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PaperclipPerfector  11d ago (text post)   32545 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025

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All this person is describing is remaining forever a child. It's actually kind of amazing. He blames that on being neurodivergent? I can't really assess whether that's a valid defense of his willful ignorance or not.

Even in his own post, he repeatedly points out all the places he recoiled from any exposure to base reality.

Men don’t compete against women, so a casual watching of a nearby TV during a conversation doesn’t give any observations. To notice a difference I would have to look for the reported numbers somewhere on the screen, write them down, and compare them across the events.

I mean, on the one hand, I can't recall the last time I actually watched the Olympics either. On the other hand, you are rarely comparing similar numbers here either. If it's some track event, all the men's times will be clustered, and then all the women's times will be clustered say, 30% slower. You aren't comparing decimal places here. Even casual observers should notice.

I opted out of gym as much as possible, it was humiliating and vulgar. The only post-puberty phys ed class I was forced to take was sex segregated so I wouldn't have had any opportunity to see differences. In earlier gym classes I didn’t look around much. Why would I? Are people comparing themselves to see how many jumping jacks they can do? I just wanted it to be done with.

I mean, did his school never do the Presidential fitness tests? He never noticed how different the standards were for even barely pubescent boys and girls?

Nothing about this entrenched ignorance seems accidental. Some seed was planted that caused him to recoil from any confounding evidence. And it's like after he got through childhood carefully selecting the reality he was exposed to so as to not challenge his pre existing views that were passed onto him, he just never gave it another thought ever again. Nor spent any time being physical with women, as even relatively sedentary man strength is often greater than female gym bunny strength.

Judo class in college was quite awkward. The men were all bigger than me and surprised by my strength, while the women were feathers and twigs and it felt like doing the moves right might break them. Also judo-pinning women feels rapy and uncomfortable.

Aikido might be a BS martial art, but the women there were athletic lesbians with some sturdiness, and there was no need to throw anyone to the ground and lay on top of them.

Nothing about this entrenched ignorance seems accidental. Some seed was planted that caused him to recoil from any confounding evidence.

It baffles me too. It’s like a chronic aversion to even entry-level Noticing.

Nor spent any time being physical with women, as even relatively sedentary man strength is often greater than female gym bunny strength.

Funnily enough, theoretically there’s a redpill belief that can help non-virgin men maintain the bluepill illusion that men and women are equally physically capable.

If you have the redpill understanding that women are usually only attracted to men who can easily physicially dominate them, then you can chalk up you-being-stronger-than-every-chick-you’ve-banged as mere selection bias, and thus retain the null hypothesis that women in general are just as strong as men.

In practice, though, I imagine this happens a Lizardman’s Constant amount.

All this person is describing is remaining forever a child. It's actually kind of amazing. He blames that on being neurodivergent? I can't really assess whether that's a valid defense of his willful ignorance or not.

It's probably an extreme way to describe it, but "remaining forever a child" seems to describe pretty accurately the kind of behavior that's encouraged in the type of nerdy/blue tribe/white collar culture this person likely grew up in. There's a reason why the term "adulting" was invented (or at least popularized) by and for people in such a culture, after all. A major part of the culture is trusting authority figures as experts who are able to guide you to the truth in a way that's superior and counterintuitive to the rubes who use their intuition and personal anecdotes to jump to conclusions. This, of course, makes sense as a child; you aren't yet equipped with the maturity with which to make judgment calls on most important things, and that's why most important decisions about your life are made by adults who theoretically have your best interests in mind. But children don't become mature adults with good judgment merely through time; it requires practice and training, which are highly constrained in these environments.

So when they're taught about the inaccuracies of stereotypes as a child and how all of society was sexist and misogynistic against women for entirely arbitrary reasons because men and women are same in every way that matters, many of them believe it and many of them refuse to believe their lying eyes. After all, their own judgment is inherently suspect for having been raised in this oppressive patriarchy which has forever sullied it with bias that they will never escape from even if they dedicate their entire lives to doing so, which is nonetheless the duty of any human being who wants to be a Decent Person.

Now, someone still holding onto this belief by the age of 38... this means that this person grew up in the 90s-00s at the latest, during which time this stuff wasn't nearly as extreme as it was in the 00s-10s, so this person is an extreme case. I'd wager the neurodivergence played a significant factor. I grew up in the 90s-00s in some of the more extreme areas of the country where this culture was dominant, and most people understood that there were significant sex differences in athletic ability (though it was nowhere near universal, especially among younger people!), so either this person was raised in one of the few even more extreme areas, or was particularly extreme in his way of thinking or both.

