Nigerian diplomat was shot by someone who was scammed. Now, this is definately some incentive for the Nigerian government to crack down on this. The reason I post on this is that in the past 3 days I’ve been swamped at ALL my various e-mail addresses (@ different domains) with requests for money, which is strange, as I normally receieved 1 request a month….
Also, check out this article on the Nature vs. Nurture issue in Wired.
Malaysia’s deprived Indian minority gets none of the benefits reserved for Malays
Malaysia’s underdogs
PEOPLE of Indian origin account for only 8% of Malaysia’s total population, but they make up 14% of its juvenile delinquents, more than 20% of its wife- and child-beaters, and 41% of its beggars. They make up less than 5% of successful university applicants, and own less than 1.5% of the country’s share capital. To make matters worse, they are not eligible for any of Malaysia’s lavish affirmative-action programmes, which are reserved for Malays and other indigenous people. Other countries may have upwardly mobile Indian immigrants, but Malaysia is fast developing an Indian underclass.
The problem stems from the decline of Malaysia’s rubber plantations. British colonialists shipped indentured Indian labourers to Malaysia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to tap rubber. After independence, many Indians stayed and became citizens, tapping rubber all the while. But over the past few decades of breakneck economic growth, developers have ploughed up many rubber plantations to plant less labour-intensive oil palms, or to build shopping malls and housing estates. The displaced workers and their families have wound up in shanty towns on the outskirts of Malaysia’s cities.
Malaysia
Until recently, the government largely ignored the problem. The many well-to-do Indian doctors and lawyers, after all, help to give Indians higher incomes on average than Malays. Many Indian labourers, even, earn more from odd jobs in the cities than rural Malays do from fishing or farming. But unlike poor farmers, explains Denison Jayasooria, the head of an Indian think-tank-cum-charity, they have to buy their own food, pay rent, and travel to work—all at inflated urban prices.
Jaya Partiban, a senator from the Malaysian Indian Congress, the biggest Indian political party, says that the sheltered life of the plantations imbued Indians with a culture of dependence. Furthermore, argues P. Ramasamy, a professor at the Malaysian National University, Indians have little prospect of advancement, since Malaysia’s Chinese minority dominates business, and Malays control the bureaucracy. Indians often complain of neglect or discrimination at the hands of civil servants, and harassment by the police.
All these frustrations boiled over into a race riot in a squatter community outside Kuala Lumpur in March 2001. Six people died and scores were injured. To this day, many Indians live in rusty corrugated-iron shacks in Kampung Medan, the scene of the riot. They complain that jobs are hard to come by, especially since employers fear that many Indians may be involved in crime. Although the police have set up three posts in the area since the riots, locals say, only one of the officers staffing them is Indian. There are no playgrounds, sports fields or clubs to tempt their children away from street gangs. The local Indian school, they add, is in a dire state.
The government has at least pledged to change all this. It has promised to move all squatters in the area to subsidised housing by 2005. It is hiring more Indian teachers. It is also financing the Yayasan Strategik Sosial, Mr Denison’s outfit, to develop schemes to help poor urban Indians. Most dramatically, it has declared its intention to double Indians’ stake in Malaysian companies by 2010—the sort of race-based target normally reserved for Malays. As it is, government officials like to point out, Malaysia’s richest man is an Indian: Ananda Krishnan. His fellow Indians, however, tend to view his success rather more cynically; they joke that Mr Krishnan takes up the community’s share of the national wealth all by himself.
Follow-up dialogue on Joan Walsh’s piece on interracial relation(ships). The black woman who wrote the article about her son needing to marry black responds. Joan then breaks-down her double-standards, while Edwards just hurls back a reality check. I sympathize with the plight of both women. In the end, Edwards is a realist-there is a large surplus of eligible single black women. Walsh might want the world to adhere to her idealistic beliefs about racial harmony, but race matters, race exists, and for black Americans who live under the continued shadow of racial hostility, platitudes about our Kumbaya future have less appeal than to someone like Joan Walsh….
Personally, I believe that “race-mixing” will be practiced by certain slices of the human race often jet-setting & transnational, united by abstractions, intellectualism and international capitalism, while the vast middle classes of decent folk will be rooted in faith, family and folk as they always have been….
Update: I guess I need to clarify, when I used the term “decent folk,” I didn’t mean to imply that I thought “race-mixing” (you can use whatever term) was a bad or good thing, but that the bulk of any given racial or ethnic group will want to “marry their own.” You can see this among Jews (an ethnic-religious group) and blacks (a racial group) or even evangelical Christians (see singles adds that specify that the person is looking for a fellow “Christian” [this generally means evangelical, though obviously Catholics and mainliners are Christian too]).
The upper castes, that prioritize high-powered careers and status often mix based more on money, education & material well-being. The race and religion of the partner (and very importantly, devotional religion is less powerful among the upper castes in most cultures) are less important relative to particulars of personal history-college, career and political values. The underclass that does not have a stake in the community on the other hand are tied together often by less savory civil institutions and life experiences.
Can someone find a survey on attitudes toward interracial marriage, etc. broken down by education? I couldn’t find any googling….
This map might interest those curious about American English dialects and cultural zones….
Mungo Man has been re-dated. 42,000 years B.P. instead of 62,000-that matters a bit….
