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Kashmir and the eternal motte and bailey of the soyjeet mind
Yesterday, terrorists, muslim terrorists, killed innocent tourists in Kashmir. They asked people their names, checked if they were circumcised or not, to ensure that the people killed were Hindu. The reaction to this news has been predictable. The right wing or the boomer wing wants more state control and will be fine with 24/7 mandatory survellance of every cell phone whilst the online soy left is back to its motte and bailey games. You can check places like /r/librandu, /r/kashmiri and /r/vaushv for takes there where people cannot openly celebrate it, so they have to resort to calling religions bad. "Religions are bad, we must all be atheists". This is thinly veiled, though I am not coming out of my hiatus to link to an unfortunate tragedy or point out logical fallacies.
Kashmir has been unstable since its independence due to being run by a tiny Hindu population and a large Muslim underclass. Indian independence meant that the feudal states would be disbanded and democratic elections would replace the ruling class. This meant death for Kashmiris. The place was on the brink of collapse, only saved by Jamwals, a nearby Rajput clan, literally buying it from the Brits and allowing Kashmiri Pandits breathing space. Both groups are upper caste, the highest two varnas and made up nearly all of the Hindu population of a muslim place.
This bit of history is important to understand recent attacks. Kashmir, at one time, was a place with quite a few Buddhists. Kashmir Shaivism, the local religious sect of Hinduism, was not on bad terms, and plenty did convert, unfortunately post post-Islamic invasions, you saw Muslim populations rise via conversions. The higher caste Hindus there, the Brahmins, the Kashmiri Pandits, were facing active persecution, and the religion itself was nearly dead. Until the State was established.
Jamwals were mercenaries from the neighbouring Himachal Pradesh, and very likely descendants of the same stock as me, as once claimed by the current King. Shaivism and the Kashmiri Pandits were saved, but things would get worse. The largest displacement started in 1991 with the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits from Srinagar and since then, they have been living in various parts of the nation, unable to ever go back to Srinagar.
The underclass actively resented the ruling class. Unlike Buddhists, muslims did not like Hinduism and seeing a minority that is responsible for every single thing good about your culture that can whip you at any time did not sit well with them. 1947 offered a break with Pakistan, a nation formed simply to support the rights of Mujeets (muslim pajeets) and quasi socialists like the INC, led by a kashmiri pandit in Nehru being squarely against the Dogra Dynasty. The problem India now faces is that the people who were displaced can never return unless you allows Kashmir to escape the laws of India.
The Indian state is a nanny state, whilst Americans can own guns and even hunt, anything beyond a knife will get you felony charges. Given that the state runs on explicit bioleninism, this meant that Islamic ghettos here become no-go zones. Police officers do not enter these ghettos, and you would find azaan playing in the background in most Indian cities simply because people live in secluded places. Kashmir today is that ghetto, but instead of 5-10 percent of the population, it's closer to 99.
India can never allow its citizens the right to own guns and rule a piece of land with any amount of sovereignty, this act actively delegitimises the state. Having a place next to you where people lead better lives with actual freedom would raise questions no one wants to answer. Kashmir will keep getting worse, the area will get more militarised, the mujeet youth will take up anti hindu activities more as they get less options for the future due to economic collapse and Indian state will intrude furhter into the lives of ordinary citizens.
My own biases are quite apparent. I came to this place a broken man. I was 20, and I was sure that my life would collapse sometime soon. I was able to change my ways this year due to my discovery of Kashmir Shaivism(not a Kashmiri btw). My family itself has personal ties or at least used to have ties with the Dogra Dynasty's current head and also the muslim ruling class and their last popular chief minister, whom I will not name for privacy concerns. The locals will always hate the Hindus, the leftists here do that too, they are just too cowardly to admit that they do too. Motte and Bailey was my favourite slatestarcodex post, helps explain a lot of what I grew up seeing.
My parents are on vacation in Kashmir, and were about 3 hours away from going to the same spot when the shooting happened and roads locked down.
Yeah. That was a fun thing to wake up to in Scotland.
It's quite scary. "youth" in Kashmir would prefer living in stone age poverty over being mildly civlized.
Hope they are safe for now.
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In my darker moments, I wonder if "decolonization" in practice is somewhat genocidal. For all the lofty "self governance" rhetoric, there are uncomfortably many examples, of which I'd consider the Subcontinent one (also Palestine, Rwanda, and many others), in which some of the first actions with newfound independence were to start killing and forcibly relocating each other.
