July 2008

In my previous post I hinted toward the topic of anti-semitism without saying so explicitly. It was only vaguely relevant and hinting in such a manner is just fun to do. Here I’ll be focusing more explicitly on the topic.

Among the small group of people who’ve heard of Albert Jay Nock, many will know that he’s been accused of anti-semitism. Searching for the source of that belief I generally come across sites by fans of his defending him by pointing out his later statement that he really just dislikes “folks” and disliked Jews in so far as they were “folks”. What a charming fellow he was. I was expecting a sort of proto-Kevin MacDonald. After a period of googling I found that the Atlantic carried a reply from James Marshall entitled The Anti-Semitic Problem in America. From there I found Nock’s original article, and from my reading that would have actually been a more appropriate title than The Jewish Problem in America (part 2 here).

Part 1 is devoted to the issue of anti-semitism, especially its tendency to erupt among the lower classes during a crisis and carry along the reluctant elite and masters of the State (he probably would have enjoyed Thomas Sowell’s Are Jews Generic? as well as Amy Hua’s World on Fire). The second part is about how the Oriental and Occidental in a mirror image must view those who are not von unsere Leute to be “the Other” in modern academic jargon. Nock holds out little hope for assimilation to proceed as it did for Irish immigrants before him.

Here he strikes me as wrong for multiple reasons. His image of Irish immigrants seems to be based on a myth promulgated by the Irish themselves. Jews in America today are so thoroughly Occidentalized that if anyone referred to them as “Oriental” in the presence of representative Americans (not people fond of the word “sayanim”) he would receive bewildered looks. Nock is right about some of the same issues applying to other Orientals such as Armenians and Lebanese (as is thoroughly discussed in Sowell’s essay) but the former hardly seem too alien nowadays and the latter only to a significant degree if they are Muslim (which most in America are not). Nock worries about Nurenberg laws and ropes on lampposts arriving in America within his lifetime, but as folks like Steve Sailer point out the peasants have had much more than pitchforks for a long time here and there has never been a real pogrom against the Jews (although there was a little bit of that directed against the Italians). The peak of anti-Eastern European sentiment is generally attributed to or at least linked to the Second Ku Klux Klan, which the IRS forced to dissolve due to embezzlement in 1944 but had been declining since the 1925 conviction of Grand Dragon David Stephenson for rape and murder. Their anti-Jewish violence didn’t seem to extend much past the lynching of Leo Frank (who at least received a trial, however kangaroo-like, unlike most pogrom victims).

Given that Nock’s pessimism proved to be unwarranted, should that make me rethink my own? I think the two cases are different for a number of reasons. One is that the “generic” Oriental acts as a middle-man minority or “market-dominant” minority. That is not at all the case with our Mexican or more broadly Hispanic immigrants. They are distinctive for acting as agricultural neo-peasants, servants and (most worryingly) an urban lumpenproletariat underclass. There are certainly middle-class Hispanics, but overlap does not imply equality and I am focusing on what is distinctive enough to merit attention. Furthermore, there is plenty of evidence in. Within a few generations the Irish, Italian, Jewish and Polish immigrants assimilated to middle class norms. A recent study by Hispanic academics is entitled “Generations of Exclusion” precisely because a socioeconomic gap has remained pronounced over four or five generations. We even have case studies of where Jewish and Mexican immigrants arrived at the same place at the same time, with widely divergent results. Nock’s concern was with anti-semitic attitudes among the American mass-man, which have turned out to be largely irrelevant (though apparently Al Sharpton caused some problems in Crown Point a while back). If his concern was that Jews weren’t becoming Midwestern farmers like other German immigrants, he would be up a creek without a paddle.

On my part I should concede that immigrants to America do not seem to have the same proclivity for terrorism and rioting (which seems to have peaked in the U.S in the 70s) as Muslims in Europe do. However, while there may be reduced levels of social pathology the sheer size of the demographics could make it more serious. Jews make up only about 2% of the population today and I don’t think they were ever far more. That’s well below any sort of critical mass. In some decades the country could be majority-minority in which only a plurality of citizens identify with Huntington’s “settlers” and huge portions feel alienated. That’s heading into World on Fire territory.

