it means that is that archeologists typically refuse to characterize migrations in terms of who is migrating where. While there is no archeological proof for an Aryan migration, there is also no proof for Greek, Germanic, Italic, Celtic or Armenian migrations in those branches of IE either.

36. The Rig Veda says that the Sarasvati River flows to the sea. According to OIT folks, since the river dried up 3900 YBP, if the Vedas discuss it flowing the sea, they must have been written before 4000 YBP. However, this statement is only in one sentence of the Vedas, and the word “sea” in question is actually samuda, which Sanskrit experts say can mean lots of thing, but in this case means and inland sea or lake as formed by a river emptying into a desert. Which is what the Sarasvati did. The Sarasvati never emptied into the sea at any time.

37. Horses. OIT proponents keep claiming that they have found horse bones or evidence of horses on seals or objects at some early date. None of this has been confirmed, and some cases have involved overt fraud by Indian nationalist “scholars.” The earliest confirmed horse in the region is at Pirak 3800 YBP. Many horse remains have been found after that, but none earlier.

38. The AMT was invented by Max Muller in 1848. Muller as a British spy – agent – whatever who was sent by the British to falsify the history of India so the Indians would lose their national pride. Hence, the AMT is a British conspiracy. Yes, OIT supporters actually say this. The long version is that he was hired by the British East India Company as part of a nefarious plot to denigrate Hinduism.

First of all, the theory was not invented in 1848 nor was it invented by Muller, as it substantially predates 1848 and Muller was not the first to come up with it.

There is no evidence at all that the AMT was hatched as a British conspiracy (other popular theories say that the entire linguistic community was in on this conspiracy), nor has anyone offered any reason how or why the British could profit by making up the theory of a Bronze Age culture in India. Or why the British, who supposedly hated Indians and thought they were inferior, would invent a theory that said that Indians were in part related to the great British people.

References

Hock, Hans H. 1999. Out of India? The Linguistic Evidence. In: J. Bronkhorst & M. Deshpande, Aryan and Non-Aryan in South Asia: Evidence, Interpretation and Ideology, 1-18. Harvard Oriental Series. Opera Minora, Vol. 3. Cambridge, MA. 

Kochhar, Rajesh. 2000. The Vedic People: Their History and Geography. New Delhi: Sangam Books. 2000.

47 Comments

Filed under Animals, Anthropology, Asia, China, Domestic, East Indians, Eurasia, Europe, Europeans, Finno-Ugric Languages, Horses, India, Indic, Indo-European, Indo-Hittite, Indo-Iranian, Indo-Irano-Armenian, Indo-Irano-Armeno-Hellenic, Iran, Kazakhstan, Language Families, Linguistics, Literature, Pakistan, Physical, Race/Ethnicity, Regional, Roma, Russia, Sanskrit, Scholarship, South Asia, South Asians, Wild

Chairman Mao Revisionism

Repost from the old site.

All Westerners agree that Mao was even worse than Stalin, so it was time to do a particularly evil and hateful troll, the pro-Chairman Mao troll.

Mao never starved 23-35 million or whatever to death during the Great Leap Forward, though there were 15 million dead through overprocurement and mass stupidity. The 23-35 million figures are derived by Western scholars by outrageously adding in the “deaths” of people who never even got born in the first place!

Yes, during the GLF, many women were malnourished and did not give birth, and this effect lasted for a few years even after the famine. A decline in the birth rate due to eggs and sperms not participating in fertilization is incredibly called murder!

At the same time, there was a wildly declining death rate every year before the GLF, and then a few years after, the death rate started drastically plummeting once again, so all that happened in the GLF was a wildly declining death rate went up (in one year quite a bit) for a few years, then began plummeting again.

It is also said that during the GLF, Mao heard about the famine deaths and refused to do anything about them. I do not know enough about the episode to take a position on that one way or another. Clearly, there was a serious lack of democracy within the party, and this led to the problems.

The GLF disaster happened like this: First there was the China-Soviet split, which was actually a pretty stupid development, and was evidence of Mao’s excessive radicalism. Problems were based on Khrushchev’s notion of peaceful cooperation with the non-Communist world versus Mao’s idea that the non-Communist world was an enemy that had to be confronted.

As a result of this stupidity on Mao’s part, the USSR left China, taking all of their advisors and aid with them. The advisors and aid had been essential in building up China from 1949-1958, and now all of this was crashing to a halt. Now China would have to build herself up all by herself with no help from anyone.

As Stalin did in the 1930′s, Mao decided to industrialize the Chinese state on the backs of the peasants. There is no other way. You have to feed all those urban workers somehow or other. Mao set wildly unrealistic demands for the rural harvests, and the local party leaders bought into the nonsense. There were natural disasters, yet the local leaders reported harvests vastly in excess of what actually occurred. Hence, there was vast overprovisioning and famine resulted in the countryside.

There are some problems with the 15 million figure, but that is the figure that the Chinese census came up with. Most of the deaths were due to disease.

Travelers in China, even to the worst-hit regions, did not report any obvious signs of famine, however, they did report that rations were very tight. Interviews with Chinese later indicate that there was a famine in China during this period, even in the cities, that people were reduced to eating grass in the fields, and that people did indeed die, mostly of disease.

The anti-Mao types claim that Mao knew about the starvation but said basically, the Hell with them, let them starve. I do not know enough about the situation to comment on this, but due to the lack of democracy in the party, apparently there were delays in telling the top leadership what was really going on in the countryside, and instead they were told what they wanted to hear.

The West looks at this most complex series of events and sees only mass murder, but what do you see? 140 million minimum have been killed in India alone as a consequence of not following the Chinese model in 1949, and 4 million more die every single year, and no one even says a peep but Lindsay the evil Commie mass murder lover.

Chairman Mao broke Stalin’s record of doubling life expectancy in the shortest period of time, from 32 in 1949 (which the US loved) to 65 in 1976, a mere 27 year period, whereas Stalin took 40 years. And this, the greatest humanitarian achievement of all time, was done by the worst murderer of all time, Chairman Mao.

It was 1949-1953 and 700,000 landlords were being tried all of China. They were dirty, horrible and awful criminals almost all guilty of theft, rape, extortion and murder.

They raped the girls and women and killed the men and the peasant was dead at 32, his life hovering between life and death the whole way, but the West just loved it that way, and the kind folks that enforced this evil went to Taiwan and swore to reinstall the system that always killed way more than Mao, to the terror of the Chinese people, who rallied around the man who saved their lives, Mao.

The people put the despicable criminals on trial, and the people killed the warlord mass murderers themselves. It was Chmielnicki and Desallines and Nat Turner all over again. The party was supposed to intervene but they never did, and for this they are now condemned. Even then, Mao rued the excesses while he praised the notion of revolutionary terror.

The GPCR (Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution) came for 10 years and went and many great and wonderful things happened along with many horrible and insane things, and it was all mixed up. The UN said the Barefoot Doctor Campaign during the GPCR was one of the greatest public health campaigns ever undertaken.

The Western liars now say that 30 million people were killed during the GPCR! Unbelievable!

There were 1 million excess deaths in the GPCR, but it was also a time of wildly exploding life expectancy and a rapid decline in the death rate, so it was all mixed up. Most of the deaths were said to be suicides as people were nearly hounded to their deaths. I guess it’s better than a bullet in the head. There were also about 29,000 executed during the GPCR.

Keep in mind that during the GPCR China saw increases in life expectancy that were the greatest such achievements that mankind has ever achieved.

A new book by a fellow named Jung Chiang has stated that Mao killed 80 million people! Wow! How did he manage that? And at the same time, produce the quickest doubling of life expectancy in a nation in the history of mankind.

You don’t set records of doubling life expectancy by killing tens of millions of people. Forget it. This book has been panned by just about every single China scholar alive, but it’s still being quoted reverentially by the West.

No one knows how many Mao killed. Forgetting about the Leap, because there were no intentional deaths there, there were 1.7 million excess deaths in which the regime either persecuted people into taking their own lives or the regime actually executed people.

No one knows about any deaths beyond the 1.7 million. Surely there were executions from 1953-1965, but no one knows how many. There was a Gulag system from 1949-1976, and surely folks died there, but no one knows how many. Obviously the true number of deaths is over 1.7 million, but until the CCP opens its archives, we will never know the true numbers. The CCP has never opened its archives, and God knows if they ever will.

13 Comments

Filed under Asia, Asian, China, Chinese, History, Left, Maoism, Marxism, Modern, Regional, Reposts From The Old Site, Scholarship, USSR

Cultural Anthropology and Physics Envy

Repost from the old site.

A Christmas Day New York Times article by George Johnson, A Question of Blame When Societies Fall, has elicited quite a bit of comment in the blogosphere. The article concerns Jared Diamond, anthropologist and popular author of two recent books on cultures, Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. The first deals with why societies succeed, and the second deals with why societies fail.

First of all, I have read neither book, but I did read parts of Collapse, specifically the chapter on the Rwanda genocide. Diamond placed the blame for the genocide on a logical Malthusian theory that population had outstripped food supply which resulted in massacre to reduce the human population so there would once again be enough food and land to go around. It seemed reasonable at the time, and it still does now.

Other than that, I have not read a lot of Diamond. He did some good work on the Proto Indo-European homeland though, which he logically places in the Southern Ukraine.

The article discusses how the politically correct have rendered cultural anthropology into something pretty silly these days. This state of affairs was a culmination of a series of events in the history of anthropological theory over the past century.

In the first half of the 1900′s, there was still a trend in anthropology, the Great Chain of Being, to see European culture as the pinnacle and to judge all cultures in relation to how far they had climbed up the European ladder.

At the same time, Franz Boas and Margaret Mead were working at cross-purposes to the implied White Supremacism of the Great Chain of Being. Kevin MacDonald has done excellent work in showing how Boas and Mead used dubious theory to advance an explicitly anti-racist agenda in anthropology.

