"Muslim" and "African" are not mutually exclusive! Top of that list is Niger and Wikipaedia says:
Islam, spread from North Africa beginning in the 10th century, has greatly shaped the mores of the people of Niger. Between 80 to more than 98% of the population is Muslim
Further down the (fertility) list: Guinea-Bissau: 35% muslim; Afganistan >99% muslim; Burundi 10%; Liberia 12%; Dem. Rep. of Congo 5%; East Timor 1%; Mali 90%; Sierra Leone 77%; Uganda 12%. If you want to group these countries, "African" (plus Afghanistan) seems to work pretty well. "Muslim", much less so.
That said, yes, contrasting "muslim" and African is nonsense; I edited my post to fix that.
Azerbaijan (98% Muslim) is 149th in that list, well below India both in ranking and actual births. A casual glance down the list shows a large proportion of Muslim countries with lower birth and fertility rates than India.
His statement is true in the same narrow sense as other nonsensical assertions like "No. Muslim countries have higher per capita incomes than the US" as a counterargument to suggestions the US might be doing rather well financially (without having as much oil per capita as Qatar and Bahrain). It's equally true to say "Christian countries have higher birth rate than India", but I'm guessing the original poster doesn't live in an environment where misleading negative stereotypes about Christians are commonplace.
Insinuating that Islam had anything to do with higher fertility rates is the sort of intellectually dishonest chauvinism and religious stereotyping that HN readers should be above. Couple that with a denial that a birthrate of >3 children per woman in an developing country of over a billion people might present a major challenge and you have a comment thoroughly deserving of downvotes.
The reasons for India's population growth are manifold. Your comments adds nothing of value, trivializes a complex problem, and contributed to continued misinformation about this topic.
According to my readings, two underappreciated reasons are:
1) unavailability of doctors/medical centers to do female sterilizations. Women literally riot in mobile sterilization camps if the camp closes before all of them are looked after. Men refuse to use condoms or get sterilized, but women do want to limit the number of children.
2) HUGE infant and child mortality among the poorer classes. If the probability of your child surviving to adulthood was low, you'd have three to five children too.
Neither of these are covered in your glib remark about porn. You should educate yourself more about your country.
You know it's fascinating how prudish a culture seems to be ties in to the levels and statistics of sexual abuse. In india words like sexual expression are a sin and a culture has emerged based on the obsession that sex is dirty. Which is centered around the glory of men and the purity of misogyny.
At the same time India by some statistics ( http://www.icrw.org/publications/international-men-and-gende... ) has the highests amounts of sexual abuse amongst it's peers like Brazil (which when compared to india is far more liberal and words like sex aren't dirty things that should be accompanied with rinsing your mouth to get rid of the impurity... ). It's just hard to believe that 25% of males surveyed have committed sexual violence compared to 2% in Brazil. This also jives with my observation that women aren't viewed as human beings over here by most people, but sex objects that are to be used for pleasure. It's just sick.
I wonder if there is more than just coincidence going on over here and if all of this feeds into one another...
Agree with you!! With all my lack of respect - what a loads of b%&^$£s. I have been following all this fuss about .xxx and I think - all this people are driven by we-have-to-do-something-with-it approach. :)
I think it must be more complex and subtle than that. Isn't India the home of the Kama Sutra? Like, if any country can claim to be the world experts on sex, it's India, they even beat the Dutch.
I think the issue is this: India has been historically openminded about sex, before the British rule. The current situation, i.e., a social taboo to even talk about sex are remnants of the British rule in India: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_sex_in_India#Colonia...
India was under British influence and control for 250 years. It seems a little strange that the Victorian Era which lasted for 70 years and the more conservation period only 50 years or so had such a strong influence on such a large and diverse country. Moreso because the Victorian era was preceded and succeeded by rather liberal periods in British society which were by Victorian standards, positively scandalous. Why did Indian society also undergo similar periods of liberalisation if British rule was so influential. Perhaps Indian society was already conservative and the Victorians simply re-inforced this.
The wikipedia articule seems to use revisionist language and lacks sufficient references so I would be interested if there any historians present with better information.
Kama Sutra is about 2000 years old in the current form, according to Wikipedia 2 CE. To put this in perspective, this predates the Muslim/Mongol invasions by about 1000 years, British invasion/colonization by 1700 years etc. Societies change.
Didn't you study history (or at least the Indian version)?
