Mostly responses to Feminism, SJWs and other strains of Cultural Marxism
When politics is entertaining, then only entertaining things become politics. So people devote their energy and attention to whatever conflict is the most entertaining, rather than useful.
In related news, a big chunk of my family still doesn’t have running water.
My Facebook Feed is all full of articles/comments/posts about how the Waco Shootout shows just how differently the media deals with white gang violence than black gang violence.
Meanwhile, my Facebook Feed has zero articles/comments/posts about black gang violence.
So, I guess we deal with white gang violence by focusing on it, and black gang violence by ignoring it as much as possible.
In the interest of fairness, I will note that Asian gangs also exist, though Asians have a much lower overall crime rate than whites.
So I happened to be browsing Stanford Magazine, and happened across two articles immediately in a row on religious issues. Each had a picture:
The contrast between the level of respect for the religion/religious believers in question really couldn’t be starker.
The respectable lady is Jane Shaw, Stanford’s new Dean of Religious life, notable for being both the first woman to hold the position and the first gay person. A few quotes from her article:
“Q. At Grace Cathedral and at Oxford, you led programs far afield from what might be considered religious: Hosting forums with politicians, activists and authors; bringing in atheists and believers; and commissioning artists-in-residence to create plays and installations. What’s your guiding light?
A. I don’t think I am a very churchy person, if that makes sense. I have always been interested in how you engage people in discussing questions of ultimate meaning, really—values, ethics, spirituality, all that stuff.
…
Q. But do you also value the “churchy” side of faith?
A. Ritual and liturgy? I love it.
Q. What new directions will you bring to Stanford?
A. …It is certainly my desire to make sure that Memorial Church is a place for extremely lively intellectual engagement, a place where possibly difficult issues can be discussed, a place where ethical and spiritual issues can be discussed. I am hoping we’ll have different sorts of people preaching here as guest preachers, not just clergy.”
The second photo is most likely a van owned by an unmedicated schizophrenic. You’d be forgiven if you therefore assumed the second article had something to do with mental illness.
It’s actually an interview with Stanford alum Kathryn Gin Lum about her new book, “Damned Nation: Hell in America from the Revolution to Reconstruction.”
Right. So whoever put the picture on this article equates the faith of the Founding Fathers (and many Americans today) with literal mental illness.
To be clear, Lum herself does not appear to be condescending toward the people/beliefs she studied, but her interview reveals that respect for the views of 60% of Americans is not common in our nation’s most respected centers of academic thought:
“Separate from any personal considerations, hell seemed to offer the best intellectual grist. ‘People in the academy,’ says Lum, tend to dismiss the notion that any consideration of hell could drive ‘how rational people think.'”
“Does hell have contemporary relevance, despite its lousy reputation in higher education?
“Strongly, thinks Lum. Much of her analysis highlights the connection between ‘people who believe in hell’ and their impulse ‘to damn other people to it.’ It’s that sensibility about calling out the world’s evils, says Lum, that suffuses today’s hot-button issues, including abortion and same-sex marriage.”
(Note that whatever insights she may have about rational people who believe in hell, or any potential good sides to the belief, the article does not mention them. It only mentions the ways in which people who believe in hell are problematic for the rest of the country. Those darn hell-believers, mucking things up for everyone else.)
“Writing about hell’s pertinence, Lum notes in her epilogue, ‘is to invite raised eyebrows.’ Her interest in the subject, she adds, has stirred reactions like ‘But you look so well-adjusted!'”
All right, so let’s review:
According to Stanford, a gay woman who isn’t very “churchy” but likes discussing ethics is one of the country’s best religious leaders, and the 60% of Americans who believe in Hell are literally insane and make trouble for everyone else.
One set of religious views is respected. The other is not.
Now, let’s try to imagine a contemporary article from any sort of respectable college or university (not one of the ones that make you mutter and stare at your feet while admitting that one of your relations was interested in the school,) that conveys the inverse: respect for people who believe in hell; disrespect for gays, women, and people whose faith isn’t based on Biblical inerrancy.
Can you? Maybe Harvard? Yale? Oberlin? CalTech? Reed? Fine, how about BYU? No, probably not even them.
I can’t imagine it. A hundred years ago, maybe. Today, no. Such notions are completely incompatible with the beliefs of modern, upper-class people.
