Bingbong
4d ago
Yeah I find my father's example interesting since paradoxically the fishermen were actually paid pretty well by general English working class standards.
But generally their lives would be spent half at sea in the middle of the Atlantic for weeks at a time, and then shore leave where they'd give over 85% of their pay packet to the wife/extended family and then drink the remainder. Made even worse by failing to do either usually marking you as a social outcast and meaning you weren't going to be invited back out on the ships for the next fishing run.
Bingbong
4d ago
Yeah like I'm not saying Africans are at some particular personal civility deficit but I feel like they're currently in the spot of just now being affluent enough and having enough of an upper class that you'll notice them. Give it another 20-30 years and it'll probably normalize.
Bingbong
4d ago
Yeah this is the issue that whenever somebody sets out to simplify the immigration question with a 'fair and unbiased criteria' inevitably a massive cottage industry converges to game the fuck out of those rules whilst also finding any possible legal angles for discrimination and humanitarian exemptions.
Bingbong
4d ago
I broadly agree but also this inherently leads to a cottage industry springing up where what should be an innate test of 'intelligence' gets gamed to the enth.
Bingbong
4d ago
Very few people are arguing you shouldn't be able to import Alfred Einstein but it's also inherent to the system that whatever cutoff line you originally use to define unique genius is going to get eroded over time as business & humanitarian cases pile up. Plus people outside the country learn to adapt their individual cases to better resemble the Diagnostic criteria.
Bingbong
4d ago
Yeah my dad was born into a poor family in a fishing-dominated area of Northern England and prettymuch had to bail to Australia to get his family's hands out of his pockets.
Bingbong
4d ago
I'm of Anglo descent, my father was born in a pretty grim part of Northern UK just after WW2 and managed to get out of 'the poverty trap' via joining the army, getting a skilled trade and then heading overseas. But in his description the culture of poor Northern English households was pretty similar to the African and Indigenous mindset. He's one of 7 siblings, and whilst he was still domiciled anywhere near his mother he was expected to send about half of his post-tax wages back home to support the broader family.
Maybe less 'random cousin Igwe jumps out of a bush' than some of the African examples but a lot of this stuff is just downstream of being poor and having large families. It's always going to be difficult to be the first one trying to better yourself if the clan assumes that wins are socialized.
Bingbong
5d ago
It could point to racial animus
If the equivalent footage was played with a white homeless male saying anything akin it'd be complete journalistic open slather.
Bingbong
5d ago
I would put it above the George Floyd footage in terms of emotional impact
Honestly if you watch the George Floyd footage there's enough in there to support a reasonable take that Chauvin was an asshole but didn't ultimately kill Floyd. Chokeholds do not work like that, positional asphyxiation may potentially work like that, a highly stressful situation plus some positional asphyxiation plus a lot of drugs in the system is the most likely causatory factor in Floyd's death
Bingbong
5d ago
He also says something about a white bitch or white woman whilst he's getting off the bus post-stabbing.
If this was reversed and somebody dropped the N-word deboarding, national martyr etcetera.
Bingbong
5d ago
Yeah I was just in Beijing. Definitely a trend towards Biang Biang/Shaanxi places lately.
Bingbong
5d ago
Sichuanese has definitely taken off hard in the last decade or two, though having just been to Beijing I'd say there's a decent diversity available. Personally I just assume Hot Pot margins must be insane.
Bingbong
5d ago
I do find it interesting how as international tourism gets more accessible to upwardly mobile developing nations their tourists tend to catch a lot of flak for visibility and doing undesired things. Chinese arguably got the most 20 years ago (though as somebody who travels a lot I think they've worked out most of the rough edges now), then Indians now since there's such a large mostly-affluent population. Even in my own experience I find that rich Africans (from Africa) tend to be some of the absolute worst in terms of obnoxiousness and interactions with service staff, but I assume that's downstream of the Nigerians I see being 1%ers in their own country and that being their typical cultural modus operandi around service staff.
Bingbong
6d ago
Weren't a bunch of those Chinese soldiers in-universe holograms created to exacerbate stereotypes?
Bingbong
6d ago
Also in the case of Australia the local trades are so unionized and wildly overpaid that there's not even really much of a pathway for sheer weight of bodies to help solve the housing issue through forcing construction wages down to regional norms.
The whole 'high skilled' thing feels like a relic of manufacturing economies with true artisans when now in the days of services being ascendant aside from a few obvious niches like surgeons and lawyers there's a great fungibility of labor in milquetoast laptop sinecures.
Bingbong
6d ago
Meanwhile you've got a plethora of other states like Singapore, Malaysia, the Gulf Arabs etcetera where the solution to this is bringing foreigners from less-advanced economies to do the shit jobs but not providing any particular pathway to family migration and/or permanent settlement.
Bingbong
6d ago
occupying the top rung of a pre-existing power structure that was, and remained, populated almost entirely by Indian people who were carrying on day-to-day business as they always had
I mean ironically the post of colonial overlord had historically bounced between a bunch of non-Indian invaders prior to the British. Mughals et al. It's not like Britain came in and were the only ones to ever subjugate the Indian people.
Bingbong
6d ago
Meanwhile in China somebody can take a crack at building a business that actually has some sort of tangible impact on the physical world (and not the ''AI-powered Grindr for Dogs'' somebody in that comment section mentioned) instead of the current SAASpit that defines modern Western tech.
Bingbong
6d ago
My personal issue with a lot of the 'high skilled immigrant' discourse is that a huge chunk of high-paid positions in the modern economy are essentially vapor atop vast flows of rent-seeking. I've done pretty well out of the tech economy personally, but there's massive chunks of jobs which don't really have much of an objective function.
This is further exacerbated when you import from certain countries where there's a cultural understanding of intense gaming of KPIs and little-to-no interest in actually 'building' anything. I have sympathy from the people from those countries, as their internal political economy means it's very hard to get ahead in a vast sea of standardized tests and affirmative action, but it's on them to go remake their country into somewhere nice to be instead of needfully KPI-maxing into high ranks of the Western Celestial Bureaucracy in companies that essentially just exist. Most of these jobs could be adequately performed by a local, or a flow chart.
Bingbong
6d ago
Part of it seems to be an insane blindspot amidst the Left with underdog fetishism where it's gauche to consider what the current underdogs actually believe and how they'd hypothetically behave if handed the reins of power.
Maybe it's follow-on from the 'Left social values are simply correct and will naturally win over the foreigners if given a chance' kinda mindset but there's unspoken assumption of human cultural fungibility that leads to the whole 'Muslim Democrat Local Leaders cancel Pride Week' headline that's cropping up fairly frequently now. Even most Left thinking on Israel v Palestine seems to be of the 'Israel are currently being mean but if they stopped the situation would instantly resolve into kumbayah'
Bingbong
6d ago
Sinners came out pretty recently and their portrayal of the local white Southerners is a pretty insane caricature. Like a ton of the narrative hinges on them deciding to lynch the black community just 'cause with no particular provocation after selling them an old mill.
Bingbong
6d ago
Is the nationalistic Indian movie being even-handed to the former colonial masters?
Yeah but anybody with a cursory understanding of Indian history knows how silly a lot of this stuff is. I've watched Lagaan and there's the mild hilarity of the Raja being held up as caring for the people and part of the proverbial furniture when he's most likely from an invasive Mughal lineage.
I feel like the uptick in mental illness and drug-motivated public transport stuff means that frequently the best move is to just not move, since you're not dealing with a rational actor.
Yes, somebody should have assisted the woman in the clip but generally on public transport when confronted with the irrational people just freeze.
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