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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   24151 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 8, 2025

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The competition with China is asinine. It really is time for the West to look inward, abandon Asia to the Chinese (not even really that, given so many in the region have their own severe differences with them, including most of their neighbors - the Russia truces are only ever temporary, the India tensions will continue indefinitely) and resolve the ongoing demographic and political crisis, which feeds into so many other economic and social issues.

China is pretty nice now in the tier 1 cities. Sure, the Chinese work long hours, but so do many Americans (you know who works the ‘996’? New York investment bankers, hotshot corporate lawyers and apparently Silicon Valley AI startup engineers). The food is good, the societies are clean and safe. You can’t be too nasty about state policy, but the same applies in much of Europe, and even in the US you still “just” get your life ruined and yourself cancelled depending on what you said and who is in power.

In 50 years, will Britain still be British? Will Germany still be German? Will America - the America of the prosperous and peaceful time still within living memory - still be America? Trump (or Miller, I guess) was right about this. Countries aren’t soil, they’re people. The people in China 50 years from now will be the descendants of the people in China 50 years ago (by and large). Can the same be said for Europeans, in Europe or in North America?

Forget about Chinese cars and datacenters; the Chinese have rarely dreamed of world domination, they are content in their backyard and with the occasional moment of international abuse around fishing fleets and ripping off poor countries with expensive development loans (many of which backfire on them anyway). Whether America rules the world or not is irrelevant to most of its people - at the height of the British Empire, the greatest in world history, the people of the metropole worked in squalid Victorian factories and lived in disgusting, fetid tenements. Even today material conditions are much better. Plenty of small countries do just fine.

And it really is important to emphasize just how bad the demographic transition is. I would rather live under the Chinese thumb in Hong Kong than “free” in Rio de Janeiro. I would rather live pretty much anywhere in China than in Somalia, Syria, Afghanistan, Niger, much of Central America, Eritrea, Haiti. And yet this is what Western lands are becoming. Better to submit to Xi Jinping than suffer Houellebecq’s Submission, although in many ways even that text is far, far too optimistic about what awaits us.

Houellebecq’s Submission

I thought to meself, "I kmow that name..." Turns out I have Platform on my bookshelf, lo these past 15 or more years. I think I started to read it and had the same visceral rejection that I experienced reading Portnoy's Complaint and simply put it down. Maybe it's worth another spin on the Houellebecq tilt-a-whirl if this Submission book is any good.

Submission is a good book, but just as horny as Platform (as is almost all of Houellebecq's work).

It is amazing how many literary novels include literature professors having sex with hot coeds.

To be fair, that was the main reason to become a literature professor up until the current year (which may have something to do with the current state of literature professors).

Just like salary, bonus, health insurance, and a 401(k) match, getting to be an authority figure in an environment full of young women in their prime beauty is part of the compensation package.

Xi Jinping doesn't particularly want submission. He wants the disputed islands and Taiwan. Fears about China taking over the world are extremely overblown they don't care that Mongolia an extremely weak country on their is a democracy after all. Global intervention is seen as a failure of the Mao era. See the Syrian civil war which involved every powerful and some less powerful countries but not China.

That doesn't quite square with their militarization of Antarctica, claims on Korean research outposts in the Yellow Sea, opposition to THAAD in South Korea, and aggression towards India and Bhutan. Not to mention how expansive those "disputed islands" are. Most of them are geographically closer to the Philippines. The "nine-dash line" lies 30 km off the Palawan coast.

better to submit to Xi Jinping than suffer Houellebecq’s Submission

Particularly as Putin welcomes millions of Indians to Russia too. Scary is the future ahead.

Could you elaborate on this scary future? I'm getting sick of Indians being portrayed as an amorphous pestilence. Like a brown mongol horde dipped in shit that's about to destroy western civilizations.

Clearly you (or people who make such comments) find something about the character of Indians to be revolting.

What's the source of it ? Is it lived experience ? Is it that they are Pagans ? Is it the state of their nation ? Is it a feeling of being threatened ? Is it something else ?

I can easily pass off as 'one of the good ones' so I am not too bothered. But, I've realized that my calibration of how a section of American society viewed Indians was off by a wild margin. I am trying to re-calibrate, so an honest answer would be appreciated. Don't hold back.

edit: I am reading all of the replies. Will try to find a common theme to consolidate this over the weekend.

I can easily pass off as 'one of the good ones' so I am not too bothered.

You really should be. No Edict of Expulsion ever included an "except the good ones" clause, and even if it did it's unlikely you'd be treated nearly as well as you are now.

I see this phenomenon in dissident spaces a lot, where non-whites underestimate the threat that HBD/racialism actually poses to them personally. There's this deflection away from taking it too seriously, in the mold of "they don't care where you're from as long as you're racist", but at a certain point, you have to assume that people actually mean what they say. If you don't believe present rhetoric is particularly worrying, you can also extrapolate beyond the current horizon; personally, if Total Chud Victory is to pass, I'd put 40-50% probability on turnabout becoming fair play, in the "Make India Aryan Again" sense.

Don’t worry bro, it’s just the Great American Hazing Ritual in action. In fifty years, your Catholic half-Hispanic grandchildren will be bitching and moaning about how we shouldn’t be letting in infinity Congolese.

Every IT worker I know IRL hates them due to past experience.

Generally incompetent, deflect, don't do their job , needy. Sure there are exceptions but they noted no other foreigners are like that.

Most groups they cooperate with abroad are 20% crap, on Indians are 80% crappy.

Nobody else mentioned it, but as best as I can tell 100% of the attempts to scam friends and family have been from subcontinentals. They stole my friend's elderly mother's savings, without remorse. Kitboga alone has probably done massive reputational damage.

What's the source of it ?

Stuff like the cow shit bathing festival. I know, know, it's just one village but there's no other country in the world, that isn't a failed state, where that would be allowed to continue. The rest of the country would think "this reflects bad on us, it needs to end". But indians are probably thinking "oh, those are just untouchables or something, it doesn't matter what they do, I am better".

The social inequality is its own turn-off, I feel like. There are countries that haven't figured out civilization or outhouses, and there are countries that have figured out both (or at least the outhouses). But India's the only one with the reputation of being the country where the upper social classes simply DGAF about what the poor are doing in any way.

It's a lot of things, but the paganism and the volume is what exacerbates the rest. By paganism, I mean it literally, as well as just the strong cultural distance. These are volumes of folks with a foreign cultural and religious foundation, flooding the middle class, and the effect is visible.

Contrast with Hispanic immigration, where, while still not highly appreciated by the same demographic, are working lower class jobs, and are still firmly shaped by hundreds of years of Western / Christian culture.

Watching housing prices go up and tech jobs disappear to very obviously culturally foreign population is different than sharing a pew with laborers. In fact, if we were better at vetting, more serious about stopping drugs and forcing English, I think most anti-immigration Americans would be fine with a pretty large stream of legal Hispanic immigration. It is more akin to previous waves of European immigrants.

Is the paganism really a problem or the specific Paganism at play here, or possibly the people being pagan.

Are the Muslim subcontinentals less of an issue to you? Are east Asian pagans as much of an issue?

Muslim subcontinentals

Although I inadvertently started this, I don't want to engage much. But... I have long been fascinated by Persian(ate) culture and learned Persian (and Arabic). Shia Islam has some weird things, but remains in conversation with philosophy, logic etc. while Sunni Islam literally rejects philosophy, science (a fire burns because God wills it, there are no "chemical laws") and... asking questions. Subcontinental Muslims are Sunni - and they mix it with ugly tribal practices (nominally banned by Islam itself). The upper class Pakistanis I discuss Persian poetry with and dated in the past, are quite nice, insightful etc. but some habits and beliefs really shock me.

edit: I didn't state the core conceit: The Islamic subcontinent was heavily Persianized, the court language was (Afghan) Persian until the 1830s when the East India company changed local governance and administration (until then their agents learned Persian and kept records in it) although the population overall never spoke it much.

like I said it's the paganism + the volume. and again I'm using pagan for coming from a nonwestern Christian context. Everything about westernism, even aggressively secular westernism is a conversation with Christianity in very Christian language, which developed in conversation with Classical paganism.

Working class Americans don't like Indians because snooty brahmins treat them like shit, and Americans are used to more... nice class relations. It's not 100% of them but it's enough to develop a reputation. Add the paganism(which the average American probably doesn't see as an ultimate sin that invites vengeance on the community but does see as savagery we moved past thousands of years ago) and cultural oddities and the highly visible middleman minority status and it doesn't really help. The stories out of Canada(which many people might not realize are from Canada) probably make it worse. Tech workers complaining about H1B's are more a thing in higher social classes.

The stories out of Canada(which many people might not realize are from Canada) probably make it worse.

Ah, the old Canadian Internet Theory.

That said, when the tariffs first hit I was surprised at how many angry Canadians who'd otherwise pass I saw in the comment section of (EDIT: American) right wing youtubers.

Trump managed to lose Canadians who would naturally be MCGA Conservatives by shitposting about invading. That is why Carney beat Poilievre.

While binge-watching Canadian anti-Trump Youtube videos one dull evening, I was surprised that most of them were on channels that had previously been posting right-coded patriotic content up to and including British Empire nostalgia.

Could you elaborate on this scary future? I'm getting sick of Indians being portrayed as an amorphous pestilence. Like a brown mongol horde dipped in shit that's about to destroy western civilizations.

For me it is a result of experience with Roma/Gypsies who came from around northern-central India. Despite six hundred years of presence in Europe, they still form permanent underclass of people living in the most filthy and disgusting conditions imaginable. When I see documentaries from India with rivers of trash, it is indistinguishable from our gypsy slums in Slovakia like Lunik IX, despite chasm of thousands of miles and hundreds of years. There were considerable migrations into Europe from all around the place - including nomadic barbarians like Bulgars or Hungarians etc. with strange customs and religions. But none of them live like that now. I do not know why gypsies are like that, but it is what it is.

