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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

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What does "keeping it real" mean in this context? It seems to be implied to be something like "defend your reputation/social standing like a man", but I'm not sure if I have ever heard it used to mean that before.

Sikh Pajeet

I'm not sure if you've been told this before, but the thing where you protest (entirely too much) that the bad stereotypes of Indians should akshually only apply to Indians who are lower-caste than you never has the effect you probably hope for. Having gone to CS grad school, I've interacted with my fair share of both Indians running the whole spectrum from stereotypical Tamil Brahmins to mystery Punjabis in the IT office that all other Indians avoid, as well as people of other ethnicities (all sorts of SEA peoples) who are familiar with Indians and not bound by American taboos. I got to see multiple instances of the high-caste Indians running their mouth similarly to what you like doing; what then always happens is that (1) the SEA Indian connoisseurs would immediately pajeet-zone them, (2) the non-woke Caucasians, if they didn't already follow suit on their own, would take the cue from SEA; (3) the other high-caste Indians would do embarrassed we-aren't-all-like-that displays of contrition to the foreign audience. (Often also (4) the original guy would go on to be rejected by a string of Chinese girls and complain how it is terribly unfair.) The lower castes acting uncivilised, and the upper castes treating them as subhuman, are easily intuitively understood to just be different life stages of the same memeplex, toxoplasma style, even by people who had no exposure to the toxoplasma idea.