I know many perfectly decent folks who believe in hell, and think they should be respected, but “be decent to people who hold denigrated religious beliefs” is not actually my point. My point is that the American upper class, academia, and the people with a great deal of power and influence over the beliefs of others clearly agrees with Pastor Shaw’s religious beliefs (when it is not outright atheist). Upper-class liberals in America are their own ethnic group with their own religion, culture, morality, and endogamous breeding habits. Conservatives are the out-group, their religious views openly mocked by the upper class and banned from the halls of academic thought.
Thing is, we happen to live, more or less, in a democracy.
One of the intended effects of democracy is that even groups with no real power can still express themselves via voting. If you have the numbers and bother to go to the polls, you can get someone in who more or less kinda sorta might represent your views.
As a result, even though conservatives are low-class and not cultural or intellectual movers and shakers, they can still influence who gets to be president or in Congress, and thus pass laws on things like abortion and stem cell research.
As a result, a group that has very little power in real life may end up with a fair amount via elections.
Think of it as a for of political power redistribution.
Because people constantly lie, shit is often confusing. American schools, for example, are actually pretty good, yet people constantly complain about them. Why?
Once you understand the real reasons for things, you can dispense with a lot of confusion. But our culture of taboos around various subjects leads to a lot of lying.
If something doesn’t make sense to you, chances are, you’ve heard a lot of lies about it. Look for the truth–even if that truth violates some taboo.
I know this is a sign that I am incredibly dumb, but I am always vaguely surprised by neoreactionaries/Dark Enlightenment types who claim to understand human genetics but are openly hostile to transsexuals, transgender, and otherwise trans- folks.
Look, guys. Every trans person I have met has something medically wrong with them–some sort of genetic or hormonal condition interfering with the production/development of normal sex hormones/characteristics. Don’t get distracted by the “gender is a social construct,” nonsense–it’s totally irrelevant. (More on that later.)
So you now how boys are genetically XY, and girls are XY? I have met trans people who are literally XXY. Like Down’s Syndrome, only your genitalia don’t quite develop right due to your body trying to produce male genitalia with way too many female hormones.
Another condition that appears to affect quite a large % of trans people is exposure to massive levels of artificial sex hormones while still in the womb, due to certain medications pregnant women have taken.
Diethylstilbestrol, (or DES,) is a synthetic nonsteroidal estrogen, synthesized way back in 1938. Between 1940 and 1971, DES was given in large quantities to pregnant women to prevent miscarriages. Unfortunately, it turns out that pumping babies full of unnaturally high levels of estrogen might be bad for them–DES was discontinued as a medication for pregnant women because it gave their daughters cancer, and the sons appear to have high rates of trans and intersex conditions, which is exactly what you’d expect.
And then there are the people I have met whose health histories I am not privy to, but who quite obviously have something hormonal going on–girls who grow up and sprout beards, for example.
Alas, I don’t have data on what is going on with 100% of trans people, but from everything I’ve seen, it looks like we’re really just talking about a few people with rare medical conditions, prenatal hormonal or toxin exposure, etc., not weirdo degenerates who are trying to destroy civilization.
In fact, every trans person I’ve ever met just wanted to live their life without being harassed and be a contributing member of society, like almost everyone else I know.
In a nation with 320 million people, and a world with even more, and the technology to find people with <1/million conditions and put them on TV or find each other on an online forum, it is easy to overestimate the commonness of extremely rare conditions. (Homosexuality comes immediately to mind–gay folks number around 3% of the country, but IIRC, people estimate that about 30% of people are gay.)
Trans people are an even smaller % of the population–even on LGBTetc forums, they complain about being left out and forgotten–because there are just so few of them. 0.3% of the population to be exact, according to Wikipedia. (This number seems consistent with “caused by a variety of rare medical conditions.”)
There are more prisoners in this country than trans people, but I don’t hear people complaining that a convicted criminal might use a public bathroom while they’re in there, even though criminals are way more likely to rape, assault, or kill you than some “chick with a beard.”
So even if I can’t convince you not to hate them, remember that trans people are such a tiny % of the overall population that worrying about them is a total waste of your time.
But what about all of this business about gender being a social construct?