I find it fascinating that western countries are willingly importing this population from country of origin, just to appease some sort of savior complex.

You've already got like a hundred responses, but none point out the obvious:

the problem is that Indians are poor, and there are more than a billion of them. When poor immigrants come to western countries, there is like a 1 in 2 chance that they will be Indian.

There's nothing particularly unique to India that makes them unpleasant that other immigrant nations lack. They are just the most populous by far.

Lived experience

Bangalore - the road turns into dirt road to cross a creek

Bangalore - next to the creek there is a holy cow in such a pathetic state that you want to euthanize the poor animal

Bangalore - in the same creek a person is shitting in the creek, a person 10 meter downstream is washing his face

Bangalore - it stinks everywhere

Bangalore - our parktronic is beeping constantly because we move so slow that the poor car is thinking we are parking and there is a torrent of scooters passing by

Bangalore - no one even admits that such things as traffic laws even exist

Bangalore - when you go to the toilet in the business center you take a pee. After flushing the water color doesn't change

Bangalore - where the water bottles have warning - please crush before throwing.

Bangalore - where the contractor team is giving us a solution to the problem that is so offensively unworkable and stupid that it is literally insulting our intelligence

And from what I have heard Bengaluru is among the better parts of india on any metric.

I can tell similar stories about Pakistan (like the guy that took a shit on the street next to the fucking Centaurus Mall) and Bangladesh too.

London - just the night before the demo the Indian subcontractor living in Zurich arrives and the demo is not even started to be implemented. We ask why - well what do you expect for X pounds? But you said X pounds - well you wouldn't have given me the project otherwise.

UK - where every eastern european I know comes home to get medical treatment (and our healthcare is on the bad side), than take a chance with subcontinent personnel filled NHS

Bangladesh, Pakistan and India are the places where any person even with tiniest authority I have met is treating everyone above them with daily rimjob (figuratively, I hope) and everyone below them as subhuman cattle Eastern Europe - where the second generation Pakistani medical students from UK are mostly know for their willingness to bribe on any exam than study. Yeah - honest advice - if you need to ever be treated by brown skinned doctor that got its diploma in Eastern Europe - just run away.

The subcontinent has some serious cultural issues that will prevent it from becoming the next china. Being poor and being a shithole are different things - India will stop being poor eventually. But being a shithole is choice.

There seems to be only two ways to make sure Indians don't enshittify your country - highly selective with human rights or mass migration under the heavy yoke - like in the gulf.

Do I want to say that all of India is terrible and so are the people there - no - I haven't traveled there too much. And well - in a nation of 1.5B - there will be a lot of decent people. Probably more than all the whites combined. But I am absolutely certain that separating the good from the bad is not worth the effort for mass influx of Indians. Kris Rock had an amazing segment on the topic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niggas_vs._Black_People

The buttlicking superiors and lording over subordinates is really pernicious because whites hire them (especially the competent ones) and are impressed by how energetic and agreeable they are. But beneath them is a very different experience. People who buttlick expect the same from their subordinates and when they don't get this they are not pleased.

I was going to add some observations but they've already been pretty well made by others.

What I would say is, if freedom of association was real, what is the tax you would pay to work in an organisation without Indians? 5% of salary feels too low. 10% feels slightly high. But if the choice was an organisation with 100% Northern Europeans and one 50/50 Indians and Europeans, I'd take the 10% hit in a heartbeat.

Immigration is interesting because when you have a few token people from different countries, especially if well selected, it is very interesting. But as soon as you have lots of them it is shit. Really is a dose makes the poison.

My very spicy take on immigration is that it is basically "retard colonialism" where you take the people but not the land.

My very spicy take on immigration is that it is basically "retard colonialism" where you take the people but not the land.

I'm still always shocked that libs didn't go the opposite way on immigration. Brain draining the 3rd world.of their best and brightest, which frankly the 3rd world needs much more than we do, is so unfair. It's literally just another form of colonial value extraction.

We made our countries rich off their backs, and then compound that wealth by vacuuming up their best people, which further propels us AND keeps them down. Oops!

Off-the-cuff non-rigorous stream-of-consciousness take:

Their increased numbers mean assimilation has slowed and they remain foreign instead of assimilating. They have started tapping into the vicitimhood politics despite being recent arrivals who often do quite well for themselves which people see as hypocritical. They are displacing white collar workers who have rarely felt the effects of mass immigration this directly before and are thus shocked and outraged that this could happen to them. Those same white collar "chattering class" workers have a much bigger megaphone than the blue collar, so we are hearing a lot more about their grievances. Rural Indians have a third world mindset (clannishness, petty scams, lying to save face, deference to authority, cruelty to underlings, hygiene differences, etc) that is not unique to India but is nonetheless very alien and uncouth to middle class Americans. Also, honestly, there seems to be a small(?) minority who are hardcore ethnoreligious chauvinists who truly look down on their host countries. For example, I think erecting a 90-foot pagan monkey god statue in notoriously conservative Texas is a really bad PR move for an immigrant minority which is (presumably) seeking acceptance if not assimilation, but the attitude from that minority seems to be "tf Timmy gon do?", unfortunately, that colors people's opinions of all Indian immigrants.

I actually feel pretty bad for the Indians who were living quietly in Western countries, working hard, learning the language, trying to get naturalized, and otherwise being model citizens before the current immigration wave. I worked closely with two 2nd genration Indian-Americans who were basically indistinguishable from Euro-Americans besides their skin color and they were both great guys. I feel sorry that they are probably dealing with the fallout from all of these recent developments that occurred outside their control. They're not even immigrants, they're US citizens.

People deeply dislike Indian culture. The more they are exposed the less they like it.

When Indians came in small highly selected numbers then it was fine, they both contributed and assimilated. Then they started coming in greater numbers and lower quality.

These are issues that to some extent exists with pretty much all immigration but here they are worse because Indian culture genuinely is worse than most others, the median Indian is worse than most other groups (which when selection decreases leads to worse outcomes than for other groups), they interact with white collar people and ruin their environments as opposed to those of the working class.

Much of this is down to the scale of the immigration. When it reaches critical mass of sustained immigration then people no longer need to integrate and when the culture is deeply unpleasant and unadmirable to the host nation then the problem magnifies.

I have heard variations of '[X group] is the worst, and the more people are exposed the more they agree' of just about every variation of [X group] that has been a critical mass growing minority elsewhere.

The process of being distinct and displacing the familiar is itself what is unpleasant and unadmirable to many host nations, regardless of what continent the arrival comes from.

I mean it definitely doesn't seem to have been true of Mexicans. Even in the early 2000's when 'immigration' was a euphemism for 'Mexicans' people mostly didn't seem to have big problems with Mexican culture- maybe some griping they didn't learn English fast enough, but people thought they were mostly normal blue collar guys who worked hard and liked beer and sports.

There was a point in time, after the Mexican-American war where Mexican lynchings were greater than black lynchings in some Western states. The relative peacefulness we see now took a long time to generate.

Mexicans sit in a weird niche where they've technically been present much, much longer than alot of other ethnic groups(since atleast the 1800s) while simultaneously having a local source right next to America that provides a constant stream of 'fresh off the boat'(unlike other groups).

And, despite being around for so long, there was still a large action to deport illegals in the 1950s.

An addendum:

White, appalachian young men and women date, have children, and even sometimes marry latino / black spouses with enough regularity that nobody outside of the deepest hollers really cares (although, strangely, they'll still use racial slurs).

This is not the case with Indians. Furthermore, this isn't just an availability bias. The small cities on the edges of Appalachia are starting to see Indian transplants.

I don’t know about Appalachians specifically but whites and Hispanics intermarry regularly- especially white man/hispanic woman. I can’t say anyone would care if it was white/black instead but it’s considerably less common.

I think there's truth to both of these points. The displacement in my area is real. The further south I go in my city, the more like Mexico it becomes. Some houses that used to have one family now hold 2 or 3, or even 4. My kid's school is probably 50% Hispanic, and every time I go to a parent-teacher meeting I hear teachers speaking Spanish to the students.

Now, when it comes to displacement, a change in language and pop-up vendors all over the place isn't exactly terrible. Mexicans do seem to share a lot of cultural similarities. That being said, the less tangible but very real feeling of being minoritized in the place you and your parents grew up is constantly increasing.

As I said, the dynamic isn't unique but it also doesn't mean that the relative badness and the particular dynamics of the changing immigration of a specific group leads to a worsening impression of the specific group.

Also, there are tons of groups that caused very limited friction when they immigrated and it has limited correlation with how "familiar" the group is.

There are cultures that are bad and my contention is that subcontinental culture (I should have said that originally instead of Indian because much of the same issues exists for Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and Indians, and often regardless of religion) is both worse and that immigration from the subcontinent scales worse than from other relevant immigration sources, especially for white collar labour.

Over here in Sweden subcontinentals aren't a very big group but despite this they're still easily the most disliked and made fun of group in workplace environments.

Over here in Sweden subcontinentals aren't a very big group but despite this they're still easily the most disliked and made fun of group in workplace environments.

I'd have said MENA Muslims are more disliked.

In general absolutely, but not in the workplace.

Also, there are tons of groups that caused very limited friction when they immigrated and it has limited correlation with how "familiar" the group is.

Which, in turn, is sidestepping the point of 'critical mass' and 'displacing local culture with their own.'

The uncanny valley effect applies as much to cultural trappings as human faces. An english-speaker in a city full of english-language signs can feel comfortable, even if there are the occasional oddities of atypical roofings or words. An english-speaker in a city of completely unfamiliar languages may not feel completely at home, but accept it as categorically foreign. It is when the city is in the process of the halfway transition between one or the other, and particularly when moving from the familiar to the alien, that unease rises.

In Sweden, in 1980 7% of the population was foreign-born. In 2000, it was about 11%. In 2020, it is roughly 20%. It is historical circumstance that that later growth was more from sub-continentals than less familiar continentals. Unease and opposition to the foreigner would still be on the rise if it was Russians or French driving that demographic change.