Mead herself was conned by her informants in Samoa. Having worked as an anthropologist myself, I am sympathetic to Mead while most are snide in their dismissal of her failures. It’s pretty easy to get conned by your informants, and it’s always a risk in anthropological work. If you think you are above that, go out and do some cultural anthropology fieldwork sometime, and get back to me.

Although Boas and Mead used a lot of fake theory to advance their agenda, we must give them at least some back slaps for trying to divert the anthropological stream of thought in an anti-racist direction. MacDonald and other racialists treat the Boasians as if they were some species of evil. Yet anti-racism is never evil, at least in intentions. It cannot be by its nature.

The Johnson article describes a politically correct conference of cultural anthropologists convened in order to attack Diamond’s books. Diamond appears to be getting it from all sides. Race realists attack him for opposing racialist theories and supporting cultural, as opposed to genetic, explanations for the degrees of success or failure of various cultures.

Diamond’s books were actually written as explicitly anti-racist critique. The winners in world history to did not overwhelm the losers due to superior genes, and the losers did not lose due to inferior genes.

Instead, we have accidents of history and geography for the winners and hostile neighbors, runaway population growth, environmental devastation, climate change, weakened trade partners and failure to resolve societal problems for the losers.

History is reduced to a crap shoot, and there are no good guys or bad guys. For this rather harmless theorizing, Diamond is being excoriated by the PC crowd.

The PC crowd, as usual, tosses out the expected weak, grasping, comical yet pitiful feel-good theories: The winners are at fault for the decline of the losers. The losers failed due to accidents and unintended consequences, not due to deliberate stupidity.

The Rwandan genocide was not a Malthusian human earthquake and resource war, instead it is reduced to an exercise in witchcraft whereby “killing the king” will bring back good luck in ailing harvests.

And at the end of the day, anti-racist Jared Diamond, like anti-racist Robert Lindsay, is another racist voodoo doll for the PC crowd to stick pins in.

Sigh.

Steve Sailer weighs in, defending Diamond, and GNXP tosses out a nearly incomprehensible post about Johnson’s piece. In GNXP‘s post and in the long and equally difficult comments section, GNXP authors and commenters thrash away at cultural anthropology. For examples of the sort of stuff that gets their goat, see these links here, here , here and here.

Wincing through the painful comments section, one sees the GNXP’s main beef with cultural anthropologists – they oppose the GNXP’s favorite subject: the genetics of racial superiority and inferiority. IQ, IQ, IQ, IQ and IQ, g factor, g, Blacks and IQ. Niggers are stupid, niggers are stupid, niggers are stupid and niggers are stupid. Oh yeah, and IQ, g factor and niggers are stupid.

The GNXP’ers have a damned one track mind. Everything is coded in the genes. From 1840-1900, when the Irish were as criminal as the Blacks of today, no doubt the Irish criminal gene was expressing away. Yet now it has curiously receded. Jews got the money gene, except in Eastern Europe in the late 1800′s when they had the poverty gene.

The Germans had the Nazi gene in the 30′s and 40′s, yet it has now nearly vanished. Everything in human behavior and society, in politics and economics and everything in between, is due to our genes. Culture is a sideshow, laughable in its meaninglessness to our enterprise.

The GNXP comments thread here was particularly painful to read, as they spend most of their time slamming cultural anthropology as utterly lacking in any scientific enterprise.

I beg to differ, and I will offer you some examples from my work as a cultural anthropologist in which science and the empirical method was important in my work. I spent 1 1/2 years working with a local Indian tribe on a government grant doing linguistic and anthropological work.

First, a bit of a defense of the cultural anthropologists: They have to work with these cultures. They go live with them, or work with them intimately. The members of these cultures are called informants.

One thing anthropologists learn very quickly is that you must suspend all moral judgments about the culture you are studying. Why? Because otherwise you will not get anywhere with them. It’s a strictly utilitarian decision. This is part of the reason why nowadays anthropologists are so reluctant to attack various cultures and peoples: we still need to work with these folks! If we attack them, they won’t work with us anymore.

As a painful example, the Indian tribe that I worked with was very suspicious of anthropologists, and many actively disliked the whole enterprise of Whitey coming out and studying the Indians. A mythology had sprung up whereby the evil White anthropologists had come out to the Indians, harmed the Indians, deliberately told lies about them, and basically just screwed them over.

The anthros hated Indians, and their agenda was to lie about them to make them look bad. This is the BS the revered Indian elders had told their gullible children.

One professor, Robert F. G. Spier, who had done his PhD dissertation on the tribe wanted to know what the tribe had thought of his work. I told him they had not even read it, and to tell the truth, many tribal members were hostile to him, as they were to all anthropologists. He was crushed, but he said, cynically, that he understood. Just to show you what we are up against.

Now, with all the hostility these Indians have towards the well-meaning anthros of the past, you can see how we need to tread carefully around our informants. Our rep is bad enough as it is. It’s painfully important to show love and compassion towards the people that we study.

In the course of my work, I read through all of the anthropological data assembled by the anthros of the past. There was a ton of great info in there. When I presented my findings to to top Indians in order to turn the work into a book – an ethnography of the tribe, the whole project was cruelly shot down.

The elders had created a myth whereby they had outsmarted the evil White anthros by telling them a pack of lies, thereby getting back at them and thwarting their whole wicked Whitey project. All the anthropological work was contaminated. Even if it were not all lies, we could not tell where the lies began and the truth ended. Not one word could be written.

The project was shelved; I was crushed, angry, embittered and cynical, yet with my background in psychology, I sadly understood the defenses working behind the Indians’ views.

At this point, my project became a scientific one. Was it actually true that the Indians had told the anthros a pack of lies to get one over on the evil White man? I worked on this question for months (while doing many other things). I read a lot more material and talked to anthropologists all over the country. I read and re-read the materials and compared them to each other.

My hypothesis was: No, the Indians had not lied to the anthros. This hypothesis had to be rejected. There were clearly cases of lying, but they were easily spotted and isolated. I fleshed out most of them and just accepted the rest as the best truth we could find. The various ethnologies by anthros trotting through every couple decades lined up extremely well.

The few questions that the Indians questioned so ferociously – “Did the Indians eat rattlesnakes, gopher snakes and skunks?” was one – were identified as painfully obvious cases of psychological defenses. Nowadays, the Indians think eating skunks is terrible, as skunks stink. The meat doesn’t stink, but it is oily yet edible. The aboriginal Indians may well have eaten skunks, but probably not often.

We need to consider that aboriginal Indians probably readily ate any decent-tasting small animal that they could easily capture and kill. Skunks are easy to kill, and the meat is ok enough to eat if you are hungry.

Modern Indians recoil at the idea of eating gopher snakes and rattlesnakes, as one lives in the dirt and “tastes dirty”, and the other is poisonous. I concluded that both snakes were eaten, and that gopher snakes do not taste dirty, as this is illogical thinking based on the notion that if something lives in the dirt it must taste like the dirt.

There were other empirical questions: What was the religion of the Indians? Nowadays, the local Indians were passionate Christians, and believed in something called the Great Spirit, the Great Creator, or the Creator. But was that an aboriginal belief? Once again, the question lingered over months of intensive research, hypothesis-testing and scientific back and forths.

I finally concluded that the aboriginal Indians were animists for whom the world, and everything in it, was alive with electric energy. The rocks, the trees, everything…a life force flowed through it all. The Indians used various magical items to tap into this magical world of spirits.

Curiously, animism is not incompatible with modern science.

As particle physics says that we are all part of everything else, and any two particles in contact will tend to spin together for the rest of their existence, there is a spinning and buzzing subatomic tapestry that links us all together as one. My body does not end where yours begins, and I am still connected to my ex-girlfriend Tracy from 1978, if she is still alive, as our particles continue to spin in tandem.

When an Indian died, a ceremony was held to see the spirit off to the Land of the Dead, which lay to the West. This ceremony was observed by Edward Curtis in 1878, 28 years after major contact, so it was probably aboriginal.

The aboriginal Indian God was described to me by a fellow anthropologist, Sylvia Broadbent, as a Deus Obtusa, or Lazy God . It was not important at all in their lives, but it did create the world, after which it did not do much of anything, except perhaps every once in a while when it got off its ass to yawn and intervene trivially in our affairs a bit before heading back to the cosmic bong hits.

Sydney Lamb concurred that aboriginally, California Indians did not believe in a Christian-type “Great Creator” God.

After 1850, the Gold Rush hit these Indians hard, and by 40 years later, 93% of them were dead. In the meantime, they were exposed to Christianity, and many were converted. At the same time, I believe, the California Indians were exposed to the Plains Indian notion of the Great Creator. Nowadays, you will find most US Indian tribes believe in a Great Creator. Aboriginally, perhaps only the Plains tribes did.

I believe that the Great Creator belief of the Plains diffused out as a general “Indian” belief in God, and rapidly Christianizing Indians all over the US picked up on it and adapted it for their own. The reason for this diffusion was the Christianization of the Indians and their exposure to the omniscient and omnipresent God of Christianity.

In order to adopt this new Christian God to the Indian World, the Great Creator concept was adopted via cultural diffusion from Plains tribes. At this point, most US Indians are passionate Christians, and most will insist that they always believed in a “Great Creator”. If you dispute this, you ask for a fight. The truth, I believe, is as described above.

Along the same lines, some of the Indian stories I was working with were the characteristic myths of the California Indians, dealing with various animal Gods. These myths explained how various things came to be, how the Earth was created, how fire was discovered, etc.

The myths date back to a time before there were people, when various animals, in the form of “Animal Gods”, and not the animals themselves as we now know them, roamed the Earth. This was the time of Stinkbug, Turtle, Coyote, Mountain Lion, Bear, Bobcat, Duck, and many other “Animal Gods”.

