Many Such Takes: Immigration Infighting, Problematic Baristas, Generous Landlord, Autistic Wishlists, Christmas Hooligan
The most unhinged discourse of the week, always free
Welcome to Many Such Takes! For those unfamiliar, this is a free weekly segment (I also do lots of other stuff!) For Many Such Takes, I stay up to date with the latest and most chaotic Twitter (and now BlueSky) discourse so you don’t have to. If you see yourself featured here and you don’t like it, simply send me a Substack message and I will happily remove, no matter who you are or what you said. For previous issues of Many Such Takes, see this tab on my main page. Many Such Takes will always be free, so please become a free or paid subscriber to see more every Sunday!
Immigration Infighting
It’s not every day that we get some good right-wing infighting, and this week we got tech bro right wingers arguing in favor of legal H1B immigration of Indian tech workers against right wingers who believed that Indians, not Jews, were replacing us (and in many cases, Jews too, I assume.) It’s “Is DoorDash Ableist?” for Republicans!
This mostly boils down to a challenge: if you want America to be the best country, with the best talent, and you are anti-DEI, preferring a straightforward meritocracy, and purportedly only take issue with illegal immigration, why should you have a problem with Asian engineers being hired at tech companies, or Asian students getting accepted to elite American universities because of their grades or accomplishments? Some on the right say that arguing against the success of Indian and Asians is just the same thing as demanding DEI for whites. The counter-argument, I suppose, is that DEI for whites is a good thing and that when they said all that anti-migrant stuff they were actually talking about legal immigrants too.
This is actually a decent summary from a not-great account:
I’ll admit, I’m not sure exactly where it started, but it involved Elon Musk at the center, after he went to war against thousands of anti-immigration groypers, who he mass-banned from Twitter. We also got this amazing tweet out of it:
Vivek Ramaswamy weighed in on the discourse with his own take: American culture rewards mediocrity and non-academic achievements. The geeks and mathletes need to be at the top of the pecking order if we want to compete on the global stage:
This post went viral, where a mom began raging over her son hypothetically getting rejected from colleges because of Asians:
She later confirmed her son’s SAT score was 1450. This created drama among the biggest nerds and pedants on right wing Twitter (the Republican version of the leftist “former gifted kids”) about what counts as a high SAT score. Apparently, not 1450!
This drama had everything because it didn’t stick to random Pepe Frog avatars and Roman Statue guys. Even Dasha of Red Scare fame joined in on the fun:
While Elon Musk, who has employed many tech workers on H1B visas, argued in favor of this type of immigration, he received backlash from the full-MAGA contingent. One Twitter user noted that he had used a voice changer as one of his aliases (first I’m hearing of this, but I am fully locked in) who in the past was seen praising him:
Apparently, the Elon Musk/Adrian Dittmann thing isn’t settled fact, and may be completely made up. Musk’s daughter referred to him sarcastically as Adrian Dittmann, but it’s still largely considered a conspiracy theory, and even a Reddit thread couldn’t get to the bottom of it. I kind of hope it’s fake, because it’s a little too sad for me to handle otherwise.
As the drama breached containment and reached left of center Twitter, we got this perfect tweet from Matt Yglesias of
:
Ah, the classic meme format:
(I once tweeted this and someone thought I actually had an abusive father and extended empathy to me for my trauma. I felt awful.)
Wait, where’s Trump to weigh in on all this?
Anyway, in case you’re getting a bit too amped up about xenophobia and racism right now, the perfect person just re-joined Twitter to participate in the discussion:
Autistic Wishlist
Another great piece of discourse this week: if an autistic person makes a Christmas wishlist, and neurotypical people flagrantly disregard the wish list, is the aforementioned autistic person allowed to be a little miffed/confused about it?
Most people slammed OP for being ungrateful, immature, or for not appreciating the “thought that counts.” But you know what? I actually kind of agree with her. Perhaps listing specific items is a bit un-festive, but as someone who loves giving gifts, it’s really only worth it if the person actually enjoys the gift. I’m at the point with my close family members where I generally know what they’re going to like, but even so, I still like to ask them if there’s anything in particular they’re looking for this year. For example, my mom told me she wanted a gym bag that wasn’t black, and I got her the Dagne Dover carryall bag in navy! I got to put some effort into the gift, she got exactly what she wanted but still got to be a little surprised. Everyone was happy (well, she has a 35-year-old daughter who writes gooning jokes for a living, so I’m not sure if she’s that happy. But she likes the bag!)
