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If any of you are on the tech/ai/startup side of x (which I imagine is everybody here), you probably saw the following exchange:
A guy working as 'head of AI' for a company called Cline commented "Imagine the smell" under a photo of a hackathon.
Indians assumed that somebody commenting on the smellyness of a hackathon (I've been to many hackathons, and nerds smell) must be commenting on Indians, and thus freaked out.
The guy who made the comment replied to some of them saying that no, actually, he was just making a common internetism, and generally speaking to the smell of a bunch of guys in a packed room.
The guy's boss gets involved, surely due to the campaign by online Indians to get him fired, saying that he wouldn't be firing anybody.
Enough pressure happened that the guy's boss recanted, and fired the guy.
Now the internet is imagining a lot of smells, cline has earned a ton of bad will, and the general dislike of Indians in the tech community has grown.
Here are some thoughts on this:
I'm increasingly of the opinion that people should be able to filter the internet by country. I don't care what people from 9000 miles away, from a totally different culture, who have no investment or stake in my society have to say about it. I don't want to interact with these people. My life and my world is not a place for them to wage petty dramas and entertain themselves by harassing people here.
Indians specifically (and I say this as somebody who has spent a considerable amount of time in India, consuming indian culturalisms, and interacting with Indians) seem to have a particular penchant for online drama. There seems to be a particular focus on people saving or losing some form of "face", although that isn't exactly it. It's similar to honor culture you find in other societies, but maybe just its own Indian brand of it. I think what we're seeing here are two cultures which should be separated by 10,000 miles of ocean running into each other on the internet; the clash should not be unexpected.
"Imagine the smell" is not an anti-Indian slur, or at least it wasn't. It comes from image boards, and gets said under almost any moderately interesting photo of people. However, I think the massive freak out over this has turned it into one. Interdesting.
I feel that way not infrequently on the internet. There are times when I really don't want to hear the opinions of people who aren't American about American politics, or even the opinions from those outside of Pennsylvania. I feel like I'm getting opinions from a low-level LLM, foreigners have half-absorbed cliches about party primary politics from reading reddit, but have never actually voted in an American primary election. People who have never been to my town feel confident to tell me what life in my town is like.
I'm increasingly blackpilled about what actual internet discourse would look like if we excluded all the foreigners from talking about American elections. But would there be any internet left?
Oh, very much so. Perhaps Americans can also deign to stop trying to talk about how bad things are like in the UK without having a shred of lived experience (much as I dislike that phrase) of the place. Saying that the UK is a country where people regularly get arrested for saying mean things online is like saying the US is a country where schools regularly get shot up. It's misleading at best and outright false at worst.
What is the quantitative amount of UK lived experience required to be permitted to talk about how bad things are in the UK?
Is there a recency requirement or any sort of continuing education requirements?
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I have a non-rhetorical question:
Suppose that
(1) a person in the UK posts an anti-immigration statement on social media, something like "I'm sick and tired of our government letting in people from third-world sh*tholes, they tend to commit a lot of crime, consume lots of welfare benefits, and don't add much of value to the country."; and
(2) another person complains about this post to the local authorities.
What is likely to happen?
And by the way, as an American I don't object to non-Americans commenting on our politics provided they make it clear that they are outsiders.
Based on what I read in the newspapers lately:
He was found 'not guilty' by a jury after 17 minutes but he was up on terror charges with a maximum sentence of 7 years.
A nurse who tweeted that she didn't care if people burned down the asylum hotels was advised to plead guilty and got several years in jail.
I agree with @Crowstep:
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I kind of agree with you, in the sense that for most people, most of the time, the state is nothing to be feared. But that's also true in literal dictatorships.
At the same time, we can't base our model of the world on what we experience ourselves. If I did that, I would assume that everyone in the UK is gainfully employed (because these are the people I associate with). But I also know that something like 25% of the working age population are on unemployment/disability/sickness benefits.
In terms of speech crimes, there were about 12,000 arrested last year (only 8% leading to convictions). For comparison, there were about 15,000 arrests for robbery.
Am I the only one who thinks 80% as many arrests for speech crimes as there are for robbery is less than ideal?
