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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

I first noticed Indians about 15 years ago. Every single one I worked with was an H1B that almost certainly lied to get the job. In fact, I have never had a satisfactory experience working with an Indian in any position. I keep running into the same failure pattern where it's like they simply don't understand language, they just make convincing mouth sounds to get people to leave them alone. I've never successfully communicated a technical problem to an Indian in a way they've understood, no matter how hard I try. Other colleagues understand what I'm trying to communicate immediately.

My entire region was over ran by them. They all drove Honda Odysseys and basically didn't follow any traffic laws what so ever. At some point my then girlfriend, now wife with a confusing ethnic sounding last name got an interview at an American company that had been completely taken over by Indians. She was told point blank that they weren't going to hire her because she was white and they only hire other Indians. To this day she carries a grudge against Indians for being so nakedly discriminated against.

Later when she was venting to her father about the incident, he asked which company, and recognized the name. Said they were notorious for just blatantly lying on every contract bid they made, and basically doing no competent work what so ever.

I wouldn't say I'm shocked if people notice misbehavior that blatant and stereotypical.

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

I think the best thing I've read so far on DOGE is this lengthy tweet from Devon Eriksen, on what DOGE will need to be effective (and thus why it probably won't be). Some highlights that stood out to me:

Currently, the fourth branch is in many ways the most powerful, and certainly the most destructive, arm of the government.

  • It has the privilege of targeting individual citizens on its own initiative, which is forbidden to the three other branches.
  • It can interfere their lives in any way it wishes by making a "ruling".
  • The only recourse against a "ruling" is to take the bureaucracy in question to court.
  • But the process is the punishment, because this takes months if not years and costs tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars.
  • Until recently, courts have deferred to bureaucrats as a matter of legal precedent. Now they merely do so as a matter of practice.
  • But should the bureaucracy lose anyway, the only punishment the court inflicts is that they are told they have to stop doing that specific thing.
  • Any fines or legal costs imposed on them punish the taxpayer, not the agent or even the agency.
  • And the next, closely related, thing the bureaucracy thinks of to do is once again fair game, until the courts are once again brought in, at further cost, to tell it to stop.

…

But words mean things.

When you create a check on the bureaucracy and call it the department of government efficiency, you focus the attention, and the correction, on the fact that the bureaucracy is stomping on people's lives and businesses inefficiently, not on the fact that they are doing so at all.

…

2. DOGE must have direct oversight.

If it must take agencies to court, it is merely a proxy for the citizens whose money is being wasted, and whose rights are being trampled.

Imagine the level of inefficiency, waste, and delay, if your process for addressing bureaucratic abuse simply results in one part of the federal government pursuing an expensive court case against another.

Instead, DOGE must have the power to simply make a ruling, via its own investigation hearing process, which is binding on federal agencies.

Any appeals to the court system must be allowed to trigger their own DOGE investigation (for wasting taxpayer fighting a ruling).

3. DOGE must have the power to punish the agent, not just the agency.

"You have to stop that now" is not a deterrent. Neither is fining the agency, because such fines are paid by the American taxpayer.

…

Agencies do not act, they do not make decisions, they do not have incentives they respond to. Any appearance to the contrary is an emergent property created by the aggregate action of agents.

Every decision, whether we admit it or not, has a name attached to it, not a department. It is that person who responds to incentives.

Agents will favor their own incentives over those of their principal (the American people) unless a counter incentive is present for that specific person.

For this reason, DOGE should, must, have the power to discipline individual employees of the federal agencies it oversees.

This doesn't just mean insignificant letters of reprimand in a file. It means fines against personal assets, firing, or even filing criminal charges. No qualified immunity.

Yes, you read that right. DOGE must be able to fire other agencies' staff. I recommend that anyone fired by DOGE be permanently illegible for any federal government job, excluding only elected positions.

…

6. Bureaucrats must be held responsible for outcomes, not just for following procedure.

Often, procedure is the problem. The precedent must be established, and clearly enforced, that because agents have agency, agents are responsible for using their discretion to ensure efficient, just, and sane outcomes, not just for doing whatever departmental policy allows.

7. DOGE must have an adversarial relationship with the bureaucracies is oversees.

This eliminates the phenomenon of "we investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing".

Following the previous recommendation is almost sure to make this happen.

