ResoluteRaven
No bio...
User ID: 867
ResoluteRaven
4d ago
And I can say that because I’ve been living in Argentina. Immigrants actually are kind of awful.
My impression was that people only liked Argentina because mass Italian immigration in the 19th century made it whiter and more culturally European than its Latin American neighbors. Otherwise it would have the cultural cachet of Ecuador or Venezuela.
I’m sick and tired of being exposed to gun violence in Chicago.
I don't think recent immigrants have much to do with this.
San Francisco is a boring Asian town now which use to be like the people from Full House.
I can't say I've seen a boring Asian town with this many homeless people, drug addicts, and shoplifters roaming the streets. And at least Asian cities build apartments.
ResoluteRaven
4d ago
Your friendly neighborhood hapa, reporting in (though I hear 'wasian' is the new hip term).
I grew up with more or less perfect OPOL i.e. my mom only spoke to me in Mandarin and my dad only spoke to me in English. I speak the former with no discernable [foreign] accent, but with a limited vocabulary and reading skills. I would say my level is quite a bit higher than the average 2nd generation Chinese-American's. Family dinners growing up were some combination of your possibilities 3 and 4. My mom would address me directly in Mandarin and my dad directly or myself and my dad collectively in English, and I would address my parents collectively in English, but my mom directly in Mandarin. There were essentially always 3 conversations happening in parallel: one between me and my mom in Mandarin that my dad didn't understand more than a few words of, one between me and my dad in English that was somewhat above my mom's English level and about subjects in which she had little interest, and a third collective discussion in simpler English.
To put it simply, any option besides option 1 (and maybe option 2, but it's not a stable equilibrium) entails the total obliteration of joint family life.
I'd say that this arrangement can be thought of as one instance of Tolstoy's unhappy families, but is not uniquely bad compared to many other possibilities e.g. divorce, abuse, absent father. When there are serious issues, the ultimate cause is usually something else i.e. if you denigrate your spouse in a language they don't understand, is it your choice of language or the lack of respect that's the main problem? Intercultural marriages typically have multiple sources of friction, and speaking the same language won't eliminate them.
This naturally raises the question: why bother? Why not just teach your kids English at home so you can have conversations as a family and forget about all this nonsense?
Some might believe that there's cognitive benefits from multilingualism, but I'm pretty sure those are bunk
That's not my understanding, but I am of course biased in this matter.
This allows them to have a shared language with their grandparents.
This was the case for me, though my grandmother didn't even speak Mandarin that well, so communication was still difficult.
It's a matter of passing down the heritage. This one I find objectionable. I do not see much value in possessing "Russian heritage" and I hope that my kids see themselves as Americans rather than Russian-Americans or whatever. Our family came to this country because it is better than the place we left, why do we want to preserve the vestiges of the bad old country?
This is the crux of it. Some immigrants recognize themselves as being here for ideological reasons e.g. escaping communism, corruption, lawlessness, and consciously intend to leave the trappings of their birthplace behind, and other immigrants are here because their friend in New York offered them a job at his restaurant that paid more than whatever they were making at the time, and they spared about as much thought to the generational consequences of moving to a new nation as you would if you got a good job offer in the next town over. Why would the latter sort of person think of their language and traditions as something bad to be shed?
The overwhelmingly likely result of doing this to your family is that your kids don't speak your language as adults and they do not have a sense of the family as a cohesive unit.
My parents were never going to form a cohesive family unit under any circumstances, so I consider it better to have at least obtained a useful skill out of it.
This is America, you don't get to raise your kids in an insular culture unless you go fully Amish.
Do Hasidic Jews count as having gone "fully Amish"?
ResoluteRaven
20d ago
You're describing the life of a graduate student, which is fine for a time, but at some point most people will want something that's easier to obtain with a social network to draw on e.g. a job referral, meeting a potential spouse, a couch to crash on, someone to help you move, someone to ramble about philosophy to at a bar late at night, and so on. Perhaps your job is stable and you enjoy it enough that you don't need any of those things, in which case I envy you, but some part of my soul recoils at the thought of living like Nikola Tesla, great inventor or no.
ResoluteRaven
1mo ago
Many Chinese won't be satisfied until you recognize the unique culture of the village of Niaobulashi and the special way they fold their dumplings, but about the smallest number you might get would be 8 or 9, lining up more or less with Patrick Chovanec's Nine Nations of China.
ResoluteRaven
1mo ago
Interestingly, Taiwanese seem much more chill, the few times I’m in Taipei it always seems like the locals are eating and drinking outside, relaxing into the evening, but maybe there are cultural or ethnic differences there.
I think the difference is that the ambitious and energetic Taiwanese are all clustered in Hsinchu Science Park, doing business on the mainland, or have emigrated to the US.
