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Notes -
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.
None of this would ever have happened in a non-At Will jurisdiction. The mob could howl as much as they wanted and the boss would just go "Sorry, the laws of this country prevent me from firing this person without good cause, if you don't like it vote to change things" and this would suddenly blow over.
There's a reason all this "firing" people for saying bad things stuff seems to be localized to the US (on both sides of the aisle).
Yeah, in Europe we just arrest them.
A wrongful arrest can be expunged and removed from your record quite quickly and if handled fast can have much less of an impact on your life and career trajectory than a wrongful firing.
England would jail you for that comment.
Just checked, I'm still not in jail. I'll update tomorrow and let you know if I've been detained.
EDIT: Still not detained, the bobbies really need to up their game...
Do you live in the UK?
He does, but he's on the proper tier.
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Yes he does
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