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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).
Having just this year had to squeeze two maliciously incompetent employees out of my department, I have a new and deep appreciation for at-will employment. Like most of our worst laws, we have at-will employment because the worst 5% of the population ruins it for everyone.
Anecdote: The unionized civil-engineering office in which I worked had a complement of around half a dozen surveyors. Most of them were industrious, but one was lazy and a troublemaker.
The survey coordinator (engineer in charge of the surveyors) had to constantly check on this surveyor to make sure that she was actually doing her assigned work in an industrious manner.
One of my engineer coworkers warned me that I should never trust this surveyor because the surveyor once told the coworker that getting in a minor crash with an office car was an easy way to get out of work.
After the survey coordinator gave her a bad performance review, she filed an HR complaint accusing him of threatening her with violence during the performance review's closed-door face-to-face meeting. It was totally frivolous, since the boss of the office was in the same meeting and could vouch for the survey coordinator's innocence! But the investigation still dragged on for many months. IIRC, I once overheard the survey coordinator discussing with the office boss how the surveyor's union-assigned lawyer would even commiserate over the phone with the survey coordinator about how the surveyor couldn't even keep her story straight.
She had a reputation for treating her two subordinate surveyors poorly. I wasn't too aware of the details, but I overheard the survey coordinator discussing with the office boss how he would look out the office window into the parking lot and see her subordinate surveyors running to the survey van in order to avoid being late.
Once I even overheard her loudly joke in the office's coffee area, "I like my coffee like I like my men—hot and black", which I as a nigger easily could have reported her to HR for (and maybe should have).
She was finally forced to resign (not even fired!) when, during the pandemic, she coughed into her hand and intentionally used the same hand to smack one of her subordinate surveyors on the back, after which the subordinate (who IIRC had a wife with a compromised immune system of some kind) filed an HR complaint and threatened to report her assault to the police on top of that.
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