Akhil Vaidya: how indian-americans became the face of multiracial conservatism
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For the most part, the people I have casually inspected seem like many people in being completely self-obsessed and lacking any interest in climate change, environmental issues, economic issues and totally hung up on culture.
It is like this guy I really dislike called Jay Kaspian Kang, who had an interview with Wayne Hsiung and with the usual throwaway reference to civil rights, spent the rest of the interview pathetically snarking about a serious issue like factory farming, a barometer of societal sociopathy that a less shallow person would get. He has written some book about being whatever he is in America.
I have always seriously wondered what is gained by a multipolar sociopathy of self-obsessed cultural chauvinists who casually throw bumper sticker politics on, but don’t give a shit about anything.
Then I saw that Kaspian Kang had cancer and well..then I felt sorry for the guy. But he still remains an example along with Miss Al Gharbi, Yasmin Nair of a type of leftist whose main thing seems envious snark.
Mechanical plaints about the “brown people”, “the working class” etc rings kinda hollow. It drives people to grifters like Joe Rogan, as these guys have destroyed education and then they shat on human gut instincts.
I don’t buy that ass Harriri’s “story telling” (should I be complaining about people about people who mostly only attack things/people? I also totally support things/people and not performatively..you can’t have one without the other), but some combination of stats and logic and like Bishop Marian Budde or journalists who without editorialising actually wrote about the lives of struggling people ..It is never easy nor formulaic.
But you should eschew narcissism. Hamilton Nolan was correct journalism is not narcissism.
Now it is interesting to hear about the lives of Yasha Levine or Dr Fauci. Why are there are so many stories about people who are generic grifters? What is gained from the experiences of generic grifter. It teaches people to aspire to be generic grifters.
Yasha Levine’s writing has a specific purpose that is not at all narcissistic. It is very tied to understanding how people who think think.
Wayne Hsuing anyway is one of my people! Animal rights green. He is a little flamboyant which I don’t quite trust..but he does seem to genuinely care.
You can tell that Alec Karakatsanis cares. And caring isn’t just this emotional nightmare of another kind. I used to bleakly look at the world you see online and go “why god why”?
The net really makes one despair that anyone is sane. But then offline people don’t know and it is hard to know how they will go.
“Don’t Look Up” which was savaged by the very people whom it satirizes, though they come together for a concert or something in the end before the world is destroyed, depicts that online dynamic. I have never followed superficial people. Not worth it. Dressed up as contrarian or standard issue froth.
I support ExtinctionRebellion and DX etc but I realized during a very troublesome period of my life that I don’t think the internet samples the real left that truly goes underground against these forces. This Guardian review of Barn 8 made me recognize those people as “Ah..those guys get it.”
Except I am so atomized, I am back online hacking away at some sort of vague guerilla warfare. Why would anyone attract attention?
I get not going so underground that now it is some sort of dark web of corruption and conspiracy theory. And that is again pro libertarian.
But at least a mid-space from where to manoeuvre with a slender tool palette, mostly attacking the assaults on the human instinct for fight these societies are driven by.
I mostly have three communities I consider myself a part of - the Greens/AR (minus those EA types..shady lot that. The AR people should totally take their money and not get mired with them); scientists/doctors (minus half of psychiatry based on my experiences..Reefer Madness shills 🙄 ..mind you none of the geniuses I dealt with would dare force coercive psychiatry on those dimwitted billionaires..why are these people so helpless? ) and the left broadly. My point is that very shallow identities seem to mire the modern human).
Except an Si Valley cultist or so, my nephews and nieces are not that bad. They seem to think about stuff that is not entirely self-centred and “All about me!” and pay attention to the world with the non-narcissist’s lens.
Honestly, how is any narcissistic worldview that different from any other type of cultural chauvinist? If you believe that we are all more the same than not, more equal or even playing ground starts to highlight personality differences more than others. I will round out the thing by attacking “my” people and in less stereotypical ways than that merely slapping on a label means much.