Even without communal violence, a permanent underclass is an unpleasant thing to have. Our indigenous population on reservations is depressing enough despite its low numbers and removed location. We witness cycles of failed policies that spur other bad policies. After the Great Migration northward around WW2 there were public housing projects and urban renewal. Then there was white flight and bussing, with further flight from suburbs to exurbs and the Sun Belt. Now the residential patterns are reversing with gentrification and Section 8 housing. In response to increased crime rates voters look to authoritarian “law and order” politicians like Giuliani. Poor housing and lack of credit led to campaigns against redlining, and then Fannie Mae and ACORN teaming up to create the subprime bubble. Disparities in employment led to the ban on IQ tests in hiring, necessitating a college degree as a substitute. Everyone then needed one, so both colleges and high schools inflated their grades and the value of a degree dropped. The government spent more and more money to make college affordable, with the obvious result of colleges increasing their prices as long they could. Affirmative action was deemed an acceptable temporary remedy, but John Rosenberg can tell you how tenaceously enduring it is, which shouldn’t be surprising as the underlying problem it is supposed to solve doesn’t get solved. Educational interventions such as Head Start were shown to have no lasting effect on the scholastic gap, but politicians insist No Child must be Left Behind. That in turn necessitates that schools cheat on standardized tests. Parents want their children to go to “good schools” which it turns out just means “good students”, and vouchers threaten to ruin things for the lucky ones, so they will reliably oppose measures that would reduce the power of teacher’s unions and slow down the growth of the administrative bureaucracy. People also seek to live in “good neighborhoods” largely defined by “good schools”, and will use a host of zoning or environmental restrictions to keep others out and ensure those neighborhoods stay “good” and housing prices high. Neglecting to invest in anything but your house seems rational when there’s rampant inflation, and inflation is popular when the government and huge portions of the population are debtors. Discuss these issues candidly and receive the fate of Summers or Watson. Those hardheaded scientists are so irritating they seem needing gleichgeschalten.

It seems I’ve gotten carried away from the original topic. So I suppose the answer to Daniel Koffler’s question is no, the goyim don’t really care that much about the Chosen People.

UPDATE: I’m kicking myself for not linking to this from Steve Sailer tying up how Jewish fear of anti-semitism impedes our discourse on other issues. I’ve mentioned before that even some of the most mistaken ideologies have a grain of truth to them that permits them to thrive, and this is no exception. Human beings are prone to having an ingroup-outgroup bias that can manifest itself in some pretty violent ways. Ethnic/racial conflict is one of the most ugly kinds, as documented by people like Chua. That is in fact why I am so wary of the World on Fire scenario. I think the country is currently in a state where it could openly deal with such issues in an open and peaceful manner, but I also think our good fortune is a rare thing that could slip from our grasp unexpectedly.

The Art of the Possible has a reading list, none of which I’ve read. One of them was The Power Elite and the State by G. William Domhoff, a leftist sociologist (or do I repeat myself)? He has a website meant as an accompaniment for another book called Who Rules America? that has almost book length material itself explaining his theories on who has power in the United States. The concept of a “power elite” comes from the earlier sociologist C. Wright Mills, but Domhoff defines it slightly differently as summarized in this picture: (more…)

Growing up I always thought of Russia as big. I’ve also usually viewed it through the lens of Bolshevism and the Cold War. I don’t know much about how it became a “horse empire” (can’t find the page I first read the term at, wish I could). I’ve often heard it’s expansion to the East compared to our Western frontier, though Texas and gold-rush California turned out mighty different from Russia past the Urals. I was reminded of that today as I finished volume 1 of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, where he says both Russia and America emerged from obscurity to grow more rapidly than any other country. Seeing as how Russia has existed for a long time and did not have anything like our Revolution/War of Independence that sounded odd to me. So is there a de Tocqueville of Tsarist Russia?

Also, Alexis says that Americans expanded in the teeth of nature and barbarians, while Russians did so against man and civilization. It was my impression that the eastern areas were relatively uncivilized, containing the distant relatives of our native americans as well as Cossacks, rather barbaric horse-backed nomads. Perhaps he was thinking of Russian expansion to the west, into Poland and the Baltic areas. Also, whatever ever happened to the Cossacks and a distinct ethnocultural group? They weren’t wiped out by disease or stuck in reservations like our natives. The Soviets really had it in for groups like the Ukranians or Chechens, but they’re still around and in the news. The Cossacks seem to have gone the way of the Ainu.

