2rafa calls them an honour based tribal culture.
Alongside the bigotry they have also been dealt debilitating losses in war, militarily and morally by Israel.
I suspect that even if we try to buy off each Palestinian with a billion dollars, many will spit on it since they place avenging their defeat over everything else, including their own prosperity.
I am a bit worried that Social media is biasing my opinions on Muslims given how the response of the vast majority of the Muslim diaspora has been extremely predictable with a small minority even being willing to concede that this looks really bad and perhaps there are lines that shouldn't be crossed.
I say this because I am good friends with a number of muslims (Indians) and I now sometimes wonder if the warmth only exists because I never discuss politics IRL.
---- A few minutes later ----
Now that the burst of angst has passed by and with a more clear mind I'd hope the general materialism that pervades middle class Indian thought also includes the Muslims since it is a much easier vice to control or justify.
These days I mostly dive straight into the technical documentation or the source code of whatever I am reading up on.
In the past these would have been reference books. But freely published technical documentation is better since they can be easily updated.
I do feel this state of things is sad since it removes a straight forward source of monetization for good technical writers, despite being objectively better.
In the absence of good docs or easily readable source code I start looking up blogs. Now, depending on the domain you may end up with a lot of blogspam, but as long as you search via HN, lobste.rs or a relevant subreddit you can do fine.
Textbooks/Research papers still have their place for more theoretical topics that do not become outdated as fast, but it is less than it was in the past.
Really? So it's just an axiom that everything bad in India is because of the "Britishers"? That certainly helps to understand Indians' beliefs, though it doesn't make me more sympathetic to them.
I do not appreciate you trying to strawman my position.
The core argument of Indian Nationalists is that the concept of India is not a colonial construct that only exists due to British Colonialization. They argue that people in the region have been linked by shared culture despite having lived through frequently changing borders.
Indian Nationalists do not make any claims to India's past economic heft. In face they very much accept that they have a long way to go. They feel that the fractured nature of their people works against them and that to accelerate development there is a need to leverage the cultural links to build a shared ethos if you ever want to get things done. For them the British are just one among the many foreign conquerors that have ruled the region since the 12th century. I very much detest it when people try to reduce it to just "Indians think India sucks because of the British". Whether or not it can be proved that India is worse off due to colonization is not at all a part of my argument.
Going back to elaborating on the point I had been trying to make to @justawoman.
What I am saying is even if there is objective evidence that India was destined to be the way it is regardless of past events, that wouldn't make the fact any less painful. And I recognize that some arguments that folks on themotte may throw around casually are actually painful to read depending on what race, religion, culture, gender or background you come from.
The whole segment on my experiences as an Indian on the internet is essentially me trying to say yes, I can empathize with the experience of @justawoman who has to argue with people casually discussing a topic that she cares deeply about and would only accept the highest standards of evidence.
But while I think that folks on themotte can be more careful with how they throw around words, it should not be something that's verboten, since topics when sociological, at best have scant evidence and that's the best we can ever get.
kiln
7mo ago
I would be interested to hear from someone more informed about the conflict whether there is any border other than "Free Palestine, from the river to the sea" that can be acceptable to a critical mass of Palestinians.
Progressive Hamas supporters speak as if Israel pulling back to 1967 borders and ending the Gaza blockade will bring eternal peace, but the average Palestinian on twitter or any video clip that ends up on Social media just seems happy as long of Jewish blood is spilled and regards every bit of Israel-Palestine as theirs.
I agree that Western civilizations seem to have a tendency to proselytize their religion, be it Christianity or Progressivism which doesn't seem to be Beijing's modus operandi. But, I am not sure if the Chinese government would be satisfied with just ruling over ethnically Chinese people.
The reason for this is hard to explain since most of us do not have a good mental model of how the Chinese government or the average Chinese citizen thinks. Most Chinese discourse happens on Chinese platforms in Chinese languages far removed from the English internet. But Beijing does seem to want to throw its weight around if it feels it can get away with it, as we've seen in a few incidents in the South China Sea or the military incursions along the Indo-Tibetan border. Though, this may be a tendency of any emerging Hegemon. The US has done it. Russia could do it in the past, but not anymore. China feels it's missing out.
kiln
1yr ago
True, that's the feeling I got from fanfiction.net or AO3, but there are fanfiction spaces that seem to have more men.
I can think of Spacebattles, Sufficient Velocity, fiction.live or Questionable Questing from the top of my mind. The last two especially, given the type of gratuitous smut you will find there.
I am not able to find the forum thread that did the poll, but you will feel the difference when reading works in these spaces vs AO3. Especially the way feelings are handled in the writing.
Of course, it is also possible that SB or SV just have better women writers and hence you don't experience the same uncanny valley feeling you get from reading a lot of AO3 authors writing men.
Do women on The Motte have any tells they use to predict whether a writer under a pseudonym is a man? Say by how they write women?
kiln
1yr ago
There are a lot of hobbies women have shown plenty of initiative and creativity in. It's just that the type of hobbies an average woman dedicates her leisure time to tends to be very different than that of men.
Most women seem to have a lower tolerance for hobbies that do not have some level of Social affirmation and interaction along the process. They are not as easily nerd sniped as men are.
I can blow a whole weekend, not speaking to a single soul, working on some obscure programming project like writing a TiddlyWiki launcher to reduce memory usage over the default Node.js launcher. A pointless investment of effort that will be of limited help for my employment prospects. No one else is going to use it or even see it. But it's fun though!