You don't even have to reach into alternate history to find examples of dislike of French or Russian culture following from the French or Russian leaving their borders into others and their new hosts having to deal with it.

Except of course that there aren't many subcontinentals coming here and they're still disliked... People aren't complaining about subcontinentals due to displacement but because they dislike them. The situation is different from the Anglophone world.

Just because displacement is a cause for animosity doesn't mean that there aren't other causes and that different groups are perceived differently relative to each other.

Except of course that there aren't many subcontinentals coming here

There are. 'Many' is a wiggle-word, but there are enough coming that their presence is notable, even if more recent arrivals are just more proximal / visible examples of the broader trend of other migrants coming in and replacing cultural symbols rather than adopting them.

More comments

As far as I can tell, the rise in anti-Indian sentiment is a Canadian phenomenon (due to their own particular failures in immigration and housing policy) that has metastasized within the online right but not within the wider American public, which still has about the same opinion of Indians (tech nerds who smell funny) as it has for the past several decades. I've spent plenty of time around 1st and 2nd generation Indian immigrants and had very few bad experiences, at least of the sort worth generalizing. There are perhaps some ways in which they are less assimilated to American culture than other immigrant groups e.g. wedding traditions, but that's about it.

Uh, blue collar Americans dislike Indians more than they dislike other middleman minorities(Lebanese, Koreans, Albanians, etc) for being rude to their workers. This is not a highly visible complaint, but it primes the ground for other complaints.

Do you have a link to polling showing that Americans generally dislike Indians? I know Indian immigrants in the UK (who are highly selected and are the highest-earning, best-educated ethnic group as a result) poll net-positive but when I try to find US polls Google keeps sending me polls of Indian-Americans rather than polls about them.

I think the Indian discourse has really taken off due to increasing exposure to Indians in the workplace for white-collar workers (both through H1-Bs and outsourced teams), combined with increased abuse of visa systems that allows for lower-quality migrants to enter western countries. There is an entire industry built around facilitating Indian access to Western labor markets, often through dubious or outright fraudulent means. For example Canada rejected 74% of Indian student visa applicants in a recent crackdown on rampant visa fraud, and significantly reduced its student visa caps, particularly for low-quality degree mills that were being used as a backdoor immigration route.

The main issue I have seen in the workplace and academia is a high-trust vs. low-trust culture clash, combined with pretty blatant ethnic nepotism. To be clear, this problem is most acute among those born and educated in India. Second-generation Indian immigrants tend to have fewer of these issues, in my experience.

Grad school was an eye-opening experience. I flagged a number of cases of pretty blatant plagiarism while marking computer science work, which disproportionately involved Indian students. Most of those cases just resulted in a warning or a slap on the wrist, despite the academic integrity code proscribing significantly harsher penalties. We also had a case where an Indian student in my department likely faked a result for a paper in a pretty blatant way (his code could not reproduce the results he put in his draft) and another where an Indian student working on a textbook chapter plagiarized large sections of material from existing published resources. Both were caught before publication and handled in-house, the first guy was just told that he could not publish the paper without reproducible results, and the second was sent on remedial academic integrity training after he used the "cultural differences" defense. Sure, it's a low sample size, but the number of issues from the relatively small Indian student population was pretty jarring.

This trend continued in the workforce. One of my first jobs during college was working for an IT consultancy owned by an Indian immigrant, and it was a complete shitshow of wage violations, borderline fraud, and ethical violations that made me quit after a couple of weeks. Later in my career, I briefly had the misfortune of working for a company in the process of being hollowed out by Indian outsourcing. We would send the offshore teams requirements, and they would either send back garbage that didn't work or nothing at all. The most frustrating part was that they would often not even admit it - they would just say "yes we did the needful, the code is done" and sometimes it wouldn't even compile, or it was missing half the features required. It was legitimately maddening and I found a new job as soon as possible. Of course management declared the offshoring a huge success, gave themselves all bonuses, and presumably hopped to new jobs while the company crashed and burned in the background. I have also been in the industry long enough at this point to know that an Indian management chain is a big red flag - a few Indian employees is no big deal, but if it's 100% Indian.... I have seen some absolutely comical listings for jobs that I'd be overqualified for, but they are very clearly written with the intention of excluding everyone except the visa applicant they want to hire. The "Indian exec hiring co-ethnics" bit mentioned below is absolutely true in my experience as well, that's the one thing from the "izzat" post that really matched my experience - I have seen the demographics of entire departments change with astonishing speed with just one or two Indians inserting themselves into the hiring process.

Honestly Indians in the US should be on the front lines of demanding an immigration moratorium from India and the termination of the H1-B program. The level of annoyance and exhaustion has hit critical mass and has now entered the cultural consciousness, and I doubt it's going away anytime soon unless some significant policy changes happen.

So from my perspective, it's not that every Indian is bad - but a lot of the bad things come from Indians.

For example, a highly publicized case (warning: CBC, little better than government propaganda) revealed that an Indian student had posted a video claiming that students could use food banks as a source of free food, rather than being for emergencies. Food banks are are very much a "high trust society" sort of thing - knowing that people who are supposed to be able to pay their own way are exploiting them is something that makes us not want to support food banks, and makes our society less high trust.

Indians are also known for being much more willing to cheat the rules, often to the detriment of their host country. For example, Navjeet Singh drove through a stop sign and killed a mother and her young daughter. Investigations suggested that he had falsified his driving record, and refused to see the police afterwards. This is not the only Indian who has killed behind the wheel. Indians are also well known for bringing their racial animus to our country.

We've also had an extremely disproportionate increase in Indians, relative to other nationalities. This means that Indians, specifically, are going to bear the brunt of our ire as immigration causes an increase in difficulties for our country (most notably, housing prices).

On a personal level; I was involved in hiring and firing at a tech company. One of the employees we hired was an Indian woman with (supposedly) over 10 years of experience. Despite numerous requests for her to do things that should be second nature to a programmer (like check in her code, etc.), she was unable to produce something that even compiled after around 4 weeks of work (despite her claiming that most of her experience was in react, and me checking in daily to see if she needed assistance, provide her with sample code, etc.). When I took over the project when we eventually fired her, it ended up being around 6 components and maybe 400 lines of code (counting CSS). The biggest problem with her was her willingness to just lie - she would assure me that things were going well, she'd show me demos that were ChatGPT'd together, but never got closer to being done, etc. The whole thing left a very sour taste in my mouth.

Edit: I do want to mention that I have worked with Indians who range from good to great too; the thing that I (and a lot of others) don't like is that there is definitely a subset (and a large enough one that we've encountered it in the wild) who are willing to lie and cheat to get ahead.

Could you elaborate on this scary future? I'm getting sick of Indians being portrayed as an amorphous pestilence. Like a brown mongol horde dipped in shit that's about to destroy western civilizations.

Clearly you (or people who make such comments) find something about the character of Indians to be revolting.

Indians are what convinced me that there's a genetic component to filth-tolerance that's separate from general intelligence or conscientiousness. Africans in tin shacks post videos mocking their food handling practices.

Indian food safety leaves a lot to be desired, but even Indians don't wear shoes in the house which a lot of Americans do.

  • -10

I've heard the mockery about wearing shoes inside a few times now, but I don't get it. About the only time I really wear shoes inside is when I'm going in and out repeatedly. It's not really something Americans do all the time, and it's not like we stomp through mud and dog shit and then think it's perfectly fine to wear them inside.

I mean, there's still a significant fraction of Americans (maybe a third of the population and disproportionally older/rural) who always keep their shoes on indoors, and to people from certain other cultures this behavior really does feel like the equivalent of shaking someone's hand after sneezing in it or dipping it in mud, so it's not that surprising.

I think there's a variance in how lenient people are with shoes in the house. The other guy is telling me that it's ok because he takes his shoes off before he gets on the couch, and I've definitely been over at people's houses where they just wear shoes all the time. Not, like, getting into bed with shoes, but still.

Okay I want to pick a fight about this.

Americans view their floors differently than other countries' floors. Our floors are treated much more like the ground outside than a clean indoor surface. We don't put pillows on the floor and lay on them, we don't eat off the ground. So it's really not a big deal.

That said, we don't just track filth indoors -- we have doormats and it would be unthinkable to track mud or shit inside the house. And in practice, a lot of people do kick their shoes off when they get home, they just do it near the couch instead of the front door. I live in Japan where walking into someones house with your shoes on is a sin nearly as great as, say, whipping out your junk unprompted. And while their floors have less outside dirt and dust, they are far from clean unless swept regularly, especially if one has kids or pets. So the difference in cleanliness is also exaggerated.

Don't get me wrong, I'm firmly in the side of taking off shoes near the threshold. But this whole meme smacks of "wypipo don season dey food" or "white people are all inbred pedos," nonsense made up out of whole cloth, or very nearly.

Wearing shoes in the house is weird to me. I am wypipo.

I think a shift has occurred. When I was a kid 30 years ago everyone wore shoes in the house. A friend's mom saying "Take your shoes off at the door!" came across as a bit fussy. But these days, when in the U.S., I subconsciously note whether there's a shoe rack by the door and take my shoes off accordingly. Maybe Americans will eventually end up tabooing keeping shoes on indoors as well.

One can hope. It's jsut a nicer way to keep one's house, IMO. The Asians have it right.

I'm sorry but this is somewhere between nonsense and cope.

Our floors are treated much more like the ground outside than a clean indoor surface. We don't put pillows on the floor and lay on them, we don't eat off the ground. So it's really not a big deal.

So you admit that the floor is considered unclean in houses where people wear shoes indoors.

That said, we don't just track filth indoors -- we have doormats and it would be unthinkable to track mud or shit inside the house.

This is like an ancient Roman telling me that they don't just walk around with shit in their asscrack, they wipe with the communal sponge on a stick.

And while their floors have less outside dirt and dust, they are far from clean unless swept regularly, especially if one has kids or pets. So the difference in cleanliness is also exaggerated.

