Comment by rayiner
22 days ago
I really do not understand immigrants who still love their home country. I’m going to die 12 thousand miles away from where my ancestors are buried going back tens of thousands of years. After spending most of my life with ashy dry skin because I’m somewhere I’m not designed to be. All because my ancestors fucked everything up! Fuck those people.
You are looking at this from the perspective of someone to whom "my ancestors fucked everything up" is obvious and self-evident. Many people don't see it this way.
FWIW when it comes to Russia specifically, I would broadly agree that the problem there is not just the government but the culture as a whole (although we'd probably disagree about the specific things in that culture that are problematic). It is not obvious, though, and I think it always behooves one to be careful when making sweeping generalizations like that and carefully rationalize them.
> FWIW when it comes to Russia specifically, I would broadly agree that the problem there is not just the government but the culture as a whole
You’re correct about Russia. And the same observation applies to the Indian subcontinent, where I’m from, as well. And, while you’re correct that each place requires a separate analysis, I would guess it applies to most places people leave.
People’s emotions and tribalism often make them romanticize the places they left. They attribute the good things about their society to the people and their culture, but externalize the bad things about their society. That’s usually self-deception.
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11340543
I haven't met him personally, but years of trading ideas with him in threads and I can tell you this is true. rayiner is among the best of us.
Poor guy seems to be going through some self hating racism crisis after reading too many twitter posts. He’s probably a nice guy and all but this online thing can get way too much.
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I have, or rather, had, a friend that lost it. He was the nicest guy. Then 9/11 happened and both him and his wife got into this 'it's all special effects' (they worked in special effects) thing and there wasn't anything you could do about it. Intelligent, creative, very skilled. But on that subject they were completely dug in and any evidence to the contrary was dismissed. Their parting words were that I must be 'one of them' and we are no longer friends.
There are a couple of subjects that seem to do this to people, immigration is one of them, 9/11 is another. Then there are holocaust deniers and people who seem to - without any kind of prompting - find it in them to be defending the actions of the various strong-arm government components in the United States.
I have no idea if there is something in the water or not but it is very scary to see otherwise intelligent people completely lose it over such objectively simple things. Once dug in the only solution seems to be to dig further and to cut off all input to that might lead to introspection.
I’m sure it’s Twitter, and not the fact I had to go to the airport with an armed escort the last time I visited, or that I had to cancel my most recent trip because they overthrew the government, again.