Even some places that set out with lofty rhetoric (South Africa) haven't really been able to realize those stated values. I recognize that the colonial powers weren't exactly saints either, so I don't have a better suggestion. Just the sad state of the world. On the other hand, there are success stories: Singapore, for example.
When Uganda decolonized it immediately engaged in ethnic expulsion of 90% of it's businesses. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_Asians_from_Uganda
Zimbabwe promptly used literally North Korea trained death squads to commit genocide against the Ndebele as soon as it could.
Algeria promptly ethnically cleansed 10% of it's population upon de-colonization. About 1 million Pied Noir were expelled. No one calls it ethnic cleansing or genocide though, because they were told they had a choice. the choice given to them:
Kenyan independence immediately led the the complete destruction of the Arabs of Zanzibar.
Even Singapore itself was effectively born from ethnic race riots. See the 1964 Race Riots. Plural.
I blame our collective forgetting about it all on Franz Fanon. Who made it clear that ethnic hate wasn't a coincidence, it was the point. He would regard modern Singapore as a failure and modern Zimbabwe as success.
Could you elaborate more on this point?
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I think this just depends on the specific circumstances and usage of the term really. Many of the colonies controlled by Imperial Japan were so awful that their descendents in China and Korea continue to hold a powerful cultural grudge to this day. And it's easy to understand when they committed atrocities like the hundred man killing contest (the specifics of this event is historically questionable but even Japanese courts generally rule something most likely happened) Their forces were so opposed to the Japanese invaders that China put their civil war aside and worked together to fight back. Decolonizing the areas they had conquered was a liberation.
But in the same way "decolonization" is used by some wacky leftist types who seem to think that the US continuing to exist at all is equivalent to doing the trail of tears over and over again. The native Americans of the 18th and 19th century might not have fared well under American rule back then, but the native Americans of today certainly benefit from our country's wealth and power.
I don't have a time machine or a parallel dimension viewer to see the counterfactual where a native American tribe won and ruled over the land of the US to see what happened. Maybe that tribal America is even wealthier and more powerful, maybe it's worse off. But it doesn't matter, we don't live in that time or alternate reality and the native Americans of today benefit from the country existing. "Decolonizing" makes no sense even from a pro-native perspective, we would be hurting them.
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Inherently, yes. The entire colonization rhetoric is incoherent in honest historical context, unless e.g. viewed as moral justification for immediate power shifts and ethnic cleansing.
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Decolonisation is a weird term. People who use it here remind of the Hindi term dehati, its closest translation would be hick I guess. There is a growing online population of people who want to "decolonise" which means becoming more afghanistan like but still staying liberal lol.
"True decolonisation" here would be like Kashmiris seeing the Hindu rule that civilised the place as evil, hence justifying current acts of violence. South Africa and Zimbabwe have become actively worse economically.
I hate the word because it is used mostly by bioleninists. India cannot "decolonise" unless you have revolutions against the upper castes, as they were here far longer than the Brits, at least that's the bioleninist narrative here.
Muslims obviously can run a civilized-if-not-to-western-preferences society(Iran and the Gulf States clearly qualify), while it is not at all clear that India and Nepal qualify as 'civilized'- and there's no hindu counterfactual.
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What are the escalation probabilities on this?
You can't fight Pakistan for the same reason you don't pick fights with a pig. Pakistan doesn't point a gun towards you. Pakistan points a gun and its own head and threatens to shoot. Every Indo-Pakistani war was started by Pakistan, because India has nothing to gain from it.
War doesn't work, because war creates unpopular deaths for India while creating martyrs in Pakistan.
Economic retaliation doesn't work because Pakistan has no economy to speak of. Resource bottlenecking doesn't work because they are already on the verge of famine. Anything more will mean civilian deaths.
Full decoupling does not work because we have long borders. The US can't enforce a border with Mexico, and that's all flat land. Imagine trying to maintain a border up in the Himalayas. Don't even get me started on their nukes.
The failed state of Pakistan is a nuisance past redemption.
If Pakistani leadership stopped to think for a second, they'd realize that India is their natural trading partner. Afterall, these trade routes go back millennia. Karachi is clearly aching for maritime trade with India's west coast. Lahore is 30 miles from Amritsar. Faisalabad is 100 miles from Amritsar.