The Indians welcomed the muslims because although they were happy playing sittars and doing yoga they missed contact with the wider world and so welcomed the rich ethnic diversity of the mughul empire and then lived happily together in peace and love until the British deliberately caused religous strife in 1946 by forcing the muslims to move to Pakistan.
See also - how native american tribes lived in peace and harmony together and at one with nature until the British arrived.
... and .xxx becomes irrelevant. Really, if any .xxx website also needs a non-.xxx domain name, what's the point? (India won't be the last to block .xxx, I imagine.)
'Becomes' is an understatement. It seems to have been patently obvious to people who understand the Internet for many years that this wasn't going to achieve anything beyond the establishment of a new registry for people to sell domains in, yet a combination of the greedy and the ignorant meant it was always likely to actualy happen.
We all know that the sites selling adult content aren't likely to give up their existing .com domains. That sites containing user-submitted content that some would view as porn but which would themselves claim otherwise - RedBubble springs to mind - definitely aren't going to be interested in shifting to .xxx and that there will be a group campaigning for their own personal definition to be used in requiring people to move. And that sites containing, for example, material on sexual health or abortion are going to be pressured in some regions to shift to .xxx. The domain solves nothing well and creates so very many problems.
This whole issue was a very predictable problem from day one and I wish ICANN had had the courage to stand up for good sense and not grant the new TLD.
I'd be surprised if there were actually going to be porn sites on xxx, since it can be blocked so easily. Probably it's going to more about underground culture.
Most porn sites aren't worried about selling to people who don't want porn. Basically, if a person decides to ban .xxx, they probably wouldn't be customers anyways.
Am not really surprised that this happens in India. On the contrary, I was expecting this to happen quite sometime before. Never underestimate the stupidity of Indian bureaucracy (inherited and modeled from the Soviets, rivals even Vogonic bureaucracy), particularly when it comes to technical matters involving software and computers.
Why would ANYONE imagine that companies would willingly put themselves in a ghetto? They know that the reason to encourage use of the .xxx TLD is to facilitate content filtering. They know that when their sites are blocked that's potential revenue lost, and if companies in the "erotica-industry" are good at anything it's making sure they make money.
I would pitch it to the adult industry as follows:
If someone is surfing from behind a content filter, they are either a child without a credit card, or in an area where sex is so taboo they will not possibly whip out their credit card for a porn site. Let us filter out these useless bandwidth leeches for you.
> I would pitch it to the adult industry as follows:
Ah, so you're going to lie to them.
> Let us filter out these useless bandwidth leeches for you.
What are the odds that you'll do a better job (from their point of view) than they will?
More to the point, why should they believe that you're even trying to help their profits? When there's a choice between the nannies and their profits, which way will you go?
> in an area where sex is so taboo they will not possibly whip out their credit card for a porn site
Since such an area doesn't exist, we know the answer to the last question. (Seriously - I'll bet real money that there are folks in the Vatican paying for porn.)
There are folks in India who are paying for porn. Since India is one of the "bandwidth leeches" that you're protecting me from....
We already have a system for classifying pages as having age-sensitive content - ICRA. Let's use that rather than shoving everything under a non-specific .xxx domain.
You are just using words which non-native english speakers tend to think about when wanting to search for sex on the internet (which are sex and porn).
I am not saying that I have proved that the US/Canadians are waay more horny than people in other parts of the world. I am just pointing to why this kind of goog charts don't work while arguing.
This is part of the social contract you sign when you're born. (oh waitaminute I didn't sign it, I never agreed to it, that's beside the point). Because when you have a problem with the system, it's up to you to change it. OR, as statists say "If you don't like this country, then you're free to move". <tree of counterpoint ignoring basic questions about who owns a human body>. Good luck!
Viewing this together with recent American moves to seize DNS listings for sites that our government doesn't like, how quickly will alternatives to the standard DNS system be sprouting up?
They can sprout up all they want. Adoption, however, is another matter, and I'm fairly confident in predicting that they will never be adopted. Alternate roots have been tried multiple times, and they've never gotten any traction beyond nerds like you and me.
The seizures you speak of weren't a failure of the DNS, either. They were the failure of registrars caving to pressure. The delegation of the domains did not change, GoDaddy (one instance I can think of) simply took control of the zone. Amusingly, everybody turned around and blamed ICANN as if they have anything to do with it, further proving that there are scant few people who understand how critical systems of the Internet work.
45 comments
[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 109 ms ] threadLooking at both http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_de... and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_de..., India is not near the top. The top isn't characterized by being muslim, either. [EDIT: was "Neither are "muslim" states, though - with the exception of Afghanistan, the top "scorers" are all African."]