Edit: As an anecdote, one of my major hobbies is ultimate Frisbee, which is one of the bluest of blue sports due in large part to how it's primarily introduced to people in college. Right now in our local leagues, it's just taken for granted that transwomen should compete with women in single-gender leagues and as women when they want to in mixed-gender leagues (teams of 7 with either 4m-3f or 3m-4f at a time, usually). (We also don't use terms like male or female because that's offensive, but rather Defender of Men and Defender of Women and Defender of Choice for transwomen who want to choose depending on the point - the fact that this means we call men DOMs has been a source of amusement). Playing pickup, I've heard people seriously argue that a particularly good female player there, who outplays most of the males in pickup, could make it to the local elite-level men's team (has won the national championship recently and has gotten to the top 8 regularly) if she chose to try out.

I'm not sure how similar frisbee is to disc golf, but men have a massive competitive advantage in the latter: https://quillette.com/2022/09/28/is-this-the-lia-thomas-of-disc-golf/

Ultimate is a team field sport with a lot of running and jumping, so I'd guess the male advantage in ultimate is even more pronounced. In mixed leagues, person-to-person defense is almost 100% on a same-sex basis, with very few exceptions when there's a woman who's particularly tall and/or athletic (this never happens in the top levels of the sport, but at the levels that I play, it's been known to happen).

I imagine the sex differences in disc golf have primarily to do with distance in throwing, which is very easily observed in ultimate as well. Each point begins with a "pull," which is like a kickoff in American football, where one player on the defensive team throws the disc from behind their own end zone line (running start allowed, but disc must be released before they cross the line). At even medium levels, men regularly throw the full 70 yards of the field, and at top levels, they regularly throw the full 90 yards that includes the 20 yard end zone. At the top levels, it's the rare woman who's able to cover the full 70 yards of the field. This difference is present and quite noticeable in long throws during the point as well, where, at the top levels, men's games tend to be more huck-heavy, since they can score with one throw from anywhere on the field, while women's games tend to be more based around shorter throws. This isn't universal, though.

Also his argument is silly. You can look at women top tier athletes. You can look at top tier male athletes. They don’t look the same. The men look bigger and stronger.

In all fairness, there's a very long history of underdog sports and fighting stories where it's also presumed that tiny, willowy men can totally beat the brawny jocks through sheer pluck or clever moves or ancient Asian secrets, or whatever. Likewise films and books where humans defeat obviously larger and stronger animals in physical fights.

Cope-oriented David-vs-Goliath media tropes were being served up to insecure men long before they got cross-applied to women.

I guess — never found those stories reasonable but then again I played sports.

Main characters in media and games are depicted as unrealistically powerful across virtually all material domains, including physical contests and bodily feats of skill but also depictions of physical handicrafts, animal interactions, vehicles and projectiles, etc. That's because almost nobody in the audience has any actual experience making, building or doing anything with their bodies in the real world, so they have zero gauge of what's plausible and no reason to care.

So yeah, a woman can't beat a guy at arm-wrestling, and also mining doesn't mean swinging a weightless pickaxe until big nuggets of gold drop out of the rock face, and also IRL that pudgy gamer could barely even lift that longsword, and also a roadrunner mostly can't outsmart a coyote. But audiences like cartoon logic because it's nice to imagine that we are powerful and other people's skills are easy.

David used a ranged weapon.

In that specific story, yes, but the emotional thrust of the trope is that a little guy can beat a much larger opponent through his superior bravery, skill or virtue. And underdog physical conflict stories are all over 60s-90s boys' media, from Tom & Jerry through The Karate Kid. TvTropes helpfully points out that this is the convention for final boss levels in videogames, as well.

So Muscles are Meaningless is not one-sided in its gender appeal.

But isn’t the trope accepting that the smaller guy can’t physically compete so he has to figure out another way (eg out smart his opponent)?

Even so, who said pure brute strength is the only legitimate way to fight? If you win, you win. Even outside complete changes of frame or dirty tricks, there's plenty of space for "superior speed" or "technique"-style workarounds.