Look, people throw around a lot of words without knowing what they really mean. Trans people are really the embodiment of the opposite of this principle. If gender were just a social construct, a woman with a beard could just say, “Well, society is wrong to say that beards are a man-thing; I’m going to declare that beards are a woman thing, too!” instead of feeling like there was something really wrong with her. Trans people would not bother with sex-reassignment-surgery (which is expensive, painful, and a pain in the butt;) they would just declare themselves to be whatever they want.
In fact, experiments have been done in which babies with indeterminate genitalia were just assigned a gender, surgically altered, (usually to female, because it is easier to subtract from working tissue than to add to it,) and then raised as their assigned gender, on the assumption that since gender is just a social construct, you can do this.
These experiments went badly. A lot of these kids grew up confused, hit puberty, and realized that they were in fact not the gender they’d been raised as (and that their parents had removed a good chunk of their genitalia.) Gender, in short, has so far resisted our best efforts to make it malleable.
In short, trans people aren’t your enemies. They just want to pee in peace.
There is a story in which a man makes the gaslights in his house flicker, and every time his wife notices this, tells her he hasn’t seen anything. Over time, she starts thinking she’s going crazy.
Society also does this, albeit (probably) less intentionally.
Humans are notoriously bad at judging a source’s reliability–take about 1,600 years of near absolute faith in the literal truthfulness of the Bible, a book that’s obviously nonsense.
Increasing quantities of easily accessed information in the past century have made people much better at discerning bullshit, but we have a new problem: we’re now getting almost all of our information about the world not from direct experience, (Hey, it’s raining on me! I’m wet!) but from reports from other people–books, newspapers, media, the Wikipedia, your best friends, etc. Our general ability to judge the reliability of sources is therefore up against far more potential sources of misinformation and manufactured consent.
Common ways society lies:
1. Discordant Sum: Since your exact experiences are unlikely to be identical to everyone else’s exact experiences, your reality and society will probably be slightly discordant. This is generally innocuous, innocent, and easy to deal with–you just have to realize that you happen to like handbags more than everyone else, or are poorer than the people on TV, or hate chocolate.
Sometimes it’s a bigger deal, like if you are naturally more or less aggressive than the rest of society, have kids who don’t act like other kids, or you have been made one of the secret Presidents of Earth. Sometime society is wrong. Sometimes you’re wrong. It can be very hard to tell the difference.
2. Active lying to sound “nice”: people say a ton of nice-sounding stuff, like, “Appearances don’t matter,” “be yourself,” “don’t care what other people think about you,” “everyone is beautiful,” “school is fun,” “learning is valuable for its own sake,” “You don’t need other people to be happy,” etc. These lies may be valuable to a subset of people, but they are also harmful to another subset. If you take this advice seriously, say, by wearing sweatpants to job interviews and picking your nose on dates, you will discover, very quickly, that society actually cares A LOT about your appearances and behavior. And at least those are things you *can* change. Fat, short, and ugly people can do very little about the fact that society discriminates constantly against them.
Nerds and aspie people seem particularly likely to believe these lies, perhaps because they lack the natural impulse to imitate others that would normally counteract them. Nerds follow these rules, and then are confused when they are treated badly because of their appearances, and may decide that the rest of the world is “bad” for not following the “rules” and valuing dumb things like appearances.
But if you try to point out that these are lies and actually terrible advice, you will get attacked. How dare you say that fat people are more likely to be poor! You’re just fat-shaming! No, fat people are discriminated against in hiring. (I have had this exact conversation with people on multiple occasions.) It’s bad enough to lie, but attacking people for pointing out that these are lies and harmful is just low.
Also forbidden: the suggestion that dumb people might have trouble managing their money and getting high-paying jobs, which could make them disproportionately poor. The suggestion that you should care what other people think because they have actual power to make your life better or worse. That spending increasingly large amounts of money on education is not always increasingly valuable. That society’s behavior standards might actually be good. That most humans do best when in relationships of various sorts with other humans, the desire for which is instinctual. Etc.
The good thing is that once you do realize that this is all BS, you can actually pick the ways you want to comport yourself, dress, spend your time, etc., within your own natural limits and income, to get the results you desire. If you want to get a job, you can dress and comport yourself like a job applicant; if you’re on a date, you can wear clothes appropriate to a date. In personal life, you can pursue relationships that make you happy without feeling guilty about being weak. in more extreme cases, people should not feel bad about using plastic surgery, hormone therapies, liposuction, or other techniques to alter the ways people treat them, or if those are not options, at least they can understand that society shits upon them for reasons that aren’t their fault.