Any horizontal surface is going to accumulate dust and dirt, of course. But wearing shoes in the house isn't making it any better. It's simply inarguable that the sole of a shoe is dirtier than the sole of your foot.

But this whole meme smacks of "wypipo don season dey food" or "white people are all inbred pedos," nonsense made up out of whole cloth, or very nearly.

It's got nothing to do with wypipo. There's a lot of variation in cultural norms, but basically all of Eastern Europe takes their shoes off at home (inb4 "slavs are asiatics").

So you admit that the floor is considered unclean in houses where people wear shoes indoors.

The floor is considered unclean in houses where people don't wear shoes indoors. Like the one I'm living in now. It's not the big deal people make it out to be.

This is like an ancient Roman telling me that they don't just walk around with shit in their asscrack, they wipe with the communal sponge on a stick.

Unless you live in the middle of a hog farm, no, it's not like that at all. Your metaphor is really melodramatic.

Any horizontal surface is going to accumulate dust and dirt, of course. But wearing shoes in the house isn't making it any better.

Eh, but it's only slightly worse. Again, unless you live in an absolutely filthy environment, it's not really a big deal. To be fair, I would not have wanted to wear my shoes indoors when living in China because the eldritch grime and bio-filth on the streets and sidewalks was genuinely terrifying. But in Japan and the (rural) U.S. the streets are clean. The worst thing you might bring inside is a little sand or dirt, and those are easily handled with a doormat.

It's got nothing to do with wypipo.

Sure, and that's cool. Good for Slavs for doing that if they like it, and no I don't think they're Asiatics. What I mean by that comment was that it's a minor, mostly inconsequential cultural difference that gets blown up online because a certain subset of non-Euros/non-whites/non-Americans seem desperate for "insults" that will "stick" and so they fixate on this. I honestly think it's a lot of sour grapes, tbh, just like most "Do Americans really?"-style questions.

The floor is considered unclean in houses where people don't wear shoes indoors.

So then you must agree that not wearing shoes in the house is more hygienic, since the floor is cleaner in such houses. Which was my original point.

What I mean by that comment was that it's a minor, mostly inconsequential cultural difference that gets blown up online because a certain subset of non-Euros/non-whites/non-Americans seem desperate for "insults" that will "stick" and so they fixate on this. I honestly think it's a lot of sour grapes, tbh, just like most "Do Americans really?"-style questions.

I'm not familiar with the "shoe in house" discourse, it's simply a salient thing many Americans do that's less hygienic than the alternatives.

I guarantee it's not sour grapes in my case because I'm an American myself.

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Yes, I have a "Mud room" by the front door, with a bench and a place to hang coats and store shoes. Unfortunately, we almost always come into the house through the garage. The first floor is basically a high-use area. With four kids, food goes on the floor, people track dirt in from the backyard to the mudroom to the garage and back. It gets swept every day, mopped and vacuumed twice a week. I wouldn't eat off the floor (though my toddler does and hasn't gotten sick yet!).

No one wears shoes on the second floor.

For what it's worth, I have no problem with Indians and I've never known someone IRL who does. Bear in mind that this place is going to be skewed towards having spicy opinions that most people don't necessarily hold, so don't take the discourse here as representative of what Americans think.

What's the source of it ? Is it lived experience ?

Not-exactly-US, but yes, major source of attitude towards Indians is because ... Indians.

When company outsources to India: Deliverables are late or of substandard quality, code not fully functional or does nonsensical things. Any written documentation or communication has superfluously complicated ... overabundance... of text in Indian English style. Supposed to sound impressive, but devoid of content or meaning. When I complain, it's common they engage in blatant attempts at gaslighting me either about what was contracted or state of the work what was delivered.

At its worst, engaging with Indian contractors was like engaging with LLMs today before LLMs were a thing.

In comparison, when company outsources to Eastern Europe, quality sometimes suffers but usually it's like, outputs are decent, and if (when) they did it on the cheap and ran out of time, it is obvious what they didn't do because they ran out of time. It feels like I am talking with real people and can have a real conversation about remaining issues and how to resolve them.

When company does not only outsource, but hires one Indian executives, in few years major part of the company workforce are co-ethnics. Work experience rarely improves, except they are now in-house employees and there is no hope of outsourcing somewhere else.

It is one of the few cases of negative in-group ethnic stereotype I have seen unfold at the workplace. None of other out-group ethnic stereotypes or conspiracy theories hit the same, because usually interactions with people at work either are neutral, totally unexpected and unrelated to any stereotypes, or perhaps match the positive stereotypes.

My brother, why do you not live in India if there are no issues there? There's an infinite supply of potent human capital if only people with the drive and ability to organize and build a glittering future for the subcontinent instead of running to hang out in the West.

How about, you are Indian, think you are Indian, see others as Indian or not Indian, and act with indignance and arrogance at the mere suggestion that European people should not be ethnically replaced by infinity Indians.

To that extent I have no opinion of Indians other than they are not my kind. They work toward their own benefit and see themselves as worthy of whatever privilege they can find in any country they reside in. And that's enough for me to not want them. They, similar to every other ethnic group I can gripe about, have no reverence or care for preserving the native populations. To that extent, like jews being parasites that weaken it, and browns being locust that devour it, you would be a symbiote that slowly but surely outnumbers the organism you engage with until there's nothing left but you. Not overtly hostile, not overtly threatening, just a slow inevitability of numbers.

But those descriptive differences are all irrelevant to the ultimate point that none of these groups care about the existence or wellbeing of the organism they are interacting with. They, theirs and their needs always come first. There's no understanding of where the natives are coming from, no recognition of what they've done and overcome. It's just an infinite struggle session of browns fighting tooth an nail for any privilege they feel should be granted to them. With no recognition or respect for the needs of the other.

I genuinely hoped that Indians were just westerners with brown skin. That they could emotionally intuit and understand the importance of recognition and respect for the continued existence of other peoples. But no, Nationalism is for Indians. Ethnic pride is for Indians. India is for Indians and so to is every other country in the world. And if you disagree, how could you! Don't you understand the plight of Indians!

It's just wild to me. I can't imagine ethnically replacing another group of people. Yet the majority of the planet seems to think it's OK if they do it to others. There's just no thought or care.

To that extent, like jews being parasites that weaken it, and browns being locust that devour it

I might let "browns being locusts" pass since DWHD did say "don't hold back," but for everyone else in the thread- no, that doesn't mean you can just let loose with your unfiltered hot takes about Indians. You, however, decided it was also an opportunity to dump on your other obsession, as if suddenly the rules about broad generalizations about your outgroup were suspended. They are not. You've been warned and banned many, many times for this. You're just a hate-poster who barely controls yourself most of the time until you can't hold back any more, and you do... this.

Your last ban was 90 days. This one will also be 90 days. Next time is probably permanent.

Modding someone who isn't a liberal/progressive? But I thought this place was a hugbox for insane rightoids! /s

Thanks for the good work.

Can you name a single progressive here? I guess magicalkitty and whatever the other person's name is (aka darwin and impassionata), although I'm not sure they count given that they've been permabanned in the past and mostly troll now. There aren't any left to mod.

On the flip side, there's nothing in the post being modded that would deserve a ban on any other topic. There's no objective rule here (however much the mods may protest to the contrary), just an arbitrary line in the sand that the local userbase happens to draw further to the right than reddit does.

To be clear, I think they're doing a good job. But the hypocrisy and chest-thumping around free speech is profoundly irritating.

Can you name a single progressive here?

I wouldn't really call myself one as progressivism progressed passed my views sometime in the 2010s but basically anyone who reliably votes Republican likely would call me one

Can you name a single progressive here?

He said "progressive/liberal." "Progressive" is kind of a dirty word hereabouts, basically interchangeable with "woke," but do you not consider yourself a liberal?

On the flip side, there's nothing in the post being modded that would deserve a ban on any other topic.

Really? So you think he could have said something similar about another group and not been modded? Why do you think that? Or are you agreeing with Hanik that the mods are ZOG collaborators? That would be a twist.

There's no objective rule here (however much the mods may protest to the contrary), just an arbitrary line in the sand that the local userbase happens to draw further to the right than reddit does.

We aspire to consistency and objectivity and freely admit that we can achieve neither. But we generally can point to the rule that was broken and for all the times I have asked someone taking a bite out of our ankles to point to this mythical other foot on which can be found an equivalent shoe, it never ever happens. "You modded a Joo-poster for crossing a line, but you totally wouldn't do that on any other subject!" Okay, show me. Show me where someone else posted something equivalent and wasn't modded. Maybe it's happened, we do miss things. But every time I have made this request, what I get is a post that isn't equivalent and a 20-post-deep argument about why it's not. I mean, do I need to point out that in your link, @naraburns was not speaking as a mod? I am the one who posted a mod comment in that thread, and that was because @magicalkittycat was kind of pattern-matching as a Darwin-troll… it wasn't about his freedom to say what he thinks of Republicans.

To be clear, I think they're doing a good job. But the hypocrisy and chest-thumping around free speech is profoundly irritating.

"You're doing a good job and you also suck" is such a special snipe.

Thumps chest

Okay, show me. Show me where someone else posted something equivalent and wasn't modded.

*Laughs in self-contradiction*

every time I have made this request, what I get is a post that isn't equivalent and a 20-post-deep argument about why it's not.

You have a post that was designed to be as equivalent as possible, specifically for the purposes of this type of request. Yes, we also have a 20-post-deep argument where you persist in claiming that the modding was for other non-specified comments, but the latest is that you've said no, that was all bollocks; the modding was for the completely and totally equivalent post.

Okay, show me. Show me where someone else posted something equivalent and wasn't modded.

I'm pretty sure WhiningCoil made a comment earlier this year calling "urban youth" parasites or something similar and then some guy made a cringe top-level comment saying he was crashing out and leaving because there was no mod action about it and there was a whole big thread but I don't remember how it ended

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He said "progressive/liberal." "Progressive" is kind of a dirty word hereabouts, basically interchangeable with "woke," but do you not consider yourself a liberal?