I would point out that much of this — treating bureaucrats as "agents with agency" and responsibility, rather than procedure-following human automatons with "bureaucratic diffusion of responsibility — runs counter to the basic Weberian character of bureaucracy (as well as the "machine mindset" and allergy to human authority characteristic of modernity). Eriksen does provide a number of likely failure modes, though.

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

I think there's also the question of which set of ideals were talking about. Are they the ideals of the Founding Fathers, which presupposed a European/Christian worldview and a virtuous populace? Or are they the ideals of the Civil Rights Neoconstitution that is IMO essentially a pro-globalist anti-identity? If it's the former, I might be okay with supporting the civnats, but it's the latter, I'm going to reluctantly support the blood-and-soil people.

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

I wrote this before the other comments, and I echo some of the same confusion. I saw this on Gabbard's wikipedia page: "Her mother, Carol, became a Hindu, and her Catholic Samoan husband later joined her in the faith. According to Gabbard, they raised their family with Hindu values."

So it seems that Tulsi was indeed raised Hindu. But apparently by parents who, if I'm getting this correctly, had no Hindu background?

I'm not doubting you or trying to be argumentative, but I'm just confused and I'd like to have a better understanding. If what you say is true and Hinduism has no concept of conversion, how do Tulsi and her mother and father fit into this worldview?

Actually, that prompts a question for me: what's the view of Hindus generally about the spiritual significance of a far-flung individual with no Hindu background or ancestry, given that Hinduism takes no converts? Is there a place in the system for Europeans and Africans? Or is it more of a "we just don't think about them" kind of thing?

If someone from New Jersey just starts worshipping Vishnu or Lakshmi and following Hindu practices -- is that praiseworthy? Contemptible? Irrelevant?

I'm also familiar with certain traditions that follow aspects of the Hindu tradition but also proselytize, most famously in the US the Hare Krishnas. How do faiths such as theirs interplay with the belief system you've outlined? According to @ResoluteRaven, this is Gabbard's background.

You can chalk this up to my Abrahamic and secular upbringing, but I definitely find it hard to wrap my head around a faith that claims privileged access to supernatural truth without providing a path for non-adherents to realize or encounter that truth in some way. I guess I find it hard to even describe that as "religion" in the sense I understand it.

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

Thanks, I will.

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

Read the link I posted a few replies above. Hanania explains it quite eloquently.

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

Anti-Indian sentiment, pajeet being mainstream and dating patterns

There has been a hockey stick like growth in terms of anti Indian sentiment online where people use the word pajeet (or jeet) for people of ancestry from the Indian subcontinent, pajeeta if you are female. Likely coined on 4chan to target sikhs who like telugus have been notorious for doing whatever it takes to get out of the country and bringing their cousins aling too, many of thier names end the suffix jeet, hence the ethnic slur "Pajeet". 2 years ago NDTV, a mainstream English speaking Indian news channel did a program about the usage of the word pajeet and how it shot up, I remember that because I was a niche microcelebe and a lot of my mutuals started using the word pajeet to describe other Indians who behaved like the stereotype, at that time the sentinemtn towards Indians on twitter was not as bad lol.

Here is Charleston White partaking in hitting the new pinata in town. In the online circles, the name has been adopted by some who use it to describe a large number of people who unfortunately fit the negative stereotypes. Due to extreme amounts of poverty and a large number of people where the HBD balance is skewed heavily due to various subclans and well things you are legally not supposed to talk about. The stereotype describes the person being smelly, extremely dishonest, high amounts of nepotism and being overall unattractive due to being skinny fat, short and dark. Most Indians absolutely do fuck others over, especially others of their own kind, scam call centres scammed my dad's colleague out of 50k USD and tried to get my own dad thrice. I simply wish to know how this seemed to have happened, the rise against an entire subcontinent overnight did take me by surprise.

My own experiences are not the same as firstly all the euros or non-Indians I met were tourists or digital nomads, most probably thought I was Jewish or Arabic or something since I am slightly different looking. This is to say that I did not encounter any racism that others of my ilk probably faced. My travels have been very limited to just Southeast Asia too, I would suspect that it is more hostile on the internet than irl. The subcontinent certainly has all the issues mentioned here and more though the people who migrate without indulging in out-and-out fraud are not this way at all. More than half the people migrate via various dishonest tactics but a very large number is of genuinely talented people who are likely suffering from being bunched together with others. It is as if you can just call Indians or Jews names online and you will go viral, is it because quite a few people from both ethnicities are high on the totem poll now that bioleninism is purity cycling where you could only say stuff against Caucasians and East Asians before.