3. The News Agenda: The media (and now, websites and blogs) pick certain news stories to emphasize, often manufacturing completely a-factual scares, eg:
A. European witch-panics
B. Justification for the Mexican-American War
C. Anti-Semitic propaganda circa 1930-1945
D. Satanic Daycare Scare
E. Monica Lewinski Scandal
F. Numerous non-existent crime waves
G. Benghazi
H. “Internet Predators”
I. “Rape culture”
etc.
Some of these panics have been entirely fictional, like the Satanic Daycare Scare. Many involve manipulating story-selection, eg, by suddenly switching to only covering one sub-set of crime so that it sounds like there’s been a huge jump in that kind of crime.
The average person is unlikely to actually know statistics on these issues–do you know the recidivism rates of different kinds of released criminals off the top of your head? How about a breakdown of crime rates for the past three decades? There’s been a lot of talk lately about police shootings and race, most of which focuses around a few well-publicized cases, but how much do you actually know about the subject?
The dangers of making bad decisions based on manufactured moral panics ought to be obvious: you might literally burn innocent people at the stake, pass restrictive laws to stop non-existent problems, waste valuable resources, or completely miss real problems that actually need work.
And once people get deep into these kids of panics, it can be almost impossible to talk them back to reality. People tend to assume the only reason you would question the factual validity of the panic is to stop them from rooting out and destroying the evil. You must be on the side of evil, otherwise you wouldn’t be claiming it doesn’t exist.
Unfortunately, a discussion about the difficult task of, say, determining optimum levels of immigration and streamlining the system so it is fair and efficient, just isn’t as much fun as either yelling about how the immigrants are destroying America or yelling about how conservatives are mean to nice, beneficial immigrants.
The media also does a lot of lying about subjects that aren’t scares or panics, like the common claim that more school funding and more college will solve all of our problems.
4. Fiction: Obviously fiction is made-up, but most people don’t have Don-Quixote-style problems with books. Problems araise when book authors purposefully and consistently lie, which, by the way, they do.
They lie for two reasons:
A. To be interesting. If books reflected reality exactly, they’d be a lot more boring.
B. To push agendas or “educate” the reader.
I realized this after spending quite a while on writers’ forums, and reading a thread in which authors were explicitly talking about fudging reality. Sure, they said, the vast majority of time, X is like FOO, but why can’t it be like BAR? Why not portray X as BAR?
For example, sure, most math majors might be male, but why not a female one? And the best students in your class are probably disproportionately Asian, but why not black? Most penniless orphans remain penniless orphans, but why not have the child adopted by a rich, loving, childless couple? Most kids don’t really like school, but why not a book about kids who love school?* And I assume that most people in Pakistan are actually pretty happy with their own society, but why not a book about someone who wants to change things?
*(If school were really so much fun, we wouldn’t need so many books to convince kids that it is. We don’t have to read kids books about how awesome ice cream is, after all.)
Combine “the counter-factual is more fun to read about” and “I would like to encourage the world to think this way,” and books (sitcoms, movies, etc.) can give a distorted view of the world.
As a result, if your experience with X is primarily through literature, you may end up massively overestimating the likelihood of BAR. And if someone else points out that FOO is actually far more common, you may end up accusing them of trying to defame or lie about X, or otherwise acting in bad faith.
I understand rioting. I understand being really fucking mad about something. Anger is a natural and valuable response to certain conditions. If a lion is trying to eat your kid, for example, a sudden burst of anger that drives you to kill that lion or die trying is totally reasonable. In the modern world, we have a lot fewer lions, but there are still plenty of threats.
So if you really believe that your people, your community, your extended family, people who look like you, etc., are under literal, homicidal attack, then the most sensible thing to do is get mad as fuck about it. The sensible thing is to get so damn mad that no one will risk killing any of your people ever again, because if they do, you’ll burn their city the fuck down.
So rioting is perfectly sensible.
The only question is, do the police actually target any particular groups of people?
Well, no. They don’t. We’ve got some pretty good data on the subject (victimization surveys, etc.,) and the police really don’t seem to disproportionately kill black guys. Police have a very high encounter rate with blacks, yes, but this is largely due to blacks committing a lot of crime. (Again, victimization surveys indicate this.)
