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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 12, 2024

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I'm pretty sure the US is less racially-culturally segregated than Malaysia.

Perhaps not? Malaysia certainly isn't great, and Singapore uses forced integration as a cheat code, but I've never felt under active threat and treated like a foreigner in Indian plantation worker encampments or in Malay kampungs the way I was treated when I crashed at my friends place in Prospect Park (the precursor to the aforementioned loot goblin episode). I honestly think the difference between Black (ghetto) and Latino America is greater than the difference between Malay and Chinese Malaysia, much less Black vs White America. I've lived in both, and the cultural contrast/conflict between ghetto america vs gentrified condos is extreme, much less suburbia. When malays reach class escape velocity and become middle or upper class, they upgrade the trappings of their existing culture and maintain existing cultural practices. Blacks who reach class escape velocity either turn full white (Obama Harris) or live white while acting black (rap and sport stars). There is no maintenance of the actual good practices of hood life: community time sharing for elder or childcare, church attendance, I'm struggling here so I'm tapping out.

I could just be especially negative towards 'the black experience', since I am not actually black and my black friends were codeswitchers who had intact middle class families and spoke ebonics just to get entry into Orange street clubs.

What’s the intermarriage rate between Chinese and Malays? Most people with a large social circle in diverse middle class parts of the US will know or have known at least a few black-white couples. I’m in KL on occasion and I’ve never seen a Chinese-Malay couple.

Honestly you might have seen plenty of Chinese women who were married to Malay men, but they dress identically to upper class Malay women (HEAVY makeup, overly embroidered tudungs, and double layered flowy full body dressses that swish aggressively to show off the expensive underlayer or shoes) and thus are indistinguishable. Similarly, upper class Malay men can look extremely Chinese, so the racial differences may not be so obvious if they are dressed the same. Malay and Chinese men can look very similar, especially when heavily weathered by the sun. For air conditioned professionals, grooming can make all the difference. Remove Hishamuddins pornstache, put him in a suit and he will look like any number of Chinese contractors.

Specific to marriage rates, Chinese women marry out at far higher rates than Chinese men, but usually to White or Indian men. Chinese women rarely marry malay men due to extreme familial resistance stemming from the religious intransigence of Islam, and for the most part girls who marry malays become fully acculturated, hence my above on the presentation.

Off the top of my head I would say the ratio of Chinese women marriages in Malaysia is 85% chinese, 7% white, 6% indian and 2% others (black, malay, hispanic). Among PMC it would be 60% chinese, 25% white, 10% indian and 5% others. This factors in the overseas education rate of Chinese PMC, where it is almost guaranteed they will marry a foreigner.

Indian and malay with have lower outmarriage rates because of lower baseline attractiveness relative to chinese women. Pale skin and low bodyfat% is still valued, and unfortunately indian and malay girls simply don't have the same genetics or cultural influences incentivizing outmarriage optimisations. Indian and Malay families refuse to let Their women be despoiled by outsiders, but Chinese either devalue daughters (more a historical than current practice) or the Chinese PMC is cucked by western liberal values into pretending all races are equal and perpetuate the kayfabe. The last point is more a westernised Asian phenomenon but such liberal pieties have found traction in the PMC here.

Interesting. I have to say though, there is categorically no way that even close to 25% of Chinese PMC women in Malaysia marry white men. White people aren’t uncommon in KL but there aren’t that many of them outside of that one backpacker / gap year party street with all the outdoor bars and stalls (and I presume those aren’t the whites marrying wealthy Chinese women), and most are either tourists, expats with expat wives/husbands, or business travellers. As regards Malays and Chinese, I’d say when dining at high end restaurants that are not specifically Malay-unfriendly (say the Nobu in the Four Seasons, which is probably my favorite decent restaurant in KL for consistency and service) every Malay I’ve ever seen there with family (ie not entertaining more diverse clients, colleagues etc) was with a wholly Malay family. All my Malaysian colleagues and clients, even though they work in companies that are ethnically diverse enough in terms of Malays, Chinese, Indians and sometimes whites being represented, are themselves in mono ethnic relationships and in their own ghettoized communities.

One thing I find amusing in KL is that even the high end shopping malls are completely segregated. There’s the Malay / Muslim one, by the base of the twin towers near the Four Season and Mandarin Oriental, featuring all halal restaurants and the Din Tai Fung where every dish replaces pork with chicken, and there’s the Chinese one whose exact location I forget, where every restaurant serves pork and one would be hard pressed to eat a full meal at Din Tai Fung that did not contain pig in some form. The stores themselves are the same, only the clientele differs.

Oh I don't mean just the chinese women still in KL. Shitloads of them have escaped to Australia, UK and US, with larger numbers here in Singapore. Of my familial circles about 30% of them have married white men, and among my peers about 20% married white. There is an overwhelming bias towards overseas education in my particular social circle, so that in hindsight skews the balance. I could be overestimating based on the number of my female peers from university and work who married white and are especially irritating on social media, with an equally irritating coterie of sycophants desperately declaring their preference for a white boyfriend ("I don't see race!"), but I see plenty of my peers who studied local (NUS) and managed to lure white men to this tropical hellscape (in terms of weather). I don't claim that KL is aberrantly monoethnic in its marriage composition, but you can see much higher multiracial marriages in Singapore and Hong Kong where you would have a higher population of white single men, compared with reluctant assignees posted to KL. White women normally are followers of their husbands, with endless bitching from single white girls that the white guys are all stolen by locals.

As for the segregation in Malaysia, yea theres a shitload going on that is both obvious and hilarious. KLCC is one of the only successful malay-focused malls, and its only successful because it is the catchment for all the KLCC malays. KLCC food actually sucks balls, and the chinese malls in the area like Pavillion blow it out of the water in terms of store quality and restaurant quality. Major malay malls are the Mara chain, which have been hilarious failures due to government enforced monopsonies crippling all the vendors, and the Chinese malls like Low Yat and Midvalley have easily double or triple the foot traffic of the Mara malls or shitholes like the Times Square Berjaya. The particular flavors of Malaysian corruption as evinced in the racial mall wars are really fucking funny to delve deep into, but are tangential to this point about outmarriage rates.

Tldr you don't see the chinese girls shacking up with white men in KL because those girls play the white passport card asap. I see them more in Singapore and HK because Singapore and HK are not necessarily worse than white countries for life outcomes, hence the delaying or even refusal to play the white passport card, and this observation is even without statistically breaking down my own social groupings.