I talked to a high-ranking Karuk Indian and asked him whether he actually believed all this stuff. He got very angry (as Indians often do when you challenge their beliefs) and insisted it was all literally true. Then I set off on a quest to see to what extent the California Indians had actually believed in these animal myths aboriginally.

After a while, the best response I found came from a brilliant linguist named Sydney Lamb at Rice University, who told me that the aboriginal Indians didn’t really believe any of that stuff. Instead, those stories were more like the Saturday morning cartoons, or fairy tales you tell to little kids.

What is curious is how stories that were aboriginally seen as “Saturday cartoons” have now been adopted as literal truth by much more scientific-minded modern Indians, and that these modern Indians also insist that this literal belief was also held aboriginally.

There were other questions. The existence of a Yokuts tribe called the Dalinchi. The local elders passionately insisted that this was not a tribe, but was merely the name of a village, and got angry when I suggested otherwise. Looking through old mission records, a linguist friend of mine found Yokuts Indians who gave their tribe as Dalinchi. They probably would not have done so if that was only a village name.

The existence of a Yokuts tribe called Dumna was questioned, and locals stated that it did not exist, in part because cynically, the locals wished to claim Dumna land as their own, mostly so they could build a casino on it.

There was a lot of anthropological work on the Dumna, especially a great book by Frank Latta, but most crucially once again, my linguist professor friend found old mission records where Indians gave their tribe as Dumna.

The local Indians asked me to draw a map of tribal boundaries. Between other work, I spent a few months on this, poring over all sorts of maps, new and old, and old ethnologies and reports. I eventually mapped out a tentative boundary for the tribe. As with most California tribes in this area, it didn’t go very far, and it didn’t go down to the San Joaquin River where they wanted me to draw the line. Close? Yes, but not to the river.

Why did they want me to draw the line to the river? So they could build a casino there! The tribe got angry at my conclusions as I had discovered the “wrong facts”, and for a bit it seemed my job was on the line. I insisted that I was a scientist, and scientifically, I could not compromise by scientific ethics for a political agenda. They seemed to accept the basic morality of my stubborn stand, and backed down.

The various empirical questions that I dealt with in the course of my work as a cultural anthropologist are bolded above.

I do resent GNXP and to a much lesser extent Sailer (who is mostly just guilty of ignorance and thinking in the same way one “skims” a book) saying that cultural anthropology is not a science, that the scientific method is not used, that we make no hypotheses, nor do we test them, nor we do we make tentative conclusions that we continually readjust in the face of new evidence.

I defy any of the arrogant hard science types in this comments thread to tell me that I was engaging in something other than the scientific method above.

References

Gayton, Anne. (1948). Yokuts and Western Mono Ethnography, Volume II: Northern Foothill Yokuts and Western Mono. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Anthropological Records 10:1-290

Heizer, Robert F. (1974, 1993). The Destruction of the California Indians. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press.

Kroeber, A.L. (1953, 1967) Handbook of the Indians of California. Berkeley, CA: California Book Company.

Latta, Frank F. (1949, 1999). Handbook of the Yokuts Indians. Exeter, CA: Brewer’s Historical Press, Salinas, CA: Coyote Press.

Spier, Robert F.G. (1954) PhD Dissertation on the Chukchansi Yokuts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University.

Spier, Robert F. G.. (1978) Handbook of the North American Indians, Volume 8, California. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institute.

3 Comments

Filed under Africa, Americas, Amerindians, Anthropology, Anti-Racism, Blacks, California, Christianity, Civil Rights, Crime, Cultural, Culture, Europe, Europeans, Genetics, History, Intelligence, Left, Linguistics, North America, Pacific, Polynesia, Psychology, Race Realism, Race/Ethnicity, Racism, Regional, Religion, Reposts From The Old Site, Scholarship, Science, Ukraine, USA, Useless Western Left, West, Whites

The Out of India Model for Indo-European

Related to “There was no Aryan Invasion” folks, mostly Hindu nationalists and Indian nationalists.

Out of India Model. Unfortunately, the Wikipedia page makes it seem somewhat plausible. It’s not. Not plausible, that is. It’s nonsense. Indo-European speakers did not come out of India. India is not the homeland of the Indo-Europeans. The true homeland is in far southern Russia north of the Caucasus, or, even better, in Anatolia.

This is what really happened: an Indo-Aryan migration. Read through that piece and it becomes quite clear that this is what really happened. Part of the problem is with the word invasion. There was no invasion. They just moved in.

Michael Witzel, a Sanskritist, has been in the forefront of attacking the Out of India model. Here is a good page savaging most of their arguments. He takes apart one of their leader proponents, N. Kazanas of Greece, a guy who is little more than a dilettante. It takes a little while to get through this stuff as it’s a bit heavy going, but I was able to do it. Once you do it, the Out of India Theory lies in ruins.

One of the OOI arguments is that Indo-Aryan peoples have no memory of a migration. But who does anyway? Most IE peoples do not remember their obvious migrations either. Romans said they came from Troy. This is a lie. Gypsies say they came from Egypt. Fiction.

Here is an argument against an Indo-Aryan incursion:

we have an archaeologically attested culture of many centuries if not millennia with undoubted literacy but without any traces of religious texts, legal codes, scientific works and even simple secular fables (except most laconic legends on indecipherable seals), and, in quick succession, even as the older culture declines, an intrusive illiterate people with no archaeological attestation at all who yet produce within a few centuries (according to the AIT) all the literature that was missing from the previous culture.

This is a unique situation that makes little sense.

However, this very thing happened in Greece. First, a Minoan cult, a Helladic civilization, but no literary texts, then, in a few centuries, then, within a few centuries, an explosion of literature, poetry, religion, philosophy, the Homeric texts, etc. Further, it does not produce “all the literature that was missing from the previous civilization. It produces new literature at a very rapid pace – see the Yayoi invasion of Japan from Korea and the rapid replacement of the Jomon culture for something similar.

Another argument is that archeologically, the record of civilization in India is continuous – that is, there is no obvious disruption dating from an Aryan invasion. However, as a general rule, culture, archeologically, is continuous in all parts of the world. Culture is continuous in Europe too, and we know full well that Indo-Europeans took over and supplanted earlier groups. Is there a record of this takeover culturally? Well no, but it happened.

However, keep in mind that horses and chariots showed up with the Indo-Aryans and were not found in India previously. OOI folks say silly things like, “Egyptians had chariots too” (Point being?). Anyway, horses and chariots did not develop in India. They came down from the steppes with the I-A speakers.

Surely if OOI is true than Sanskrit would be the most ancient IE language. It’s not at all. It only goes back 3,500 years too. The Anatolian branch may well date back 8,000 years.

If OOI is true than borrowings from other Indian languages such as Dravidian and Munda would be found in all branches of IE, no? But of course they are only found in Indic, which we would expect if Indic speakers migrated into India and not out of it.

Going back to pre-Indo-Aryan times, paleontologists find differences between bones even between Mohenjo Daro and Harappa. Also, there are no I-A bones found here. Of course not. Aryans will not show up for 1000′s of years.

Yes, Harappans built wheels, but they built no spoke-wheeled chariot. This came only with the Aryans. OOI folks have no explanation for this.

Indeed, Aryan chariots are built from woods from the Punjab plain, not wood from say the steppes. But this is not a valid OOI argument. Invaders always use whatever is available. Aryan immigrants brought chariot technology with them from the steppes. To make chariots in their new homeland, they used local wood. This is surprising?

41 Comments

Filed under Anatolian, Ancient Greece, Anthropology, Antiquity, Asia, Asian, Culture, Dravidian, Ethnic Nationalism, Eurasia, Europe, History, India, Indic, Indo-European, Indo-Hittite, Indo-Iranian, Indo-Irano-Armenian, Indo-Irano-Armeno-Hellenic, Language Families, Linguistics, Nationalism, Paleontology, Political Science, Regional, Russia, Sanskrit, Scholarship, South Asia

Journeys in Asian Prehistory

Repost from the old site.

In this post we will look at the prehistory of the Asian or Mongoloid Race and some its subgroups. After humans came out of Africa about 70,000 years ago, they moved along the coast of Arabia, Southwest Asia, South Asia and eventually to Southeast Asia.

One Asian man’s rendering of modern Asian expansion, contrasted with the typical model. I don’t agree with either model, but I like the one on the left a little better. For starters, the yellow line on the map to the left should be hugging the coast quite closely and the brown and red lines should be radiating out from a base somewhere along the yellow line. Unfortunately, my artistic skills are not good enough to draw my own map.

We think that these people looked something like the Negritos of today, such as those on the Andaman Islands.

At some point, probably in Southern China, the Mongoloid Race was born. The timeline, as determined by looking at genes, was from 60,000-110,000 years ago. As humans are thought to have only populated the world 70,000 years or so ago, it is strange that the timeline may go back as far as 110,000 years.

One thing that is very interesting is that there is evidence for regional continuity in Asia (especially China) dating back 100,000′s of years, if not millions of years. This is called the multiregional hypothesis of human development.

Though it is mostly abandoned today, it still has its adherents.

Some of its adherents are Asian nationalists of various types, especially Chinese and Indonesian nationalists. They all want to think that man was born in their particular country. Others are White nationalists who refuse to believe that they are descended from Africans, whom they consider to be inferior. The problem is that the Asians can indeed show good evidence for continuity in the skulls in their region.

A good midway point between the two, that sort of solves the conundrum, is that humans came out of Africa, say, ~70,000 years or so ago, and when they got to Asia, they bred in with some of the more archaic types there. The problem with this is that the only modern human showing evidence of pre-modern Homo genes in Mungo Man in Australia from 50,000 years ago.

There is evidence that as late as 120,000 years ago, supposedly fully modern humans in Tanzania were still transitioning from archaic to modern man. Ancient South African humans 100-110,000 yrs ago looked like neither Bantus nor Bushmen.