I read a story the other day about a white man who died after a police officer shot him in the stomach for not showing his ID while dropping a cat off at an animal shelter. I don’t see any riots for this guy, even though his death is just as awful as every other police brutality death.
I really do hope for less police brutality. But the narrative is a lie.
Doing my Chanukah/Christmas/Festivus/whateverthefuck I’m celebrating shopping. [Note: I wrote this post a while back.] Looking at the toys. Thinking about what the kids would like. Remembering my own childhood. Reflecting on Barbies, Lammily, Bratz, Princesses; Ninjago, Thomas, Super Mario Bros.
Once upon a time, I was the kind of person who stressed out a lot about the kinds of messages society sends kids, the way parents force their kids into particular molds, etc.
Then I actually had kids, didn’t get enough sleep for about 8 years and counting, and mellowed the fuck out because my priorities became things like, “What do you mean you didn’t eat lunch?” and “oh no there are no wipes in the diaper bag” and “GO TO BED IT IS PAST YOUR BEDTIME.”
I have also learned some things like, “Even though we own tons of dolls, the boys never touch them,” and “the girl likes to do everything her brothers do, but always seems to append ‘princess’ to it.”
I’m going to go out on a very sturdy limb and say that gender roles are part socialization, and part innate. Some things do appeal more to boys, on average, than to girls, on average, and vice versa. Some activities appeal more, too. And in my limited observations of my small-N and their companions, girls and boys do seem to have different basic, instinctual ways of moving and relating to the world. (Basically, boys fling themselves into action, ignore you, and get in trouble more. Girls move smoothly and thoughtfully, are responsive, and generally only need gentle reprimands because they actually seem to desire to be good.)
For the past god knows however many decades, at least two as far as I’ve been aware, there’s been a fairly constant discussion, especially on the left, about the terrible terrible ways things like Barbies and Princesses and the genderization of toys socialize girls into feminine roles and give them eating disorders and generally perpetuate all of the ills of Patriarchy. Some of these arguments have been valid; many have been very silly. (You think Barbie’s bad? Seriously? Have you visited a toy aisle lately? Let me show you some Monster High Dolls’ dimensions. Or Bratz or a half-dozen other lines that are even less realistic and skinnier than Barbie.)
Despite this, these views have gotten very popular. Take the recent success (so far) of the Lammily doll, marketed as the “realistic Barbie”. You can even buy, I shit you not, stickers to simulate stretch marks, cellulite, and acne for your kid’s doll.
(You know what I suspect kids don’t really want in their toys? Realism. That’s why bright purple ponies sell better than realistic looking toy horses. The whole point of play is that it’s imaginary.)
Despite how this might sound, this is not actually progress. (Let’s assume that we want progress, where progress = fixing all of the stuff feminists complain about.) Why? Because Lammily is a single blip in the ocean of dolls that have become even less realistic than Barbie over the past 20 years.
Once upon a time, Legos were marketed (and sold) as a basically gender neutral toy. I had Legos; you probably did, too. Tinkertoys, Lincoln Logs, all sorts of toys featured girls and boys on the packaging and were bought by parents of all genders. Sure, girls liked dolls and boys liked trains, but there was a lot of stuff in between. Even Disney movies aimed to be gender neutral, with such exciting flops as The Rescuers and The Rescuers Down Under.
Disney animation almost shut down completely under the weight of such crappy movies, until the release, in 1989, of The Little Mermaid, the first modern “princess movie” and the movie that saved Disney animation. Since then, they’ve released the occasional “Lion King”, with cross-gender appeal, (and the occasional dud, like The Hunchback of Nortre Dame, Jesus, what the hell were they thinking?) but their core success has revolved entirely around the Princesses.
Little girls love princesses. I don’t know why. I think it’s because princesses get awesome clothes and look pretty.
Lammily gets boring ass clothes and stretch marks.
When I was a kid, “princesses” were not a thing. There was She-Ra, Princess of Power, but she was a very different phenomenon. Today, it is totally normal for little girls to wear sparkly princess tutus literally everywhere. Ballet and dress-up clothes have become completely normal.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the aisle, Lego released its Star Wars lines, Ninjago, etc., until finally I suspect someone looked at the shelves and said, “Gee, all of this is explicitly marketed to boys.” So to make it up, they started a line explicitly aimed at girls, the Lego Friends.
Tinkertoys comes in pink. So do Lincoln Logs. But rare is the successful Disney animation with a male lead.
