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Comment by local_crmdgeon | Hacker News Reader

>Cultures that keep looking at imagined past glories, imo, are destined to become static and falter.

If education was just chanting this half the day the world would be better off.

I had a Hindu nationalist recently berate me about how the "US had lost the Space Race, ISRO was the clear winner."

I mentioned the US landed on the Moon first, and he said "would rather have not landed on the Moon than live in a country with a large number of Black people" (put less pleasantly).

Weird guy! Weird political movement!

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Indian here. Your exchange doesn't surprise me one bit. The Hindu nationalists are some of the most delusional, ultra-nationalistic, racist morons out there.

Many of them think India is going to be the next superpower and economic miracle out there. There's a large number of them working in big tech, and they'll say how fantastic India is, now that there are very high-paying tech jobs available there (almost all of them in American companies) and this gives them fantastic standards of living because they can easily afford maids and cooks aka cheap labor they can exploit. I scratch my head and wonder, if India is so good WTF are they still doing here, while also working on their Green Card petitions?

> because they can easily afford maids and cooks aka cheap labor they can exploit

Is this in India or abroad?

Is ~100$ a month, for 2 hours of work a day, 3 days paid leave, support for children's education underpaying?

Oh, and the same maid works in 4 different houses, getting a reasonable monthly income.

I've seen this too. My ex is kind of a Hindu nationalist and her friend group and family are full of them. Her brother even threatened her for dating me saying he would cut off all contact and never let her see his children unless she consented to do an arranged marriage with an Indian (which she secretly came here to escape).

But then the same Hindu nationalists had this weird tendency to think they were entitled to US based tech jobs. They would claim Indians were responsible for all the tech companies in the US being successful and not Americans and that America is this awful, sad, corrupt society that they really wanted to get into despite India being better in every way apparently. It was irritating at times and sad because this isn't uncommon imo.

A lot of the US tech industry was built on the backs of Indians. You'll find that the Indians were the second largest race involved in early computing after the Whites.

The second point is that a lot of the problems in India do stem from colonialism - in Asian culture the vast majority don't usually segregate Europe from the US, and view Americans as being just as responsible for colonialism and the benefits of colonialism as modern-day Europeans.

Was the US tech industry built on the backs of whites also then? You're not denigrating anyone's accomplishment are you?

> I scratch my head and wonder, if India is so good WTF are they still doing here

Some of Erdoğan's most reliable voters live in Germany. It's not uncommon.

> I had a Hindu nationalist recently berate me about how the "US had lost the Space Race, ISRO was the clear winner."

... did they give any examples of ISRO space accomplishments that predate US or Soviet accomplishment?

No, he just pivoted to talking about how America is just a bunch of "Black ghettos" and then I blocked him.

One important thing to know about people like these is that they don't have a rational argument They have a Believe and they like to shout it out to the world.

Oh, I'm absolutely aware of that, I was just curious if there was literally anything they could point to that could, if viewed at through significantly rose-colored lenses, be seen as support for their statement. Like maybe (given my previous experience with Hindu nationalists) some passage in the Vedas that was interpreted to mean ancient Hindus were actually a spacefaring race or something.

It's mostly them dancing on "see ISRO launches satellites for so much more less cost!". Like PPP, labor and material costs being much expensive in the US are not factors that exist.

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