Sure but the idea is in the context of “men and women are equally strong” which even those tropes suggest is not true (because of course it isn’t true)

"Headshot your enemy. Doesn't matter how strong he is if his head is broken open."

Timeless wisdom.

A person who is not interested in sports will not spend time (1) looking at top-tier athletes and (2) comparing their musculature in detail.

Or at least they won't be looking at top-tier athletes of both sexes in order to make the comparison.

I seem to remember at least one issue of Sports Illustrated each year being widely purchased by men who were not particularly interested in sports, although I agree not everyone depicted therein (whose musculature would, indeed, be looked at in detail) was a top-tier athlete.

It doesn’t require detail. Pick any NFL WR. They don’t look like any women. It’s obvious.

Even if literally all you watched was blue-coded, scripted media where they used the same camera tricks used to make people like RDJ and Tom Cruise look taller, you can't avoid noticing the difference in stature/physical expectations for people who are cast to look like the top physical specimens for their sex.

Yeah I just don’t know how people can look at men and women and think “physically pretty similar.”

Nothing about this entrenched ignorance seems accidental. Some seed was planted that caused him to recoil from any confounding evidence.

Yeah, I suppose it's more noble to blame your neurodivergence and a hermetically sealed bubble but, speaking from personal experience, it really is just this. People treat disconfirming evidence on certain subjects like touching the proverbial poo. There's really no profit in doing so and plenty of social risk.

There was nothing magically convincing about new atheists or biblical scholars when I was 18 rather than 15. In one case, I simply counted myself amongst the religious and didn't approach the fence or ask myself obvious questions (like why the sports were sex-segregated in the first place) and, in the other, I was more independent and chose to do so.

Now, I may be wrong now but I can't blame my past position on ignorance just happening to me. I knew what I was doing when I simply refused to read certain things.

I don't think it is a huge problem for the idea that society can put us in a place to believe false things since people will do this semi-reliably with a little prompting. Though I suppose it may be embarrassing for a rationalist.

I mean, on the one hand, I can't recall the last time I actually watched the Olympics either. On the other hand, you are rarely comparing similar numbers here either. If it's some track event, all the men's times will be clustered, and then all the women's times will be clustered say, 30% slower. You aren't comparing decimal places here. Even casual observers should notice.

It's only ~10-12% for running events and once you get to anything other than 100 meters the numbers aren't things that are going to be intuitive to the average person. There aren't very many people that know how long a 1500m race takes to run off the top of their heads.

This isn't to defend the author's studied obliviousness to easily observed realities, just saying that I bet most people would have no idea if a 10K time was fast or slow from a quick look at the corner of the screen.

if a 10K time was fast or slow

Where would you put the threshold for "fast" or "slow"? I run a fair amount, and while I'm definitely not "fast" by my own definition, I have won a race or two when it's a low-key park run or such. I suppose compared to the average American I'm "fast", but my personal mark is "the Boston qualifying time" which continues to be slightly out of reach.

I mean, in the context of the Olympics, it's a high bar. I guess these days it's sub-27 for men and sub-30 for women for it to be considered a fast race.

In general conversation, I would probably call someone "fast" if they could go sub-35. I suspect that my definition works pretty much the same as yours though - that's "fast" because it's faster than me rather than it being relative to a given percentage of the population. For reference, I haven't run a 10K in a couple years, but split the first 10K of my last half marathon at 38 minutes and continued at the same pace for the rest of the race (on a fairly hill course). Other recent race results suggest that I'd run 36-low on a good day on a fast course or track. I'd probably agree that the most common spot for people in the hobby running community to start calling someone "fast" is BQ or equivalent speeds at shorter distances - sub-18 5K, sub-38 10K, sub-3 marathon are probably pretty common numbers.

To be a bit corny, I don't like to call people slow as long as they're trying. It's all so relative, we're all working towards goals, and I'm behind too many people by too much to feel good about calling other people slow. That said, if someone demanded that I tell them whether I think they're slow, I'd probably say that a healthy young male that can't crack 50 minutes is slow.

For all numbers adjust by ~11-12% for women.

Good luck on getting a BQ!

I think his account is perfectly reasonable. I personally was not aware of the huge strength differences between men and women until around age 25, when I stumbled across this transcript of a Senate hearing on the topic of adding women to combat units in the US armed forces. I watched exactly zero sports on television.

