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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   28817 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 21, 2025

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The first one is obviously a scammer, lots of these come out of the woodwork to offer help (at a hefty price) to families whenever there's something newsworthy like a tragedy reported.

The grandpa's brother had a contact in the Chilean government? This sounds less like "simple leatherworker" and more like maybe something is going on that is not being reported. If any of this is true and not a story being peddled around by "Nataly" to make bank off the outrage about deportations. Sometimes people do make up fake stories to sell, shocking I know!

This sounds less like "simple leatherworker" and more like maybe something is going on that is not being reported.

He was granted asylum because he was tortured by Pinochet, so he was probably involved with left-wing politicos there. Maybe he kept in contact.

It's also... just not that hard to get in contact with government officials, in most countries. In the US, you can absolutely call your Senator because a passport is taking too long to renew, or because the feds are being too annoying about an EPA thing. There's an entire industry of constituent services. You'll get thrown around by half-dozen different aides and they probably won't help much unless it's the sorta problem that can be solved with a phone call, and I'd assume a helpful unrelated donation will get faster a response, but it's absolutely something John Public can and often does do.

I remember waiting a full year for the government to complete a task... at which point I reached out to my local Senator's office, and within two weeks, shockingly it was done.

The grandpa's brother had a contact in the Chilean government? This sounds less like "simple leatherworker" and more like maybe something is going on that is not being reported.

To be fair, I am no high-class fellow, and yet in a governmental crisis, my family could probably make calls to contacts to contact their contacts to contact their contacts and, eventually, find someone who might have heard something.

I wonder. The way it's reported sounds less "Cousin Miguel knows somebody whose sister-in-law is a clerk in a government office, maybe she can look this up" and more "somebody high up enough to get access to the information straight away". But it's all so nebulous it's not even sure that the alleged family exist, or the guy, or that this story is more than someone trying to use outrage bait to get a juicy payoff from selling interviews to the media (or I suppose using the media to publicise their GoFundMe to 'bring Grandpa home').

Unironically, this might be indicative of the single biggest difference between WEIRD and non-WEIRD societies: the expectation that people naturally will—and should!—leverage social ties, especially family/kinship ties, to get preferential treatment when dealing with large, impersonal bureaucracies like the government. The Chinese call it guanxi, but of course it has a million names besides, in basically every part of the world except Northern Europe and the Anglosphere. Hell, even in the Anglosphere, we have the old saw “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know”, which gestures at the same thing.

There’s not enough evidence to say whether this situation in particular is a case of such behavior, but it being Latin America, I wouldn’t be terribly surprised. Then again, it is Chile, which I vaguely intuit is WEIRD-er than par for the Hispanophone course.

I don't think this is a WEIRD vs not situation. I'd expect anyone in a Western society, faced with a blank bureaucracy and a dire situation, to reach out to someone who might know someone who might know something about the situation.

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