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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 2, 2023

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I fully realize this comment might get me in trouble and it is ad-hominem and "tasteless". I will delete it if mods say so and apologize. It is even embarrassing if I got my basic assumption wrong. Here we go though..

I strongly suspect the real reason is because he is Indian, and the said occasional human rights violations are against Muslims. HBD is a thin veneer used to justify seeing human beings as bugs to be crushed because they aren't technologically advanced enough. Online high-caste Indian men seem to be highly susceptible to such viewpoints, probably because of their experience of living in India of all places, the pinnacle of HDB inequality.

Better than speculating "He only believes that for tribal reasons" would be to... ask him. Yes, we generally dislike people lobbing identity-based arguments at each other. We also prefer you don't delete posts. Whether or not you want to apologize is up to you.

That is a fair point. I will do so the next time. I am quicker to assume such things when people are low key advocating for ethnic cleansing.

I am a South Asian Muslim (technically outside the caste system, which is a Hindu thing, but in reality there is an informal system that everyone knows), and I also

respect that enough to ignore the whole religious ethno-state deal, or even the occasional human rights violation.

I strongly suspect the real reason is because he is Indian, and the said occasional human rights violations are against Muslims

Bruh. I remember you making the same completely unfounded claim about me before, which I immediately pushed back against.

I'm secularly irreligious, largely hating most religion equally, albeit a few annoy me enough to earn more of my scorn. Muslims, Hindu fundamentalists, roughly about as bad as I'm concerned, even if the latter are currently in power.

I'm sure you've seen me ~politely squabble with the local Mormons and miscellaneous denominations of Christianity here too.

On a more forgivable error, I didn't come to believe in HBD while living in India, or at least not while observing Indians growing up.

Living in an upper-middle class bubble tends to blur everything together, especially when I'm unusually bad at figuring out caste from surnames, and I didn't even know what caste I was until I was around 19 (it's not high at all, just a cut above people who get affirmative action in fact, woe is me that I had to get into med school the hard way).

Now, actual med school, where I had to restrain endless fury that I had ended up shunted off to a backwater while my Scheduled Class classmates, if they didn't gotten upgraded a few days later to a far better one, had ranks twice as bad I did in the competitive exam, while being visibly worse at things.. Yeah, that'll radicalize you, or at least make you listen when the oldies mumble when not in public. Huh, seems like they were on to something after all.

I hope you remember this time, not that it really matters.