A Serious Question

I think some people in general and many Indian people are against using deodarant.  With the Indian people, it might be based on their religion, I’ve wondered about this too, but never researched it.  In a way it makes sense in that it’s putting something artificial and in some cases harmful on your body to cover up natural scents, however offensive they can be.

Isn’t it to do with mutations in human DNA?

I’ve been reading a book on human evolution lately ("Out Of Eden", Stephen Oppenheimer) and it seems that Europeans have been separated from Indians/Asians for at least around 50,000 years. In that time, the DNA that controls sweat/skin scent could easily have changed in both populations. Or it might just be with our noses - that we can detect their natural skin scent, I guess they can smell a European just as we can them. It’s the same with Papuans (from Papua New Guinea), I lived there for 10 years and the skin scent is very distinctive. I guess it’s the same with any two populations that have been separated for tens of thousands of years. The separation from Europeans and Papuans is around 80,000 years.

AFAIK, the book doesn’t discuss this topic; I’m about half-way through. All the above is my own thinking.

It’s not just Indians that smell, every culture has its own unique smell - even Whites do have a distinct smell. As a Black person, I notice that even other Blacks have a distinct smell. It may have to do with genetics and/or the food we eat. Other cultures may not tend to place such a strong emphasis on bad body odour as much as we North Americans do and therefore do not feel the need to shower or bathe 2 or 3 times a day. Remember running tap water is a luxury for many places in the world - even Europe. Eventually after time, people who immigrate here tend to pick up  on subtle stuff like that and adjust.

Your first post was semi-reasonable; now you’re just acting like a child.

> if we used all the good stuff like you Americans, and were
> as nice smelling as you, then you would find less reasons
> to spit on us.

I haven’t "spit on" anyone, and I don’t even know anyone who "spits on" Indians.  I didn’t stereotype Indians; I merely stated an observation which you and others have now verified.  So don’t stereotype me nor other Americans.

> God does not like smelly people - especially those that
> do not use deodarants which do not boost the profits of
> American companies.

Grow up.  Aside from being asinine altogether, your comment implies that America is the only country that uses/produces deodorant, when in fact most of the world uses it, and many other countries produce it.

> Nuke’em.

First of all, this is completely OT.  But anyway...

America-haters love to paint America this way.  Unfortunately for the haters, they are either liars, or too freaking stupid to realize the truth of the situation.  The fact is that America exercises restraint, though we could instantly take out any country we want to.  But we don’t want to, because we are actually civilized.  It would have been much simpler, less expensive (in both blood and treasure), and quicker to say "nuke ’em" to the whole middle-east after September 11th, but we didn’t.  And we never will, either, unless Al-Qaeda or another terrorist group acquires a nuke and vaporizes one of our cities first.

The restraint that you speak of  is imposed by the defence industry in particular and other business interests in general. Supposing you nuked all the other countries in the world, the American arms industry would go bust. Who would they sell arms to afterwards ? And who would the other businessess export stuff to ? This is a fallacious argument. Besides America is not the only one who can nuke everybody else.
Also, who would American troops torture and take naked pictures of ? No fun in doing it to your own. Or maybe there is.
First of all, there is no need for America to amass all the weapons they possess. There is no immediate threat that warrants the huge arms industry.  The arms only encourage war-mongering leaders to flaunt their egos in the name of democracy, freedom etc., because they possess overwhelming military strength. And you want the whole world to love you because you have this overwhelming military might, which you can unleash on them at will, but keep yourself "restrained" as long as they tow your line.  Wake-up and smell the air. Nobody loves a  nation which says "I can kill you if you don’t fall in line, but I wont as long as you do what I say". They’ll do what you say, but hate you. This is exactly what has been happening and you hardly want to acknowledge that.

