I’ve gotten mostly positive response (one negative) from forwarding this URL: http://www.tardblog.com.

Thanks to Jacqueline for pointing me in the right direction.

It is not well known, but the Shia of southern Iraq and Iran belong to different sub-sects of the Twelver Shia sub-sect. With that in mind, from The Economist:

Top theologians, even inside Iran, prefer aloofness from worldly affairs to the late Ayatollah Khomeini’s doctrine of placing worldly power in the hands of a single senior cleric. Non-Iranian Shias dream of restoring the scholarly pre-eminence of Najaf at the expense of the ayatollah’s hometown, Qom. “It is in our genes as Arabs to claim rightful leadership of the faith,” says Bayan Jabur, a SCIRI official in Damascus.

When I was a child in upstate New York, the local mosque had sponsored a visit by a learned man from Yemen to give us a sermon. The mosque was 3/4 non-Arab [1]. All the non-Arabs had headphones because he was going to give the sermon in Arabic and someone would translate for us. The sheik looked a bit confused & annoyed. Before he gave the sermon, he decided to give us a long lecture (30 minutes) about how “all true Muslims know Arabic. It is the tongue of the prophet, the language of God.” He was positively distraught and seemed like he was going to shed tears as to the blasphemy of it all (in hindsight, how learned could this guy be to be shocked that non-Arab Muslims didn’t know Arabic fluently???). I was 9 or so, and rather confused. My father and all the other non-Arabs were stoic about it. After he was done bitching us out he gave us his sermon, though grudgingly. He talked about how Muslims would go paradise would conquer all before them at some point-standard fare-nothing our imam, who was a nice guy, didn’t tell us every week (OK, my family generally went on the holidays, though my dad showed up now and then). No one complained about the outburst except for the big black burly guy who drove the bus for the “Sunday School”-I could hear him bitching out our iman about why we spent money on this guy when he totally disrespected us. In Mauratania & Sudan, states with large non-Arab indigenous populations, the Arabs enslave those not genetically destined to rule (the Berbers of Morocco and Algeria aren’t quit treated the same, though there must be a reason that they tend to oppose Islamists). In the Gulf Arabs treat the Indians, Filipinos & other non-Arabs (and Arabs from non-oil countries to be fair) like indentured servants. The Filipinos, as dirty non-Muslims, have the privilege of being beaten and raped now & then (non-Muslims are screwed in their legal systems often). How do I know this? Not just reading about in the papers, a Saudi student came up to me in college and explained to me how he liked Bangladeshis since we cleaned ourselves, and weren’t dirty & lazy like the Filipinos who needed to be beaten to get work out of them. I think we can understand why the Kurds are one of the few philo-Semitic Muslim groups-they have lived under Arab domination [2].

Muslims in South Asia are correct to criticize Hindus for their revolting pre-modern caste system. On the other hand, they must admit that a tacit caste system exists amongst Muslims. Sayyids, descendents of the prophet, have cachet. Arabs are respected as teachers, and their version of Islam, generally pushed by the Gulf Arabs with their Wahabbism, is given precedence over the interpretations of non-Arabs (Turkish Sufism for instance). Southeast Asians like Mahathir Mohammed might talk about taking leadership of the faith, but I’ve heard Malays talk about how their Islam is better than that practiced by their Indian brothers because they received it directly from the Arabs [3]. I’ve talked to idiot Bangladeshis who take pride in their Arab ancestors, real or made up (our non-Indian ancestors are far more likely to have been Persian, Afghan or Turkish-and most Muslim Bangladeshis are no different than Hindu Bengalis in India). My father, a moderate on religious questions, admits that Arabic is the “most beautiful language in the world,” but he goes on to declare that “its grammatical structure is perfect and pure.” He did speak Arabic fluently as a child, so I don’t know whether to believe him or not. Islam is the brotherhood of believers, and it practices that quite a bit. Nonetheless, I feel that Muslims, especially the malwali people (the converted people-of course, Arabs had to convert at some point too!) , tend to downplay that there is a stratification and perception of spiritual purity.

[1] The division of labor at the mosque: the Arabs were Sunday School teachers and and religious functionaries, the blacks drove the buses and did all the low level work necessary to keep things going and the South Asians provided the financing. This was in the mid-1980s when the South Asian community had a higher portion of college and post-grad educated types, not many cab drivers and what not at the mosque.

[2] Saddam in his speech last night talked about the attack on the “Arab nation.” Iraq is a member of the Arab League. This neglects the fact that the Kurds are 25% of the population and speak an Indo-European language. The Baath Arab nationalist ideology by definition excludes these native Iraqis but reaches out to Arabs in other nations.