I agreed with this Indian woman who wrote in The Atlantic that she is not that different from Usha Vance, though a democrat. I agreed. They seem more or less the same.
I met one of my nieces a couple of years ago. She is the reason I would be extra angry if I cannot remain anonymous. She is very private and savvy. She helped me a lot with reminding myself of who I was and am.
She is a worried young person. I came back to India, but apparently because one person from the family somehow ends up being over there, she is now there as a tuition paying student.
I have very mixed feelings about it. But it was too late to do anything to dissuade her.
She is a good kid. I am very fond of her and worried that she is there. One of many ongoing worries.
She is pretty left leaning (but she is dismissive of bullshitters) and a real chip of the old block. Yeah on the whole I am sorry I met her. I am not a good person for any young person to be associated with. I know that though I cannot feel it as much as I know I would if I could see.
The Indians and Indian Americans typically in these things don’t represent my family or me I find, which is sort of more underground and suspicious (not paranoid) of these noisy, yapping types. And the Americans I liked were similar. Not going around attracting as much attention as one can from morons.
It is with extreme annoyance and increasing irascibility that I am outing myself in bad grace as the human I am. As it has become impossible to allow this to grow around one.
My niece has the normal prudent facade of civility which I no longer do.
She is a good kid. She is like a quizzical little bird. When I first met her, I took an immediate liking to her and was friendly and I could tell that she was not precisely wary, but confused about this random aunt who is so gushy. Those are good instincts over jumping into all sorts of random things. My other niece is more open and friendly, but she has no intention of ever going to America and in the spaces she goes to her instincts are good.
It is hard to have sane cultural anthropology when the only people who engage do so under duress and while strategising about protest to avoid getting sucked into more spurious market and theatre driven bs over serious conflict when you don’t trust the instincts of these loud or scheming types.
Bah..all bullshit..
A lot of these left and right labels are so superficial. Or rather the left part of it. The grifty right is a very real right. Besides that is not how humans think. All humans have some conservative instincts and some lefty ones. It is what you make of them, rather than slapping on a label and going “Go Team” or crafting an identity that is purely contrarian, purely sugary or something ..that is so empty and ossified wrt adaptation to changing nuisances.
I was rather pleased when my niece said something I have always thought about those Indian Americans who go on and on about their “culture” ( the counterpart to this other type that “assimilates” by myopically mimicking the dumbest and shallowest people they can find)..
She said “what are these guys always going on about ‘their culture’ for? There is a country of a billion plus people (constantly breeding..I added that part) right over here.. their ‘culture’ isn’t going anywhere”.
What is going extinct is hundreds of millions of years of biological evolution. And any people who ever gave a shit about something without weaving it into this bullshit parade as “inevitable!”. And I am sick of these narcissistic parasites not even waiting till I am dead to grab my resources..bloody disgusting.
Shallow narcissists all..and making life hell for people in “their group” by collective stupid decisions that affect people whom they don’t know and never will because no group is a monolith and this is the tip of the iceberg re the extent of this net-based shallow monoculture of vapidity taking over everything. Maybe all will go that way but some won’t. And messing there is a bad idea.
The people I know get worn down and like me back in the day, don’t grasp how bad it is. But they wouldn’t really agree.. because it is stupid and short sighted.
But these shallow people who are in shallow waters on all levels..they are hopeless and they should all-white, nonwhite, Indian, not Indian, male, female etc stay in their scammy, loud, frivolous “Kim Kardashian is a feminist!” “my culture of bullshit is more important than mass extinction and factory farming! I can walk and chew gum-except I mostly just chew gum! I am vaguely a hair different from the average self-absorbed male ass on Fark! I am a lefty liberal!
And their sleazy, parasitic “hardcore” grifters in some stem field they are disgracing are worse. If that crowd is annoying, this thieving and extortionate “meritocrat” huckster is outright criminal. Only standards in data science and generally will fix it.
This is in every way an assault on human livelihoods and life and it’s being sold with more of this criminal “smart city” propaganda.
