Over at Dancing With Dogs Shanti (her name means “Peace” if my brown-speak memory is correct) has a great post on anti-upper-caste affirmative action in India:

Let me make this a little clearer – my husband had to get a rank of 486 out of the hundreds of thousands of people who wrote the exam with him, to barely make it into computer engineering at a local university – his classmate? a girl with 16000 rank, who happened to hit the double jackpot, since she also belonged to the lowest of low castes as they are categorized. Did she deserve it? She failed every subject in the finals in her first year, except English – she took between 5 and 6 years to complete a 4-year course. Poor thing! she must have been so poor…hold it – she was rich enough to attend one of the best private schools that money could buy for her high school education….

Let me make also it clear-as someone from a Muslim background, I find caste abhorrent. I’ve gotten on Hinduism’s case because frankly it makes a rather poor showing in terms of preventing its own marginalized members from jumping ship for Islam or Christianity (and I’m not a big fan of the Abrahamic god as most of you know). But despite past and present injustices non-upper-castes in India have to endure, quotas that establish different rules for various castes will institutionalize caste distinctions for future generations (assume that a Brahmin marries a Dalit, and their child marries a Brahmin, will the 1/4 Dalit taint be enough that this 3/4 Brahmin individual competes in the pool with Dalits?).

Esteem from upper-castes will be earned only through enduring the high standards set for others and succeeding against odds. Affirmative action only reinforces stereotypes and prejudices when applied beyond the most ginger levels, it perpetuates itself and continues to self-generate the social injustice that its existence is contingent on. Over the generations, Dalits and “Other Backward Castes” will become masters of the skills of government manipulation-their children will know that they must prepare themselves for a different set of standards than their classmates [1]. They will start (and are) packing the bureaucracy because the private sector will assume that Dalits and “Other Backward Castes” that graduate with engineering degrees are morons that can’t hack it in comparison to their upper-caste colleagues that received no preferences [2].

Sound familiar?

[1] Just like the United States where the term “people of color” has expanded affirmative action beyond blacks, other non-upper caste groups besides Dalits are clamoring for quotas, and quite often because of their greater social standing manage to get more resources from the government.

[2] The grotesque level of quotas that India seems to have established simply makes rational discrimination a necessity for private sector firms from what I can see. By this, I mean that even if a Dalit engineer is competant, they will be discriminated against because the vast majority of Dalit’s are so below-standard that it makes more sense in terms of Human Resource man-hours to eliminate all Dalits out of the candidate pool. By further explication: if quotas were dropped, and the % of Dalits from an engineering school dropped to .5% from 15%, I would not be surprised if the number of Dalits hired increased in the private sector, because those .5% would be at the same level as their classmates. On the other hand, if the 15% quota was continued, than the other 14.5%, over 96% of the Dalit graduates, would be simply not worth the effort to take on or possibly even interview. The cost might be too high to look for the 1 out of 30 that would be worth hiring. On the other hand, the majority of the 85% that were admitted without quotas would almost all fit minimum requirements.

Human Shields are going to Iraq! Here is a TODO list for Human Shields:

* Congo (Rebels eating pygmies)
* Nepal (Maoist conflict)
* Zimbabwe (Shonas starving Matabeles)
* Indonesia (the army killing partially Melanesian Christians in the east and Muslim whack-jobs in Aceh)
* India (Kashmir)
* China (Xinjiang)
* Russia (Chechnya, the winters there are a bitch)
* Solomon Islands (probably eating each other because of civil war & natural disaster)
* Every other African country
* Every third Asian country
* Detroit, MI (50% illiterate, as many pit bulls as people)

Why aren’t there Human Shields in all these places? I mean, I’m sure the Ugandan-backed rebels in the Congo would MUCH rather eat fatty hunks of white meat rather than stringy pygmy.

The truth is, colored killing colored (and eating colored sometimes) isn’t that big of a deal to the First World Left. The white man is held to a higher standard of morality-just as a white wife beater is held to a higher standard than an Arab wife beater (you need to kill the Arab woman to get the same level of outrage).

Not that only the Left engages in this. I’ve shut my eyes to the Israeli-Arab conflict because when I was reading The Economist in the fall of 2000, and the front page was about the Israeli-Arab conflict, tucked in the Africa section was a small article mentioning in passing that 200-300 people had died that day because of fighting in Kisingani.

Let’s just be open and honest about the reality of the kind of life we value. If the American government decided to bomb the rebels in Congo so they might stop their meals of “pygmy rump roast”-I guarantee you Human Shields and Leftists of many stripes would protest that we should “give peace a chance” and “allow negotiations to work themselves out” (I can imagine it-“More pygmies will die of US bombing that in all the months they’ve been hunted and cooked over the open flame!”). The touch of the white man’s oppression is what gives value to the life of the colored.

