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Lol … I like the part about the Caucuses being in the USSR, so being Caucasian meant being Soviet.

I once told a friend from west India to put “Aryan” down for race, but then stopped him and apologized after I realized that was mean-funny, not funny-funny.

I was really an asshole in my 20s.

Kinda unrelated but Les is one of my favorite people to use as an example of how "websites" used to be. His writing is fun and honest, and some of his ideas were imo groundbreaking (and many are floating about waiting to be rediscovered).

This is pretty good, thanks. TLDR: institutional adventures from a national security employee challenging the requirement to declare their race.

This reminds me of "Seeing like a State" by James C Scott: attempts to simplify the world to allow generalizations about it always lose valuable detail.