Nevertheless, we can reject the multiregional theory in its strong form as junk science. We also note cynically that once again ethnic nationalists and regular nationalists, including some of the world’s top scientists, are pushing a blatantly unscientific theory. Yet again ethnic nationalism is shown to be a stupidifying mindset.

There must be a reason why ethnic nationalism seems to turn so many smart people into total idiots. I suspect it lies in the fact that the basic way of thinking involved in ethnic nationalism is just a garbage way of looking at the world, and getting into it distorts one’s mind similar to the way a mental illness does.

We think that the homeland of the Asians is in Southern China, just north of the Vietnam border. This is because the people with the greatest genetic diversity in Asia are found in Northern Vietnam. Since the Vietnamese are known to have largely come from Southern China, we can assume that the homeland was just north of the border. From there, all modern Asians were born.

This means all NE and SE Asians, Polynesians, Micronesians and Melanesians came out of this Asian homeland.

School kids in Hothot, a town in Inner Mongolia. There is some question about whether China really has a right to control this area. These Northeast Asians originally came from a homeland in SE Asia near the China-Vietnam border. As this race is only 9,000 years old, NE Asians could not possibly have gone through an Ice Age that molded their brains for high intelligence, as the racist liar and scientific fraud Richard Lynn claims .

There is even evidence that the Altaics of Siberia originated from the SE Asian homeland. They are thought to have moved out of there to the west and north to become the various Altaic groups such as the Buryats. Later Caucasian lines came to the Altaics from the West.

A Mongolian man on the steppes with a grazing animal and possibly a yurt in the background. Yurts are conical structures that the Mongolians still live in. I believe that Mongolians also eat a lot of yogurt, which they cultivate from the milk of their grazing animals. Note the pale blue eyes and somewhat Caucasian appearance.

My astute Chinese commenter notes: “While Mongolians do have ‘Caucasian genes’, they look distinct from Uighurs, who are mixed. I’m thinking Mongolians and Central Asians lie in a spectrum between Caucasoids in West Asia and “Mongoloids” in Northeast Asians, while Uighurs were the product of Central Asian, West Asian, and Northeast Asian interbreeding.”

In fact, all of these populations are on the border genetically between Caucasians and Asians.

A Mongolian woman. Note short, stocky appearance with short limbs to preserve heat in the cold. Note also the long, moon-shaped, ruddy face, possibly red from the cold weather. Are those ginseng roots in her hand?

More Mongolians, this time with what look like grazing reindeer in the background. Mongolians herd reindeer? Note once again the long, flat, moon-shaped face, the almost-Caucasian features and especially the pale blue eyes of each woman. I cannot help but think that both of these women also look like Amerindians. Neither would be out of place at a pow wow.

More Mongolians, this time a Mongolian boy. Other than the eyes, he definitely looks Caucasian. He looks like a lot of the kids I grew up with in facial structure. Mongolians are anywhere from 10% Caucasian to 14% Caucasian.

From their Altaic lands, especially in the Altai region and the mouth of the Amur River, they moved into the Americas either across the Bering Straight or in boats along the Western US Coast. Another line went north to become the Northeast Asians. And from the Northeast Asian homeland near Lake Baikal, another line went on to become the Siberians.

An Evenki boy with his reindeer. Prototypical reindeer herders, the Evenki are a classical Siberian group. Strangely enough, they are related to both NE Asians and other Siberians and also to Tibetans. This indicates that the genesis of the Tibetans may have been up near or in Siberia.

From 10-40,000 yrs ago, the Siberian population was Mongoloid or pre-Mongoloid. After 10,000 yrs BP (before present), Caucasians or proto-Caucasians moved in from the West across the steppes, but they never got further than Lake Baikal. This group came from the Caucasus Mountains. They are members of the Tungus Race and are quite divergent from most other groups genetically.

More Evenkis, members of the Tungus Race, this time some beautiful women and kids in traditional costumes. But this photo was taken in some Siberian city, so they may have just been dressing up. They probably have some Caucasian genes, as the nearby Yakuts are 6% Caucasian. Many of the Evenki women have become single Moms, because the men are seen as violent, drunk and a financial drain.

Soon after the founding of the Asian homeland in northern Vietnam 53,000-90,000 yrs ago, the proto-Asians split into three distinct lines – a line heading to Japanese and related peoples, another heading to the North and Northeast Asians, and a third to the Southern Han Chinese and SE Asian lines.

A beautiful royal member of the Southern Han Dynasty in Hong Kong, member of the South China Sea Race. This race consists of the Filipinos, the Ami and the Southern Han from Guangdong Province. The Ami are a Taiwanese Aborigine tribe who made up the bulk of the Austronesians who populated much of island SE Asia over the past 8,000 years.

These Southern Chinese people never went through any Ice Age, and the SE Asian Race is only 10,000 years old anyway. So why are they so smart? Unlike some NE Asian groups, especially those around Mongolia, the Altai region, the Central Asian Stans and Siberia, the Han have no Caucasian in them.

A bright Chinese commenter left me some astute remarks about the South Chinese IQ: “Some possible reasons for high South Chinese IQ’s: Chinese culture is very… g-loaded. For example, understanding the language requires good pitch, recognizing Chinese characters takes visual IQ and good memory, Chinese literature and history span 3,000-4,000 years for references, etc.

For several thousand years testing determined your social position (and it still does to some extent in Confucian nations). Those left in the countryside were periodically left to famine and “barbarian” invasions (slaughter).

Likewise, when Chinese people interbreed, there is strong pressure to breed into the upper class of a native population. Whatever caused the high selection when Chinese and Mon-Khmer/Dai groups interbred probably gave the Chinese immigrants leverage to marry into the upper classes when they did. This is something the Asian diaspora still tends to do.”

Regarding South Chinese appearance, he notes, “Lastly, the Chinese in Fujian have distinct features. They have thicker lips, curlier hair, more prominent brow, less pronounced epicanthic folds, etc. I’m in Taiwan now and I do notice it. I was at a packed market a while ago and was noting the way people look.”

As a result of this split, all Chinese are related at a deep level, even though Northern Chinese are closer to Caucasians than to Southern Chinese. Nevertheless, we can still see a deep continuum amongst Asian populations.

A Northern Chinese man with distinctly Caucasian features. Although they have no Caucasian genes that we can see anymore, they are still closer to Caucasians than to the Southern Chinese.

The major genetic frequency found in Japan, Korea and Northern China is also found at very high levels in Southern China, Malaysia and Thailand, and at lower levels in the Philippines, Vietnam and Indonesia. Incredibly, even higher levels are found in Southern China, Malaysia and Thailand than in Northern China.

The proto-NE Asian or North Asian homeland was around Lake Baikal about 35,000 years ago. The Ainu and a neighboring group, the Nivkhi, are thought to be the last remaining groups left from this line. The Ainu are related to the Jomon, the earliest group in Japan, who are thought to have originated in Thailand about 16,000 years ago and then came up to Japan on boats to form the proto-Jomon.

The Jomon culture itself formally begins about 9,000 years ago. Japan at that time was connected to the mainland. Jomonese skulls found in Japan look something like Aborigines. Later, around 2,300 years ago, a group called the Yayoi came across the sea from Korea and moved into Japan.

The woman on the left is more Yayoi and the one on the right is more Okinawan. The Okinawans, members of the Ryukyuan Race, seem to be related to the Ainu, and they have a long history in the south of Japan. The Ryukyuan Race is a very divergent grouping.

Most Japanese are members of the Japanese-Korean Race (like the Yayoi woman at left) but there is a divergent group in the South called the Southern Japanese Race, made up of the Honshu Kinki (the people around Kyoto) and the island of Kyushu. They may be more Okinawan than the rest of the mainland Japanese.

Over the next 2,300 years, the Yayoi slowly conquered and interbred with the Ainu until at the present time, the Ainu are nearly extinct as a cultural and racial entity. The Ainu have always been treated terribly by the Japanese, in part because they are quite hairy, like Caucasians.

The hairy body is thought to be a leftover from proto-NE Asian days, as some other groups in that area also have a lot of body hair. Despite the fact that they look down on the Ainu, about 40% of Japanese are related to the Ainu, and the rest are more or less related to the Yayoi. Actually, Japanese genetics seems a lot more complicated than that, but that’s as good a summary as any.

The Ainu. Though despised by the Japanese in part due to their Caucasian-like “monkey hair” on their bodies (note the guy’s hairy legs), the Japanese themselves are about 40% Ainu. The Ainu are members of the Ainu-Gilyak Race and are one of the most diverse groups on Earth.

A photo of Ainu Yasli Adam in traditional garb. I love this photo. Note that he could be mistaken for an Aborigine or a Caucasian. For a long time, the Ainu were considered to be Caucasians, but recent genetic studies have shown conclusively that they are Asians.

The Ainu language is formally an isolate, but in my opinion it is probably related to Japanese and Korean and thence to Altaic, nevertheless I think that both Japanese and Korean are closer to Altaic than Ainu is. Genetically, the Ainu are closest to NE Asians but are also fairly close to the Na-Dene Amerindians. Cavalli-Sforza says they are in between NE Asians, Amerindians and Australians.

At this time, similar-looking Australoids who looked something like Papuans, Aborigines or Negritos were present all over Asia, since the NE Asians and SE Asians we know them today did not form until around 10,000 years ago.

There are still some traces of these genes, that look like a Papuan line, in modern-day Malays, coastal Vietnamese, parts of Indonesia and some Southwestern Chinese. The genes go back to 13,000 years ago and indicate a major Australoid population expansion in the area at that time. Absolutely nothing whatsoever is known about this Australoid expansion.

God I love these Paleolithic types. A Papuan Huli man, member of the Papuan Race, who looks somewhat like an Australian Aborigine. Although it is often said that Papuans and Aborigines are related, they are only in the deepest sense. In truth, they really do form two completely separate races because they are so far apart.