On a final note, it seems Alexis was dead wrong about the trend against centralism in America. Near the end he also says any states could easily secede if they merely wished to, and a year after his death he was proved wrong. He even thought the presence of slavery would make the South to afraid to be without the assistance of the North to prevent any slave uprising! Tying into my earlier point about the similarity between 19th century Russia and America, one parallel he declines to make is the endurance of serfdom in Russia.

I have put Tom Wolfe’s old New Journalism essay here. It generally comes with Radical Chic, which I find less interesting (perhaps because the topic has been done to death, given that more attention is paid to fashionable folks) and is also already available online.

In an Overcoming Bias post on Gary Taubes’ diet heresy Stuart Buck refers to a “politically incorrect result from a clinical trial in Minnesota (in which 269 mental patients assigned to a cholesterol-lowering diet died, compared to 206 in the control group)”. So is cholestorol-bad an axiom of political correctness? It doesn’t seem that political to me, but most people do believe that cholestorol is bad. Are you considered a bad person if you disagree? What is necessary for a belief to be politically incorrect? It might be offensive to some sort of designated victim group. Smokers seem to be a designated hate-deserving group, and not necessarily because they harm others through second-hand smoke, but simply because we (even Ilkka Kokkarinen) consider them disgusting. The intersection of P.C and religion is especially confusing because some of the most uninfluential, pathetic and disliked minority religions are also the most egregious violators of other P.C (especially with regard to gender or sexuality) tenets. The disjunction between the various axioms makes me believe that those Mencius Moldbug considers Stasi will not be reliable in enforcing orthodoxy on, say, global warming.

On a somewhat related note, Al Roth gets into a discussion of repugnance in this talk about market design.

UPDATE: Via Marginal Revolution, a ranking of academic disciplines by political correctness.

Via Volokh. I’ve been saying this kind of thing for a while.
UPDATE: Reason Magazine on the paper here.

UPDATE 2: Guess who’s responsible for turning the anti-Spencerian Oliver Wendell Holmes into a liberal icon? The Jews! Guess who’s responsible for exposing that? The Jews!

Sorry for my tardiness to responding to comments, I was away. Those hoping for more HTMW posts will be disappointed because though I finished it before leaving I have nothing more to say about it. I picked up Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and Judith Harris’ The Nurture Assumption though and I should get Tom Wolfe’s Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers tomorrow. These will likely be the topics of my upcoming posts, but as I haven’t been reading my regular sites for a while there could be some more important things to talk about that I just don’t know about yet. For now here’s a good footnote from Democracy in America:

“During the War of 1812, a striking example of the excesses to which the despotism of the majority may lead occurred in Baltimore. At that time the war was very popular there. One newspaper, which was strongly opposed, incurred the wrath of the city’s inhabitants. A crowd assembled, smashed the presses, and attacked the homes of journalists. An attempt was made to call in the militia, but the troops failed to answer the call. To save the lives of the unfortunate victims of the public’s fury, it was decided that they should be taken to prison like criminals, but this precaution proved vain: during the night another crowd gathered; because officials had been unsuccessful in summoning the militia, the prison was stormed; one of the journalists was killed, and the others were left for dead. The perpetrators were tried but acquitted by a jury.

One day I asked a Pennsylvanian to “explain to me, please, how in a state founded by Quakers and renowned for its tolerance, freed Negroes are not allowed to exercise the rights of citizens. They pay taxes. Is it not right that they should vote?” – “Do not insult us,” he replied, “by thinking that our legislators would commit an act of such gross injustice and intolerance.” – “So, Blacks have the right to vote in your state?” – “Certainly.” – “Then why is it that in the electoral college this morning I did not see a single one?” – “That is not the fault of the law,” the American told me. “Negroes have the right to go to the polls, but they voluntarily abstain.” – “How extraordinarily modest of them!” – “Oh! It isn’t that the refuse to vote, but they are afraid of being mistreated if they do. The law here has no teeth if the majority refuses to support it. But the majority harbors strong prejudices against the Negroes, and our officials do not feel strong enough to guarantee the rights that the legislature has bestowed on them.” “What! Do you mean to say that the majority, which enjoys the privilege of making the law, also insists on the privilege of disobeying it?””

