Month: August 2019
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On Socrates the insufferable
I am trying to make a second go-around the whole audiobook thing. For whatever reason, I’m not very good at listening to books, as opposed to reading them. I’ve spent a lifetime reading, but am not the best listener. Books require concentrated attention across many sequences of ideas and thoughts, and I’m much better with…
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Taking sides when good and evil is unclear
One of the things that I admitted when reflecting on where I’ve been wrong, is that my default stance is to be somewhat isolationist because international entanglements are so complex. Some critics always wonder why I use such a simple heuristic, why not evaluate on a case by case basis? At the extreme, this is…
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This is your independence day!
Twitter tells me that this is India’s independence day. Since I didn’t know that this was the case until this morning, I obviously have nothing deep to say. Except let me enjoin the people of India and its leadership class to one thing: do not be haunted by the past, look to the future. The…
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America does a good job assimilating immigraints
Priyanka Chopra tweeted during a time when we were this 👌🏽 close to sending nukes to one another. Instead of advocating for peace she tweeted in support of the Indian army pic.twitter.com/LhbMkOW59v — Ayesha Malik (@Spishaa) August 11, 2019 If you are lucky, you are not aware that Priyanka Chopra got “called out” by a…
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America does a good job assimilating immigraints
Priyanka Chopra tweeted during a time when we were this 👌🏽 close to sending nukes to one another. Instead of advocating for peace she tweeted in support of the Indian army pic.twitter.com/LhbMkOW59v — Ayesha Malik (@Spishaa) August 11, 2019 If you are lucky, you are not aware that Priyanka Chopra got “called out” by a…
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Between Terence and incommensurability
One of my favorite quotes is from the Roman playright Terence. He asserted: Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto. I know of it through the English translation, “I am human, and I think nothing human is alien to me.” This truth was brought home to me in the early 2000s when I read…
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Open Thread, 08/11/2019
John Reader’s Africa: A Biography of the Continent is one of my favorite books. Cities is not as good, but if you are trying to avoid cookie-cutter surveys, it is pretty decent. Reader is an engaging writer. I haven’t had time to work on the South Asian Genotype or Tutsi projects in a while. But…
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Open Thread – Brown Pundits
Please keep the other posts on topic. Use this for talking about whatever you want to talk about.
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The Neolithic roots of modern East Asian human geography
Because of the long and thorough tradition of Chinese historiography, we have a good and deep chronological record of East Asia going back two to three thousand years ago. Chinese records also help illuminate and clarify aspects of Japanese, Korean, and Southeast Asian, history. For example, what we know about the Indianized kingdom of Funan…
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Notes on podcast & blog
– A greater and greater portion of the traffic on this weblog is mobile (about 60% now). That’s why I redesigned it a while back. This mobile traffic is clearly driven by Indian traffic, which is overwhelmingly mobile. – There has been a major dropoff in positive reviews on Apple Podcasts and Stitcher. Please leave…
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Appropriation of “black and brown”
Language evolves, and social media has made certain phrases mainstream where they were relatively unknown. The fragment “black and brown”, often used in conjunction with “folks,” connotes certain issues and politics in 2019. It probably emerged as a term because there are 35% more Latinos than black Americans and the two form a minority social…
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The one directional conveyer belt of lifestyles?
Though we are taking a hiatus for the summer for The Insight podcast, we have many episodes already recorded and ready to go. The current plan is to launch season 3 with a discussion between Spencer and myself on the Tocharians. One of the things I brought up is an observation about the changing lifestyles…
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The one directional conveyer belt of lifestyles?
Though we are taking a hiatus for the summer for The Insight podcast, we have many episodes already recorded and ready to go. The current plan is to launch season 3 with a discussion between Spencer and myself on the Tocharians. One of the things I brought up is an observation about the changing lifestyles…
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Genetics of Kashmiris
People keep asking about this. But there was a paper, A Genome-Wide Search for Greek and Jewish Admixture in the Kashmiri Population. Basically, they aren’t anything you wouldn’t expect.
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Episode 63: Zack Ajmal, Pakistani American in Pakistan
Another BP Podcast is up. You can listen on Libsyn, iTunes, Spotify, and Stitcher. Probably the easiest way to keep up the podcast since we don’t have a regular schedule is to subscribe at one of the links above. You can also support the podcast as a patron. The primary benefit now is that you get the podcasts considerably earlier than…
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Kashmir “open thread”
Nothing to say of substance myself. What do I know compared to you geniuses? That being said, I’m a little surprised how dumb the American media is ( basically they seem to fall back on the same sources). Like they used to say back in the day, “it’s yours”….
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Enter the dragon
On the first episode of a new podcast, The Realignment, the hosts interview J. D. Vance. It was an interesting conversation, during the course of which Vance expressed a great deal of alarmism about the rise of China as a world power. He indicated that hear feared China is intent on world domination. Vance’s…
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A matter of representation
Several readers have brought it up in the comments, and it even cropped up in a secret message group I’m in, so I need to talk about this issue I guess. There is a serious lack of representation in the 2019 winning team from the United State of America in the International Math Olympiad. Except…
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Stuff I was wrong about!
A friend of mine was talking about which public intellectuals change their mind, and which do not. It turns out most don’t seem to. To be frank I don’t count myself as a public intellectual…but since some people have much looser criteria than I do, I thought I should review things I’ve changed my mind…
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Little Qatar playing the Soviet Union in our time
It’s cool how Jake Tapper compares occupied Palestinians to white nationalists while he’s actually giving them a platform on his own show (Richard Spencer most recently). Collect your man @cnn. — Sana Saeed (@SanaSaeed) August 5, 2019 There is a little Twitter tiff going on because of what seems like a misunderstanding (misrepresentation?) of what…