Clearly, the solution is this: for people who actually want to make sure the gifts they get are used/enjoyed, they should employ a strategy where they list general things they like—for example, “Everlane and Aritzia sweaters in cool tones,” and let their family and friends connect the dots.
Of course, if you don’t really care what you get, feel free to disregard. But I think OP was unfairly maligned here! Autistic or not autistic, it’s probably best to stay on-list, or at least get a general idea of what the person wants. Nobody likes waste, or enjoys pretending to like something they know they’ll never use.
Problematic Baristas
This week, someone named Jeff (no notable lore as far as I know) asserted that being a barista is “not a career.” This assertion was challenged by Cassie Pritchard, a member of leftist Twitter known for her infamous “cocaine and bananas” take (I may be butchering this, but I think she said something degrowthy about how we should all stop eating bananas under communism but also said she wasn’t going to be too dogmatic about it because cocaine is okay on occasion. Like I said, it was a while ago, I may be misremembering.) Anyway, despite that absolutely nuclear take, she’s turned out to be a fairly reasonable and interesting person, and a very good poster with the ability to laugh at herself. Anyway, she disagrees that a barista cannot be a career. But it goes further than that:
While Cassie was initially arguing against a more right-wing (or at least pro-capitalist) anti-barista stance, someone else attacked her from the left about why baristas are problematic, actually:
Why did I read this like she was talking:
Anyway, turns out this poster was a barista? So perhaps this is all a bunch of atonement for all the problematic latte foam-making.
Generous Landlord
I have to say, “landlord drama” is slowly turning into one of my favorite genres of Twitter drama. Just last week, we had the unforgettable “can a butch lesbian be a landlord?” debate. And this week, we have something almost as good. Tell me, is the below scenario heartwarming, or dystopian?
Twitter users were split. Some thought she was doing an altruistic thing. Others accused her of overcharging for rent in order to “set aside” money for the tenants’ daughters, and compared her to Michael Scott in the infamous Scott’s Tots episode of The Office.
Christmas Hooligan
This guy got worked up about a young man wearing a backwards hat at Christmas Eve service. What he didn’t expect was that Catholic Twitter would descend upon him for attending a heathen Protestant church:
Other Happenings/Funny Tweets
Apparently there was some drama on leftist Twitter about The Odyssey being America-centric, and honestly I was too overwhelmed to get into it, but you’re free to explore.
Twitter collectively praised a “good parent” for raising a toddler who was overjoyed to receive broccoli as a Christmas gift. As the mom of young children, I can say this probably had nothing to do with good parenting and everything to do with the fact that it’s perfectly normal for a three-year-old to have an irrational special interest involving broccoli (for a while, my older child needed to carry a jug of apple cider with him everywhere.)
Happy Hanukkah!
A Twitter user from the UK who was apparently assigned to make a “Hitler Twitter” (or as many people today would call it, X) when she was in school:
This solid good joke:
Another one that made me chuckle:
I very rarely post on Twitter (actually mostly as a vague reply girl to you, lol), but I had to get involved in the second round of Odyssey discourse about woke translations of Homer. So much ignorance about iambic pentameter!
The original tweet to kick it all off was actually very funny: someone who had to google the Odyssey because he didn’t know what it was when he heard that Christopher Nolan was adapting it for the screen. And, then was amazed that Nolan had found such an obscure and esoteric ancient text for his next film.
The “there will be no coffee under socialism” discourse is insufferable because the only way you can disprove the argument is by citing evidence that runs straight into other dumb online leftist discourse. If you try and point out that even if the Global South was very developed, they’d still grow coffee because of specialization, they’ll tell you that the supply and demand theory of value is fake and right-wing and if you try to point out that a place like Hawaii still grows coffee then you’ll run into people with crazy Hawaii takes (worst mistake of my life is ever talking about Hawaii on Twitter). Many such cases!