Once again, while Afrocentrists also like to claim these folks as “Black”, the Papuans and Aborigines are the two people on Earth most distant from Africans, possibly because they were the first to split off and have been evolving away from Africans for so long. I don’t know what that thing in his mouth is, but it looks like a gigantic bong to me. There are about 800 languages spoken on Papua, including some of the most maddeningly complex languages on Earth.

NE Asian skulls from around 10,000 years ago also look somewhat like Papuans, as do the earliest skulls found in the Americas. The first Americans, before the Mongoloids, were apparently Australoids.

The proto-NE Asian Australoids transitioned to NE Asians around 9,000 years ago. We know this because the skulls at Zhoukoudian Cave in NE China from about 10,000 years ago look like the Ainu, the Jomon people, Negritos and Polynesians.

Waitress in Hothot, Inner Mongolia. Zhoukoudian Cave is not far from here. Note the typical NE Asian appearance. Mongolians are members of the Mongolian Race and speak a language that is part of the Altaic Family.

We think that these Australoids also came down in boats or came over the Bering Straight to become the first Native Americans. At that time – 9-13,000 years ago, Zhoukoudian Cave types were generalized throughout Asia before the arrival of the NE Asians.

Northern Chinese prototypes from a photo of faculty and students at Jilin University in Northern China. People in this area, members of the Northern Chinese Race, are closely related to Koreans. Note the lighter skin and often taller bodies than the shorter, darker Southern Chinese. The man in the center is a White man who is posing with the Chinese in this picture.

My brother worked at a cable TV outfit once and there was a Northern Chinese and a Southern Chinese working there. The Northern one was taller and lighter, and the Southern one was shorter and darker. The northern guy treated the southern guy with little-disguised contempt the whole time. He always called the southern guy “little man”, his voice dripping with condescension.

This was my first exposure to intra-Chinese racism. Many NE Asians, especially Japanese, are openly contemptuous of SE Asians, in part because they are darker.

Native Americans go from Australoids to Mongoloids from 7,000-9,000 years ago, around the same time – 9,000 years ago – that the first modern NE Asians show up.

Prototypical NE Asians – Chinese in Harbin, in far northeastern China. This area gets very cold in the winter, sort of like Minnesota. Keep in mind that this race is only 9,000 years old. Note the short, stocky body type, possibly a cold weather adaptation to preserve heat.

Some of the earliest Amerindian skulls such as Spirit Cave Man, Kennewick Man, and Buhl Woman look like Ainu and various Polynesians, especially Maoris.

A Hawaiian woman, part of the Polynesian Race. Kennewick Man does not look like any existing populations today, but he is closest to Polynesians, especially the virtually extinct Moiriori of the Chatham Islands and to a lesser extent the Cook Islanders. Yes, many of the various Polynesians can be distinguished based on skulls. Other early Amerindian finds, such as Buhl Woman and Spirit Cave Woman also look something like Polynesians.

It is starting to look like from a period of ~7,000-11,000 years ago in the Americas, the Amerindians looked like Polynesians and were not related to the existing populations today, who arrived ~7,000 years ago and either displaced or bred out the Polynesian types. Furthermore, early proto-NE Asian skulls, before the appearance of the NE Asian race 9,000 years ago, look somewhat like Polynesians, among other groups.

An archaeologist who worked on Kennewick Man says Amerindians assaulted him, spit on him and threatened to kill him because he said that Kennewick Man was not an Amerindian related to living groups, and that his line seemed to have no ancestors left in the Americas.

Furthermore, most Amerindians insist that their own tribe “has always been here”, because this is what their silly ancestral religions and their elders tell them. They can get quite hostile if you question them on this, as I can attest after working with an Amerindian tribe for 1½ years in the US.

To add further insult to reason, a completely insane law called NAGPRA, or Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act, mandates that all bones found on any tribe’s territory are the ancestors of that tribe and must be returned to the tribe for reburial. This idiotic law is completely anti-scientific, but most Amerindians, even highly educated ones, get pretty huffy about defending it (Trust me!).

Hence there has been a huge battle over the bones of Kennewick Man. Equally idiotically, White Nationalists insist that Kennewick Man is a Caucasian, so that means he is one of theirs. They also use this to conveniently note that Whites occupied the US before the Indians, and therefore, that the Amerindians implicitly have no rights to the place and that the land-theft of Amerindian America by Whites was right and proper.

This is even more insane than Zionism by orders of magnitude. First of all, Kennewick Man is not a Caucasian! He just sort of looks like one. But that is only because Polynesians, the Ainu and even Aborigines look somewhat Caucasian. This is not due to Caucasian genes, but is instead simply a case of convergent evolution.

These dual episodes above, like the Asian paleontologist morons above, adds weight to my hypothesis that ethnic nationalism, and nationalism in general, turns people into dithering morons. Among other reasons, that is why this proudly internationalist blog casts such a wary eye on nationalism of all kinds.

The prehistory of SE Asia follows a similar storyline. Once again, all of SE Asia was inhabited by Australoids. They probably looked something like the Negritos of today. Skulls from 9,000-11,000 years ago in SE Asia (including Southern China) resemble modern-day Australoids.

The oldest skulls in Vietnam look like Negritos. 25,800 yr old bones from Thailand look like Aborigines and the genes look like the Semang, Negritos of Thailand and Malaysia. There are skulls dating back 44,000 years in Malaysia and these also look like Aborigines. Some say that the Semang go back 50,000 years in Malaysia.

Andaman Islands Negritos. This type was probably the main human type all throughout SE Asia, and a variation of this type was in NE Asia too. These are really the first people to come out of Africa. Afrocentrists like to say that these people are Black, but the truth is that these people are very far away from Black people – in fact, they are Asians.

Andaman Islanders have peppercorn hair like the hair of the Bushmen in Africa. This would differentiate this group from the woolly-haired Negritos in the Philippines. Genetic studies have shown that the Andaman Islanders are quite probably the precise remains of the first people to come out of Africa.

Genetically, they tend to resemble whatever group they are living around, with some distinct variations. In truth, this group here, the Andamans, is one of the “purest” ethnic groups on Earth, because they have been evolving in isolation for so long. This is known as genetic drift. At the same time, I think there is little diversity internally in their genome, also due to drift.

The Andaman Negritos are part of the Andaman Islands Negrito Race. Their strange and poorly understood languages are not related to any others, but there is some speculation that they are related to Kusunda in Nepal, a language isolate. I tend to agree with that theory.

One of the problems with genetic drift is after a while you get an “island” effect where the population lacks genetic diversity, since diversity comes from inputs from outside populations. Hence they tend to be vulnerable to changes in the environment that a more genetically diverse population would be able to weather a lot better.

Although racist idiot Richard Lynn likes to claim that all people like this have primitive languages, the truth is that the Andaman languages are so maddeningly complex that we are still having a hard time making sense out of them.

As in the case of Melanesians, Papuans and some Indian tribals, Afrocentrists like to claim that the Negritos are “Africans”, i.e., Black people. The truth is that Negritos are one of the most distant groups on Earth to existing Black populations. Negrito populations tend to be related, though not closely, with whatever non-Negrito population are in the vicinity. This is due to interbreeding over the years. Furthermore, most, if not all, Negritos are racially Asians, not Africans.

Another misconception is that Negritos are Australoids. Genetically, the vast majority of them do not fall into the Papuan or Australian races, but anthropometrically, at least some are Australoid. There is a lot of discrimination against these people wherever they reside, where they are usually despised by the locals.

White Supremacists have a particular contempt for them. As a side note, although White Supremacists like to talk about how ugly these people are, I think these Negrito women are really cute and delightful looking, but do you think they have large teeth? Some say Negritos have large teeth.

Around 8,500 years ago, the newly minted NE Asians, who had just transitioned from Australoids to NE Asians, came down from the north into the south in a massive influx, displacing the native Australoids. We can still see the results today. Based on teeth, SE Asians have teeth mixed between Australoids (Melanesians) and NE Asians. Yet, as noted above, there are few Australoid genes in SE Asians.

8,500 years ago, NE Asians moved down into SE Asia, displacing the native Australoids and creating the SE Asian race. If NE Asians are so smart though, I want to know what these women are doing wearing bathing suits in the freezing cold. Compare the appearance of these Northern Chinese to other NE Asian mainland groups above.

A prominent anthropology blogger suggests that a similar process occurred possibly around the same time in South Asia and the Middle East, where proto-Caucasians moved in and supplanted an native Australoid mix.

One group that was originally thought to be related to the remains of the original SE Asians is called the Yumbri, a group of primitive hunter-gatherers who live in the jungles of northern Laos and Thailand. Some think that the Yumbri may be the remains of the aboriginal people of Thailand, Laos and possibly Cambodia, but there is controversy about this.

Yumbri noble savages racing through the Thai rain forest. The group is seldom seen and little is known about them. They are thought to number only 200 or so anymore, and there are fears that they may be dying out. This paper indicates via genetics that the Yumbri are a Khmuic group that were former agriculturalists who for some odd reason gave up agriculture to go back to the jungles and live the hunter-gatherer way.

This is one of the very few case cases of agriculturalists reverting to hunting and gathering. The language looks like Khmuic (especially one Khmu language – Tin) but it also seems to have some unknown other language embedded in it. Genetics shows they have only existed for around 800 years and they have very little genetic diversity.

The low genetic diversity means that they underwent a genetic bottleneck, in this case so severe that the Yumbri may have been reduced to only one female and 1-4 males. It is interesting that the Tin Prai (a Tin group) has a legend about the origin of the Yumbri in which two children were expelled from the tribe and sent on a canoe downstream. They survived and melted into the forest where they took up a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

The Khmu are an Austroasiatic group that are thought to be the indigenous people of Laos, living there for 4,000 years before the Lao (Thai) came down 800 years ago and largely displaced them from the lowlands into the hills. The Austroasiatic homeland is usually thought to be somewhere in Central China (specifically around the Middle Yangtze River Valley), but there are some who think it was in India.