[3] North Indian Muslims did get their Islam from the Turks and Persians. Turkic and South Asian Sunnis share the liberal Hanafi legal tradition. They dealt with non-Muslims, so the stricter types would tend to be more difficult to jive with dhimmi and often pagan peoples that these rulers dominated. Some South Indian Muslims though probably get their Islam from Arab traders, for instance, the Mopillas of Kerala, that form about 20% of that state’s population. Additionally, the Malays got their Islam from a host of sources, including, Indian, often Gujarati, merchants-in addition to the Persian and Arab influences. Mahathir Mohammed’s father was an Indian Muslim, so he is probably aware of this.

Charles Murtaugh comments on the “Moron Majority”:

It is interesting that Rall, a liberal, is willing to be so open with his contempt for the average American. (Or, as a politico would put it, America’s working men and women.) It raises a more generally-interesting question, of what obligation the non-moron elite owes to the moron majority. After all, most of our entitlement dollars go to supporting — placating? — that majority. What idiot doesn’t plan for his own retirement? Oh, yeah, that would be most of the country. What kind of fool hasn’t learned to read by the time they get out of high school? What kind of mouth-breather hasn’t figured out that they would be better off saving money than gambling it in the lottery? Um, well, let’s not go there: better not to alienate too much of the Democratic base.

1) A lot of the “Morons” have college educations-these aren’t “working Americans” as working class.

2) The Morons are Left, Right and Center, stupidity has no political affiliation, really!

Posted by razib at 10:03 AM

Whenever I look to in the MOVABLE TYPE activity log I end up seeing search terms-and it seems that someone is always looking for a picture of me (not the same person, I check the IP addresses). Look to the left now, my baby and non-baby picture linked up there. I’ll replace the non-baby one in the spring when the sun is back and my past-brown pallor is warmed up by some rays.

Update: Someone, I think a Canadian, is did another search for my picture. Is this some joke? I know Canadians have good senses of humor….

Fall 1996: “Show me the money!”
Spring 2003: “Shock & awe”

If I hear those words paired one more time, I’m going to tear someone’s throat out.

David Frum slams paleos. He mentions The Occidental Quarterly. First, Steve Sailer, and now the TOQ? Some little boy has been really naughty, reading up on verboten materials….

Brown person Zack Ajmal is working on a series on marriage in the Muslim world. See here, here and here.

Good complement to the ParaPundit post titled Consanguinity prevents Middle Eastern political development (all related articles here). Add to this a recent Ann Marlowe piece on the importance of the circle-of-cousins in Afghan culture. She indicates quite clearly that it acts on a block to the development of what we in the West would view was a fully-fleshed civil society and government.

Guns, strong familial circles of support and a history of decentralization, yet Afghanistan is not a libertarian paradise. Clearly, liberty as we understand it requires some preconditions. Yes, I’m sure clear to all you sage readers, but if I had told myself that 4 years ago, I would have shot back with a whole flood of inferences from a few axioms rooted in Natural Rights.

Update: Steve Sailer had a good article on this too that was printed in The American Conservative, I don’t recall it ever being linked to on his blog but I just found it online. -JM

Dr. Greg Cochran on the possibility of gene frequencies shifting in populations leading to changes in phenotype (eg; IQs going up and down yo-yo style over thousands of years):

Look, _nobody_ thinks about this. I’m not just talking about people who want to celebrate their ancestors’ real or imagined achievements.

If you really want to understand long-range historical trends, assuming that that is even possible, you’re going to have to take selection over historical time into account. Or so it seems to me.

OK, I know Greg is working on a quantitative study of Ashkenazi Jews in this context (or so I gather from his comments). Kevin MacDonald’s work focuses on the group selection strategy having a eugenic effect. Does anyone know of other studies? David Sloan Wilson has done some work on Overseas Chinese (I am reading a book on what I now know is the great transnational crime racket that is the Chinese Diaspora).

I have shot-the-shit and talked to friends about possibilities that different historical experiences have had on discrete populations. Myopia for instance comes to mind (imagine a Chinese guy wearing glasses, and an Australian Aborigine wearing glasses, and reflect on which mental image seems a little ridiculous). But do these selection pressures apply anymore today? Famine is now man-made (in other world, chains of supply from surplus to deficit regions are blocked by political barriers). Many people seem to agree that for the past few generations in the modern West the “lower orders” have been more prolific.

Update: Some readers might be interested in this site: http://www.cashforbirthcontrol.com.

From Pontikos exposed: “3. Pontikos says that race-mixing is actually a good thing and has very positive effects!;”

Kristin Kreuk, Sino-Dutch Canadian.