My theories:
1. Little kids don’t give a crap what grownups argue about online, and marketers have figured out some successful marketing scheme.
2. The people who complain about kids’ toys aren’t generally the people with kids. People with kids don’t care, and will buy their kids whatever.
3. People who tend to complain about kids’ toys have also chosen to have very few children compared to people who are explicitly anti-feminist and pro-genderizing of toys. As a result, the current crop of kids may actually have a tendency (socially and/or genetically induced) to want to be more gendered and play with more explicitly gendered items than previous generations.
The one exception is masculine toys linked to conservative culture, like b.b. guns. Those are probably way less popular.
If you haven’t heard of Rotherham, it’s a town in Britain where a major scandal recently occurred: Muslim immigrants kidnapped about 1,400 girls over the past decade, raping them and selling them into prostitution. The police had plenty of information coming in about this, but decided it was better to cover up what was happening than to actually bother to rescue anyone, out of fear that doing so would make them look racist.
If it weren’t so goddamn tragic, it’d be hilarious.
The important lesson here isn’t that immigrants are bad. Most immigrants are not bad. The important lesson is that all of the people who claim to be looking out for women did and have done jack shit about the systematic kidnapping and raping of over a thousand girls.
And, look, speaking as a female, I take that kind of personally.
So, what were the feminists doing when this broke? Oh, right, they were too busy talking about a handful of women who were sent death threats over Gamergate to pay attention to the actual violence done to over a thousand women.
A liberal, feminist acquaintance who lives in the UK recently posted, perhaps rhetorically, ‘Why are so many Brits are becoming hostile to immigrants?’ I responded, ‘Well, there was that business in Rotherham,’ and he responded that the media has been under pressure to dig up anything negative they can find on the immigrants.
Later I looked back on this exchange and thought, “Wait a minute, this person, who no doubt considers himself a good person, who believes that he cares about women, just responded to a case of over a thousand women being kidnapped and raped with some twaddle about the media looking for ways to make immigrants look bad? What the fuck?”
As far as I am concerned, feminism is fucking done. I sincerely hope that someone steps up to the plate to help women, because god knows we need it, but it certainly isn’t feminists.
The rest of the liberals are just as negligent. They have completely abandoned the notion of giving a shit about women, except when they want our votes against Republican candidates.
And conservatives, when they pop up, are still blathering on about outlawing abortion, as though this were the 1970s.
Enemies to my right, no friends to the left–what’s a girl to do?
(Incidentally, the Sierra Club recently came out in favor of increased immigration. Increasing the US population is a fine position, if you don’t happen to have trees as your supposed priority.)
(To be fair, my conservative relatives would have put a bullet into anyone who tried to kidnap me when I was a kid. That counts for a little something in my book, though it is balanced by them nearly killing each other when I was a kid.)
As for Rotherham, the lesson there is that if our ability to interact with outsiders is so bad that we’re too scared to arrest them for kidnapping, then we should not be dealing with outsiders. Let someone who is confident that they are not racist and whom you are confident is not racist handle the arresting. And if we can’t be confident that people are capable of being non-racist, then we need to seriously rethink our immigration policies, because why would we let people into our country if we think we (or our neighbors) are going to be racist toward them? People deserve to live in places where they are warmly accepted by those around them, not subject to racist assholes. And people deserve to be protected from criminals, not to have a special class that gets a free pass from the police.
I am an IQ Nationalist. You might also call me a Euro-Exceptionalist.
I don’t care where you come from or what you look like, so long as you’re smart and we get along.
In his SMART FRACTION THEORY OF IQ AND THE WEALTH OF NATIONS and SMART FRACTION THEORY II: WHY ASIANS LAG La Griffe du Lion asserts that, “In market economies, per capita GDP is directly proportional to the population fraction with verbal IQ equal to or greater than 106.”
White IQs average around 100, maybe a little more–meaning that half or more of whites are below this threshold. With IQs around 110 to 115, the average Ashkenazi easily outclasses the average goy. Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, and Taiwanese IQs are roughly on par with whites–immigrants from these countries tend to come almost exclusively from the upper end of the IQ range. Some Indian castes have selected heavily for intelligence, with impressive results.
Smart people make the world a good place. They gave us vaccines, refrigeration, computers, airplanes, and massive quantities of food. I want to live in a world full of smart people.