They moved from there down into SE Asia over possibly 5,000 years or so. Many Austroasiatics began moving down into SE Asia during the Shang and Zhou Dynasties due to Han pushing south, but the expansion had actually started about 8,500 years ago. At this time, SE Asia was mostly populated by Negrito types. The suggestion is that the Austroasiatics displaced the Negritos, and there was little interbreeding.

The Austroasiatic languages are thought to be the languages of the original people of SE Asia and India, with families like Sino-Tibetan, Tai-Kadai, Indo-European and Dravidian being latecomers. There are possible deep linguistic roots with the Austronesian Family, and genetically, the Austroasiatics are related to Sino-Tibetan, Tai-Kadai and the Hmong-Mien speakers.

There is an interesting paradox with the Southern Chinese in that genetically, they look like SE Asians, but they have IQ’s more like NE Asians, around ~105. There do not seem to be any reasonable theories about why this is so. It is true that NE Asians came down and moved into SE Asia, but they moved into the whole area, not just Southern China, yet SE Asian IQ’s are not nearly as high as Southern Chinese IQ’s.

Of relevance to the IQ debate is that Asians, especially NE Asians, score lower on self-esteem than Blacks, yet they do much better in school. This would tend to argue against the contention of many that Black relatively poor school performance is a consequence of them not feeling good about themselves.

This seems to poke one more hole in Richard Lynn’s theory that a journey through the Ice Age is necessary for a high IQ, as the Southern Chinese made no such sojourn.

As a result of the Northern and Southern mix in Southern China, groups such as the Yunnanese are quite a mixed group. Yunnanese are mostly southern and are extremely distant from NE Asians. The Wa are a group in the area that is almost equally mixed with northern and southern admixture.

Two pretty Laotian girls being starved to death by murderous Communist killers in Laos. The Lao are related to the Thai and are members of the Tai Race that includes the Lao, Thai, Aini, Deang, Blang, Vietnamese, Muong, Shan, Dai and Naxi peoples. The Lao language is a member of the Tai language family.

The Thai are related to the Tai group in Yunnan in Southern China. They evolved there about 4,000 years ago and then gave birth to a number of groups in the region. The modern Thai are latecomers to the region, moving into the area in huge numbers only about 700 years ago to become the Lao, Thai and Shan. The Lao are the descendants of recent Tai immigrants who interbred heavily with existing Chinese and Mon-Khmer populations.

Gorgeous Dai women in China. The Dai are an ethnic group in China, mostly in Yunnan, who are related to the Thai – they are also members of the Tai Race and speak a Tai language . It looks like the Thai split off from the larger Dai group and moved into Thailand in recent centuries.

The Dai were together with the Zhuang, another Yunnan group, as the proto-Tai north of Yunnan about 5000 years ago. They moved south into Yunnan and split into the Zhuang and the Tai. There were also Tai movements south into Vietnam via Yunnan.

More Dai, this time two young Dai men from Thailand. They do seem to look a bit different from other Thais, eh? They look a little more Chinese to me. The Thai are not the only ethnic group in Thailand; there are 74 languages spoken there, and almost all are in good shape. These people apparently speak the Tai Nüa language.

A proud Dai father in China, where they Dai are an official nationality together with the Zhuang. He’s got some problems with his teeth, but that is pretty typical in most of the world, where people usually lack modern dental care.

A photo of a Thai waitress in Bangkok getting ready to serve some of that yummy Thai food. Note that she looks different from the Dai above – more Southeast Asian and less Chinese like the Dai. The Thai are also members of the Tai Race.

Another pic of a Thai street vendor. The Thai are darker and less Chinese-looking than the lighter Dai. The Tai people are thought to have come from Taiwan over 5,000 years ago. They left Taiwan for the mainland and then moved into Southwest China, which is thought to be their homeland. Then, 5,000 years ago, they split with the Zhuang. The Zhuang went to Guangxi and the Tai went to Yunnan.

A Thai monk. Am I hallucinating or does this guy look sort of Caucasian? In Thai society, it is normal for a young man to go off and become a monk for a couple of years around ages 18-20. Many Thai men and most Lao men do this. I keep thinking this might be a good idea in our society. Khrushchev used to send them off to work in the fields for a couple of years at this age.

Nevertheless, most Yunnanese have SE Asian gene lines and they are quite distant from the NE Asians (as noted, NE Asians are further from SE Asians than they are from Caucasians).

More beautiful women, this time from Yunnan, in Communist-controlled China. Look at the miserable faces on these poor, starving women as they suffer through Communist terror and wholesale murder.

Yunnan was the starting point for most of peoples in the region, including the Tai, the Hmong, the Mon-Khmer, the Vietnamese, the Taiwanese aborigines and from there to the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Melanesia, Polynesia and Micronesia.

In a sense, almost all of SE Asia was settled via a southward and southeastward movement out of Yunnan. Why so many groups migrated out of Yunnan is not known, but they may have being pushed out of there via continuous southward movements by Northern Han. Yunnan was seen as a sort of rearguard base and sanctuary for many Chinese ethnic groups who were being pushed out of their areas, mostly by Han expansions.

The terrain was rough but fertile. At some point, the Han started pushing down into Yunnan and that is when many southward expansions into SE Asia over the last 5000 or so years took place. A discussion of Asian racial features and their possible evolution is here.

Tibetans are close to NE Asians genetically, though they are located in the South. This is because they evolved in NE Asia and only recently moved down into Tibet. After coming into Tibet, they moved down into Burma. Many of today’s Burmese came from Tibet.

A Tibetan tourist in India. This woman has more of a classic Tibetan look than the younger woman below. Tibetans characteristically have darker skin than many NE Asians – Tibetans are actually NE Asians displaced to the south in fairly recent times. Although it is high and cold in Tibet, the region is at a more southerly latitude. Nevertheless, UV radiation is very intense in Tibet, which probably accounts for the darker skin.

It looks like all humans were pretty dark at the start and in some cases have lost melanin in cold climes where they needed to lighten to get Vitamin D. White skin in Europe is merely 9,000 years old, so European Whites never went through any brain-sharpening Ice Age either.

Tibetans are members of the General Tibetan Race, which includes the Tibetan, Nakhi, Lisu, Nu, Karen, Adi, Tujia, Hui and Kachin peoples. They speak a Tibeto-Burman language, part of the larger Sino-Tibetan family.

My observant Chinese commenter notes about the Tibetans: “As for the Tibetans, they seem to be primarily Northeast Asian (they look to be the most “yellow” of any Asians) with some other (South Asian-looking) element that interbred with them fairly recently. They tend to also be more ruddy, and have skin tones from reddish to yellow to brown.

You can see some similarities with Burmese, but they are distinct. Another thing to note is that the prevalence of colored hair and eyes is relatively higher in Tibet.

A gorgeous Tibetan woman, but to me she does not look typically Tibetan. Note that she seems to have put some whitening powder on her face – note contrast between her face and her darker hand.

Although this blog supports Tibetan freedom and opposed the colonial Chinese takeover and racist ethnic cleansing of the Tibetan people by the Chinese Communists, it should nevertheless be noted that the wonderful regime that the Dalai Lama apparently wants to bring back was one of the most vicious forms of pure feudalism existing into modern times, where the vast majority of the population were serf-slaves for the Buddhist religious ruling class.

Yes, that wonderful religion called Buddhism has its downside.

The Buddhist paradise of Burma, run by one of the most evil military dictatorships on Earth (No satire in that sentence). I thought Buddhists were supposed to be peace loving?

A Burmese woman with classic Burmese features. The Burmese, better known as the Bamar, are members of the General Tibetan Race. Boy, she sure is cute. And yes, I do have a thing for Asian women. I think I need to retitle this post Hot Asian Babes.

There are several interesting points in the sketch above. First of all, much as it pains them to be compared to people whom they probably consider to be inferior, all NE Asians were originally Australoids similar to the Australian Aborigines.

NE Asians like to accuse SE Asians of being mostly an “Australoid” group, an analysis that is shared by many amateur anthropologists on the web. We will look into this question more in the future, but it appears that both NE and SE Asians are derived from Australoid stock. Further, there are few Australoid genes left in any mainland SE Asians and none in most SE Asians.

It is true that Melanesians, Polynesians and Micronesians are part-Australoid in that the latter two are derived from Melanesians, who are derived from Austronesians mixed with Papuans. Any analysis that concludes that non-Oceanic SE Asians are “part-Australoid” is dubious.

If anything, NE Asians are closer to Australoids than most SE Asians. The Japanese and Koreans are probably closer to Australian Aborigines than any other group in Asia. I am certain that the ultranationalist and racialist Japanese at least will not be pleased to learn this.

Second, we note that all Asians are related, and that the proto-Asian homeland was in northern Vietnam. It follows that NE Asians are in fact derived from the very SE Asians whom the NE Asians consider to be inferior. A NE Asian who is well versed in these matters (He was of the “SE Asians are part-Australoid” persuasion) was not happy to hear my opinion at all, and left sputtering and mumbling.

NE Asian superiority over SE Asians is a common point of view, especially amongst Japanese – the Japanese especially look down on Koreans (Their fellow NE Asians!), Vietnamese, Filipinos (the “niggers of Asia”), the Hmong (the “hillbillies of Asia”) and the Khmer.

The beautiful, intelligent, civilized and accomplished Koreans. Tell me, the Japanese look down on these people are inferiors why now? Note the rather distinct short and stocky appearance, possibly a heat-preserving adaptation to cold weather. Note also the moon-shaped face.