Islam, spread from North Africa beginning in the 10th century, has greatly shaped the mores of the people of Niger. Between 80 to more than 98% of the population is Muslim
So dimmuborgir was quite correct.
That said, yes, contrasting "muslim" and African is nonsense; I edited my post to fix that.
His statement is true in the same narrow sense as other nonsensical assertions like "No. Muslim countries have higher per capita incomes than the US" as a counterargument to suggestions the US might be doing rather well financially (without having as much oil per capita as Qatar and Bahrain). It's equally true to say "Christian countries have higher birth rate than India", but I'm guessing the original poster doesn't live in an environment where misleading negative stereotypes about Christians are commonplace.
Insinuating that Islam had anything to do with higher fertility rates is the sort of intellectually dishonest chauvinism and religious stereotyping that HN readers should be above. Couple that with a denial that a birthrate of >3 children per woman in an developing country of over a billion people might present a major challenge and you have a comment thoroughly deserving of downvotes.
According to my readings, two underappreciated reasons are:
1) unavailability of doctors/medical centers to do female sterilizations. Women literally riot in mobile sterilization camps if the camp closes before all of them are looked after. Men refuse to use condoms or get sterilized, but women do want to limit the number of children.
2) HUGE infant and child mortality among the poorer classes. If the probability of your child surviving to adulthood was low, you'd have three to five children too.
Neither of these are covered in your glib remark about porn. You should educate yourself more about your country.
At the same time India by some statistics ( http://www.icrw.org/publications/international-men-and-gende... ) has the highests amounts of sexual abuse amongst it's peers like Brazil (which when compared to india is far more liberal and words like sex aren't dirty things that should be accompanied with rinsing your mouth to get rid of the impurity... ). It's just hard to believe that 25% of males surveyed have committed sexual violence compared to 2% in Brazil. This also jives with my observation that women aren't viewed as human beings over here by most people, but sex objects that are to be used for pleasure. It's just sick.
I wonder if there is more than just coincidence going on over here and if all of this feeds into one another...
The wikipedia articule seems to use revisionist language and lacks sufficient references so I would be interested if there any historians present with better information.
The Indians welcomed the muslims because although they were happy playing sittars and doing yoga they missed contact with the wider world and so welcomed the rich ethnic diversity of the mughul empire and then lived happily together in peace and love until the British deliberately caused religous strife in 1946 by forcing the muslims to move to Pakistan.
See also - how native american tribes lived in peace and harmony together and at one with nature until the British arrived.
We all know that the sites selling adult content aren't likely to give up their existing .com domains. That sites containing user-submitted content that some would view as porn but which would themselves claim otherwise - RedBubble springs to mind - definitely aren't going to be interested in shifting to .xxx and that there will be a group campaigning for their own personal definition to be used in requiring people to move. And that sites containing, for example, material on sexual health or abortion are going to be pressured in some regions to shift to .xxx. The domain solves nothing well and creates so very many problems.
This whole issue was a very predictable problem from day one and I wish ICANN had had the courage to stand up for good sense and not grant the new TLD.
On another note, http://toroid.org/ams/etc/dot-india-crypto-nonsense ; on how competent the policymakers are.
Ah, so you're going to lie to them.
> Let us filter out these useless bandwidth leeches for you.
What are the odds that you'll do a better job (from their point of view) than they will?
More to the point, why should they believe that you're even trying to help their profits? When there's a choice between the nannies and their profits, which way will you go?
> in an area where sex is so taboo they will not possibly whip out their credit card for a porn site
Since such an area doesn't exist, we know the answer to the last question. (Seriously - I'll bet real money that there are folks in the Vatican paying for porn.)
There are folks in India who are paying for porn. Since India is one of the "bandwidth leeches" that you're protecting me from....
Try sex, blowjob http://www.google.com/trends?q=sex%2Cblowjob&ctab=0&...
I am not saying that I have proved that the US/Canadians are waay more horny than people in other parts of the world. I am just pointing to why this kind of goog charts don't work while arguing.
And that's just a normal part of the way the world works.
The seizures you speak of weren't a failure of the DNS, either. They were the failure of registrars caving to pressure. The delegation of the domains did not change, GoDaddy (one instance I can think of) simply took control of the zone. Amusingly, everybody turned around and blamed ICANN as if they have anything to do with it, further proving that there are scant few people who understand how critical systems of the Internet work.