In that case, why say progressive at all? And even then, the word 'liberal' contains multitudes. A Texas democrat, a Freddie De Boer flavor liberal who rarely culture wars, some kind of lawyer from Pittsburgh and some kind of software-adjacent lawyer are the vanguard now that everyone to their left is gone. Who's who, and whether that's an accurate cross-section of the label 'liberal' is left to you. 3-4 people is still not that many.

Once, I would have gotten pushback and been told I'm too sensitive and used to my progressive safe spaces and there's an even balance of left/right viewpoints. Now, there's tacit acknowledgement even from the mods that this is true and the party line has shifted to liberals are just too thin-skinned to deal with how wrong they are.

Sure, I'm probably a liberal, although I rarely participate in discussions and Mr. delVasto probably wasn't around when I did.

Really? So you think he could have said something similar about another group and not been modded? Why do you think that? Or are you agreeing with Hanik that the mods are ZOG collaborators? That would be a twist.

No, you aren't on the AIPAC payroll (or if you are, make me a mod daddy - I'll ban all the jew-haters tomorrow). But he was relatively polite, speaking clearly and it certainly wasn't low effort. His participation adhered to the rules better than Jiro saying 'Yeah, no' because he was butthurt about Jews being called parasites.

But yes, I'm pretty sure he could get away with hating on American blacks or illegal immigrants or Islamists or progressives or plenty of other groups for a lot longer than he could get away with hating on Jews. Coincidentally, there are a hell of a lot more Jews here than blacks or any of those other groups. Why do I think it would be modded differently? Because people hate on blacks and illegals all the time without consequence, maybe a bit less monomaniacally than SS, but just as virulently and often less articulately.

I mean, do I need to point out that in your link, @naraburns was not speaking as a mod?

What does it matter? His views on his objectivity are the same whether he's posting with mod flair or not.

"You're doing a good job and you also suck" is such a special snipe.

I don't have time to fully flesh this out because life, so concisely:

  1. You (the mod team and userbase more broadly, not you specifically) pride yourselves on being free speech absolutists and sneer at [insert lesser forum here.]
  2. Actual free speech absolutism leads to autistic 20 page screeds about holocaust denial and eventually devolves into 4chan.
  3. You know this. You tell those people to shut the fuck up and ban them when they get too obnoxious, or, as people here like to say: 'start scaring the hoes.' Iterate for definition of hoes moving rightward over time.
  4. 'Free speech' now works great because most substantial disagreement is gone from the platform and people pulling you too hard towards chanhood get banned.

I think you're right to do #3, and that you do a good job of it. I just think it's hypocritical to claim to be advocates of free speech when the only difference between you and reddit is where you've drawn the line in the sand, and that line is largely a product of the views of your userbase.

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To that extent, like jews being parasites that weaken it,

Yeah, no.

Yeah, yeah.

From Boasian anthropology, Freudian psychoanalysis, and the Frankfurt school adjacent work on prejudice and later mass propaganda, you have the academic underpinnings of the modern anti-white paradigm. As documented in detail by Kevin MacDonald and Andrew Joyce, these were jewish intellectual movements. Their influence is not just felt in various adjacent fields but their lies are still explicitly taught as fact in many.

To make a long story short, the majority of people have no conception of where the world they live in comes from, why it exists how it does or who made it to be that way. Black people just disproportionally appear in advertisements because... They just do! It's not as if there was a giant jewish academic movement centered around deconstructing 'white prejudice' through mass propaganda. That would be insane.

Academics in social sciences think racial categorization in humans is a social construct because... They just do! It can't be that there was a giant jewish academic movement centered around deconstructing biological distinctions between humans. That would be insane.

On top of that there exist large political movements driven by jewish intellectuals on both sides of the political isle that center around either explicit or implicit jewish interests. The Civil Rights movements and Marxism on the left, and the Neoconservative movement on the right. Both sides have supported mass immigration, of course.

It's hard to argue this, as jews have a very high nose for their own excellence. Anything bad that happens as a consequence of their self centered advocacy is just collateral damage in the wake of their righteous ethnic ego. If they even dare admit as much to themselves.

It can't be that there was a giant [J]ewish academic movement centered around deconstructing biological distinctions between humans.

I'm not sure I'd blame them if there were, given how obvious it had become that the Nations couldn't be trusted with such distinctions.

ack people just disproportionally appear in advertisements because... They just do! It's not as if there was a giant jewish academic movement centered around deconstructing 'white prejudice' through mass propaganda. That would be insane.

What planet are you living on? Affirmative Action and the pro-#representation woke block are in no way trying to hide their agenda. Landmark casting of a black Star Wars lead or whatever are inevitably cause for grand celebrations, and the political ramifications and academic justifications are outspokenly praised by the media! The politically-correct "box-ticking" phenomenon is many things, but it is not some secretive conspiracy that the Elders of Zion are gambling the public literally won't notice. Except for the word "Jewish", the overwhelming majority of the online left would happily endorse your second sentence!

(As for the Jewish angle, I think you're committing the usual anti-Semite's magic trick of blurring the distinction between "ideologies invented by people who happened to be ethnically Jewish" and "ideologies deliberately crafted to benefit the Jews as a community". The idea that Freud was playing 5D chess to undermine other races at the behest of his own is farcical if you've ever read any of his writing. He was plainly just an ordinary crank who thought he'd figured out the truth about human psychology. HBD itself, whose suppression you claim is some wicked Jewish plot, would predict that there would be a high percentage of Jewish individuals in the intellectual classes in any era, so it's not surprising that a high percentage of ideologies we inherited from 20th century intellectuals would have Jews in their family tree; you do not need to posit a secret coordinated plot to explain this observation.)

Indian immigrants to the anglosphere, up until recently, were highly selected and assimilated well. In the UK it was completely taken for granted that Indians integrated well and became good citizens, and... well, you weren't allowed to talk about what Pakistanis did. Then, roughly simultaneously, the immigration gates got opened to the chandala (more in some countries than others - but Canadians post online even more than Americans per capita), extremely-online tech workers started having to deal with cheap offshore Indian teams in their companies (where you get what you pay for), the expansion of internet access in India brought a flood of obnoxious hindutva seethers onto social media, and the /int/pol/etc. style banter of the internet made hay with the worst stuff they could find from India. As far as I can tell, Indians are still viewed very positively on the ground in America, because the average American encounters highly-selected and assimilated immigrants, but the online view is seeing some serious whiplash as the most-online corners of the internet encounter the most unpleasant aspects of India all at once.

There's a good chance you've read this, but just in case you haven't:

Indians Are Hated Because They Are Dark and Can't Play Football

I find this almost comedic in its wrongness.

There are visceral reasons some people dislike Indians, it will rarely be their skin color, rather it is smell and fashion.

There are personality reasons why people dislike Indians. It is not lack of masculinity, although some people think it cricket is a little queer. Rather it is backstabbiness, the general grafty and scammy nature of doing business with an Indian, wherein every transaction is a negotiation. And once you thought you had a deal there is another round of negotiation. Its like going to a used car dealer, except for something as simple as fulfilling an order of widgets that is the same volume and the same widget as last month, or asking a junior associate to take on a project.

There is also, the ever present trash/littering issue as well.

I have.

I read it again. It's a good one. On second reading, I like how sharp and straightforward this article is. It's easy reading. Therefore it must be damn hard writing.

I agree with his theory. But I'm also a comparatively fair, sporty and charismatic Indian (if I say so myself). It places blame on India traits that my ego is shielded from.

It would be convenient for me if this theory were true. Yet, I treat it with a degree of scepticism to counter my own prioirs. But his points are all solid.

  • People, at least once they hit a certain age, want the SFH and the big yard with the fence and the space to raise their children.

I would say that's a very specific type of people. Snooty urbanist types like myself sometimes call them "breeders." It works if youre a married couple, age 25-45, with young children and a steady long-term job. It does not work nearly so well for others.

For me, i grew up a place like that. I remember it being great as a kid because the yard was big enough for me to run, and my boomer parents could either leave me at home or easily drive me around town. The local public school was nothing special, but good enough.

When i became a teenager though, it was stifling. A suburban yard isn't nearly enough space for any real sports, so it just become a pain the ass thing to take care of. Everything is designed around driving, so i was stuck dependant on my parents for all transportation until i got old enough to drive. The local school was excruciatingly boring for a gifted kid. No one seemed to care about anything except work, grades, and sportsball. If you were caught outside "loitering," the police would come and forcibly bring you home. The "spacious" surban home still had thin walls and a bad layout, so we had no privacy. I, like many teens, started staying up late to avoid my parents.

When i go back there now as an adult, it seems creepy. An adult single male just doesnt fit in there at all. Everything is oriented around child rearing- for young children. Almost nothing is open at night. There's hardly anything in the way of aets, music, or culture. The social life all revolves around "the parents of my chikd's friends." Its just not a place someone like me can live.

I remember it being great as a kid because the yard was big enough for me to run, and my boomer parents could either leave me at home or easily drive me around town.

GenXers like you didn't have smartphones, tablets or computers available though. I think we can assume suburban children today rarely use the yard the way you did unless their use of digital devices is strictly restricted or banned, which in most cases it isn't.

When i became a teenager though, it was stifling.

Not untrue, but how many years one spends as a teenager? 4 years from 14 to 18 perhaps? Substantial but a minority fraction compared to time one is a kid, and not that large fraction of human lifespan. I prefer my kids will have good childhood at cost of some boredom as teenagers (boredom is supposedly good for intellectual growth anyway). Hopefully they are ready equipped to handle some adult excitement when they are adults. Much better than living in a city where kids can be easily exposed to unsavory or dangerous side of adult excitement.

Nobody expects single adult males to move to suburbia. Lack of single adult men having fun is more of a feature, really.

14-18 is when you're supposed to transition into an adult not just bodily (that happens on its own for most), but also socially and psychologically. Seems unwise to just assume "rebellion" will do all the work here. Many anecdotes of young adults either being infantile or throwing themselves in the deep end of adulthood after being stifled during formational years.