The Koreans seem to have come down from Mongolia about 5,000 years ago and completely displaced an unknown native group, but don’t tell any Korean that. Koreans are members of the Japanese-Korean Race and the Korean language is said to be a language isolate, but I think it is distantly related to Japanese, Ainu and Gilyak in a separate, distant branch of Altaic.

My Chinese commenter adds: “I get the impression that Koreans are at least comprised two major physically discernible groups. Some of them have a shade of skin similar to the Inuit or Na Dene. But I think they have intermixed quite a lot during some relatively stable 5,000+ year period, which results in a fairly even spectrum.”

Third, Richard Lynn’s Ice Age Theory takes another hit as he can explain neither the Southern Chinese high IQ, nor the genesis of high-IQ NE Asians from lower-IQ SE Asians, nor the fact that NE Asians do not appear in the anthropological record until 9,000 years ago (after the Ice Age that supposedly molded those fantastic brains of theirs), nor the genesis of these brainy folks via Australoids, whom Lynn says are idiots.

Fourth, the Negritos, who are widely reviled in their respective countries as inferiors, are looking more and more like the ancestors of many of us proud humans. Perhaps a little respect for the living incarnations of our ancient relatives is in order.

46 Comments

Filed under Aborigines, Africa, Ainu, Altaic, Amerindians, Andaman Islanders, Anthropology, Asia, Asians, Australia, Austro-Tai, Austronesian, Blacks, Buddhism, Burmese, Cambodia, China, Chinese (Ethnic), Culture, Dene-Yenisien, Dravidian, East Africa, Ethnic Nationalism, Europeans, Filipinos, Genetics, Hmong-Mien, Indo-European, Indo-Hittite, Inner Mongolia, Intelligence, Inuit, Isolates, Japan, Japanese, Korean language, Koreans, Language Families, Lao, Laos, Left, Linguistics, Malays, Malaysia, Maoism, Marxism, Melanesians, Micronesians, Na-Dene, Nationalism, NE Asia, Negritos, Nepal, Northeast Asians, Oceanians, Paleontology, Papuans, Political Science, Polynesians, Psychology, Race/Ethnicity, Racism, Regional, Religion, Reposts From The Old Site, Scholarship, SE Asia, SE Asians, Siberia, Siberians, Sino-Tibetan, South Africa, Tai-Kadai, Taiwan, Taiwanese Aborigines, Tanzania, Thai, Thailand, Tibet, Tibetans, Uighurs, Ultranationalism, Vietnam, Vietnamese, White Nationalism, Whites

Repeat After Me: There Was No Holodomor

Repeat after me. There was no Holodomor, there was no Holodomor, there was no Holodomor, there was no Holodomor.

The Holodomor is the terror famine that never happened.

According to Holodomor narrative, now official state policy of the Ukraine and also recognized officially by the US, there was a bumper harvest in the Ukraine in 1932. However, to punish the Ukrainians who were resisting collectivization, the USSR confiscated the wheat crop, herded the people into villages that were more like concentration camps and denied them food there. The “terror famine” or “deliberate famine” resulted in the deaths of 5-10 million Ukrainians and broke the back of the anti-collectivization movement there.

However, this narrative simply never occurred. It never happened. What happened instead was harvest failure, followed by other problems. Most died of disease in their malnourished state; there were few actual deaths of hunger.

The following is a Q and A with J. Arch Getty about the famine in the Ukraine.

I am not a specialist on the Ukrainian famine, but I am familiar with the recent research by several scholars on the matter, and think rather a lot of the deep and broad research that Mark Tauger has conducted over many years.

That familiarity leads me to believe that there are no simple answers to this. A “man-made” famine is not the same as a deliberate or “terror-famine”. A famine originally caused by crop failure and aggravated by poor policies is “man aggravated” but only partially “man-made”. Why in this field do we always insist on absolutes, especially categorical, binary
and polemical ones? True/false. Good/evil. Crop failure/Man made?

Reminds me of the Stalinist approach.

Many questions have ambiguous answers.

1. Why was the Ukraine sealed off by the Soviet authorities?

Not necessarily to punish Ukrainians. It was also done to prevent starving people from flocking into non-famine areas, putting pressure on scarce food supplies there, and thereby turning a regional disaster into a universal one. This was also the original reason for the internal passport system, which was adopted in the first instance to prevent the movement of hungry and desperate people and, with them, the spread of famine.

2. Why were foreign journalists, even Stalin apologists like Duranty, refused access to the famine areas?

For the same reason that US journalists are no longer allowed into US combat zones (Gulf War, Afghanistan) since Vietnam. No regime is anxious to take the chance on bad press if they can control the situation otherwise.

3. Why was aid from other countries refused?

Obviously to deny the “imperialists” a chance to trumpet the failure of socialism. Certainly politics triumphed over humanitarianism. Moreover, in the growing paranoia of the times (and based on experience in the Civil War) the regime believed that spies came along with relief administration.

4. Why do I read and hear stories of families who tried to take supplies from other regions to help their extended families through the period having all foodstuffs confiscated as they crossed back into the famine regions?

The regime believed, reasonably I think, that speculators were trying to take advantage of the disaster by buying up food in non-famine (but nevertheless food-short) regions, moving it to Ukraine, and reselling it at a higher price. In true Bolshevik fashion, there was no nuanced approach to this, no distinguishing between families and speculators, and everybody was stopped.

As with point 1 above, regimes facing famine typically try to contain the disaster geographically. This is not the same as intending to punish the victims.

5. If it was a harvest failure, why was the burden of that failure not simply shared across the Soviet Union?

It was. No region had a lot of food in 1932-33. Food was short and expensive everywhere. Everybody was hungry.

With the above suggestions, I do not mean to make excuses or apologies for the Stalinists. Their conduct in this was erratic, incompetent, and cruel, and millions of people suffered unimaginably and died as a result. But it is too simple to explain everything with a “Bolsheviks were just evil people” explanation more suitable to children than scholars.

It was more complex than that. Although the situation was aggravated in some ways by Bolshevik mistakes, their attempts to contain the famine, once it started, were not entirely stupid, nor were they necessarily gratuitously cruel. The Stalinists did, by the way, eventually cut grain exports and did, by the way, send food relief to Ukraine and other areas. It was too little too late, but there is no evidence (aside from constantly repeated assertions by some writers) that this was a deliberately inflicted
“terror-famine.”

6. Finally, to deny the Jewish genocide quite rightly brings opprobrium. Surely to deny the terror famine of 1932-33 ought to provoke the same response.

This is a position that I personally find grotesque, insulting and at least shallow. Nobody is denying the famine or the huge scale of suffering, (as holocaust-deniers do), least of all Tauger and other researchers who have spent much of their careers trying to bring this tragedy to light and give us a factual account of it. Admittedly, what he and other scholars do is different from the work of journalists and polemicists who indiscriminately collect horror stories and layer them between repetitive statements about evil, piling it all up and calling it history.

A factual, careful account of horror in no way makes it less horrible.

5 Comments

Filed under Agricutlure, Economics, Eurasia, Europe, Europeans, History, Jews, Journalism, Left, Marxism, Modern, Politics, Race/Ethnicity, Scholarship, Socialism, Ukraine, USSR

More Neoliberal Insanity

Another rightwing Libertarian who also happens to be part of the race realist and PUA/men’s rights communities (Who would have guessed?) has ventured into our comments section pushing insane neoliberal snake oil:

By the way, I’m in agreement with your argument as posed to Robert Lindsay. There is no concept of “evil capitalist” because if they were evil they would become uncompetitive as less evil capitalists took their productive workers from them. In short, the free market would beat the evil right out of these employers.Eventually, as economist Gary Becker has pointed out, these inefficient employers will shoot themselves in the foot.

Tangentially, that’s the reason this legislation for the Paycheck Fairness Act – which hopes to eradicate discrimination against women by closing the mythical 23 cent pay gap between men and women – is illogical. Businesses and ultimately consumers don’t care who has jobs and makes goods and adds value. If a woman of equal education and equal ability made 77 cents to a man’s $1, a smart firm would come along and pay that woman 78 cents. This would continue until that gap was effectively closed.

More neoclassical insanity. This stuff works in theory, but not in the real world. In fact, I am amazed that you guys act like you actually believe this nonsense. You’re lying, right? You know this is all crap, right, and you’re saying it to sell the proles a good line that works great for the rich and screws everyone else? Because if you actually believe this nonsense, you are deluded.

The real world simply does not work this way. With mass unemployment, firms do not compete for workers by offering higher wages. They don’t do this in the 3rd World either. They hardly do this anywhere. The general trend is for capitalists to pay less for labor. The capitalist always try to pay the least for his labor as he can possibly get away with.

Let’s look at the construction industry. This used to be a high-paying industry with good jobs paying what would now be $33-40/hour. The work was all unionized. The capitalists, in order to pay less, broke all the unions, at least here in California. They went through the sectors breaking the unions one by one. Then the capitalists flooded the US with illegal alien labor. The capitalists started using the illegal alien labor to outcompete each other. This is still going on in California as I speak. Eventually, most of the unions were broken, the wages had fallen from $37 to ~$10/hour, and the field was flooded with cheap labor, legal and illegal.

There are still some places around that pay good wages. There are painters paying $25/hour, but they are always in danger of being taken out by the illegals making $10/hour. My friends work for local White construction companies who treat their workers like shit and are always threatening to replace them with “Mexicans” = illegal aliens. I believe that construction workers are generally treated much more poorly here in California now than they were in the era of unionized construction work.

There are zero, I mean zero, construction firms here in California in the past 20 years who are competing with other firms to pay workers more or treat them better in order to drive all the others out of business. It doesn’t happen.

Let’s look at the meatpacking industry. These used to be high-paying jobs that paid around $17-25/hour. It was mostly working class Whites working at them. The unions were all broken and the jobs were filled with illegal aliens working minimum wage. Working conditions crashed and workers are seriously treated like shit.

Not one meatpacking firm has opened up to pay workers and treat them better to outcompete the other firms.