Those guys are balanced out by their fellow narcissists who are more honestly self-absorbed, douchey right wing nutjobs.
Christopher Ketcham is too kind wrt clown car.
(I mean that is probably how they think. That was what I roughly gathered was in those emtpy heads. With the obligatory - “I do real hardcore work in the real world”. Bollocks.).
Bah..all humbug..most probably anyway..I question these pugilistic admissions.
Such bs..nationalistic puffery and kayfabe along with selling off the country and people’s livelihoods and homes to the lowest bidders (“a race to the bottom is inevitable! It is math! The hell it is..what kind of fascist math is that?).
And there is no such thing as “brand India”. And beef is not left. Empty-headed twaddle.
Or “leftism” that screws over women, poor people etc and again hands over everything to Ambani, Adani, creepy “little guys!”
I know a little Hindi..10th standard bare pass! (i repeat my jokes because these fuckers repeat their stupidity) and I was thinking
“Apne Maa Baap ka Ghar Samjha hain kya? Main tumhaari behen ya beti nahi hoon! Main ek mavaali hoon! Sharm nahi hain Kyan? Yeh creeps ka agenda implement karte?”. I shall mangle communication in two languages henceforth. A third would disrupt even the facade of ..
And not learnt from Bollywood/Garbage GPT, but various Kendriya Vidyalaya Hindi textbooks.
I come back from another country because those fuckers there are going crazy and then put up with this shit here.
Unbelievable.
It is as if there is no one here..
What was the topic? Oh yeah Indian Americans …yeah..Indians or Indian American or any other group. I don’t trust any of these fuckers.
And they never get that barely veiled with humor “personas” doesn’t mean that the real thing is not real. I hate dealing with daft people.
Like President Trump, I am running on pure bullshit here only without support (unless one of my cats counts..even with them, I was only able to get one on board and probably because my cat speak is garbled. No doubt she will sue me for libel/slander and defamation and false advertising in the future). But we have slightly different goals.
President Trump and I, I have noticed share some common features.
Neither of us have any talent, knowledge, skills, circumspection and fly by the seat of our pants and have weaves filled with tangential rambles and boring, inconsequential and infuriating anecdotes. We both aim to confuse the brain so we can..there we diverge..our delusional grandiosity has different ends.
Like Colbert was a huge fan of HW, I am fascinated by President Trump. At least the imitative faculty of parrots should eventually mimic something better than a groveling hostage in some sort of unclear and no doubt stupid “Prisoner’s Dilemma”.
I am a huge fan of President Trump. I really am in a way. It is somehow easier without even a basic sop to sanity when bts it is this fucking lunatic. This is a decades long project of chipping away at all working parts of human society for some sort of noxious pyramid/ponzi scheme.
Prof Steve Chu gets it. He is not stupid - an enconium he no doubt is unused to . A rare attribute in even true elites. He was not a good businessman. Different skill set that. He is from Missouri. Interesting guy.
Can’t he do something? Anything?
What are they all doing?
Sitting around going “I 😻 Zuckerberg (“left””💗+🧠”)/Musk (RIGHT”💪”+🍆
”. Seriously that would be their taped together disgraceful, unintelligently designed Frankenstein that is shilled Theranos style, built on stolen garbage repurposed as garbage to sell. I mean..many shots in the dark. But some must hit a mark or two.
Goddamn computer maniacs miring everyone else. I hate Stanford, Berkeley and MIT. I have to go draft something about criminal liability…
Going by this experience, I would guess that the large number of silent lurkers out there are people whom one knows little about.
Sure I had a DU page back in 2006 where I used to try to dully post clunkily about the environment. I did post in the MIRT forum about my marriage and with a picture on Photobucket (I am already evidently in this stalkerish system so if people with legit access like EarlG/elad and MIRT identify me or my old schools, including that last one, okay.. I hate hackers..it is not a service to society to put info about people who are private out there and it makes you look like an ass..).