Did his school never do the Presidential fitness tests?

I don't think my high school did.

I mean... I hate to out you but...

Nor spent any time being physical with women

So like, age 25, you found out about physical strength differences between men and women from a senate transcript before you got any hands on experience?

I'll be out with it. It's really difficult for me to square total ignorance of the sex differences between men and women with first hand carnal knowledge of the opposite sex. So when I hear "I honestly had no idea and zero exposure to any physical reality that could possibly contradict that men and women are equally as physically capable" I just think "So.... you're a virgin?"

Although I suppose the bottom quintile and the top quintile could shack up from time to time. Just odd to think of that being someone's sole experience from which they extrapolate out to the entire human population. I mean, everyone has a type I suppose, but then again, if it's your type, you'd have to be aware of that fact, right? Which means there are lots of people out there outside your "type"?

Like others have said, I'm confused what physical strength differences have to do with having sex. I have sex [citation needed], and it's never been relevant. My wife and I are having fun jamming our genitals together, not wrestling.

I mean, forget all the euphemisms I've seen like "struggle snuggles" or whatever. Who carries who? Who picks up who? Who holds who up against a wall? There are ample non-violent opportunities during sex to notice a strength difference.

I donno, maybe I'm opening the kimono too much. If you put on smooth jazz and languidly do whatever you do with your genitals that makes it happen for you, more power to you.

In our case... nobody, nobody and nobody. I think that like you said, this comes down to personal style differences.

Plenty of people aren't having/into the sort of struggle snuggles at volume that would make the strength difference apparent

Most people also just don't really think about things

Consider that the gap between “me and a woman I have had sex with” may not generalize to World Cup men vs. women, logically speaking. Yes, it actually does (assuming me and the woman are average) but we know that [male] athletes in strength sports are basically superhumans, they are incomparably stronger and more fit than the general population. If you do not pay any attention to sports and aren't very observant, it's easy to believe that there exist outliers, massive 250 lb Amasons with six-packs and 20 inch biceps, somewhere out there. They exist in fiction, after all…

The biggest reason that the strongest women are much weaker than the strongest men is not the average gap. It's that they have a much lower ceiling.

Nor spent any time being physical with women

If you are playfighting with a woman you are on the way to having sex with (which is the main time you might legally get into a battle of strength with a woman), you modulate your effort in order to win slowly. I always knew that there is a large strength gap, and correctly intuited that she was going all-out and still losing, but I can imagine a guy who had been told that the strength gap is smaller thinking that she is half-assing it just like he is.

If you are playfighting with a woman you are on the way to having sex with

I’d like to add a modification to that to say: if you’re playfighting with a woman, you’re on the way to having sex with her.

Whenever a chick initiates a playfight or playfight-adjacent physical contest, I know a trip to pound town is imminent. It’s high key hilarious how chicks are turned on by getting dominated.

I can’t imagine any scenario in which an adult woman would play fight with an unrelated man she wasn’t attracted to, sure. I can’t even really imagining it happening in the context of something that wasn’t already a relationship or a date, except in the “best friends who are not-so-secretly in love with each other” way.

It’s not merely a product of selection, but a causative effect—the odds are that dominating a chick through interactions such as playfighting increases her attraction toward you and/or turns her on much more than the marginal replacement typical date interaction.

I will willingly out myself here to give some perspective. No, I have not had carnal knowledge of a woman. Yes, throughout high school, I thought the difference between me and the average woman was probably not much. I knew women who could do more pull-ups than me (I could do one-and-a-half unassisted, and I didn't know they needed assistance, but even once I did know, it still hadn't really sunk in for me), I knew women who had better mile times than me, and I thought the difference in push-up requirements weren't much different. I think it wasn't until I did co-ed softball in college that I realized "wow, all the women are really slow and horrible at the game, and all the dudes are superstars who we bank the entire game's performance on".

Kickball in high school probably could have given me this realization as well, if I had cared to notice, but it's not as stark because you've also got unathletic girls and boys who weren't choosing to be there and don't want to put in much effort. I guess I thought even the athletic girls playing just weren't as serious about it as the boys.

Admittedly, there may be a bit of an inferiority complex that played into my not realizing that I am actually stronger than most women. I always thought I was sort of weak. Also, you generally don't get into armwrestling matches with women who are not lesbians, and there were almost no lesbians at my school. Sad, isn't it?