Let us look at the IT industry. This used to be a place where you could make a good wage. However, the industry was mad about workers being paid so well, so they started importing Hindu 1-B guest workers from overseas to drive down wages in order to maximize their profits. This crashed wages in the field to the point where no sane White American would go into this field. I’m not sure about working conditions, but I am told that many workers now work in Hindu IT “sweatshops,” for their Hindu scum bosses who treat them abysmally in the time-honored Indian way that the working man has always been treated in that blighted land. So apparently working conditions have taken a dive too.

One would think that some enterprising firms would have sprung up to pay workers well and hire all the workers away from the firms hiring the Hindu 1-B invader-thieves, but this has not occurred. Why not?

Taxi driver used to be a good job. For some reason, it’s not anymore. The field has been taken over by fly by night firms, mostly run by shady immigrants, who hire downtrodden immigrants to work very long hours for terrible pay, sometimes possibly below the minimum wage. The field has been nuked, worker-wise.

Not one taxi company has sprung up to pay workers better and drive all the other firms out of business. Not one.

Short-haul truck driver (not big rigs) used to be a great job. My working class White friends used to work in these jobs. The field is gone. It’s all Mexicans, mostly illegals. The firms are all run by criminals. The workers lease out the trucks, but they make so little (really below minimum wage) that they can’t keep the trucks up, so the trucks are always falling apart. This damages our roads and is a safety problem. The workers are overworked, downtrodden and poorly paid.

Not one trucking firm has stepped in to drive the others out of business by offering the workers better wages or working conditions. Not one.

All over the US, firms head to US South, where wages are lower and unions are scarce. Many states have anti-union right to work laws. Suppose I am in Ohio. I wish to compete with firms who moved to the South in search of non-union cheap labor. I open up my firm and say everyone come work for me as I will pay you and treat you better. How many workers are going to leave South Carolina to come up to Georgia and work for me? None.

So this doesn’t happen. Firms don’t compete with firms who moved to the South by offering better wages.

If companies competed on wages to hire workers, they would be happier with unions. Unions only want the best for their workers in terms of wages and working conditions. Most reasonable unions are not trying to drive the firm out of business in a suicidal gesture. Yet firms hate unions and do anything to keep them out because the union will try to force the firm to raise wages and improve working conditions.

In the 3rd World, unionists are regularly murdered, to the cheers of the capitalist world, its media and its militaries. In fact, one of the main strategies of US imperialism in the 3rd World has been to encourage a “kill the unionists” campaign. US imperialism teaches this philosophy via its imperialist military, CIA and their institutions such as police and military training programs and the School of the Americas in Georgia. If firms were happy to compete on wages, they would embrace unions rather than kill their members.

Most of the 3rd World is characterized by crap wages far below what the capitalists could easily afford to pay and abysmal working conditions.

One would think that firms in the 3rd World would be competing by raising wages and bettering working conditions to drive each other out of business. Yet it simply does not occur. Why not?

Nowadays, things have moved away from the field of the nation to the supranational playing field. So firms in the US compete by closing US plants and moving them overseas where labor is cheaper. Now suppose I have a firm in the US. I want to compete with these firms moving jobs overseas in search of cheap labor. I set up a plant here in the US to be the good guy and tell all the workers to come work for me because I have the best wages and whatnot. I will still be driven out of business because the worker pool I am competing with is physically overseas! The workers can’t exactly leave China to come work in my New York firm, now can they?

In Europe, in the US, in the Developed World in general, what we see is firms competing by trying to drive wages and working conditions down as low as they can get them. In the US, unions and strikes are broken, illegals and Hindu 1-B and other guest worker job thieves are imported from overseas and hired, jobs are moved overseas and workers are always told to take pay and benefit cuts.

One would think that some firms could open up to hire only American workers and refuse to hire illegals, and to pay workers and treat them better to outcompete the other firms. Yet this is not occurring. Why not?

I am thinking of my town here. I can’t think of any firms in this town who are competing for workers with other firms by trying to pay them better or treat them better to drive the competition out of business. If anyone knows of any, could you please let me know?

It’s really amazing how this nonsense has taken over the world of Economics. The truth is that if you want a job in Economics nowadays, all jobs (or 90%+ of them) are for neoclassical (neoliberal) Economists. There are no jobs for Economists from any other schools. It’s interesting to theorize why this is. Most economists nowadays work for capitalist firms. Capitalist firms only want to hire neoclassical economists, because neoclassical is what the capitalists want to hear – it’s the economic school (religion) most acceptable to them. All or most of the economic textbooks, journals, and schools are neoclassical.

As you can see from the nonsense and insanity that the resident Libertarians in our comments section regularly, spout, neoclassical, Austrian or Libertarian economics is mostly a bunch of nonsense. It’s  more of a religion than anything else. Unfortunately, most economic schools are religions, because in general, economics only works on a small scale (microeconomics) and tends to fall apart when it moves towards a larger view (macroeconomics). Most of them just publish a bunch of crap that their audience or school wants to hear, and this is how the school builds itself on and on. Based on the blatherings of our neoclassical friends in the comments, we can see there’s little empirical basis for most of it.

Adam Smith wrote some fine texts, but most of it seems to be nonsense. He was correct in one way in that he was writing against the Mercantile School of Economics.

Most nations ran Mercantile economics, where most of the trade was run by the state – sort of a state capitalism. It doesn’t work very well, but it worked well enough for a long time. Mercantilism is monopoly economics. The state runs everything. It regulates the prices of the capitalists, etc., because the state is competing against other nations. When England is competing with France, it needs its capitalists to be in line with its competitive strategy vis a vis the French, not secretly working with the French against England. You can’t allow French firms to come in to England and set up shop and run all of the British producers of some industry out of business.

However, Smith was writing in opposition to Mercantilism in favor of a free market. So Smith was anti-monopoly. Now all neoclassical economists are in favor of monopolies, although they usually don’t come right out and say so. This is because monopoly is the natural end result of capitalism.

David Ricardo is the king of the neoclassical scholars. He was some Jew who didn’t even have much of an education. He went into the family business and got stinking rich, and then wrote up a great economic theory that told the rich everything they wanted to hear. It’s mostly a bunch of nonsense and crap, but it’s still taking the world by storm, because it’s what the elites want to hear, and in capitalist society, as Gramsci notes, elites make culture – the dominant culture or bourgeois culture is that of the rich. In other words, under capitalism, everyone, the rich and the upper middle class (who need no schooling), the middle class, the working class and the poor all adopt the ways of thinking of the rich. The rich replicate their culture across all of society.

There used to be how many Mom and Pop stores in the US? Now there’s Walmart.

There’s how many OS and major software makers? One, Microsoft. There used to be countless firms.

There used to be countless media firms across the US. Now there are only a few. Less than 10 media firms, all rightwing, control almost all US newspaper, newsmagazine and TV news.

There are how many firms making microprocessors? Intel and who else?

There are how many car firms in the US? And how many in the world?

As you can see, capitalism tends more and more towards monopoly. It’s a natural tendency in a free market, and it’s only arrested via government intervention. In a monopoloy market, most of the silly economic notions of the neoclassicals go out the window. There’s no competition, so firms charge the highest price they can, abuse their workers the most and make the crappiest products that they can possibly get away with. Sure, there’s no law forcing them to do so, the neoclassicals would say, I suppose. Sure you could have a monopolist that charged low prices, made great products, and treated their workers great. But it never works that way, and anyway, nowadays, any monopolist who tried to do that would be fired by his stockholders.

Over the past 100 years, we have built up a huge amount of evidence that shows that monopolies are bad for consumers, workers and the industry itself. They treat workers poorly, abuse consumers, charge high prices, and make crappy products. They harm the industry by retarding its development. This scholarship is excellent and is beyond challenge.

In the 1970′s, the late Jewish economist Milton Friedman developed his theory of neoliberal economics around an eager group of acolytes at the University of Chicago. He has since become a demigod in the field (most economists now are Friedmanites) and the mass media adores him. His school spent many years writing a cavalcade of books, journal articles, etc. overturning 100 years of scholarship on monopolies that proved all of what we discussed in the last paragraph.

The Friedmanites “proved” via long tomes, complex mathematical models and a sea of “evidence” that monopolies to do not raise prices, abuse consumers and workers or produce crap products. In fact, they don’t even hinder competition. All laws against monopolies must therefore be overthrown. Exactly what the capitalists wanted to hear.

It’s all crazy, and it’s a pack of lies as high as the day is long; there’s no truth in any of it. But his theories (LOL) about monopolies have since gained huge currency not only in the Republican Party (Oh really?) but in large sectors of the Democratic Party, including liberals (huh?). It’s very popular with journalists, including many liberal journalists. And it’s about as reasonable as believing in a flat Earth.

Gary Becker is quoted by the Libertarian commenter above saying some nonsense about firms that try to lower wage costs as being “inefficient” (LOL). Gary Becker is an idiot who has somehow been awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics (LOL) for his stupid crap. He’s a Friedmanite, and much of what he writes is nonsense and crap, like all of them. But this guy won the Nobel Prize in Economics and is considered to be one of the world’s top economics scholars (LOL). That shows you what a joke this field is.

Yet most economists nowadays are Beckerians. So are most capitalists (duh). More frightening, most journalists all over the world are Beckerians, as are the politicians running most of the countries on Earth.

The world has gone insane.

2 Comments

Filed under Americas, Asia, California, Capitalism, China, Culture, Democrats, East Indians, Economics, Europe, European, Europeans, Fake Guest Workers, Hispanics, History, Illegal, Immigration, Imperialism, Journalism, Labor, Liberalism, Libertarianism, Mexicans, Neoliberalism, North America, Political Science, Politics, Race/Ethnicity, Regional, Republicans, Scholarship, South, South Asians, US Politics, USA, West, Whites