That is not one example. The My Lai massacres in Vietnam in the 60’s is well documented by hundreds of authors. Infact Hersh was even awarded a  Pulitzer for covering the My Lai  massacres.  Nixon, Kissinger tried to cover it all up because the pictures were dreadful
Read about it here :
http://www.fortwayne.com/mld/journalgazette/news/nation/8773349.htm
and here
http://www.kentucky.com/mld/kentucky/news/8770265.htm
http://www.dailynews.com/Stories/0,1413,200~20954~2174298,00.html
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/05/27/1085641649378.html
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/world/8771809.htm?1c

Recently released docs show how a drunk, war-mongering democratically elected leader slaughtered innocent defenceless people before you were even born. The same state of affairs has continued to-date. It is not new. It is a great American tradition people like you are proud of. Jesus is gonna love you for that. Hallelujah ! Glory to thee. Especially turning the other cheek.
As for immediate threats, Bush went to war saying that he will find weapons that demonstrate the threat. The great military has found none after scrounging for a year. Frustrated, they tortured and massacred innocent people.  They represent the 300 million Americans because, it is they who authorized them to be there in the first place. You cannot escape responsibility by saying "only a handful". Has happened in the past, has always been happening and will continue.  And you wonder why the whole world hates you.  Does not matter whether you care or not. There are other Americans who are bleeding their hearts - the leftists - who care. And have a heart. It is for them that everybody else cares.
Sept 11th took place after months and years of planning. They are not on the scale of ICBMs which will kill hundreds and thousands of people in a stroke. Sept 11 killed less than 5000. Whereas the nukes on Japan killed hundreds of thousands. The American people have this on their soul. The executive duly elected by them, which is representative of them has massacred millions around the world for a long time. You might not care, but the fact exists.
You took action against Saddam because powerful business interests want a chunk of the wealth. They want new markets which will dance to their tune. Remember you and your allies were the ones to first sell arms to Saddam in the first place. If it really mattered to you that he was a bad guy, you would never have consorted with him.  He is a bad guy now because you want the oil. You wanna pay 10c less at the pump. How ? Dubya and his company have a plan. Find some excuse to grab some oil. To hell with WMDs.

I have a partner who is Indian.  The smell comes from two factors - the food they eat.  If I eat at my friends house every day from a while, I will smell just like them.  This is the primary factor.

The secondary factor is the frequency of washing clothes.  Most Indians wear their clothes more than once, and so do I as a matter of fact.  This will amplify any natural smells.

The comments about DNA are bunk.  The DNA for all people groups is 99.9999% the same, and the differences are a result of the subtraction of genetic information from some isolated people groups.  There is no known mechanism for adding new genetic material (information) to DNA.  Besides, the continent of India is not that isolated and does not meet the criteria for an isolated people group in which DNA modifications could develop and survive introduction to the larger group.

If you are out there thinking "mutations add the information", please document and demonstrate how this will work, and you’ll win a Nobel prize.

Den Beste said some pertinent (and naturally more well-spoken) things a couple weeks ago:

(A Den Beste reader:)
> how come US is so convinced about this war when the rest of the world
> disagree?  Shouldn’t that make you wonder?

Yes, it sometimes makes me wonder, but not about what you think it should.

It makes me wonder when "the rest of the world" totally lost its moral compass.  Or if it ever really had one.

"The world" is not unanimous in opposition to the war.  The claim that "the rest of the world disagrees" is a lie.

But even if it were true, it would not matter.  We Americans have a saying: "It’s more important what you stand for than who you stand with."  I do not rely upon peer opinion to decide what is right and what is wrong.  I make those decisions for myself, and even if I discover that every other human alive chose differently, that doesn’t mean I was wrong.

You have repackaged "Ask yourself why they hate you" with your rhetorical question.  That was always a stupid question, because the unspoken text of it was, "If ’they’ hate you, doesn’t it mean you should hate yourself?"

No, it does not.

If the rest of the world disagrees with the US on this war, shouldn’t that make me wonder about whether we are right to go to war?

No, it should not.

I do not consider that kind of thinking to be "nuanced" or "sophisticated".  I consider it to be a demonstration of decadence and moral decay.  I am not a simple man or a simple thinker, but there are some kinds of situations where the answer is simple, and in such cases if someone still tries to find a more complex nuanced answer it shows that he has no backbone.