The thing is, the bottom quintile of men (edit: or even third quintile of men) and the top quintile of women very rarely get together, so a man who has noticed women he has had sex with are weaker than he is, but who has also noticed there are much bigger and stronger women around may not realize the general situation.

If you do participate in sports where both genders participate (though not formally competing), you will probably find yourself in situations where high-tier women and similar or lower-tier men get compared, and the women are sometimes surprised and upset at how badly they come off.

Yes, lots of smart, shy men who spend time on the internet are virgins. I don't think anyone should find this surprising.

Do they also not have sisters and female cousins or friends or moms? Aunts? Grandmas?

Or dads to tell them to be gentle with women?

The levels of ignorance get really deep really fast. As a male, there is some gigantic certainty that you will at some point become much much stronger than the females you are close to. Maybe its your mom who you can pick up with ease at 13 even though she's heavier than you. Maybe its your sister. Older or younger doesn't matter, there are common feats of strength easily observable. Maybe its a cousin. Or an aunt. Maybe all those people and your dad or grandpa told you the importance of "never hitting a woman". Any normal individual understands this, it is because they are fragile. Which is statistically true.

Being a virgin isn't an excuse. You have to be the level of the the guy who wrote the original article to get close to having an excuse. He was all of that plus more.

Sure, he’s autistic and probably was quite self-righteous about being ‘one of the good ones’.

I think though that a lot of people here are Red-Tribe-ish enough that they’re used to having largeish families.

If you don’t have children until mid-late 30s that means…

  • Your children are unlikely to have more than one sibling, if that (so 50% chance no sisters).
  • Their aunts and grandparents will be quite old and weak by the time they’re physically mature.
  • Their parents are unlikely to have many siblings either, so few aunts/cousins. Both sides are likely to move regularly for work, so you don’t see them often.

It’s sad but having relatively little familial contact is quite normal for a big section of society at this point, especially upper-middle class.

Well, as long as we're on the topic of innumeracy and poor estimation skills, I actually do still feel a moment of surprise when I realize I'm interacting with someone that's missing such a basic and core experience. It's one of those things that I know intellectually is some relevant percentage of the populace, but it's still surprising to encounter. This is a similar sort of thing to realizing that you might have been arguing with a 13-year-old about something.

Shrug. Despite being a virgin, I've always taken it as a given that women are just overall weaker than men. Training in martial arts just confirms it even further, to the point I almost feel bad about it.

Alot of it may just come down to living in radically different bubbles, some bordering on active, almost delusional isolation.

What does having had sex have to do with having physically struggle against a woman anyway?

The mere fact of your interaction with a woman at that level of intimacy will reveal to you that she is comparatively incredibly weak in the vast majority of such intimate interactions.

This need not be intentional for you, you will simply be stronger. It wont be close. People dont have sex, as a general rule, where the only interaction is the penis penetrating the vagina. Other, non-essential (from a reproductive POV) things happen. They are going to involve legs and arms. If you are the man, your legs and arms will be stronger in almost every instance.

The world records do indicate that women stronger than me do exist. I have never met such a woman. Honestly, I would speculate they likely have what my HS coach called "air muscles". This is a derogatory term for lifters for both sexes and is true. Being strong at weightlifts is only useful if it translates to combat or hay baling. Obviously the best at both are men.

I have to say that carrying 50 lbs sacks of dirt for my mom's gardening projects when I was a teenager did infinitely more to drive that home than any sex I had a couple of years later. Not that I needed any of that given that "men are stronger than women" was and still is a universally accepted fact here the same way as "men are taller than women" is.

I still don't see how bringing having sex into it is anything other than a way to make fun of nerdy guys for not being lucky with girls.

Yes, at age 31 I have fucked exactly zero hawt gurls. Unfortunately, the rumors of magical wizard powers are greatly exaggerated. (I may spend five kilodollars on a trip to the brothels of Australia after I retire two years from now, but I probably will not be able to justify that expense.)

Surely there must be a cheaper way for you to pay to get laid, wherever you are? If you're traveling to Australia at significant expense, there's likely a whole bunch of cheap Asian countries along the way.

Flying to the brothels of Nevada would cost me next to nothing. But it's my understanding that the extremely low supply of (legal) prostitutes in Nevada results in high prices and low quality. If this is the only sex I will ever have, why not go to a proper free market in order to buy it at low prices and high quality, rather than rewarding the Nevada government for its stupid policies?