Geographically, Pakistan's urban areas hug India in the same way Canada's hug the USA. Can you imagine if Canada arbitrarily decided to have zero trade ties with India. Yes, Pakistan is client state to China and could trade with them. But China is too far. Beijing is closer to Anchorage than it is Islamabad. After 100 years of poisoning the well, I am aware that India-Pakistan peace is broken for good. But, what a waste.
Agree with everything 100 percent. Will add that Pakistan as a nation that is so much worse than India. They take the worst parts of their neighbors and mix in enough resentment that they would pick a fight at all costs.
Even if it means that they get their teeth kicked in, they would take that deal if it means chipping their neighbors nail. My main gripe is not Pakistan, though. At some point, India and the upper castes in particular have to come to terms with demographic shifts. You simply cannot let electoral democracy play out in a place that has always been a minority rule.
Pakistan is beyond one's abilities, but with Kashmir is effectively Pakistan for most Indians. These issues will spring up as ghetto dwellers get to bear weapons, while people living in gated societies do not. India needs to actually own Kashmir, and that cannot happen if the apparatus and values running it are Indian.
The Indian army is a big unit and it's fairly competent despite the occasional scandals and bureaucratic red tape. Kashmir takes up more resources than any part of India, and people who join the armed forces get stationed there at least once in their lives. That place needs to be truly reclaimed and that requires interventions that go against the beliefs of 1947.
And for a while they were doing good. India was a languishing in socialist democracy (hindu rate of growth) and a Bangladesh was still finding its feet as fledgling nation. In the 20th century, Pakistan was in a better place than India or Bangladesh. In the 90s, they nearly doubled India in GDP-PPP/Capita terms.
Even as a badly run but stable nation, Pakistan has a lot to offer. It has tons of rare earths. Pakistani-Kashmir is heaven on earth. Punjabi river systems are well-suited for industrialized agriculture. I would much prefer for Pakistan to thrive as nation of 250 million people, than this clown show they've been running.
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They did make changes to Indu water treaty plans but nothing will happen. India will never do anything to go agaisnt bio leninists, my posting exists to prove that spandrells hypothesis describes the decaying husk of erstwhile glorious Aryavarta.
The guy who took responsibility for this is the same guy from 26/11, the Mumbai attacks. They will kill some minor members, the media will show Modi laser eye edits with phonk music and people will accept a new low as the normal.
I assume this is someone who not a Pakistani National or part of the military or government apparatus? What are the odds India tries to kill him? Why haven’t they already?
He lives in Pakistan.
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Not OP but someone who occasionally devotes some attention to India/Pakistan, low to middling. The Indian Defense Minister has sworn retaliation, and made a not-so-veiled reference to Pakistan in doing so ("We will not only reach those who perpetrated this act, we will even reach those who, sitting behind the scenes, conspired to carry out such nefarious activities on Indian soil"). Of course my prior is "nothing ever happens" and there'd have to be some kind of serious shakeup for me to assume something is going to happen. India might conduct some targeted raids into Kashmir, might saber-rattle on the Pakistani border a bit, but I seriously doubt real escalation comes from this. This is merely the most recent terrorist attack in Kashmir. There's been 1-3 a year since 2013, and this is only the deadliest since 2019.
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What is a pajeet? Urbandictionary has it variously as a slur which could refer to Canadian Sikhs, north Indians, Hindus, Indians in general, or any South Asian.
In India, people use it to refer to anyone who belongs to the underclass or acts like they are a member of it. It started as a slur for sikhs via 4chan. It is used as a catch-all for south asians who act in a way befitting a slur, which is most of this place, unfortunately.
To everyone outside the subcontinent it is used as a generic racial slur against Indians and other subcontinentals. There is no distinction whatsoever between the ones who look and act a certain way or different castes/classes which makes your usage of the term risible. It’s like an Israeli from some small Jewish sect calling other Jewish sect kikes. “Ah those Neturei Karta KIKES are at it again! Not like us noble Breslov Hasidim! Don’t you know this slur has always referred to the BAD Jews?”
Yeah, I don't fully agree and jews themselves exist in distinct groups. Asheknazis are different from sephadrics.
A jew using the word kike and me using it are different things, ditto for pajeet. There is an underclass and it now has a collective name.
And all this happened because Sikhs, telugus and some others abused the living shit out of the migration system so bad that anyone sane would vote for remigration. The people whose antics got the word coined are a good chunk even within the west. This is a terrible thing because most people cannot differentiate between a hard working lawyer who migrated on his own from some city in Himachal vs a guy who got there through illicit means.
