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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.
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.
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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