Regarding rebellion, the whole theory of teenage rebellion as commonly understood has struck me as wrong recently. Most teens aren't universally rebellious, they copy who they are around - and if they're around peers, they will copy the most charismatic and loud of those peers, hence the whole "peer pressure" thing. Parents call it rebellion but in fact it's just a transition of primary authority.

I'd say we had a rather good discussion on this matter here. I agree with @coffee_enjoyer - teenage rebellion is very much real in the sense that when the average teenager encounters a grumpy old man or woman who wants to block him/her from pursuing sex, partying and fun in general while at the same time lacking any authority to actually control the supply of sex, alcohol and drugs, that old Boomer will only get laughed at.

14-18 is when you're supposed to transition into an adult

This process is broken (particularly for boys) across the West regardless of urban form, although I agree car-dependent suburbia doesn't help. [Things would be different if a teen could run a beater car with the income from a Saturday job and some DIY shop time on Sunday afternoon - I don't know how realistic that ever was in the US, but given the cost of insurance for teen drivers it probably never should have been.]

Wasn't it standard in the US before 1990 or so for high schoolers to perform as part-time workers most of the crummy jobs that were later given to illegal immigrants?

Teens did work more, and that was a good thing in terms of the transition to adulthood. I don't think they did the jobs that are now being done by illegal immigrants. Teens couldn't do seasonal agricultural work or heavy construction unless it was in their own family or a close friend's business. The classic teen jobs in the 1990s UK I grew up in were seasonal tourism-related work, waiting tables, and retail, which AFAIK are now more likely to be done by undergraduates. Some older teens did warehouse work or entry-level office admin, but that tended to be restricted to the summer between school and university.

cost of insurance for teen drivers

This is a non-factor if insurance isn't mandatory, but it means the old pay higher rates to subsidize the young and not the other way around, so naturally that's a non-starter today.

14-18 is when you're supposed to transition into an adult not just bodily (that happens on its own for most), but also socially and psychologically. Seems unwise to just assume "rebellion" will do all the work here. Many anecdotes of young adults either being infantile or throwing themselves in the deep end of adulthood after being stifled during formational years.

So where did I claim that "rebellion" will do any work? Scans comments I wrote. Apparently nowhere, which is good as I remember writing no such thing. I did wrote that some cultural limitations on sex and drugs puts limits and boundaries how far teenage rebellion will push them. In more concrete terms, in today's day and time and culture, teenagers are prone to experiment with premarital sex and mind-altering substances. I believe it will be a more innocuous experience in a low population density moderately high trust suburbia. Part of maintaining that includes that adults consider topics of sex and drugs uncouth instead of interesting conversation starters with random young adult males (which was the original complaint upthread).

I can agree suburbia is neither the ancestral hunter-gatherer or agricultural environment. Neither is any of available alternatives. Are megacities more conductive for social and psychological growth to adulthood? Until recently most people lived their whole lives in small rural communities with population far below Dunbar's number. Cities were not really comparable to modern cities in size, and in their modest size were disease-ridden population sinks, meaning, they were places where many people went to die childless. Fertility ratios in modern Western urbanized areas suggest cities are still population sinks when we have solved disease with indoor plumbing and antibiotics.

Suppose many kids are bit bored and more than bit sheltered in sterotypical suburbia. If they stay bored for more than one week, I'd say that betrays only emptiness of mind and lack of creativity, and I am uncertain how city life would help with it? What precious experiences are there to be found in a big city that kids will miss out on if faced with few boring teenage years in suburbia? High culture? I propose that only minuscule percentage of teenagers in places like NYC frequent or obtain value from the Met or MOMA or access to university tier libraries or any other similar venue. Perhaps some highly successful people can find a super enriching bubble for raising children in a big city, but that is very select slice of population. Hard city life? I suppose most kids can and will survive and be "hardened" through a stereotypical hard city high school experience (humans are quite adaptable and have survived in quite shitty societies). Still I'd rather avoid such environments if I can, because I do not think that is the civilization I want my kids to grow in and consider as "normal".

History of literature is full of artsy authors complaining how stifling small provincial towns and then later suburbs were for more than a century now, and yet they remain popular and sought after localities. Seems likely to that most people who seek out the artsy vibrancy are exceptional people, and very few who seek it achieve anything of note with it.

4 years from 14 to 18 perhaps? Substantial but a minority fraction compared to time one is a kid, and not that large fraction of human lifespan.

It's a rather important period for psychological development and social maturation though.

I prefer my kids will have good childhood at cost of some boredom as teenagers (boredom is supposedly good for intellectual growth anyway). Hopefully they are ready equipped to handle some adult excitement when they are adults.

In college I noticed that my classmates who had grown up in New York were generally more responsible and less likely to get into the sorts of trouble that a naive suburbanite would. Now, it certainly had more to do with parenting style than the nature of the built environment, but the latter sort of kid was notable for their paucity of life experience and inability to deal with interpersonal conflict. Personally, I went from living in a third world country to an American exurb at age 8 and the latter was so mind-numbingly boring that I have no memory of anything that happened in my life, good or bad, between then and high school.

I don't see why it should be a selling point of inner city childhood that you "get" to become that sort of unnaive(?) hardboiled(?) person with lots of adult-tier "life experiences" before you are an adult.

I do have many things to sneer at about American parenting practices, suburban and urban alike, including ability to handle various social situations, but I am restraining myself not to rant about them as I don't see the concept of suburbia (detached houses, low population density, boring by standard of single young adults) as the culprit.

Certainly I can see it would be nice to bring up kids in a nice city with "high culture" and civilized people and such, but current available cities are bit lackluster in that regard.

Personally, I went from living in a third world country to an American exurb at age 8 and the latter was so mind-numbingly boring that I have no memory of anything that happened in my life, good or bad, between then and high school.

I have hard time believing this lack of memories is a feature of American exurb. Perhaps it was just you?

Not untrue, but how many years one spends as a teenager? 4 years from 14 to 18 perhaps?

Well, the literal mathematical answer would be from the second you turn 13 until just the second you turn 20. So 7 years. Almost half their life at that point, and more than half of the years they actually remember.

A less literal answer is that it's all the years when an adolescent is expected to have adult-type responsibilities, but without adult-type privileges. So roughly from age 10-18, although the exact age range depends on the person and their situation. But the exact ages don't matter, we see the same pattern play out again and again and again- an adolescent is stuck living in an environment that's profoundly bad for them. It's kind of odd to me that so many parents say "I'm moving to the suburbs for the sake of my children," but don't seem to care at all about what it does to their older children.

But hey, I'm an adult single male, so no one give a shit what I think. Let the soccer moms rule society.

A less literal answer is that it's all the years when an adolescent is expected to have adult-type responsibilities, but without adult-type privileges.

I don't think there is such a thing. Normally, both privileges and responsibilities get gradually added as someone gets older. Things like having to work to pay rent are adult responsibilities, and people in that age range rarely have that responsibility. And I'm sure you can name privileges that someone just below 18 has that someone at 10 doesn't.

Not untrue, but how many years one spends as a teenager? 4 years from 14 to 18 perhaps? Substantial but a minority fraction compared to time one is a kid, and not that large fraction of human lifespan.

Small children play in the yard with their dads. By the time they're six, they're old enough to play with friends on their own. Options for autonomous play are extremely limited in suburbia which means that kids basically play in front of the house on the driveway or, if the street is quiet enough, on the street.

Kids under sixteen rely on their parents to drive them to every single activity since they have no other means of transportation. That means those activities are usually planned by the parents too. So much for intellectual growth.

boredom is supposedly good for intellectual growth anyway

It's 2025. Nobody's going to be bored, they'll just scroll tiktok if there's no point going outside except when Mom drags them to soccer practice.

Kids under sixteen rely on their parents to drive them to every single activity since they have no other means of transportation.

This is the key problem with American suburbs. Zoning laws make it impossible to build anything other than houses in suburbs, and there's no public transport because US zoning is designed around cars.

In the UK, suburbs have pubs, shops, schools, parks, churches, and buses to get to denser areas if you want. We get most of the upsides (our houses and gardens are smaller, to be fair) and few of the downsides.

If only we could build more of them...

As someone who's pro-suburb, I like places with human-scale mini-downtowns – usually just one street – with those kinds of thing, and I would heartily support linking them with one another, nearby towns, and the city with buses. But the nearby city gets to define our mass-transit policy, and they want jobs downtown with commuter links to hollowed out bedroom communities, so that's what our mass-transit policy supports. The suburbs that maintain their own characters do so in defiance of the city and of transit.

Small children play in the yard with their dads. By the time they're six, they're old enough to play with friends on their own. Options for autonomous play are extremely limited in suburbia which means that kids basically play in front of the house on the driveway or, if the street is quiet enough, on the street.

From what I see, options for autonomous outdoors play in a big city are not better and usually much worse. No yard either behind or front of the house. All environments are built. If you are lucky, they are managed. Street and driveway certainly are not an option for kids to hang around, usually you hang around inside. In a nice suburb you have access to some parks, playgrounds and like. (You could say you have access to parks and playgrounds and like in a city, too, but cities get the drawbacks from higher population density.)

Kids under sixteen rely on their parents to drive them to every single activity since they have no other means of transportation. That means those activities are usually planned by the parents too. So much for intellectual growth.

I kind view that this structured activity craze is pushed by adult FOMO. I though myself as a bit of loner nerdy kid and yet I had spent a great deal of unplanned hanging around time in friends' places after school and during weekends, and then we got ideas. DnD campaign, transliterated some short stories to Angerthas Moria and then briefly tried to learn to speak in Sindarin, which was too much like learning languages in school, so we come up with our own language. One summer one of us got access to someones old video camcorder, so during span of two summer we made amateur home movies, with only select safe parts shown to parents (in retrospect the edgy parts were quite innocent too). Later, girls and illicit booze, but for some reason I was no longer cool for those parties. Also lot of time with nothing but books and imagination.