ResoluteRaven
1mo ago
I think climate is certainly a factor. It's very difficult to keep building facades in subtropical or tropical climates clear of mold, vines, and water damage, and only places like Singapore are willing to expend the resources to maintain appearances in this way. Another is age; cities like Shanghai and Suzhou were built up long before the rest of the country. Shenzhen looks shiny and new now, but after a century in the same climate it may (differences in architecture and city planning aside) not look so different from Hong Kong i.e. overgrown and dilapidated.
ResoluteRaven
1mo ago
Heilongjiang does have more Russian influence than Liaoning; its capital Harbin had a majority ethnic Russian population in the early 20th century after all. However, all of the foods you mentioned are still commonly eaten across Northeast China. I would expect that simpler preparations e.g. boiled potatoes, sauerkraut, and pork are less likely to be found in restaurants than as home-cooked meals, and in some cases may be looked down upon as "peasant food" by young, upwardly mobile Chinese.
ResoluteRaven
1mo ago
I went to a magnet high school with a rigorous enough curriculum that even the chemical engineering program at a prestigious university was a step down in terms of difficulty, but I would still say I worked fairly hard.
Not that much I learned has been of use since then; most ChemE departments still teach as though all their students will end up working in oil and gas, when in reality less than 10% do these days.
ResoluteRaven
1mo ago
I've never had a hangover, and I've also never gone to sleep drunk. Perhaps those things are related, or I just don't drink enough (I have Asian glow).
ResoluteRaven
1mo ago
The closest thing I've read is The Tragedy of Liberation by Frank Dikötter, but it focuses more on the period immediately after 1949 than the Chinese Civil War itself.
ResoluteRaven
1mo ago
Is the taste of the food the only thing normal people care about at a restaurant?
It's just about all I care about, assuming the low bars of "won't get food poisoning" and "don't have to wait 2 hours for a meal" are cleared. When reading Yelp or Google reviews for restaurants I find it incredibly frustrating to wade through paragraphs of descriptions of the service, atmosphere, or other things I couldn't give less of a shit about, and prefer those written by Asian immigrants, who typically get right to the point and focus exclusively on the quality of the food. Of course, I'm far from normal, and the fact that I have this problem is evidence that your typical restaurant-goer does in fact care more about ambiance than me.
ResoluteRaven
1mo ago
delicious food in a shitty, antisocial environment doesn't bring that much pleasure
If I were a prisoner in solitary confinement and you served me a Michelin star meal, I think I'd disagree.
ResoluteRaven
1mo ago
I don't personally enjoy most paintings from the Impressionists onwards, including famous works by Monet, Van Gogh, Picasso, etc. and concur with Scott on the aesthetic qualities of Angelus Novus and his opinions on architecture, expressed elsewhere. I think the latter field has more of an obligation to cater to the lowest common denominator taste-wise, as your average philistine can choose not to visit a modern art exhibition, but can't choose not to see the buildings they walk by every day. One area where I do have more "refined" tastes (literally) is food, but I only proffer my opinions on the subject when asked, cook for myself whenever possible, and make no great effort to change people's mind about [insert weird foreign dish that your average American would find disgusting].
ResoluteRaven
1mo ago
For those with knowledge/believers of HBD, what does it have to say about Indians (East Asia), Arabs, & Hispanics (IQ wise)? I've been living in my city and I've noticed Indians tend to live in the nicer neighborhoods. Perhaps just selection effects from immigration?
There are high-performing (IQ-wise and economically) subgroups of all these populations e.g. Tamil Brahmins for Indians, Maronite Christians for Arabs, and the white elites of any Latin American country for Hispanics, so you'll have to be more specific. Typically, immigrants who do not have access to a land border to hop or refugee status to apply for are disproportionately from these sorts of high-performing groups and subject to additional selection effects as well. People disagree on the magnitude of each of these effects, but that they exist there should be no doubt.
Hispanics have similar problems as black people, what does HBD say about them?
If by similar problems you mean crime, then at least as far as Mexico is concerned it seems to me that interpersonal violence correlates with Spanish conquistador ancestry. Areas that remain majority indigenous, such as the Yucatan peninsula, have low homicide rates, and travelers tend to remark that the locals are quite docile compared to their mestizo neighbors. There is a confounding factor, in that the whiter states in the north are close to the American border, a major catalyst for crime, but seeing as the Spainards who came to the New World were from areas like Extremadura that were at the front lines of the Reconquista for centuries (cf. the Scotch-Irish, who came from the bloody no-man's land between England and Scotland) it makes sense to me.