On an unrelated note, someone at the Advanced Physics forum has responded to my question about the weak nuclear force with a better explanation than I have ever come across here.

This book is just chock-full of good parts to quote. The Distributed Republic linked to this blog earlier on the Prisoner’s Dilemma and war, and here’s another example.

“Decades before Tooby and Cosmides spelled out this logic, the pyschologist Anatol Rapoport illustrated it with a paradox from World War II. (He believed the secnario was true but was unable to very it.) At a bomber base in the Pacific, a flier had only a twenty-five percent chance of surviving his quota of missions. Someone calculated that if the fliers carried twice as many bombs, a mission could be carried out with half as many flights. But the only way to increase they payload was to reduce the fuel, which meant that the planes would have to fly on one-way missions. If the fliers would be willing to draw lots and take a one-in-two chance of flying off to a certain death instead of hanging on to their three-in-four chance of fling off to an unpredictable death, they would double their chance of survival: only half of them would die instead of three-quarters. Needless to say, it was never implemented. Few of us would accept such an offer, though it is completely fair and would save many lives, including, possibly, our own. The paradox is an intriguing demonstration that our mind is equipped to volunteer for a risk of death in a coalition but only if we do not know when death will come.” Pinker does not mention the Japanese kamikaze pilots of that same war.

As might be expected from his History of Violence stuff, Pinker is a believer in “moral progress” (discussed here and here at Overcoming Bias).

“And on the larger stage, history has seen terrible blights disappear permanently, sometimes only after years of bloodshed, sometimes as if in a puff of smoke. Slavery, harem-holding despots, colonial conquest, blood feuds, womean as property, institutionalized racism and anti-Semitism, child labor, apartheid, fascism, Stalinism, Leninism, and war have vanished from expanses of the world that had suffered them for decades, centuries or millennia. The homicide rates in the most vicious American urban jungles are twenty times lower than in many foraging societies. Modern Britons are twenty times less likely to be murdered than their medieval ancestors.

If the brain has not changed over the centuries, how can the human condition have improved? Part of the answer, I think is that literacy, knowledge, and the exchange of ideas have undermined some kinds of exploitation. It’s not that people have a well of goodness that moral exhortations can tap. It’s that information can be framed in a way that makes exploiters look like hypocrites or fools. One of our baser instincts – claiming authority on a pretext of beneficence and competence – can be cunningly turned on the others. When everyone sees graphic representations of suffering [note from TGGP: see Chris DeBona explain what he’s optimistic about at Edge], it is no longer possible to claim that no harm is being done. When a victim gives a first-person account in worders the victimizer might use, it’s harder to maintain that the victims are a lesser kind of being. When a speaker is shown to be echoing the words of his enemy or of a past speaker whose policies led to disaster, his authority can crumble. When peaceable neighbors are described, it’s harder to insist that war is inevitable. When Martin Luther King said, “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,'” he made it impossible for segregationists to maintain they were patriots without looking like charlatans.

And as I mentioned at the outset, though conflict is a human universal, so are the efforts to reduce it. The human mind occasionally catches a glimmering of the brute economic fact that often adversaries can both come out ahead by dividing up the surplus created by their laying down their arms. Even some of the Yanomamo see the futility of their ways and long for a means to break the cycle of bengeance. People throughout history have invented ingenious technologies that turn one part of the mind against aother and eke increments of civility from a human nature that was not selected for nicness: rhetoric, exposes, mediation, face-saving measures, contracts, deterrence, equal opportunity, mediation [yes, he did just repeat himself], courts, enforceable laws, monogamy, limits on economic inequality, abjuring vengeance, and many others. Utopian theoreticians ought to be humble in the face of this practical wisdom. It is likely to remian more effective than “cultural” proposals to make over childrearing, language, and the media, and “biological” proposals to scan the brains and genes of gang members for aggression markers and to hand out antiviolence pills in the ghettos.” Oddly enough, he noted earlier in the book that monogamy is a conspiracy of non-alpha males to decrease the supply of eligible husbands for women and thereby gain at their expense (as well as that of alpha-males).

Science says so.