Oh, and by the way, I would really respect the Human Shield types if they decided to go the Congo, since they would have an incentive to stop the fighting, their fat white asses might be too tempting for the rebel troops if they didn’t manage to demobalize them….

And for the record, I don’t give a fuck about Iraq. I just want it over with so the economic markets are a bit less volatile, that’s all I really care about, honestly.

If 10,000 people died in Ghana because of a genocide, I would spend 15 minutes reading about it and go on to dinner. If my roommate had a really bad flu, I’d take 30-45 minutes and go to Fred Meyer and get him some medicine. Now, if 100,000 people died in Ghana, some inner analog compassion counter would probably kick in, perhaps because 100,000 seems like a large number, $100,000 being a lot. I might go to a candle-lit vigil. If it wasn’t too cold. And half the time I went to rallies and vigils in college was to impress some moronic chick (and don’t get on my case for being OK with stupidity as far as chicks are concerned-godless shit on me about that constantly). I bet you that over half the guys that show up to those things are thinking more about “getting some” than helping the oppressed. It’s like the political equivalent of a chick flick, we’ll go, but only because….

It is rural southerners that fight on the front-lines, not blacks, says this story:

Examples:

* Of the Army’s 45,586 enlisted combat infantryman, 10.6% are black.

* Of the Air Force’s 12,000 pilots, 245, or about 2%, are black.

* In the Navy, 2.5% of the pilots are black.

Senior Air Force officials say they are troubled by the number of black pilots and plan to do better.

OK, so now, the story indicates that blacks gravitate toward non-combat positions so they can aquire marketable skills, while putting them on the front-lines puts them at more risk. So, isn’t it “racist” to encourage black soldiers to be at the front-lines, instead of allowing them to build skills for the civilian sector? Or is it “racist” to let them be stereotyped as paper pushers? Hmmm….

Ron Bailey has an important article on boosting mental performance and enhancing stability.

I was going to start my first post for Gene Expression with the more clinical-sounding Prostitution and Genes but I thought that might not get people’s attention.

I invite the other contributors and commenters of Gene Expression to consider the issue of sex enslavement in terms of human biodiversity. Jim Henley and Lynxx Pherrett are having a civilized and enlightening disagreement about the issue. Jim, as honorable a non-interventionist as I can think of (Lew Rockwell being the opposite), thinks that foreign “peacekeeping forces” cause, or at least greatly facilitate, the evil practice. But Lynxx points out In general, importation is driven more by ethnic issues than economic ones: it’s bad form to enslave locals, no matter what the economic range of the clientele. So Henley’s assertion that “Local militias were not importing women from other countries to enslave” before the arrival of NATO is probably bunk. There where probably plenty of Bosnian girls shipped to the brothels of Belgrade before the intervention.

I think that you can probably find a midpoint where the two apparently opposite views intersect. Foreign peacekeepers (read: horny foreign men either too young to have formed families, or separated from families) in effect create the same situation as importing foreign women into a developed country. You have the combustible intersection of young, nubile, vulnerable females without the traditional protections of family* with sexually hungry males. Bad combination for all concerned, especially the girls. A female body in this situation is reduced to a commodity to be trafficked. It’s easier for a man to think of a foreign girl this way. In fact, for a man to think of “one of his own” in such a commodified fashion would be unthinkable.

Question: is reducing sex to an impersonal transactional act a means of facilitating gene flow from isolated communities? After all, Lynxx keeps referring to these gender-neutral laws about “Trafficking in Persons” but most of the persons being trafficked are fertile young women, not boys. Clean up your minds: my reference to boys has nothing to do with sex. If we are talking about slavery here, and if the developed world is so insatiable for cheap labor, then why not traffic even more in young men, who are capable of doing all the developed world’s dirty work as slaves, rather than just cheap labor? Because what we are talking about here is sex, not just slavery. Treating the problem as simply a slavery issue won’t work unless we concentrate on the sex part.

Lynxx’s post is very long and exhaustive, separating out countries by origin, transit and destination. It does not separate out the slavery by type–because the human rights organizations and non-governmental organizations that treat the issue do not separate out slavery by type. I would suggest that they do and they would get a firmer grasp on the issue. “Israel is a destination country for trafficked women”; “Japan is a destination country for women trafficked for commercial sexual exploitation and for men trafficked for labor purposes”; “Pakistan is a country of origin for young boys who are kidnapped or bought and sent to work as camel jockeys in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar.” I suggest that these are quite different problems, with different sources in human biology.

As an aside, most of the white girls so trafficked are from Eastern Europe or the Balkans. This was traditionally the mine-field where slavers stocked the harems of the Ottoman elite. I wonder if some enterprising Ph.D. student could trace a historical continuity between the family-based prostitution rings of today with the slave-trading networks of yore.