Women here make smarter choices. They demand more from their hobbies rather than just a short burst of satisfaction from solving some obscure problem. At the very least they expect it to have Social value. Though this may be changing with Social media addiction.
Footnote:
Reading what I wrote above, I realize, I have issues.
A lot of women in highly visible positions seem to be very much aligned with the progressive Zeitgeist in regarding rationalist adjacent spaces as *-ists. Aella seems to be an oddity in this regard. I am pretty sure if any other woman even makes a superficial attempt [1] at hearing out rationalist positions, she will build up a similar following of simps.
[1] By superficial attempt I do not mean to say anything about Aella. I don't follow her and don't know anything about her.
kiln
7mo ago
With such a large and growing population,
I am not particularly informed about this topic, and nor am I American, but are these genuine cases?
Most "Native Americans" I come across on Social media are a bunch of functionally white women making noises about feeling under represented. I often find out that they have a a native great grandmother from a poor financial background who married a well off white man and had kids who were raised white.
So, based on what I said above it is no surprise that I find their claims weak and superficial, the tiny bits of Native American cultural practices they perform in the name of reconnecting with their roots more close to putting on the stereotypical feathered Native American costume than genuine practice. And I find it hard to believe anyone would believe the spin.
Now, I am biased by Social media which often platforms performative hacks over genuine products, so I may be way way off on this.
I am South Indian (from Karnataka to be specific).
India and Bharat are both equally palatable to me or anyone else I know, though Bharat (or in Kannada Bharata) is rarely used out of formal contexts.
I suspect that in the South Indian context the name will only cause indigestion for Periyarists from Tamil Nadu. Others won't really care.
Edit: In Karnataka, the few people who do care, namely Kannada activists in the Old Mysore region only have the issue that Bharata as it is written in Sanskrit is a more accurate name with Bharat being a bastardization of the name by Hindi.
kiln
1yr ago
I have observed that most Hindu Indian diaspora folks are non-practicing and do not have any serious engagement with their cultural traditions or philosophy. At best they may dress up for Diwali and often not even that. A good chunk of Urban India also belongs to this category.
I am also pretty much the same, the modern deracinated Indian, so I am not trying to throw shade or anything. Given this cultural upbringing, I do not think Sunak, Patel or Braverman's policy positions have any religious basis.
It is possible that this is just coincidence, but you're not wrong in saying that Indians (but not progressive Indian diaspora) are more likely to be critical when Pakistan is involved. India already gets a horrible rap in the media especially on gender issues and more recently on Caste and Nationalism. Indians are extremely wary of facing further backlash due to the depredations of the Pakistanis being conflated with Indians since they're all "South Asian". For example, I saw a post on reddit speaking about the British Grooming gang issue as a problem the "South Asian" community needs to face. Many Indians do not see Pakistanis as their community, especially if they are Hindu.
The animus between the average Indian and Pakistani is as real as the animus between Ukraine and Russia. Shared blood or similarities in culture only makes the wound deeper rather than "superficial" as many Westerners and progressive diaspora like to claim.
The Indian commentariat also feels there is an increasing tendency of Progressive media to lump negative coverage of Pakistani mainland or diaspora with South Asia. This is perceived by Indians as an insincere attempt to wash away the ills of Pakistan as South Asian since any positive coverage is happily proclaimed as Pakistani
| Origin | +ve coverage | -ve coverage |
| Pakistan | Pakistani | South Asian |
| India | South Asian | Indian |
Forgive the horrible formatting but, I can't seem to get the markdown tables right.
Proportionally, do Trans women have greater visibility in the Open Source ecosystem as compared to Cis Women?
This is anecdotal, but I've often noticed that, I read a technical blog post by someone, end up following them, find that they are women (pronouns/name) and later find that they are trans.
At this point almost all women whose technical blogs I follow are Trans. So, this makes me wonder, are Cis women Software Engineers just not interested in Open Source or writing blogs? If there is some sort of discrimination involved then it should also effect Trans women since they are just another username on the screen, just like everyone else. In fact they may even face more discrimination than Cis women.
This very much looks like something progressives should be up in the arms about since Identarian politics and equality of outcome is very much their thing. But you only have strategic silence.
I think this is potentially evidence against the blank slatism that says systemic discrimination is the only possible reason for the lack of female representation in certain occupations. One issue you could poke in this argument is that Trans women were socialized as male, but I think all the young boys who are being socialized as girls today will soon prove them wrong.
I don't think my CS domain interests are too niche. They mostly lean towards Systems, Security, Programming languages (Go, Rust, C++, ...). I source technical content on these topics from HN, lobste.rs and some subreddits which themselves are not overly niche platforms in the Software industry. So I think there is something to think about here.
OR I am just falling prey to some sort of Sampling bias and the argument above is garbage.
Having said all this, I actually think a 50/50 gender distribution typically helps in creating a healthier work atmosphere, mitigating the worst excesses of either gender. Male dominated work environments can run you ragged and be outright abusive when under a lot of competition.
<rant>But, I do not see any way to achieve this due to the asymmetry in the distribution of interest. When taken to its logical conclusion, average expendable (male) Software Engineers like me will be left hanging out to dry unlike average or below average women. And it galls me when my concerns get gaslighted as incompetent men who cannot handle the competition.
</rant>More options
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