I should not be using the word as much, I think you're right now that I think about it.
I guess this is how American southerners feel about being called 'Yankees'.
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"...you fucking kikes are making us Jews look bad!" (c) a joke about Jews.
I've heard it also works for black people.
Indeed, there is a whole Chris Rock bit from the 90s where he talks about "there's black people, and there's niggas. And niggas have got to go". Anecdotally, I would say that matches my experience. My wife and her family really do not like the dumb-ass black people who make them look bad by association.
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It’s less effective as a joke when OP uses it unironically and when you consider he constantly mentions his caste and noble family connections in between (and sometimes even within) sad posts about his chronic unemployment and overall underachievement. He’s been doing this for years across various accounts with little self-awareness.
That's not an unfair view of things. I have had issues but I'm not crossing borders illegally, posting rape threats or staring at girls on the street. My descriptions here paint a far worse picture because I have a hard time appreciating anything decent in life.
Same goes for my employment issues, I chose to take time off to learn more things than my peers because I wouldn't have found the same line of employment where one hates showing up to office and knows nothing beyond leet code questions to be worthwhile, I did the equivalent of that in college. My sabbatical isn't ideal, but I did the right thing.
I should not use the word as muc,h though, slurs are not nice to use. Indians have a much worse image now than before, having slurs that for people of the subcontinent isn't good in such scenarios.
Also, I mentioned the faint previous ties to say that my analysis of the issue had some indirect inputs from people who were relevant at one point in time. The mentions of caste and other details exist to provide context for whatever is here. I don't go around driving with a "Brahmin" or equivalent sticker on my car. Castes are more or less dead in many ways beyond marriage. I do care about castes but that is a private matter.
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It is completely fucking wild to me that some random 4chan slur gets adopted by it's target nation for their own underclass. Is this widespread? Is it just their westernized too online NEET class? I must know more.
I actively played a role in this unfortunately, twitter is the only place where you find any semblance freedom, though it's still terrible, pajeet twitter became a thing.
Indians, the upper classes have always seen themselves as different people from the underclass, so Sikhs being the target of the slur and it being used people around them had an impact. It's not a popular term at all but it will be.
4chan is undefeated, check out bharatchan.com for more info
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I haven't been out of India for even a year now, and I can promise you I've never heard anyone call anyone else a Pajeet in real life, nor online. OP has a rather unusual online circle.
Some people picked it from me, it's not used as much now but it'll be soon. My online circle is quite unusual tho lol
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Subcontinentals are extremely classist (which is funny because virtually all of them, even those highly educated Model Minority types far outearning Westerners, remain lower-class-coded in the Western mind) so it's no wonder they found a catchy slur appropriate.
“Pajeet” is not a real Indian name, but that's really a nitpick because there are tons of legitimate names that are very similar. I sometimes interact with people called something like “Rajeet Patel” and it's a bit awkward how I can't not associate them with 4chan memes.
Subcontinent has extreme levels of scarcity. The big tragedy here is not that the vast majority of people are a part of the underclass, it's that the elites behave just like them.
People gauge your class by how fluent or non Indian sounding your English is. Hell, even the sports people watch reflect their class. Richer ones who are not completely dehati will watch f1 as cricket is seen as a lower class thing.
The Jeet thing is quite funny, a guy literally named winnerjeet singh was a meme a few years ago because he got 3 votes in an election in Punjab.
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OP is Indian (and, it must be clarified, is living in India), and is using pajeet in the urban dictionary sense, referring to old people in his country as “boomer pajeets.”
OP is semi-playfully referring to his co-nationals as pajeets simply because he’s proficient in English and very online (in the wojack memer sense).
The term originates from the fact that latinized Indian names often follow a distinctive convention for vowel sounds, for example characteristically going for the double-e instead of what we might be used to from another European language: pajeet instead of pajit. Or Navdeep instead of Navdip. Also Pooja and Preeti. There are plenty of exceptions, no easier to read aloud without pausing (Srinivas). I don’t believe this is really documented anywhere, but this is the best through-line I can come up with for the origin.
It just originates from people noticing the Jeet suffix in Punjabi names.
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Pajeet was an Indian name that happened to be used in a 4chan meme about "designated shitting streets" (itself a variation of a comic making fun of Turkish claims to steppe nomad heritage), and the name just stuck.
I don't think it's an actual name, it just sounds like one.
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