Squinting ahead into the 21st Century, most people are looking to China or the Far East generally or Europe (ha!) or Russia (ha! ha!) to be the next big player. My money’s on India. They’re big, they’re clever, they’re charming and they make excellent 1950s Hollywood musicals. It’s a country not without problems, but I’m betting she has the stuff to pull herself together and kick world ass.
So it’s worth noting that, genetically, they’re the same people as the Pakistanis. And Pakistan is a shithole.
The difference is, Pakistan is Islamic. And India — well, it’s not truly in the Anglosphere, but it was blessed with a period of British colonial rule and absorbed the lesson. Ipso facto it is not race that maketh a shithole. It is ideas.
Sure, being a colony is a drag, but the combination of Capitalism + English common law has been an unbeatable formula for prosperity, growth and invention wherever it has been applied, from Hong Kong to Rhodesia. Even when applied at the ass-end of a gun. The purer the tincture, the surer the cure.
Don’t give me that shit about Islam and algebra or medicine or whatever. That was hundreds and hundreds of years ago and it takes credit for stuff filched from the better cultures it absorbed. The few real Muslim innovators skated close to the edge with their own religious leadership. Purist Islam is conformist, repressive, hierarchical, intolerant, dogmatic. Innovation needs flexibility, tolerance for eccentricity and the willingness to absorb insult without riots or sawing off heads.
In the end, I have no worries who will win the argument. Everybody wants to live in a world with antibiotics and television. Even Osama luv him sat-phone. A caliphate could limp along at a frozen level of technology for a while (the Soviet Union made it almost a century, after all). But the nerds will win the long game, because they have allllll the mana points. This is why the “demographics is destiny” argument falls flat for me — I believe a thousand strong, stupid young men will lose a prolonged fight to ten geeks.
The question is the body count.
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This is one of them there trick questions ain’t it?
Just angling for my spot on the “Behead Me First” list.
I once did a bit of Africa travelling with a friend who was stationed there as a Peace Corps worker. Even though ALL of the countries he had been in would qualify as shitholes, his theory was that the formerly British colonies were the least shitholey of the bunch. Some vestige of how a country could be run without becoming 100% corrupted and chaotic seemed to have been passed down.
Geeks are good at hiding and
picking the battles they know
they can win.
They may in lots of cases be
young, but they ain’t young,and dumb.
Howzat for an angle?
If you get a fatwa calling for your beheading, let me know. Then I’ll know what to do to get the same.
You and skinbad bring up an interesting point. Pakistanis, and even some Indians, are fond of waxing eloquent on how the British messed up South Asia. But it reminds me a bit of the sketch in The Life of Brian where someone asks (rhetorically), “What have the Romans done for us?” (”Us” being the Israelites.) After some discussion, the question becomes: “All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?”
Although the Brits may have messed some stuff up (but, honestly, what imperial power hasn’t?), some people don’t give them credit where it’s due.
I think one reason Pakistan is in such a horrid condition whereas India is rising is because India was established as a secular state and on the remains of a polity that at some point or another existed as a historical fact for centuries, if not millennia, whereas Pakistan was established on the basis of religion and as an artificial construct with nothing historical, ethnic, cultural, et cetera, to serve as a foundation.
Compare Malaysia and Burmah.
Both ex-british colonies, one Islamic, one not. Which one is the more successful?
I dislike retarded persons. chinese men have small dicks
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