I see no fundamental reason why substantial part of similar class of experiences it could not be ... not exactly replicated, but have something similar in spirit. Kids have spirit of creativity if given the space and the opportunity and the means. Bookish kids will be drawn to bookish experiences. If the kids turn sportish, replace books with sports.

Regarding transportation, ideally really I'd find a bikeable neighborhood. Chances for that are better in suburbia than a city.

It's 2025. Nobody's going to be bored, they'll just scroll tiktok if there's no point going outside except when Mom drags them to soccer practice.

...I will be so disappointed if they only tiktok and don't find even a single obscure internet discussion forum teeming with political opinions I oppose. In any case, I will restrict internet access initially.

In a nice suburb you have access to some parks, playgrounds and like. (You could say you have access to parks and playgrounds and like in a city, too, but cities get the drawbacks from higher population density.)

If we're cherry picking just the nice suburbs, we're gonna have to cherry pick the nice urban neighborhoods too.

In my suburban neighborhood, the nearest park is nearly a mile away and requires crossing a five lane state highway. That park is about 150 feet square.

I kind view that this structured activity craze is pushed by adult FOMO.

Correct. Where do you think you find such adults? They move to the suburbs.

I though myself as a bit of loner nerdy kid and yet I had spent a great deal of unplanned hanging around time in friends' places after school and during weekends, and then we got ideas.

How old are you and where are you from? The situation is very different today. I know there are young kids on my street because I see them with their parents, but they do not play outside. My parents live in a neighborhood a few teenagers on the block and they are similarly never seen. The suburban reality today is phones and extracurriculars.

Regarding transportation, ideally really I'd find a bikeable neighborhood. Chances for that are better in suburbia than a city.

Assuming "bikeable" means that you can get somewhere you want to be, I wouldn't be so sure. The suburban housing division I grew up in was bikeable in the sense that you can bike around the subdivision and the streets are pretty quiet, but if you even wanted to get to the mall you'd have to bike on a 45MPH road without a bike lane. Urban cores don't even have roads with speed limits like that these days.

Obsessive helicopter parenting is not exclusive to the suburbs though. To the extent you see self-actualizing children unsupervised in urban areas, it's packs of young teens popping wheelies on bikes or terrorizing theater-goers. It's not like most kids growing up in the big city are spending their weekends taking the bus to the local art museum or enjoying restaurant week. They're either sitting inside on their phones or getting into the sort of trouble I doubt you really approve of.

At the same time, it's not like all suburban kids are hermetically sealed behind their parents' property line. They ride their bikes to their friends' houses, hang out at the park, explore the woods behind the housing development, etc. Living in the city isn't singificantly more stimulating than the suburbs if you don't have any money to spend on cool city things and the bulk of your leisure time rounds down to "loitering with your friends" regardless of where you live.

Small children play in the yard with their dads. By the time they're six, they're old enough to play with friends on their own. Options for autonomous play are extremely limited in suburbia which means that kids basically play in front of the house on the driveway or, if the street is quiet enough, on the street.

As an early millenial who grew up in an american-style suburb (in Canada), I didn't quite have the kind of feral childhood that boomers describe fondly, but I would usually just play in the streets around my block. I had an understanding with my parents that if I wasn't at home and I didn't tell them where I was going, I'd be somewhere around the block. This was from about 6 to 12. I had 3 friends living within seconds walking distance from me. If I wanted to go see a friend that lived further or go play at a park, or whatever, my parents would expect me to tell them where I was going, but in general it was more so that they could tell me when to come back for lunch/supper, or where to look if I wasn't back when I was expected.

Kids under sixteen rely on their parents to drive them to every single activity since they have no other means of transportation. That means those activities are usually planned by the parents too. So much for intellectual growth.

I would go places by bike or rollerblade, or by walking when I had ample time (and suburban teens usually have a lot of time). By the time I finished high school, I would also start taking the local buses, which, while they were not an efficient method of transportation between two points in the suburbs (they would still work in a pinch, but in general having to go to a larger hub in between extended travel time by at least 30 minutes), did the job.

Then get married and become a normie.

Like it or not, society doesn't revolve around men having fun. You're not a kid anymore. I'm not sure why eccentrics should have a veto over societal development. The suburbs are great for most people; your disinterest in growing up into a normie probably says more about you than it does about society.

OP’s argument appears to be that American suburbia is specifically structured around the sole consideration of enabling young children to play in yards and on lawns, and that this is done at the expense of everything else (walkability, services etc.). I’d add that this consideration doesn’t even hold up, because children nowadays scarcely use their free time to play in yards instead of staring at screens, and the period in their lives when they are even interested in playing in yards at all is rather short.

Then get married and become a normie. Like it or not, society doesn't revolve around men having fun. You're not a kid anymore.

Brutal.

This is a stage of adulthood that a lot of men have trouble with. Maybe an identity crisis over. Life isn't fun all of the time, and it gets more unfun with time. People grow old and die. First your parents and then your older siblings and cousins and then you. You may as well learn sooner, rather than later, that life is still meaningful and worth living even if it's not maximally fun.

your disinterest in growing up into a normie probably says more about you than it does about society.

Indeed.

I'm not sure why eccentrics should have a veto over societal development.

Who are you worried about veto-ing what exactly? There's approximately 0 veto-ing that prevents new suburban development, except for the NINBYism of neighboring suburban developments lol.

There's approximately 0 veto-ing that prevents new suburban development

Incorrect. Central planning at the state and regional level does so, through urban growth boundaries and similar growth restrictions. This isn't NIMBYs (who mostly don't want you to build halfway houses for criminals and/or the mentally ill, or dense pod housing, next to them), it's New Urbanists and similar anti-sprawl types restricting single family development.

While you're not wrong about urban boundaries, this:

who mostly don't want you to build halfway houses for criminals and/or the mentally ill, or dense pod housing, next to them

Is absolutely ridiculous lmao, just blatantly not true

I can find roughly infinite examples of quite literally every built form being opposed, my buddies neighborhood Facebook group is current having a meltdown because someone wants to build an extension on the back of their SFH

The New Urbanists are having about as much success restricting single family development as Hamas is at destroying Israel.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST1F

This isn't NIMBYs (who mostly don't want you to build halfway houses for criminals and/or the mentally ill, or dense pod housing, next to them)

That's the sanewashed position. The reality is that NIMBYs are against duplexes and fourplexes too.

And single-family homes on small lots.

The metro areas with urban growth boundaries are the same ones that resist densification downtown because that is what blue state voters (especially blue state Republicans) vote for. Houston and Austin are sprawling at the edges and densifying in the middle simultaneously because that is what Texans (including Austin liberals) vote for.

This effect is less obvious in the UK because everywhere has local politics dominated by Boomer NIMBYs and the only solution appears to be for the working-age population to wait it out six-to-a-bedroom in our overpriced hovels chanting "They can't live forever".

Houston and Austin are sprawling at the edges and densifying in the middle simultaneously because that is what Texans (including Austin liberals) vote for.

Ok, minor correction- while Austin liberals are decently pro-growth, the suburban sprawl in Texas is approved by... republicans. Including in metros where the core city votes very reliably blue. The suburbs outside the city which due the sprawling are invariably republican run and republican voting, although these republicans are often moderate. In general Texas republicans want to build out and Texas democrats want to build up, and except for Fort Worth(which is run by republicans) all the major cities are run by democrats so they build apartments, and all the suburbs are run by republicans so they build vast tracts of single family homes.

The 'smaller' cities(and this means not big 6- Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio, Austin, El Paso. Some of them are major cities population wise) in Texas are ruby red and mostly build out, but often build lower quality(more duplexes and stuff). If you're wondering why Texas is still red, it's mostly due to the overwhelming republican advantage in the smaller cities and their ability to keep pace in growth terms due to endless cheap suburbia.

I don't think there is any disagreement here. In Texas you have Texas Democrats who want to build up in their cities (and Texas Republicans don't try to stop them) and Texas Republicans who want to build out in their cities (and Texas Democrats don't try to stop them). But in the deep blue states (definitely including CA, OR and NY - I am not an expert on the US-wide situation) - and the rest of the Anglosphere with the appropriate recolouration - you have blue state Democrats who mostly don't want to build up in their cities (and blue state Republicans try to stop them when they do, and sometimes succeed) and blue state Republicans who are kind of meh about building out in their cities (and blue state Democrats try to stop them when they do, and often succeed).

This is unusual because it is a difference between blue state and red state political culture, not a difference between blue tribe and red tribe beliefs.

How much actual banning of single family homes is going on? The only thing I've seen is banning "single family zoning" which doesn't ban single family houses but bans the banning of denser options.

Oregon, Washington, and Tennessee have state-mandated urban growth boundaries for all cities. California has growth boundaries in many areas. Even Florida does. Maryland has a state growth plan that prevents building in Western Maryland. Then there's things like affordable housing requirements, which mean you can't build market price SFH in any given town unless you build the requisite number of subsidized pods.

Yes, but,

"breeders."

He's gay. Or using gay lingo. I don't forsee a wife and kids in his future.

Well then he should fix that.

How would you suggest he do that?

A 1972 case study suggests that it is possible to use a combination of wireheading and conditioning to treat homosexuality (h/t: The Occidental Observer), but that's probably not feasible for an individual.

I'll caveat that :

  • in someone who had some heterosexual arousal beforehand (reading between the lines, possibly to the point of what we call schizoid sexuality today), was a strict top, already reported weird sex burnout (and was a piece of work otherwise: don't do nutmeg)
  • extremely prone to addiction
  • seemingly ended up bisexual-ish by modern standards, although that doesn't really get in the way of the wife-and-kids bit as much as the druggie bit
  • in a study by a guy who was a bit of a crank even by the standards of his own time, depending on his reporting.