One theory I have is that due to a lot of Incels online being Indian and the sharp growth of internet usage in India thanks to super cheap data, the vast majority of them being people who fit the stereotypes. There are plenty of Indians who just are not like the stereotype while many absolutely do fit it due to a combination of poverty, culture, and maybe genetics, I do have a soft spot for those who migrated out and have to be associated with the bottom of the barrel people at home and border jumping swindlers in the west.

Incel forums and looksmaxxing becoming more mainstream plays a big part too. Most would use the term currycel for self-description with ricecel being for east asians. The oxford study results paint a grim picture for East Asians where it states that women of east asia are more likely to prefer dating people of other races with whites being highest rated, I would argue that the subcontinent and south-east Asia has the similar issues. Posters on incel forums would self-deprecate quite heavily, whilst I mention the shortcomings of people here sometimes, it is never me saying stuff like ethnic tax. Quite a lot of the info you see out there did come from these forums.

short off tangent remark

In Thailand the nightclubs with tourists were basically tourists and Thai girls, barely any Thai dudes at all, you most only see mixed-race couples where the guy was non-Thai and the woman wasn't. These are taboo topics you cannot discuss that incels brought up on various forums. They would always cite Elliot Rodgers the supreme gentleman as an example of why this mating strategy would be worse for Hapas (half-east Asians). Sort of a tangent here but I never did see this being brought up. I never had an issue with interacting with girls of any race in nightclubs, during my extremely short time in SEA I nearly exclusively spoke with girls from my region, a few Arabics (Christians somehow, every time) and mostly Euros. Is the whole race and dating thing really that fucked? thought I would say that Eastern Asian and South-east asian women, in general, were super receptive, way way more than any I had ever met, I never went home with one or anything but it did feel odd how me not being East/Southeast Asian was a positive in their eyes. Anyhow, apologies for the long meandering post, I had something happen yesterday that did scare me lol.

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

What does this have to do with anything? Ron's nickname was "desanctimonious".

Yes, and as we can see running against Trump in the primaries and getting a nickname doesn't suddenly mean Trump won't turn around and treat you favorably later.

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

She was raised Hindu. You can't convert to Hinduism. No Indian would be able to explain what that even means.

Gabbard has no Indian ancestry and her mother does not appear to have known anything about Hinduism prior to moving to Hawaii and getting involved with the Hare Krishna sect there, being herself a white American from Indiana. For whatever reason, this rather unorthodox religious background did not seem to bother the Hindu community in the US, who claimed Tulsi as one of their own when she was first elected. Not that I would fault anyone for believing her family aren't real Hindus, but certainly it was also possible to convert to Hinduism in the past, otherwise Southeast Asia wouldn't be full of beautiful Hindu temples.

That aside, what's her reason for opposing gay marriage? I know Christians and Muslims have a scriptural disgust for it. I'd like to know where young Tulsi's strong opposition to it comes from.

Her father is a conservative Catholic whose only claim to fame has been being stridently opposed to gay marriage for the past 30 years.

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

Does "the Gribble faction" just mean "people who don't trust all the official narratives and are therefore low status" or do you have something more specific in mind?

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

Machiavellian. There’s already a name for it. And to be fair, what they’re describing is exactly how politics actually works in a democratic system. The name of the game is to get people to vote for you and you do that by convincing people to want to vote for you. Propaganda is constant in our system driven into every media and cultural outlet it can be. You’ve been taught to want certain things, to believe certain policies will give you a better life. That’s manipulation, and quite often lying to people, and almost certainly “hiding poison pills under the carpet”.

The truism of politics, no matter what the system actually looks like is pretty simple. If you get power, you get to rule, if you don’t, you watch other people rule. There’s nothing unusual about the concept. In autocratic systems, you have to overthrow the current government, in democratic ones, you have to get voted in. Either way, you have to get access to the levers of power before the policies you have in mind actually count for anything.

And treating peasants like peasants is fairly common. It would be the same in any type of system with any party or faction you care to name. Most people in a nation are peasants or even serfs with little to no political control over anything. The sneering condescension is simply reality — despite what both parties tell the voters every couple of years, you actually don’t matter to them, and they actually do hold you to be beneath them.