That’s what Bryan Caplan asks Jeff Hummel, after the latter trashed the “crazy Rothbardian” take on the 100% reserve gold standard. I don’t know if said debunking is online, but I do think central banks throughout the first world have outperformed Milton Friedman‘s expectations perhaps because of Friedman himself. I do think it’s a good question to ask libertarians, and brings to mind James Q. Wilson’s book (which I reviewed here). Wilson has a high opinion of the Army Corps of Engineers (as well as the Forestry Service and for a long time the Social Security agnecy). Libertarian Steve Horwitz says the Coast Guard performed relatively well in the aftermath of Katrina here. I agree with some of Caplan’s commenters that the military is one of the few bureaucracies that actually faces competition that could eliminate it, but the U.S is such an overwhelming superpower and its military used for such pointless excursions I don’t know if I would select it. The Post Office now breaks even and competes to some limited extent with UPS, so it’s a candidate. Finally, if the comparison was not to a hypothetical privatized version but other existing states, I would say that our country does a quite good job of providing “rule of law“.

I retrieved my copy of Bruce Benson’s Enterprise of Law. I may quote some passages from it later on, but Pinker precedes it.

“Hotheads”, the chapter on game theory (though I forget if Pinker actually uses the phrase) in How the Mind Works is really good stuff. It reminds me a bit of this from Mike Munger. I’ve discussed related issues with regard to contractarianism, but I don’t think I’ve done so in depth anywhere I can link to. I’m not going to quote anything from it though, you’ll just have to read it yourself. Instead I’ll quote from “Family Values”.

“Another surprising consequence of kin solidarity is that the family is a subversive organization. That conclusion flies in the face of the right-wing view that the church and the state have always been steadfast upholders of the family and of the left-wing view that the family is a bourgeois, patriarchal institution designed to suppress women, weaken class solidarity, and manufacture docile consumers. The jounalist Ferdinand Mount has documented how ever political and religious movement in history has sought to undermine the family. The reasons are obvious. Not only is the family a rival coalition competing for a person’s loyalties, but it is a rival with an unfair advantage: relatives innately care for one another more than comrades do. They bestow nepotistic benefits, forgive the daily frictions that strain other organizations, and stop at nothing to avenge wrongs against a member. Leninism, Nazism, and other totalitarian ideologies always demand a new loyalty “higher” than, and contrary to, family ties. So have religions from early Christianity to the Moonies […]

Successful religions and states eventually realize they have to coexist with families, but they do what they can to contain them, particularly the most threatening ones. The anthropologist Nancy Thornhill has found that the incest laws of most cultures are not created to deal with the problem of borther-sister marriages; brothers and sisters don’t want to marry to begin with. Although brother-sister incest may be included in the prohibition and may help to legitimize it, the real targets of the laws are marriages that threaten the interests of the lawmakers. The rules ban marriages among more distant relatives like cousins, and are promulgated by the rulers of stratified societies to prevent wealth and poewr from accumulating in families, which could be future rivals. The anthropologist Laura Betzig has shown that the medieval church’s rules on sex and marriage were also weapons against familial dynasties. In feudal Europe, parents did not bequeath their estates in equal parts to all of their children. Plots of land could not be subdivided every generation or they would become uselessly small, and a title can fall on only one heir. The custome of primogeniture arose, in which everything went to the oldest son and the other sons hit the road to seek their fortunes, often joining armies or the church. The church filled up with disnherited younger sons, who then manipulated marriage rules to make it harder for owners and title-holders to bear legitimate heirs. If they died without sons, the properties and titles passed back to the disinherited brothers or the church they served. According to their laws, a man could not divorce a childless wife, remarry while she was alive, adopt an heir, bear an heir with a woman closer than a seventh cousin, or have sex on various special days that added up to more than half the year. The story of Henry VIII reminds us that much of European history revolves around battles between powerful individuals tyring to leverage family feelings for political gain – marrying strategically, striving for heirs – and other powerful individuals trying to foil them.”

Of course there is always the question of what is healthy tissue and what is cancerous growth. As families pre-exist religion and the state I say it is the latter that are subversive. Lawrence Auster thought I was crazy when I made that claim, and I would say “Who’s crazy now!? Goo goo gajoob!” except that he rejects Darwinism and so Pinker’s reasoning would fall on deaf ears.

Off-topic: Michael Moynihan often rubs me the wrong way (too friendly to AIPAC/neo-cons and more interested in being anti-left than anti-state), but this double review of Naomi Wolf and Jonah Goldberg’s books on fascism hits the spot.