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It’s also worth taking into account the other poster by his own admission hates white people and is from the subcontinent. The free speech debate is directly tied to the immigrant debate. OP benefits from quashing the immigrant debate but knows free speech is broadly popular and therefore prefers to downplay the assault on free speech.
The OP also confuses state actors with private actors; one is stochastic and the other systemic. Even if the rate of being arrested is similar to the rate of being at a school with a shooting, it doesn’t mean the felt effect of the two would be similar.
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Your "lived experience" of the UK is also a tremendously narrow sliver, and trying to style on the burgers with it is unimpressive.
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As I'm sure you're painfully aware, we Americans are almost categorically unashamed to boldly declare our nationality to anyone who will listen. It's a complaint I hear a lot of.
So, per the original complaint, you're unlikely to have unidentified foreign influence contaminating your information space, at least from Americans.
Oh, I agree it's not unidentified. It's loud and proud foreign influence...
Well, the good news is that if you'd like to stop hearing what Americans think of you, you'll have no problems curating an accurate block list. What's stopping you?
I want to stop hearing what Americans think in certain but not all areas, much like how I might like to listen to a rock band during a concert but not if they're playing at full blast at 11PM on a Wednesday in my neighboring apartment while I am trying to go to sleep.
Americans are not a curated performance designed for the consumption of a particular audience. I've heard this isn't a flaw unique to my people.
Neither are thunderstorms, but I find them quite welcome when they're part of the monsoon after two months of the hot season and very unwelcome when I have to bike through them in January in the UK.
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Are you saying that people in the UK don't get arrsted for sending mean tweets? Can you explain it more clearly?
The mean tweets definitely play a part in people getting arrested but almost always there's more to the story and when there's not in the unlikely event of an arrest it (eventually) gets classed as a miscarriage of justice (see how Northamtonshire Police was recently forced to pay a £50k fine for a wrongful arrest of someone for just "mean tweets", not to mention their legal costs and damages to the person who was wrongfully arrested).
Are you referring to this? If so, that’s a completely false description of the incident. The police were forced to pay the fine for repeatedly and deliberately failing to hand over video clips of the arrest despite several court orders, after the detainee alleged officers physically assaulted her during her arrest. The fine was not because the arrest itself was deemed unlawful.
Yep, I'm talking about that. I would say that's not a completely false description, the whole reason this kerfuffle started in the first place was that the claimant got arrested for saying mean things online about some people who had said mean things about her online and she took the force to court over the wrongful arrest and then the force started prevaricating and delaying but now the truth has come out about how this was indeed a wrongful arrest where unnecessary physical force was used.
As far as I can tell, your expanded description still isn’t accurate, as no court has ruled that the arrest itself was wrongful. The only thing the police are in trouble for is repeatedly defying court orders requiring them to hand over evidence of physical abuse during the arrest. Certainly the arrest itself has not been ruled as a miscarriage of justice, as your original comment claimed.
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We've just been through this conversation...
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Ok, fine. The UK isn't a place where people get arrested for saying perfectly innocent things online. It's a place where underage girls are regularly raped by gangs of Pakistanis who kidnap and imprison them. Is that acceptable? Or would you say that is misleading, as well?
Don't play games with language. If something that shouldn't happens happens with a frequency of more than once per year, it's fine to call it 'regularly'. If I came to your house and shot your in the foot on your birthday every year, people would say that it is a regular occurrence, and wouldn't equivocate to 'misleading' or 'outright false'. I either shot your foot, or I didn't. It's not something you can smear with a narrative slight of hand.
Nope, that's misleading as well, in the same sense that saying the US is a place where innocent Black people regularly get killed by the police is misleading. That also happens more than once a year in the US.
Would you tell me your date of birth and your real life location, so I may mislead and deceive the public into the regular occurance of me shooting your foot?
Yes, I know you're being sarcastic, but don't test "How close can I get to actually threatening people?"
This is an obvious rhetorical flourish, nowhere even close to an actual threat.
Yes, I am aware that crushedoranges was not literally threatening to shoot BC in the foot. If I said I would like to come to your house and punch you in the face as a "rhetorical flourish," you'd be the first to report it.
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Birthday: October 9, 1,830,656 BC
Location: Just behind the third cobweb after you turn right down the landing of the entrance of the CvC castle.
What are you doing to that cobweb?
Hey, we all have our needs you know...
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