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

That aside, what's her reason for opposing gay marriage? I know Christians and Muslims have a scriptural disgust for it. I'd like to know where young Tulsi's strong opposition to it comes from.

She worked for her father's anti-gay organisation when she was younger.

She's since retracted her anti-gay stance.

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

Yeah, the 'Russian Asset' came direct from Hillary during the 2019 DNC primaries.

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

Apparently the Harris campaign was astroturfing Reddit using an army of volunteers organized via a discord.

But, as you point out, why did they even bother? The site is full of deranged partisans. Almost all the top posts are made by deranged partisans. Going from 95% to 99% DNC propaganda if anything just devalues it.

In any case, no one ever accused the Harris campaign of competence.

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

I don't know if trying to turn Reddit from 95% pro-Democrat to 99% pro-Democrat was worth what the Democrats invested in it, but it might be.

I've come to the conclusion that local political censorship ("evaporative cooling") within a community is something that probably has pretty strongly nonlinear behavior. Badgering, for small values of badgering, works in terms of swaying consensus -- it probably shows up great in academic studies or commercial A/B ad testing. But it reaches a point of diminishing, or even negative returns: at some point, maybe even between your 95 and 99 percent numbers, where the evaporated community starts condensing and forming its own alternative structures, eventually re-establishing a more representative balance.

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

She is against the MIC, the deep state (unelected bureaucrats) and forever wars.

I'm fairly confident these are the actual reasons behind her being attacked so much.

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/its-catching/201703/why-are-females-prone-to-mass-hysteria

But honestly I'm at a loss as to how anyone could be so, uh, sheltered from the realities of differences between men and women that they'd ask for a citation. It's like asking whether boys or girls are more likely to throw knives at stuff for fun, and then demanding a citation when someone gives the obvious answer. There's a screamingly-loud pattern here that I'd think one has to be either extremely autistic or intensively propagandized in order to miss.

You're making a factual claim that it's significantly more common in one sex here, not about how masculine/feminine the behavior is

What a baffling statement.

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

You are confusing 'liberalist state with robust rule of law' with 'democracy' -- the two are pretty orthogonal, although in practice they are often seen together these days due to accidents of history.

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

Always check the sub overlap thing, whatever it's called (and if it still works with the API restrictions). Neoliberal users are basically just the political wing of /r/traaaaaansIRL_egg-crackers.

Focus on winning the election, focus on telling people what they want to hear and hide behind the carpet all of the progressive electoral poison pills. After you’re in power, you can go back to those points.

If there isn't a name for this there needs to be. The sneering condescension and treating voters as pawns to be manipulated, and expecting them to never figure it out no matter how many times you lie to them, as if they're video game NPCs who can't see you stealing if you stick a bucket on their heads.

And hey, to my discredit I thought it was working for them again right up until 2am on election night.

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

Gaetz immediately resigned from his house seat...maybe this is a bureaucratic poisoned chalice for the senate, which has the choice of either confirming Gaetz as AG or facing a potential appointment of Gaetz to Rubio's vacant seat?

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

I wouldn't recommend throwing Musk off a building; he'd probably shoot flames out of his ass and land safely.

I would imagine they think by the time the Dems regain power, the impossible-to-work-with faction will have been soundly defeated and whoever takes over will only be a drag on their businesses, not anything worse. I don't believe that, but Musk, at least, is an optimist.

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

They'll do what filthy rich billionaires did before them : Donate = Bribe = Lobby.

Now that Elon & Thiel are Texans, the state should offer them plenty of protection even after Trump goes away.

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

You and the other so-called 'partisan hacks' don't get to say you're right because a coin came up heads despite a poll saying it had a 60% chance to come up tails. The fact that you 'correctly predicted' an event has little inherent bearing on whether your reasoning was correct.

I'm incredibly tired of hearing this talking point. Did you correctly predict the election map in 2020? in 2016? Do you have a better record overall than the pollsters you critiscize? What reason do I have to believe that you are not a broken clock that is right twice a day?

On the other hand, you're fine to critiscize OP calling someone a crank with no substantive reasoning.

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

It's not just political subs. Reddit is a web of lies, misrepresentation, shills, fraud, and trolling. Believe me I wish it weren't the case. I mean I have a long train commute.

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

Geeze. You weren't kidding about neoliberal being hysterical today. They're in rare form. I expect this from /r/politics and their ilk. I thought neoliberal thought they were high brow.