Dirty needles ‘spread Africa Aids’ blares the headline. I hope this isn’t the public health version of ‘Cold Fusion.’ If true, it would make the epidemic far more soluble in my judgement, rather than complex cultural tendencies and grinding poverty, the problem could be rectified by targeting public health budgets. But I am skeptical, unfortunately.
1) How did Uganda control its epidemic with condoms and education if needles are spreading the disease?
2) Why are prosperous regions like Botswana, South Africa and until recently Zimbabwe (once prosperous before the blossoming of kleptocracy) the new heart of the epidemic (you can’t be telling me that chaotic western Africa has better public health services!).
3) Why does circumcision seem to prevent the spread of AIDS? (this is a contested claim, but I am pretty convinced by the fact that uncircumcised Zulus have far higher rates that circumcised Xhosas in South Africa).
Granted, the new research does not claim all the spread is due to needles, but 60% is non-trivial. I’m all for overturning conventional wisdom, but one study does not a paradigm shift make….
Here is an 2 year old article titled “Heritability Estimates vs. Large Environmental Effects: The IQ Paradox Resolved”. I find the title a little bit peculiar, as the article brings up possibilities and avenues of investigation to resolve the paradox (read the article and it seems clear they are concerned with the race discrepancy in IQs rather than the straightforward question of gene-environment feeback loops) , but doesn’t seem to indicate a clear resolution….
And to return to the race and IQ debate, it shows that environment could explain racial IQ differences just as it explains IQ differences between generations.
Reminds me of Godless’ post titled “Modern Day Epicyclists”. Yes, Flynn might be right, Jensen himself has stated unlike most of his detractors Flynn is a serious thinker who gives him a fair shake, but what seems like the most parsimonious explanation to you? Good people will disagree me thinks….
Brother Poe chides those of us who become a bit too seduced by the serpent. Richard’s problem is that evolutionary conservatives-ergo Steve Sailer-have become a bit too enamoured of biology, nature and “instinct” and neglect other factors that shape human events. Biology is not always destiny. And yet, neither is culture. To prove that, note that Poe disagrees with Sailer, but both are men of half-Jewish extraction (biology) of Catholic faith (culture).
I know that here at Gene Expression we focus on, well, genes. But the main reason we do this is that others do not, social & cultural explanations rule the roost (among both liberals and cultural conservatives). Additionally, evolutionary psychologists study human universals, while ignoring possible group & individual differences [1]. But that doesn’t mean that I ignore culture and history, a quick perusal of the content here will show that I am very cognizant of non-biological forces that are determinants of the human condition.
Richard in particular seems to object to Steve’s contrast of the family patterns in west Africa with Scandinavia, and the different products that have resulted from the same reagents [2]. Reading Steve’s original article, I had some of the same thoughts as Richard. Some of the ancient pre-Christian European peoples had strong fosterage traditions, as Richard notes, the Celts for instance. The Romans themselves had peculiar familial institutions where adoption was given great weight. But just because the two groups practice/practiced fosterage does not mean the anology holds (to my knowledge, I recall that many tribal peoples practiced fosterage to strengthen ties between families and tribes, while Steve indicates that west African fosterage is more of a practical way to discard the children of a dead father).
I began to think of these topics a few weeks ago when considering that west Africa is often considered matrifocal in orientation. And yet the men live basically polygamous lives. Parts of southern India (among the Nairs of Kerala) also exhibit matrifocal tendencies, but it seems that there are important differences. In Kerala there was a matrilineal tradition that focused on the relationship between maternal uncles and their nieces and nephews, as well as the primacy of the female lineage [3]. To my knowledge Nairs and their kin do not practice anything close to the family structure that characterizes west Africa (weak relationships between parents, primacy of females in farm work, etc.), and yet both can be characterized as “matrifocal.” Similarly, yes, the Celts practiced fosterage, but they did not tend toward the commonplace loosely structured polygany that characterises modern west Africa (the pre-Christian Indo-European tribes did practice polygany to a limited extent among high status males, similar to the depictions found in Indo-Aryan oral tradition, but never to the extent that seems the norm in African and Semitic lore).
That being said, time will tell if Richard is correct, if Scandinavia will succumb to the “underclass disease.” It is good to look at the same problem from every angle-it hints that solutions may be possible if not obvious….
Brother Poe strikes again! Response pending completion of my day job….
[1] The exception to this is gender, which is one reason that Gene Expression does not focus so much attention on a topic that is often covered in Time and Newsweek.
[2] Scandinavia + welfare = nanny state, black America + welfare = heart of darkness (both groups are characterized by high rates out-of-wedlock births, but the former situation is noted for cohabitation and male involvement in progeny according to Fukuyama’s Great Disruption).
[3] For comparison, note that northern India and the Middle East both share intense patriarchal traditions and are highly patrilineal. Women are commodities, suttee is a north Indian sin, while honor killings are most prevelant in the Middle East. And yet the Indo-Aryan cultures of northern India enforce intra-village exogamy and male monogamy, while those of the Middle East and Muslim influenced northern India favor familial endogamy (cousin marriages) and polygamy (a sign of high status).
Over @ Matthew Yglesias’ blog they are talking about IQ & the new brain scan results. I’m going to be a bit busy with a coding project, so I invite (on Matthew’s behalf) all the heathens at Gene Expression to jump into the fray and enlighten those baptised by the True Faith of NoGeneralIntelligenseism….
(thanks to Charlie Murtaugh for mentioning GNXP so that I saw this commentary in my logs-normally I don’t venture into those corners of the blogosphere where Yglesias & Co. reside)