Wikipedia indicates that, other than the US, Australia is the only English-speaking country where brothels are legal. (In Britain, prostitution is legal, but brothels and advertising prostitution are not.)

Why the only time? First you can always go back. Second, maybe getting laid will inspire you to get laid without paying for it

Sounds expensive either way.

Hiring prostitutes is a fun thought, but thinking about the price at all dispels the notion. The cheapest escorts on the forward thinking hippie sex work site are like, $500. Imagine... you could buy a Glock 19 for that and it wouldn't be gone in an hour of passion. You could buy a bike. You could upgrade a bunch of your old computer parts. You could fix your air conditioner during a heat wave in June. You could put it in an investment fund. I'll be the first to say it: for $500, investment funds are better than sex.

Back when I was an adult virgin, I would have easily paid 500$, or up to four times that, if it could permanently dispel the feeling of shame I would sometimes feel being virgin. The point would not have been to enjoy myself, but to break a psychological barrier that I saw as a blocker for all my attempts at dating. The reason I didn't is not because of the opportunity cost, but because I didn't believe it would dispel that feeling, and perhaps pile on a whole new shame on to it.

Australian brothels advertise prices around 200 Australian dollars (130 US dollars) for 45 minutes of time. The majority of the cost would be the plane tickets, which I agree probably are not worth it.

I'd rather advice a trip to Southeast Asia, in that case. If you want to retire anyway, it's a great place to stay for indefinite time as well.

They don't speak much English in Southeast Asia.

Trust me that's the very last of you worries. Two of my best school friends, then college age, went backpacking there for several months with very mediocre english and no knowledge of any local language.

One of them, a very shy but super nice, hardworking and competent guy who never had to my knowledge even kissed a girl - zero game as the kids say -, came back with a girlfriend. And not a bad one, some kind of banking business work, very easygoing, down-to-earth and admittedly quite attractive. They're now living together for a few years.

Of course sex tourism is also an option there, but imo getting a serious gf is a much more sensible option and very realistic for a well-earning westerner now matter how much you struggle with western women.

Also living expenses are quite low, so even apart from any dating a great place for young retirees to stay or travel indefinitely.

Trust me that's the very last of your worries. Two of my best school friends, then college age, went backpacking there for several months with very mediocre English and no knowledge of any local language.

That doesn't sound very enjoyable to me.

IMO getting a serious gf is a much more sensible option and very realistic for a well-earning westerner now matter how much you struggle with western women

I am not seeking a romantic partner. After around a half-dozen attempted friendships in college, I concluded that friendship was not worth the effort—and romance is just deeper friendship, so it would be even worse.

Also living expenses are quite low, so even apart from any dating a great place for young retirees to stay or travel indefinitely.

My calculations indicate that I will have enough money to retire in the US two years from now, so I have no need to move to the jungle.

Well, suit yourself. My personal experience with people who use this line of argument is that it's pure cope; i.e., the moment someone comes along who opens up the possibility of romance, they'll jump and cling on by any means necessary, betraying their earlier statements. It would have been wiser for them to put in more effort earlier, so that they're not so desperately dependent on that particular person later. But I don't know you, so maybe you really are different than everybody else.

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My 5 star hotel that I was staying at with my family (!) overlooked the red light district in that part of Thailand. Trust me, not speaking the local language was the last thing dissuading the gents who came by, and they seemed to be having a great time.

It appears that brothels are illegal in Thailand (1 2). Randomly walking the streets of a country where I don't speak the language in order to look for women of widely-varying hotness at opaque prices (and, if this is the only sex that I will ever have, why not go for the hottest ones?) does not sound very enjoyable, in comparison to being able to pick from a lineup of brothel-curated employees at transparent prices that are posted on an English-language website.

There's a very good reason the country is so popular for sex tourism. It's safe, and it's cheap, and the only English required is me love you long time.

Even if outright brothels are illegal, there are entire red light districts, and you can just take them to a hotel. But of course, if you really want legible prices, legality with easy access and English speakers, your options are limited. I just think those are unusual priorities and people seem to do fine there.

Bangkok is kinda known for this sort of thing, so I imagine their are plenty of polyglots in the industry. Also nominative determinism, but I'm sure that's been done to death.

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