There comes a time in every man’s life when he has to choose sides.  I have chosen my side.  I am comfortable with my decision.  I do not think everyone on my side is a saint, but I know that those on the other side are much, much worse.

Sometimes a man with too broad a perspective reveals himself as having no real perspective at all.  A man who tries too hard to see every side may be a man who is trying to avoid choosing any side.  A man who tries too hard to seek a deeper truth may be trying to hide from the truth he already knows.

That is not a sign of intellectual sophistication and "great thinking".  It is a demonstration of moral degeneracy and cowardice.

If you truly think that America is no better than the terrorists, then go watch the video of Nicholas Berg’s brutal murder.  After you’ve listened to his horrible screams as he died, and after you’ve watched his killers wave his bloody head in front of the camera, get back to me and explain to me why I and my nation are responsible for Berg’s death, and why the man who wielded the knife is not.

And Catfish responded to that with a good explanation of the fact that America is not Europe, and is fundamentally not even similar to Europe:

You see, Europeans fear and detest American patriotism because they fundamentally believe that America is just like Europe.

Now wait a second. I know that sounds paradoxical; Europeans and Americans currently make a habit of pointing out how different the two continents are.  But they also believe in a uniting principle.

Den Beste doesn’t worry about the United States’ ability to have a self-consistent and non-self-defeating strategy.  Andreas the Swede does not have that same confidence in his country.  And, in general, European nations do not have that confidence.  Why? In a word, history.  More generally, the combination of decolonization and imperial downfall, the disaster of World War II, and the imposition of external powers on Europe throughout the Cold War, taught the European peoples that they were incapable of designing a successful national ideology or policy in isolation.

This proposition is true only to varying degrees in each European country.  It is the least true in Great Britain and France, where empire lingered longest and independent action lasted longest.  It is the most true in small powers such as Belgium and weak powers such as Spain, where national weakness have lasted for decades or centuries.  But it is a general sense shared across Europe, and it is one of the main drivers of the European integration project.

Europeans believe that by uniting in the European Union, a successful common defense and security policy can be born without recourse to a national ideology or policy.  An international policy would, in the minds of Europeans, avoid the pitfalls of nationalism and racial superiority, and the associated fascism and imperialism.

Europeans (and associated activists in America controlled by European memes, a population Den Beste identifies as p-idealists) see in America their own past: patriotism, superiority, and Machiavellian or Clausewitzian imperialism.  They fundamentally believe that we are taking the same path that their nations took last century, and it will result in a national catastrophe at home and disastrous interventions abroad.

Europeans believee that we are fundamentally no different from their own nations.  The only difference, they believe, is that we are a century or so behind them in our social development.  Eventually, they believe, we will accept their philosophy (possibly because we experience the same tragedies they have), and we will act and think just like they do now.

The fallacy, of course, is that America really is different from a European nation.  We are empiricists and a nation of immigrants; our nation is bound together by ideology and not any form of geographic, cultural, or genetic affiliation, and it has always been so.

But Europeans don’t see that.  They assume that America’s culture and system of government has the same flaws that theirs has, and that their solution (the triumph of internationalism over nationalism) applies to us just as much as it does to them.

Den Beste:
’the unspoken text of it was, "If ’they’ hate you, doesn’t it mean you should hate yourself?"  No, it does not.’

No, it doesn’t, if you believe that your country is capable of judging its own self-interest better than the rest of the world.  Europeans don’t believe that about themselves (and can you blame them?).  They also don’t believe it about us, and the solution that they have devised to replace nationalism requires that they loudly inform us of their belief at every possible opportunity.

it’s because of what they eat
greek people smell like garlic because they cook with it so much it comes out of their pores.  i think its garlic...one of those spices

secondly i have heard that aluminum anti-perisperant causes alzheimers...or maybe it just increases your chance of getting it if you are pre-disposed to alzheimers...like if it runs in your family.
i hope its not true because deodorant only works when it has aluminum

thank you anthony.
thank you for explaining the truth