*Remember the part of the Godfather where the Corleone family takes care of a “domestic abuse” of a Corleone daughter? They don’t read feminist tracts to the abusing husband. They beat the crap out of him. Now that’s family. When people talk about family values, they don’t realize that family values (which appeal to instincts relating to blood and individual survival) function above and beyond the reach of the law, which appeal to ideas of universal ethics and morality, and which may–indeed must–supersede one family’s interests.

Turned on HTML comments…hope everyone remembers to close their tags from now on 🙂

Posted by razib at 12:22 PM

This article about the hell that inner city schools have become (from the perspective of a young TEACH FOR AMERICA graduate) is getting a lot of play. But, it ends on a high-note:

I know for sure that inner-city schools don’t have to be hellholes like Emery and its District of Columbia brethren, with their poor administration and lack of parental support, their misguided focus on children’s rights, their anti-white racism, and their lawsuit-crazed culture. Some of my closest TFA friends, thrilled to be liberated from the D.C. system, went on to teach at D.C. charter schools, where they really can make a difference in underprivileged children’s lives. For example, at Paul Junior High School, which serves students with the same economic and cultural background as those at Emery, the principal’s tough approach to discipline fosters a serious atmosphere of scholarship, and parents are held accountable, because the principal can kick their children back to the public school system if they refuse to cooperate. A friend who works at the Hyde School, which emphasizes character education (and sits directly across a field from Emery), tells me that this charter school is quiet and orderly, the teachers are happy, and the children are achieving at a much higher level—so much higher that several of the best students at Emery who transferred to Hyde nearly flunked out of their new school.

The problem with this statement is that charter schools probably attract the best students and most involved parents already. The parents that don’t care if their kids are kicked back to the regular system are the ones that wouldn’t send their kids to the charter schools in the first place-removing one of the major difficulties. I am curious if charter schools can change the character of a random sample of children-and so we might know that the lessons learned can be applied generally rather than to a particular subset.

The WHO is actually recommending (link requires registration) that developing countries invest in genetic services as part of more holistic and complete health care system.

I’m surprised that the WHO has not thought through some of the obvious unintended consequences of this recommendation. Several cultures in developing countries have a rather, well, different view of what is considered a genetic defect and what is not. In addition, the rapid pace of change in genomics research can quickly overwhelm and twist traditional practices.

An egregious example would be its effects on premarital screening. Arranged marriages are very common from Iran to China (and with a big pit-stop in India). The rationale behind “arranging” a marriage is to allow for maximum cultural and tribal compatibility between two complete strangers. Today, the search for compatibility in arranged Indian marriages has led most communities away from old-fashioned astrology and to the medical history of the family. Now throw the family genetic history in the mix, and it becomes easy to envisage the rise of widespread, populist eugenic practices in these cultures.

I happen to think that both our ability and the desire to alter our genetic landscape heralds one of the most exciting events of this century. It’s going to be fun to watch, and even more fun to be a part of. I can’t wait!

Razib adds: Great Suman, now I’ve got to worry about my mom stealing some cells to get tested so she can have the results on hand when she’s looking for a wife for me. Grrrr….

Just went to see Antwone Fisher today. Good movie. But there was one thing that kind of confused me….

Look at this picture of the two actors that play the main couple in the story:

Now here is a picture of Salli Richardson-the half-Irish actress that plays Denzel’s film wife:

Antwone’s aunt, who was portrayed in a good light, was of medium brown complexion, but his mother, who was not depicted with any great sympathy by the film’s conclusion, was played by a very dark-skinned woman.

I just bring this up because the film addresses black color consciousness-as Antwone says: “First the light-skinned girls were adopted, then the light-skinned boys, and then the dark-skinned girls, and finally the dark-skinned boys.” Antwone recalls how his foster-mother would compare him unfavorably with his half-white foster brother (“He has good hair & skin & is better than you!”).

So in light of all this, the stereotypical portrayal of light-skinned women as the ideal mate or relative seems out of place. But perhaps it was just me that noticed it (though the two light-skinned actresses were in my opinion very attractive, so I’m not complaining about that)….

Scientific American has a little article on suicide. Some quotations: “I’m not saying that suicide is purely biological, but it starts with having an underlying biological risk.” What’s the biological risk? “At a conference of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology in 2001, Arango reported that the brains of people who were depressed and died by suicide contained fewer neurons in the orbital prefrontal cortex, a patch of brain just above each eye. What is more, in suicide brains, that area had one third the number of presynaptic serotonin transporters that control brains had but roughly 30 percent more postsynaptic serotonin receptors.”

As we discover more about brain architecture, we’ll be seeing more discussions on the chemical basis for emotions and intelligence. Of course, the chemistry is controlled to a large degree by genetics…