It's a pity that a) no credible research org is willing to try anything along these lines today, and b) the places that would want to try it are so sketchy, because it seems like tRMS should be a good deal more ethical and ... well, if not reversible, at least not as heavy on long-term infections and seizures. But I've got a kink for orientation play, followed a lot of bihackers in the tumblr ratsphere (and unintentional bihackers in the furry fandom), and I know more people who've ended up in relationships they can jerk off over but not consistently consummate than who've gotten it to work out well. Maybe they're just missing something -- I'm convinced that a lot of the 'physical' problems are downstream of scent and texture, which neither the Tulane study nor modern efforts generally train around -- but it might well be something deeper that only a small fraction of the populace can train.

On the gripping hand, if you just want a wife and kids, a gay guy doesn't really have to go that far. Beards are not new technology; post-nut clarity isn't gonna make a vial of your swimmers stop working; fujoshi are not unobtanium. Which points to the broader issue. Despite the perceptions, gay guys are looking for more than a hole (or pole) to pump and ignore until the next time they get horny.

It's not a defect, unless you consider him to be a means to an end rather than an end in himself.

Nope. Utterly, totally fucking wrong. A big part of why I like cities, as a straight man, is that the dating scene is better. Good luck with your OLD apps in the exurbs though.

Okay. "Breeders" is a gay term for straight people. You can borrow gay language. People reading it will think you are gay.

Not clear what old apps are. Dating apps? I have never used a dating app. This is actually confusing since the same apps are inside and outside city limits. Some other meaning of "apps" I'm not getting?

Pretty sure OLD = Online Dating

Ironically, i need to first move to a city to find a wife. Only then can i move to a suburb to spawn and become a normie. That's the American cycle of life.

I don't agree with the "just find a wife bro" that you're responding to, but this isn't true either. You can in fact find a nice girl (or boy) whether you live in the city center, in the suburbs, or in BFE nowhere. People do it all the time.

How do you find a potential wife who is presumably outside your social circle in a US suburb?

That is very much outside the scope of my expertise. I met my wife through online dating, so there's that. But otherwise I don't know how people are meeting, I just know that they do as a result of seeing people's stories over time.

(If you don't mind her weighing 250lbs)

Women in cities do tend to have better physiques than elsewhere (same with the men, of course). There's also a level of achievement in cities: you have to put up with the In This House We Believe crowd a lot more, but, absolutely and proportionately, you find more people who are deeply ambitious, agentic, and capable of making an important mark on the world. The culture of the suburbs is more just finding the joy in the day-to-day, which has its own value, but some people want something different.

Yeah, I'm biased, as someone deeply attracted to a will to power in women, but that's the next level up of concern. I can't imagine settling for a femoid whose dream in life is to trade in wall-to-wall beige carpets for grey walls and lighter-grey floorboards.

Then get married and become a normie.

You say this as if it is a choice.

I'd also ask to consider what's the point of being a normie in a decadent, degenerate society.

I think raising kids gives people immense satisfaction; and you can live in a decadent degenerate society and NOT be decadent or degenerate.

People would probably respond better to this sort of pro-suburban stuff if it was ever written as a paean to the sublime joys of seeing your children and caring for them and making that sacrifice, instead of longhouse hectoring because "you just have to, ok?! And if you don't, I'll tell the HOA!" Urbanists and suburbanists appear to be in some kind of competition to see who can me more off-putting to onlookers.

Those joys are unfortunately not very describable.

I have plenty of friends who do a pretty good job of it. Just got to overcome the instinctive negativity bias the internet gives people.

When i go back there now as an adult, it seems creepy. An adult single male just doesnt fit in there at all. Everything is oriented around child rearing- for young children. Almost nothing is open at night. There's hardly anything in the way of aets, music, or culture. The social life all revolves around "the parents of my chikd's friends." Its just not a place someone like me can live.

Depends on what you value. Arts, music, and culture can all be readily found on the internet. If you want to go experience it in person, it's typically a 20-30 minute drive away from the suburb. You can easily manage that a night or two a week.

I accept your critique as stifling a teenager, though I don't think that's a bad thing. What exactly is the problem as an adult male?

Arts, music, and culture can all be readily found on the internet. If you want to go experience it in person, it's typically a 20-30 minute drive away from the suburb. You can easily manage that a night or two a week.

But you're supposed to be doing all that socially, with other like-minded peers.

Arts, music, and culture can all be readily found on the internet

You will live in the suburb, you will consume essential human experiences via a screen, you will be happy

lol, lmao even

I'd say its a vibe more than anything specific, which makes it hard to put into words. Almost everyone i meet there is married , has kids, and moved there intentionally to raise their kids. They live in a world of Disney movies and Youtube Kids. Talking about sex, drugs, or anything "weird" is verboten.

And yeah, there's the internet... but I feel like the internet is getting worse every year. And driving 30 minutes for real life culture is highly optimistic. I don't just want to stare at some paintings, i want to be part of a community that looks at paintings, do you feel me?

They live in a world of Disney movies and Youtube Kids. Talking about sex, drugs, or anything "weird" is verboten.

Why this is a problem?

Since this is Themotte, the main factor I'd definitely bring up is that the US suburb is a heavily blue-pilling environment.

thinking bit more, my first reply above was too flippant.

More charitable version: vibe of no sex and drugs is exactly the main feature. And frankly: when I was kid, there was some amount of sex and drugs^1 and rock'n'roll behind the curtains. Anti-signalling is there to establish safe limits for teenagers to rebel against, to keep it at manageable levels, because is is frickin bad sign to have that stuff overtly around when you are raising kids.

I view that there is a purpose for having different urban environments for different stages of life. Single adults are more than welcome to leave suburbia, try adult life in college towns or artsy parts of big cities or spend few years as vagabonds (and ultimately see it for its emptiness in comparison to simple joys of love, marriage and family, and see the benefits of suburban environ).

^1 mostly pot and alcohol

And yeah, there's the internet... but I feel like the internet is getting worse every year. And driving 30 minutes for real life culture is highly optimistic. I don't just want to stare at some paintings, i want to be part of a community that looks at paintings, do you feel me?

Move to Europe.

And driving 30 minutes for real life culture is highly optimistic. I don't just want to stare at some paintings, i want to be part of a community that looks at paintings, do you feel me?

What's interesting is that most highly-cultured tier-1-city people live around 30 minutes by public transit from their local art museum, symphony orchestra, etc., but that doesn't stop them. I suspect it's partly a question of driving having a higher activation energy and commitment than public transit, and partly that, realistically, your suburb's city is unlikely to actually have good enough culture to sustain a feeling of culturedness.

Other public transit pros:

Generally the density of places with it means I can add a second or third destination after the primary museum, gallery, glory hole, restaurant on a whim

If your social sphere lives in the same area, it's much easier to meet up with people while doing any of this

You can read or do other stuff while you travel, no attention required

I can get drunk or high at the destination without coordinating a DD

Edit: I realize this is mildly uncouth but I'd like to offer an open mic to anyone drive-by downvoting this comment, why? Do you think my 'pros" here are stupid? Do you dislike public transit? I'm genuinely curious what motivates someone to look at the comment and go "I dislike this" but then also not articulate their thoughts at all. Let's chat

Other public transit pros:

Generally the density of places with it means I can add a second or third destination after the primary museum, gallery, glory hole, restaurant on a whim

If everyone else drives to a destination neighbourhood, then once you get there the place is necessarily dominated by parking so you can't walk from the theatre to the restaurant to the bar. There are ways of fixing this problem - New Urbanists talk about "park once" districts and point out that the proof-of-concept is the mall, which forces people to get out of their cars and walk from shop to shop by putting the "street" the shops are on indoors. But it means giving up the ability to park right outside the building you are going to.

Self driving cars make this a lot easier because (even if they are privately owned, rather than robotaxis which don't park up at all) parking in a lot outside the destination neighbourhood becomes zero cost. On the other hand, they will add a whole different set of moving congestion problems that we haven't really thought about yet.

I don't really understand your point because I live in Toronto and I have never once thought to myself "damn I can't walk from the ROM to the restaurant I'm meeting my friends at because there's too many parking lots in the way". I'm also generally not suffering for parking in Toronto when I drive places, I love how much underground parking we have hidden away.

Although that was actually my experience in San Antonio, so I think the real thing here is an urban planning skill issue lol

so I think the real thing here is an urban planning skill issue lol

This is the New Urbanist view - that you can absolutely build destination neighborhoods where everyone arrives by car, parks, and then walks within the neighborhood, but Americans fail to do so by default. Apart from indoor malls and planned New Urbanist communities, Toronto is the place I would most expect to pull it off.

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I live in a suburb right now and it's a 50 minute drive to the nearest proper city, where I can spend another 15 minutes looking for parking.

Looking at pics on the Internet is so far away from what any humans before the rise of the otaku would have recognized as "participating in culture" that I'm not even sure what you mean.

What exactly is the problem as an adult male?

OP's point is that there's no benefit to living in the suburbs as a single adult male and nothing to do. Is your rebuttal "that's not true, you can drive half an hour or more to a place with something to do, what's the problem"?

it's a 50 minute drive to the nearest proper city

This is an exurb. You live in the countryside. You might as well own a farm.

My friend, I live in a bedroom community of nearly a hundred thousand people. This is the reality of life in the bay area.

My apologies. I forget that a disproportionate share of this community hails from the most topographically inefficient metropolitan area in the country.

yeah? where do you live, where it's a 30 minute drive to the opera house, live theater, and art gallery, or any other sort of cultural scene, but you can still buy a large suburban home for cheap? are you a time traveler from the 1950s?

Houston is that way.

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Any city in Texas.

I used to live in Silver Spring, MD, in a decently sized house (it was a group home situation with a bunch of singles). It was 15 minutes drive to Bethesda, which is a fairly metropolitan downtown with everything a young man could desire (even art galleries!), or I could even ride my bicycle to the red line of the DC metro if I wanted to go into the city proper. To be honest I rarely did either because it was more fun and cheaper to spend time with my friends. A 4 bed, 3 bath similar to the one we rented is currently selling for $400K.

Not cheap, but my suburb of Seattle is a quicker drive to the theaters and museums and such than much of Seattle proper.

It’s about a 15 minute drive at this late hour, with no traffic.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


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