Hacker News Reader

Comment by uptownfunk | Hacker News Reader

Great, good luck enforcing that. Good luck even verifying caste identity. The last name is not even close to 100% valid in determining caste identity. Also, I think whether we admit it or not, we definitely have a notion of caste in the west except it’s a combination of race and socioeconomic identity. Growing up my white friends had a whole network of friends with summer homes and we once took a tour around the USA just staying in unoccupied summer homes of rich white friends.

View on HN

White man here, citizen of US. I actually think this could work to our long-term advantage. We get some laws passed that ban caste discrimination, not realizing that the same problems exist in other parts of US society and is not just a "SE Asia problem". And then eventually someone comes along and uses the caste discrimination laws creatively for some kind of civil rights / liberties win that is not related to SE Asia. I'm pretty sure that a fair amount of our civil rights / liberties progress came about through creative use of laws that were not expected to be used for that purpose.

> just staying in unoccupied summer homes of rich white friends.

Class divide is not caste divide.

Imagine if you went to the market, and you touched someone, and immediately, their parents/people around them flicked drops of water at them to purify them because they got touched by an untouchable. Do you experience THAT in the US? Do you know how humiliating that is?

You're being absurd at equating the two.

It’s actually worse. Why are we focusing on caste, which is very isolated, when class divide and class discrimination is a much worse problem. Probably because the upper class who would be adversely affected by any efforts to fix it are the ones in control of driving the agenda. We’re too focused on idealistic feel good politics and not focused enough issues that are affecting most of the nation

Are you seriously alleging that class discrimination is a problem that society is ignoring? Did the 20th century simply not happen?

Basically. Even if they aren’t ignoring it, they aren’t addressing it effectively. Look at rich men north of Richmond. Hard to afford much of anything these days. But oh wait, that’s not the problem, the real problem is some obscure ancient practice from india coming to USA affecting highly privileged and overpaid tech workers.

So are you advocating banning people from having too many friends? Owning summer houses?

I'm just trying to understood how do you think that could work (besides from abolishing capitalism).

This is only partially sarcasm, I do certainly thing that growing inequality is one of the biggest issues today.

And yet, that practice won’t be prevented by this law.

Your “flicking of water” happens to many middle class who go to high end boutique stores. Classism is just an evolved form casteism that has embedded itself into the subconscious so we don’t recognize it as such.

I have no idea what point you're making

And that’s the whole problem. We have lost the point. Divorces are increasing, single parents, single moms are increasing, kids growing up lost in broken homes, a crumbling education system shifting to only individuals who can afford private schools, crime increasing, social media toxicity. But no no no it’s casteism that’s the problem, let’s legislate on that and pat ourselves on the back. Wake up people, your nation is crumbling before you.

I once edited a code comment that had a typo because I happened to notice it as I was glancing through. At the time, there were serious problems with the architecture and design of the codebase. Was I wrong to do that?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com