Dienekes deconstructs pan-European racialists. He points out the problems caused by centers of reference and drawing lines on an arbitrary basis (or being influenced by non-anthropological criteria). To be mislabelled is a common occurance for many people, and if an individual of group A can confuse someone of group B as one of their own (or vice versa), then there needs to be a closer examination of the basis for any given taxonomic division.

If the oldest European civilizations were situated in the heart of Europe, in the region of modern Bavaria, Austria and Bohemia, the pan-European racialists would have a much easier time. They could dismiss Greeks as peripheral and only marginally European. Unfortunately, Greece serves as one of the main taproots for western culture, and the deepest to boot. The Romans, who served as models for European states and empire-builders for 2,000 years were also a southron people, though probably somewhat more physically diverse [1]. Northern & central Europeans can not cut the southerners off from the movement with any ease simply because much of what makes Europe what it is came from the south (Christian religion primarily, but also Civil Law, and inspiration for the Renaissance). On the other hand, Europeans with less historical heft can be demonized, so the Russians have often been portrayed as semi-Asiatic in nature to explain their despotic traditions and alien ways. Similarly, even the Germans were depicted as “Huns,” harking back to a people of Oriental origins and pagan brutality.

Minor note: I’ve been linking a lot to Dienekes, so much that some will accuse me of being a Hellenic stooge! In fact, I think that the Perl editor I used to use was made by a Greek company…connections, connections. So I offer this link Pontikos Exposed, brought to you by your local anti-Mud Clearinghouse Stormfront. To be fair, I do think Dienekes is a bit of a Hellenophile who tends to see his own people as the apex of creation (and can’t help but get some swipes in at “Nordicists” and rehash ancient ideas of his people being the Golden Mean), but, he is a Greek-and they frankly have a lot to be proud of. When was the last time you heard a Greek claiming that The Pharoh was an Achaean or that an ancient Indian philosopher had an Athenian father? They don’t need to do that, not when you have 3,500 years (minus a Dark Age) of literate history to draw upon. Contrast this with the Hinduvata movement that has a bizarre tendency to always assert somehow that “it all started in India,” (the ludicrous claims about nuclear weapons in ancient India as recorded by the Mahabharata). I can give Afro-centrists some slack for claiming Hannibal and Rameses II as “great black men” because black Africa had little in the way of literate centralized statecraft and if you need to believe your ancestors were great builders of cities but they were mostly at a pre-literate neolithic level, some white lies are understandable. But folk of the land of The Kama Sutra (brown people having sex-yuck!) shouldn’t need to resort to fantasy and falsehood. True, they were running around half-naked before my paternal grandfather’s foreskinless forbears came sweeping down out of the highlands of Turan introducing prudery, but those ornate temples with golden calfs required a great deal of taxation, alms and general injustice and despotism, so Indians can be proud, tyranny is part of their patrimony (and the idols melted so well, all the better to make ingots that could finance the building of clean mosques!) . No need to go one up everyone and claim that they had their hands on nuclear weapons before whitey!

[1] Dienekes has a fair take down of John V. Day’s contention that the proto-Indo-Europeans were fair-haired peoples who were later absorbed by swarthy indigenes in the ancient world. Dienekes criticises Day for noting the first 19 Roman Emperors as being rather light in color compared to what we perceive Italians to be, for of course, many of these individuals were related and so would not be a random sample of the Roman elite. The first five were members of the Julio-Claudian dynasty. Caesars gens, the Julii, were notoriously fair-haired, as Gauis Julius Caesar himself was. Augustus had reddish blonde hair while the last of his line, Nero, was also a blonde. Of the later Emperors, none of them were from old Roman stock (from the patrician & plebian nobility of the City), so to use them as exemplars of the Aryan ideal among the Latins is somewhat peculiar (there were still some non-Indo-European tribes in Italy during the late Republic aside from the Etruscans, so “Latin” was still a far narrower term in that age). The Flavians were Italian lumpen by origin (and related, father and two sons). The Antonines were of mixed provenance, but they were all provincials after Nerva, Roman stock mixed with Spanish and Gaulish (and related by marriage and extended family ties). I don’t wish to harp on this point, but I do simply because 19 is a small sample. That they were mostly related and most of the later ones were not by blood connected to the ancient Roman aristocracy makes Day’s point rather mute. And why did Day stop at Commodus? Well, after a period of chaos, the Libyan-Syrian dynasty of the Severrans comes to the for, so this was the point with Mr. Day probably would want to draw the line (They were of polygot partial Italian origin as well, but the busts of Septimius Severus seem to indicate he would not stand out in modern day Tripoli as far as features go). He isn’t as extreme as Afro-Centrists trying to prove that the Sumerians were black because they called themselves the “black-headed people,” but I certainly knew what his conclusion was going to be (The essay was an interesting read of course)….