ResoluteRaven
1mo ago
The HBD explanation for the differences between northern and southern Italy isn't African ancestry, it's the Hajnal line. The north fell within the region where the influence of the Catholic church and the manor system was sufficient to break traditional clan networks and create an individualistic population with higher social trust where it was possible to do business with strangers, while in the south the same type of tribal honor culture persisted that holds back much of the Middle East and Africa ("Me and my brothers against my cousins; me and my cousins against the world").
ResoluteRaven
1mo ago
No, I don't think the average man is disgusted by painted nails. I find the Empress Dowager Cixi-type nail extensions to be silly and impractical but have no visceral reaction to them, despite being on the extreme end of the prudishness spectrum when it comes to other types of body modifications e.g. tattoos, piercings, and dyed hair. I've also seen nothing to indicate that this practice is gaining in popularity in the real world.
ResoluteRaven
1mo ago
It wasn't independent during the period of greatest emigration though.
ResoluteRaven
2mo ago
Some leftover Japanese-style chicken curry and rice. I use the premade roux cubes but add a lot of additional spices, and my family recipe includes okra and coconut milk. Afterwards I'll prepare a big pot of black-eyed peas with ham hocks and collard greens for the week.
ResoluteRaven
2mo ago
Rotisserie chicken eaters: Science says that diets high in sodium are bad for you. What do you do about this?
If I am preparing a meal and one of the ingredients is salty then I add less salt. If all of my ingredients are salty then I go to the grocery store to restock on fresh produce. Easy enough.
It is funny to me that teammates in high school baseball would insist on drinking Gatorade and getting others to drink Gatorade on the basis that you NEED those electrolytes on hot days or you'd DIE.
I sweat so much on hot summer days, even just standing outside, that I will get dizzy without some source of electrolytes, whether gatorade, jerky, or something else. Other people don't seem to have this problem and I envy them.
ResoluteRaven
2mo ago
Is it really so simple that the conspiracy theories of a revolutionary pack of morons in 1979 drove them to fight their only geopolitical friends in the region?
In a word, yes. The Iranian revolutionary program is a descendant of the Muslim Brotherhood ideology of Sayyid Qutb (though this is embarassing for them to admit, as he was a Sunni and spawned other groups that have been or are enemies of Iran), which was itself a repackaging of early 20th century leftist ideas in an anticolonial context where poor Muslims are the oppressed class and Western powers are the oppressors. Israel, being for most intents and purposes a Western settler-colonialist state founded by Europeans, is a natural enemy for people with such beliefs. As you pointed out, the timing of the revolution in Iran allowed the new regime to step in as the champions of the Palestinian cause at the precise moment the Arab governments were giving up the struggle and signing peace accords, and the ability to channel the free-floating anger of millions of young Muslim men was a handy thing for them until Hamas finally broke their leash and set off the geopolitical chain reaction we are still living through.
ResoluteRaven
2mo ago
Have users on this forum struggled with mixed identities? How did you resolve the frictions? Do you have a stable identity that you're now at peace with?
I grew up as a mixed race State Department kid living in a series of third world countries. I was not particularly introspective about my ethnic or cultural identity until some point in high school, when I put some thought into which aspects of my parents' cultures I valued and consciously took those parts for my own. I do not fit in perfectly with any larger cultural community and that is fine. If I have children, they will most likely assimilate fully into broader American culture regardless of what efforts I make to preserve our ancestral traditions, language, etc., and that is also simply the way of things.
ResoluteRaven
2mo ago
ResoluteRaven
2mo ago
Black culture is more warm in the sense that people are gregarious, speak louder, touch each other more, and have more large raucous social gatherings than certain types of borderline autistic northern Europeans or WASPs who stand six feet apart, never talk over each other, and eat meals of boiled potatoes and beef in respectful silence. Of course, not all western cultures are like the latter, and southern whites in the US are noticeably more similar to their black neighbors in behavior, food, accent, etc. compared to northeners.
ResoluteRaven
2mo ago
So if they said "I politically believe that people like me are benefited from seeing people with views like you as demonic monsters and that killing you would be a net positive to my group's quality of life" is that really gonna be ok?
Yes, those are the rules. Anyone is free to express their desire to commit torture, rape, and genocide as long as they are polite about it. That may seem ridiculous, but it has worked out for us so far, while other comparable fora have died from lack of engagement or collapsed into (greater) ideological conformity.
I don't see what the practical consequences of this decision going the other way would have been, other than increasing the number of illegal immigrants on paper. If mass deportations were going to happen, they would have already, so what difference does it make?
As to the role of the Church in all this, what did you think real Christianity meant? Vibes? Papers? Essays? Trying to repurpose a universalist and egalitarian religion into a tool of nativist exclusion was always a fool's errand. Perhaps the laity can be kept ignorant of the tenets of their own faith, but not the elites who have to read and interpret the scriptures.
More options
Context Copy link