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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   33970 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 9, 2024

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I am still waiting for this to get common enough that we get a TV shows about the reverse Fresh Prince, where a promising young rich kid is sent to live with his ghetto (or hillbilly) auntie for a chance to get into a better college.

I imagine the plot would be sort of a twist on the oft-forgotten Jamie Kennedy vehicle Malibu’s Most Wanted.

Taiwanese immigrant tiger mom sends her striver son to live in Compton in order to up his street cred. Unfortunately, her perceptions of America being thirty years out of date and skewed by pop culture, she doesn’t realize that Compton was gentrified by Latino immigrants more than a decade ago and isn’t even a particularly unsafe area anymore. However, her son desperately needs to maintain appearances so his mother doesn’t realize her money (she’s paying his rent, which is no longer dirt-cheap in Compton) is being wasted. So, he hires some of his black actor friends to pretend to be hardcore gangsters every time his mom comes to check on him.

However, when a real gang confrontation does break out (instigated by a very real and very scary Latino gang) he and his fake gangster buddies have to put their money where their mouths are, with the protagonist displaying surprising aplomb and bravado. This is witnessed by a Harvard admissions officer, who offers full-ride scholarships to him and to his “gang”. (None of whom, mirroring real life, are actual poor urban blacks, but who will happily count toward Harvard’s black quota)

Great premise. Not too different from current asian meta of 'personality hacking' instead of achievement grinding. Asians are unpopular so use a Nigerian immigrant pretending to be ghetto in order to get the best success at hollywood scripts.

this is very good.

This sounds hilarious, but also raises a genuine question. Why aren't the tiger moms already doing this? It seems like a lot of striving asian families are still doing things the old-fashioned way, sending their kids off for piano and violin classes. They seem smart enough to realize that the system is rigged against them (hence the lawsuit), but not smart enough to work the system and send their kids to the ghetto.

My guess would be that they fear the damage done by a ghetto school would outweigh the benefits.

well, you could find some other way to work the system. Start a "service club" where you do volunteer work in the ghetto, rather than practicing violin. Something like that. The volunteer work could be anything, it doesn't even have to be real.

Asian Americans (Indian and sinics) end up crowding the meta. Relatively safe New Jersey shitholes got rapidly gentrified and flooded with Asians to pull test scores up too fast. Its like a tragedy of the commons, too many smart hardworking kids in a shithole make them stand out less.

I'm reminded of that joke on reddit of the guy who lets off a few shots every now and then to keep property prices low. The actual meta for Asians should be to loudly complain that their kids sre getting bullied and becoming stupider at some low achieving district in order to dissuade overachievers from crowding out their kid. If the current meta favors 'best in class', then cripple the class at the outset.

But a lot of them are still doing the same old grindfest. "good grades, good test scores especially in math. No extracurriculars except violin, piano, and helping in the family business." It really causes a lot of them to punch below their weight.

I'd watch that show.

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