Question for the race supremacists...

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They've probably been trying to rid of it since at least 1947.

I believe it doesn't exist in many of the urban areas.

It's still influences marriage choices but urban/english educated Indians marry whom they want.

Perceived social "class" does influence marriage choices everywhere in the world.

In the US, it's very common for parents to want kids to marry either in their "social class" or above it.

Alternatively, you can state the facts. <shrug>
These are not ad hominin attacks.

BTW, look who's talking...
Should I call you Mr Pot or Mr Kettle?

I'm am sorry.
I apologise.
<shame faced>

Hang on!
I most certainly do not!

The whole point of my prolonged, but oh so perfectly reasoned, rant was to defend freedom of expression against weaponised PC.

My god man!
Here is a quid.
Get yourself a replacement logic chip.
The one you have is obviously faulty.

Pax.

Point ii) is all that distinguishes colonial Europe from just about all other pre-industrial societies. Human history is brutal. Europe happened to have the right combination of technologies at the right time to conquer the world.

If the Chinese hadn't gone isolationist under the Ming dynasty perhaps we're talking about how China conquered and enslaved everyone and then rewrote history to be favorable to them.

Or if the Muslim forces had held onto the Iberian Penninsula and developed the sailing technology to travel all over the world, perhaps we're talking about how the Islamic faith conquered and enslaved everyone and then rewrote history to be favorable to them.

People seem to hate on European history, but its really no different from the history of the rest of the world.

<reductionist mode on>
Agreed.
Humanity stinks.

Read Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. He nicely outlines why European civilizations have survived and conquered others, while arguing against the idea that European hegemony is due to any form of European intellectual, moral, or inherent genetic superiority. Diamond argues that the gaps in power and technology between human societies originate primarily in environmental differences, which are amplified by various positive feedback loops. When cultural or genetic differences have favoured Europeans (for example, written language or the development among Europeans of resistance to endemic diseases), he asserts that these advantages occurred because of the influence of geography on societies and cultures (for example, by facilitating commerce and trade between different cultures) and were not inherent in the European genomes.

Diamond is routinely called a racist for his book, which I find hilarious because that's a literal inversion of his argument; Europeans are not superior because they are White, but environments with climate mild enough to more easily facilitate civilization-building tend to also produce fair skin.

I think a useful book (which is no longer in publication) is Sir Halford Mackinder's "The geographical pivot of history". Despite being an aristocrat his insight into how geography and access to resources determined colonial empires is actually very accurate, particularly as it was published during the height of the British empire.

I know of Guns, Germs and Steel by reputation although have not had the opportunity to read it, and generally agree with this conclusion. Geography and luck are what so benefited Europe.

The entire old world was at an advantage relative to the new world by having a larger population and more civilization nucleation events (Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Yangtze River valley). Europe's major advantage was developing better nautical technology as it is a continent made of islands and peninsulas with formidable land barriers and as such nautical technology was more valued there than elsewhere.

It's interesting that China would have been the preeminent naval (and probably world) power had one of the emperors not decided to restrict movement of it's people and navy.

With this argumentation, I'm more curious why the Polynesians don't rule the world - the name "Navigator Islands" for Samoa has been fully earned by the locals.

I could say the same about the Vikings...they were pretty impressive seafarers. And like the polynesians they spread over a huge geographic area. But in the end their numbers were never large enough to mount serious warfare.

I sometimes wonder what would happen if the Vikings successfully colonized Vinland (North America).
Maybe it would have been better for the Americans - the colonization wouldn't be this awful extermination but rather something more similar to how Kiev Rus was established - mixing local and immigrant elements more evenly.

If we assume that difficult technological innovations are largely random events (IE the invention of the wheel, which was never invented in the New World), than the more people you have the greater chance you have of making a difficult technological innovation. Of course the more technology you have the more your technological process accelerates, which is why over time you get vast technological differences between groups of people. The polynesians never had the population to make that kind of progress, and given the vast distances of the Pacific Ocean could not acquire them from East Asian cultures.



The Ming really screwed over China which upto the Yuan dynasty had been the world's forefront culture on technological innovation. Isolationism kills because you no longer have access to the technical innovations of other peoples.



The Vikings may not have conquered the world, but they contributed greatly to the rest of Europe being able to do so. Their seafaring technology was adopted and improved upon by regions like England, France, Spain etc. Furthermore, Scandinavia was still in contact with those regions throughout history. It was actually the Swedes who figured out how to mass-manufacture cast-iron cannons such that they could be put on ships.