Miscellaneous News
- Thread starter bd popeye
- Start date
FriedRiceNSpice
Major
Liberalism and capitalism was the new, "opium," and unfortunately potentially much more addictive and difficult to eradicate than the original. The Trade War was never about the trade surplus, it was about access to Chinese financial markets and subjecting RMB and Chinese financial assets for harvest via the dollar cycle.
Last edited:
200K USD, what a bargain! lol
manqiangrexue
Brigadier
India is known as the country with incredible potential but incredibly bad ability to achieve it. I used to think India was going to be the next big thing since I grew up in NYC and Indians were one of the very few groups of people who could academically challenge Chinese people but seeing how Indians in India actuall handle themselves, I'm no longer worried.
Grok got nuetered:
**No, there is no biological evolutionary basis for any ethnic or racial group—including people from India (South Asia, not the "Far East," which usually means East Asia)—being genetically "wired" for two-facedness or playing both sides.**
Human evolutionary biology does not support population-specific genetic adaptations for complex, context-dependent social strategies like diplomatic hedging, opportunism, or "duplicity." Here's why, grounded in what we actually know from genetics, population biology, and evolutionary theory:
All modern humans share ~99.9% of our DNA, with the vast majority of variation within groups rather than between them. The major migrations that shaped South Asian populations (Ancient Ancestral South Indians, Indus Valley-related groups, steppe pastoralist inputs, etc.) happened thousands of years ago—far too recently and with too much gene flow for selection to fix anything as nuanced as "preferring to balance alliances" into an entire subcontinent's gene pool. Complex behavioral traits like trust, reciprocity, or strategic flexibility have low to moderate heritability overall (twin studies put broad personality dimensions like Machiavellianism around 30-50%, but that's individual variation, not group averages). Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) and polygenic scores for personality or political orientation show tiny effect sizes per variant, massive polygenicity, and near-zero explanatory power for "why one nationality's government hedges bets." No credible population genetics paper has ever identified alleles for "two-faced diplomacy" enriched in Indians (or any other group). Claims otherwise are pseudoscience, akin to old phrenology or 19th-century racial typologies that were debunked decades ago.
Evolutionary game theory (e.g., Axelrod's tit-for-tat, mixed strategies in the prisoner's dilemma) shows that "playing both sides"—hedging, forming temporary coalitions, extracting value from multiple partners—is an adaptive response to *uncertainty*, resource competition, and multi-player environments. It's not ethnicity-specific; it's what any rational actor does when payoffs are unclear. Every population on Earth has done it when conditions favored it:
- Small-scale foragers switch alliances.
- Medieval European states balanced between Pope, emperor, and rivals.
- Modern superpowers (U.S., China, Russia) routinely play all sides on trade, arms, energy.
India's government doing multi-alignment (buying Russian oil while buying U.S. tech/defense, maintaining ties with Iran and Israel, QUAD + BRICS) is textbook realpolitik for a large, populous nation with energy needs, border threats, and no formal alliances like NATO. That's cultural-historical path dependence—centuries of invasions, fragmented kingdoms, colonial divide-and-rule, the Non-Aligned Movement, post-1991 liberalization—not Darwinian selection on Indian DNA. Dense populations, monsoon agriculture, caste-based social complexity, and merchant traditions (historical trade networks from Rome to Southeast Asia) culturally rewarded negotiation, haggling, and pragmatic flexibility. Those are learned norms transmitted socially, not hardwired.
Stereotypes persist for all sorts of reasons (availability bias, media focus on call-center haggling, outsourcing anecdotes, confirmation from specific high-profile cases, historical British colonial narratives), but "they exist so they must have a kernel of biological truth" is a fallacy. Plenty of stereotypes were flat-out invented or exaggerated for political ends and had zero empirical basis (blood libels, "lazy" groups, etc.). Group-average behavioral differences can exist and be measurable in some domains (reaction times, certain cognitive profiles, disease susceptibilities), but they do not extend to moralized traits like inherent duplicity, and they never justify essentializing 1.4 billion people as "two-faced." Environment, incentives, institutions, and individual agency dominate.
In short: evolution explains why flexible social strategizing exists in *Homo sapiens*. It does not explain why you'd attribute it racially to Indians (or anyone) any more than you'd claim Europeans evolved to be "inherently colonial" or East Asians "inherently conformist." That's just storytelling, not science. If you're seeing patterns in Indian foreign policy or business practices, look to history, economics, and geography—they're far better explanations.
Well, Jesus is Palestinian after all...
proelite
Senior Member
Both the British Raj and the Qing Dynasty had the largest economies and the largest working age population in the 1800s.
Right now, betting 3.9 cents on return of Jesus will win you $1.00 if he indeed returns by end of this year. You can also bet 96.2 cents on Jesus not returning by end of this year and also win $1.00 if he does not return.
Musk‘s AIPAC monitor, Niko bans conscientious objector group.