site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   24149 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 8, 2025

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

5
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Tyler Cowen had Dan Wang (author of Breakneck, originator of the 'China is run by engineers, US is run by lawyers' meme) on his podcast last week. IMO, Tyler's podcast is at it's best when he's debating rather than interviewing, part of why his year-end reviews are some of his best episodes. It's particularly interesting watching someone intelligent actually defend America and moreover champion causes that inevitably would code as lower-status to the intellectual class.

tl;dr, Tyler's views —

  1. Suburbs good, cars and highways good
  2. HSR/mass transit overrated (but we should still do better)
  3. America can build (gives the example of AI data centers)
  4. American Healthcare + rate of healthcare spending good
  5. China pandemic response bad, America pandemic response good

Massive quotes incoming. Skip ahead if you don't want to read Tyler's arguments:

COWEN: A very simple question. Doesn’t America just have better infrastructure than China? Let’s say I live in Columbus, Ohio. What exactly am I lacking in terms of infrastructure? I have this great semi-suburban life. It’s quite comfortable. What’s the problem?

WANG: America has excellent infrastructure if you own a car. If you are driving every day on the highways into the parking garages to work, that is quite fine. I’ve never been to Columbus, Ohio. I’m sure its airport is perfectly adequate. I live mostly in between Ann Arbor as well as Palo Alto. These are cities that enjoy access to two excellent airports: DTW as well as SFO. All of that is fine...

I think there should also be much better transit options within cities as well, because we are working through these subway systems built mostly 100 years ago now in New York City, which are screechingly loud. The noise levels on BART as well as New York City are sometimes exceeding these danger levels experienced by most people. I think that there should be just more options, rather than cars, as well as airports.

COWEN: Aren’t those relatively minor problems? I agree that we should build more rail, but mostly we’re not going to. We’ll improve airports, add more flights. The New York subway is clearly too loud, but part of the American genius is you don’t have to live in New York City. Say we did everything you just mentioned. Would GDP be more than 1% higher...Just get everyone a car, or almost everyone... I don’t see how we could make American cities into European cities. What we have are the very best suburbs. Chinese suburbs strike me as really quite mediocre. They can have excellent food as pretty much all of China does, but after that, I don’t see anything to recommend them at all.

And honestly, this seems to me to be the revealed preferences of most people. Europeans and Chinese who move to the US largely move to the burbs and buy the big car even while (at least the former) tut-tutting about how barbaric it all is. 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.

WANG: I think that my hypothesis is that China will continue to build much, much more because it doesn’t have a lot of these American notions of being super obsessed with financial measures, like profitability, as well as these other ratios. I think there is something much more common in China, as well as the rest of East Asia, where the business leaders are much more concerned about simply market share than they are about having really high profits.

COWEN: This critique that the United States is too financialized or too concerned with the bottom line, hasn’t recent experience with AI infrastructure and data centers shown we can rise to the occasion? It’s not obvious all of that will make money, but we’re going to put up trillions of dollars to do it. We’re going to do it pretty rapidly. We’re way ahead of China, certainly ahead of the rest of the world. The Gulf may end up in the running there.

On the pandemic and vaccines:

COWEN: That seems wrong to me. US underperformed by different bureaucratic measures, but what really mattered for saving lives and reopening was vaccines.

WANG: I agree.

COWEN: On that, US overperformed. China is miserable at the bottom of the barrel. They even had the Pfizer contract and wouldn’t even use those vaccines. They used their own inferior vaccines because they didn’t have a society of lawyers who would go crazy suing everyone. US, I think, in pandemic, everyone did terribly, but US got the vaccines, got them quickly, way ahead of schedule, and did certainly much better than China.

And yet. And yet! At one point we have this brief exchange:

WANG: ...What I am always asking is, what if they succeed on being the global center for automotives?

COWEN: Which is likely, right?

WANG: Which is likely. They’re on track to do that. Right now, they have about a third of global manufacturing capacity. They may continue gaining share, in part because they’re deindustrializing everyone else, deindustrializing Germany in particular, as well as Japan and South Korea. The US has mostly already deindustrialized itself, so it’s not in the firing line. At some point, there will be a second China shock coming for America’s manufacturing industries. They’re going to make all the drones. They’re going to make much of the electronics.

I can buy some of Tyler's takes, and as I mentioned it's refreshing to see an actual contrarian take about the competence of America. But at some point, it just transcends a contrarian take into cope territory. Why are we complacently accepting that China is going to be the global center for auto manufacturing on top of drones and everything else? Life might be good now, but if China is just 1950s America, and 1950s America was just 19th century Britain, aren't we headed for the same stagnation and broad irrelevance of the UK today?

Maybe some of the catastrophizing about China is overwrought and some of America's apparent weaknesses are just the invisible hand of the market moving in mysterious ways, while the gleaming bridges and HSR to nowhere are albatross projects and a drag on growth. Maybe our apparent decadence and vice are really just the product of a system optimized for giving it's people a good life, while Chinese grind 996 work weeks for shit wages to stroke Xi Jinping's ego. But man, I don't want to get hit with the rare earth metals stick whenever the POTUS doesn't kowtow to the emperor. I'm still torn between whether the economists should be running the show or whether we should keep them as far away from the levers of power as possible.

Make some actual tariffs that bite and laws that promote onshoring; and if consumers don't even notice an increase in prices it ain't working. If your argument is that we can't match the Chinese in whatever way, deregulate or bring Chinese companies here so we can learn from them or do whatever it takes to compete. Instead, we just decided to sell them H200s and erode one of our few remaining advantages (maybe someone more plugged in can comment on how significant this is?).

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.

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.

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.

More comments

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.

More comments

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

More comments

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.

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!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats