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Comment by smashah | Hacker News Reader

Thank you notepad++ for taking a stand instead of conveniently brushing the issue aside.

It's at times like these when the 2/3rd generation diaspora should be undermining the governments actions loudly.

On another side note, I don't know if it's just me, but on Facebook I keep getting videos like "cool amazing Chinese inventions" and it's just a bunch of people doing farm work with interesting tools or just people working (like putting tires on a truck [in reverse]). I am somewhat to blame as I generally like watching those videos. But I have a feeling it is being heavily pushed by China as some sort of psy-ops PR.

Anyways. Life is political nowadays. Thank you again notepad ++.

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>Life is political nowadays.

I don't know where the train left the rails but I think it's insane that politics, conversations about the people controlling our lives, became such a forbidden topic. We need to be better than that.

It probably happened when we decided to start doing cost benefit analyses on doing the right thing.

I'm glad the tide is turning.

It's time for the comfortable to help carry the burden and for the concerned to have their anxieties validated.

I wonder if it's because of the Internet making the world a global village. In a village in the old days there were probably discussions about people as well, and if there were disagreements where people took sides, it surely got debated, disturbing their dinners and maybe even their work.

Maybe back then villagers had to stop arguing at one point and get back to work, otherwise they'd not have anything to eat that day, and when you have to work together, you see this guy you've been arguing with but is now pulling his weight isn't such an asshole after all.

I wonder if there's always been 2 realities, nowadays there are people who believe Trump is still draining the swamp and is making great deals, and (with overlap) that Obama is a Kenyan Terrorist.

Seems like plain old nationalism to me. I've been seeing a lot of Indian nationalism online as well, particularly on videos about the Indian space program or Indian mathematicians

Agreed. I went on a YouTube binge on pre-Indo-European genetics and culture, human haplogroup tracking etc. There were a bunch of white nationalist comments, everything from the "superior culture" of the Indo-Europeans that killed the Stonehenge inhabitants to outright racism in the Bantu expansion videos. I guess people look this stuff up because they're obsessed with proving their historical birthright or superiority or something, but man I just wanted to learn paleontology..

The YouTube recommendations after that binge made my feed quite unpleasant.

Indian nationalism can get especially weird where it intersects with Hindu fundamentalism. A common pattern I've seen is claims that a modern invention or scientific discovery (like the speed of light, or the light bulb, or a space probe) was actually "inspired by", or "predicted by", or even "stolen from" the Vedas.

(This isn't to detract from the technological discoveries which really did originate in India, of course! A few commonly cited true examplies of these are place-value numeric notation, cataract surgery, and certain advances in early metallurgy. The sorts of claims I'm referring to are much more fanciful -- for instance, one I've seen is that certain large symbolic numbers in the Vedas actually represent values of scientific interest, like the speed of light, the diameter of the Earth, or the distance to the Moon.)

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