The last one was here. This one is is response to this post by him.

Subject: Thomas Firey on GSEs

You say he “calls Fannie a “much needed lubricant to the mortgage market.”” Reading the link that quote appears in the past-tense, referring to its creation. He states that it was a suboptimal solution due to the bad regulations on finance on that time. He also advocates right now (he links to a piece in the WSJ) breaking up the GSEs into smaller entities that are not “too big to fail”. I would suggest that you edit your Lew Rockwell blog-post so as not to mislead anyone who doesn’t read that second link and thinks it is anything like the first (which is exactly how you made it out to be).

Check it out. Of all the people frequently accused of trolling, he’s the most worth reading. I’m glad Eliezer let him stay at O.B but I think the editing of his comments contributes little value.

A while back I asked him if he wanted to co-blog here, but he said he wasn’t interested in blogging. Now that his claim has been revealed as dastardly deceptive I retaliate by saying I don’t like the layout. So there!

“It is not only science that can suffer under the thumb of those in power. The anthropologist Donald Brown was puzzled to learn that over the millennia the Hindus of India produced virtually no histories, while the neighboring Chinese had produced libraries full. He suspected that the potentates of a hereditary caste society realized that no good could come from a scholar nosing around in records of the past where he might stumble upon evidence undermining their claims to have descended from heroes and gods. Brown looked at twenty-five civilizations and compared the ones organized by hereditary castes with the others. None of the caste societies had developed a tradition of writing accurate depictions of the past; instead of history they had myth and legend. The caste societies were also distinguished by an absence of political science, social science, natural science, biography, realistic portraiture, and uniform education.”

That’s another quote from Steven Pinker’s How the Mind Works. It reminds me that long ago I promised to write a post on why I am not in favor of caste. I’ll have to ask for another extension on that. However, after giving a Straussian analysis of Mencius Moldbug as Islam-proponent (read the comments for MM’s responses), how could I resist finding the similarities here as well? One of the oddest statements MM has made is that history has been corrupted by “social science” (which he hates) and is properly a branch of literature. He favors figures like Carlyle or Ruskin who held that history is the account of the acts of “great men”, which sounds a lot like myth and legend. He of course despises uniform education as brainwashing by the Cathedral (I can’t say I dissagree terribly there). He doesn’t much trust natural scientists either whether the subject is global warming, string theory (though he seems more sympathetic to Lubos Motl than Lee Smolin for global warming and political reasons) and is quite ready to concede that cold fusion has been suppressed by a conspiracy of scientists.

You might note that the quote contrasts China with India, and MM currently promotes the post-Deng system of the former and named himself after a follower of Confucius. Can a good Straussian take him at his word? He once defined leftism as the belief that we should be governed by scholars, perhaps assuming people would make the connection to Plato’s Philosopher King (he later defined it as favoring disorder, while he as a righty/”pronomian” favors the opposite). A much better connection could be made to the Mandarins of China. The term he uses for our intellectual class is “Brahmin”, which like his “Vaisyas” and “Dalits” he takes from India (Optimates are Roman and Helots served Spartans). This is a purposeful bit of misdirection. The Mandarin class of China was famously meritocratic, while in India one’s caste is determined at birth (there are even some well-off intellectual Dalits). MM notes that the Brahmins recruit the children of Optimates (who are fast disappearing) and Vaisyas sent to universities, and despite PC cant those universities are very meritocratic. Even the ethnic group most closely associated with that caste, the Jews, rose up to it after starting out as lower-class immigrants or shtetl dwellers. The Chinese are well known for their abhorrence of disorder, but what’s often forgotten by Westerners is that this is the result of their experiencing the awful consequences of it repeatedly. Mao and his cultural revolution are a recent example, but there have been waves of other intellectual movements that burned the books of the Four Olds (both the Maoists and the Legalists hated Confucianism). India remained firmly in the grip of the warrior caste, and despite being the birthplace of Buddhism it ignored that faddish religion for the Chinese to take up (some of them simultaneously believe in it as well as Taoism). The sub-continent is also the birthplace of Jainism (perhaps the ultimate progressive religion) and Sikhism, but its adherents are generally content to go into finance rather than trying to overturn society. A bonus from my perspective and possibly his is that India was never unified until the British arrived and conquered the various little kingdoms. (more…)

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