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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 30, 2024

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As someone living the “not very well integrated brownish expat working a lot in high earning sector in the West” life it makes me rather nervous to see the calibre and the intentions of the people supposedly vouching for my interests in this debate.

The social contract I came here for is simple. I broadly like the society these people created. I don’t think a different people could/would create this society so I am happy people of broadly the same ancestry and culture stay in control of it. In exchange of living in it and having my children become a proper part of it I can pay a lot in taxes and generally be a modal citizen at the sidelines of the society.

I am aware of the costs I am imposing on the society here. I am pricing the residents out of the housing market, causing some wage suppression, watering down their culture and social cohesion and giving them mixed-race grandkids who doesn’t quite look like them.

The desirable scenario for me is that immigrants are not too high in numbers and generally similar in profile to me so that the tensions aren’t too big and our posterity assimilates without attracting too much negative attention.

The very undesirable scenario for me is that high profile individuals shout it to the regular people from the top of their lungs that their culture is worthless, their children are deadweights, and they will use armies of people who look somewhat like me to teach them a lesson.

This is a very dangerous game they are playing. Many PMC immigrants seem entirely incapable of sensing the zeitgeist and subterranean societal currents of the countries they are living in. The people from the subcontinent are especially bad at this

I get the feeling that a lot of H1Bs just want to make their bag and go home: Vivek is pissed that not only that he's being treated as new money (because, well, he is) that he's also not getting any respect for being an Indian. Sundar and Nadella may be CEOs of American tech companies but he might as well be a Level 1 IT call center man for all the difference it makes to the average American.

And that's the rub. He wants respect and status, but you can't get that by sneering at the natives. Complaining about the football quarterback that goes home to fuck the prom queen outs you as a particular kind of nerd.

Complaining about the football quarterback that goes home to fuck the prom queen outs you as a particular kind of nerd.

I don't think being "a particular kind of nerd" has anything to do with it. It all comes down to the "sneering at the natives". IE, if you're going to approach the natives with derision and hostility what reasons have you've given them not to respond in kind?