Sort of unrelated but I posted a while ago about the use of the word foreigner and how I think it’s racist and biased. An othering that’s unnecessary. China is guilty of this, as is English. I’m not sure of other languages.

I elaborated how there is very much a gaslighting culture against Westerners in Asian countries, where they are seen as having less rights, and less right to criticize failures, than locals.

And how if you do speak up, people respond to you by saying things like: "go back to your own country if you don’t like"; or, “the local people are probably just curious they don’t mean any bad intention” by doing whatever bad thing it is you were criticizing; Or, “that doesn’t happen that’s just made up”; or, “it’s probably something you did, which caused them to do“ whatever the bad thing is that you’re criticizing.

So there’s a fair amount of victim fake-blaming, and gaslighting that goes on, as well as denial, and outright fake-justification of bias and abuse.

And something else that happens is if these points are raised is people become angry, and act as if you don’t even have the right to raise them. Reinforcing the impression.

Locals often say, like: “the local people have it really tough here and you have it so easy it’s your foreign privilege here.” as if to suggest yet another fake justification for whatever bad behavior you suffer at their abusive hands or bad behavior.

In other words, whatever bad stuff happens, it’s sort of deserved and justified anyway because it’s equalizing things because local people already had a disadvantage so they’re just trying to equalize it. Which is total shit bullshit.

Anyway, to my post that someone responded and said

In developing countries foreigners are often accorded special unwritten privileges. They may be charged more for services but they are also often simply expelled for offences that locals would be severely punished for. They would not like it if they are treated the same as the locals in every way.

Which (apart from its creepily threatening or accusatory overtones), again is propagating these sort of negative biased stereotypes, that non-local people are committing crimes and are involved in crime: when the wealth gap cause of crime reality is that many of the non-local people come there for work and don’t have any sort of wealth gap issues that would make them likely perpetrators involved in crime.

But all these kind of attitudes and biases such as the one I quit above, have a similar problem. As if to say: “you shouldn’t complain you don’t have a right to complain because you get things easier, and because you get things easier, we can treat you worse.”

My experience in living in the "Sinosphere", not that all those regions comprising it are homogenous at all, yet in my decades-long experience living in this part of the world, within my vast experience here, one of the downsides I've noticed clearly is this: the theories about unwritten privileges and advantages are just bullshit. If anything there are many "written disadvantages" written into the law preventing non-local people from having the same access to banking, telecoms, and so on, as locals, even if you have residency. But more importantly, these fake stories about "foreigners" (a bad, abusive word, often, as how it's used), in other words, about non-locals, are just compensation that local people tell themselves to feel better.

It’s simply a story that local people tell themselves to feel better about their own suffering and why they didn’t do better. Rather than (or in addition to) blaming their government, they blame "the non locals", who they assume have more success / money / happiness / freedom. So they then see themselves, the locals, as justifiably behaving badly towards, and non-considering non-locals, because that satisfies both a perverse amoral sense of "fairness", as well as providing them an outlet to take out their emotions on, so they can hurt others to feel better themselves (or, somewhat, to not feel they are the only ones hurt by their own wretchedness). So they invent stories of unearned or unfair "privilege", as fake-pay-off compensation to excuse their own failures, and as fake-justification to be bad or abusive toward non-locals. So I think they design to only tell themselves these fake stories only as a fake justification for taking out their pent-up emotion on, and taking out abuse unjustifiably, on those non-local people.

In other words, it’s just a fake story they use as a fake pretext to fake justify abusing people who are not from their culture. So it’s just a pretext to fake justification for racism because by telling yourself all these people have it so much better you’re immediately trivializing their suffering in emotions and you’re enabling and supporting and legitimizing and normalizing any abuse of them because you can sort of dismiss it with a hand wave oh, "it’s nothing you know because look we are really the ones who really suffered here, and those outsiders don't have it tough". So it's really just hatespeech against non-local people.

I think this is the way (or one way) that racism works in every place, but it's just disappointing to see it and experience it in part in Asia, a place where you think the people cannot be racist because they always complain about and blame white people for racism against them in white countries. But it's not only white people that Asians in the Sinosphere are racist against, they're often racist against brown and black people. For example, migrant workers and maids from South-East Asia.

Living in the "Sinosphere", I’ve seen examples where the local people break the law and simply because there’s another person involved, who's not a local person (a white person, or even another non-local person sometimes), then no charges will be pressed against the local person. And so the reality this creates is that you don't feel the police work for you, or care about you, if you're not a local person, and you don't have as many rights as local people.

The locals telling themselves these lies that pretend non-locals are so "privileged", is simply only disguising the status quo racist abuse, is simply running cover to continue the situation where non-locals don't actually have the same rights, and suffer abuse, and aren't afforded anywhere near the same protection or consideration of the "law" as the locals. So by telling yourself this story you pretend that it's not the opposite, when in fact it is the opposite.

And I think that’s the way that the local people like it to be so all of this fake justifying via of these bullshit stories about non-local people is just sort of propaganda support for this biased attitude, and the continuation of these bad, racist behaviors.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32907115

Yeah, so all of this today is what I came here to say (including that link above that’s what some of what I'm talking about today). So take that! all you biased racist racists out there thinking that you can just treat people like that--well, you can't, right? You know? You can't.

It's just not fair. It's not right. But they pretend it is. And that's the wrong thing. It's a cover for abuse, and that's bad.

It's not that all things are wrong and racist in the sinosphere, but there is a huge undercurrent of stuff that is just not discussed. And that contributes to it. And it should be discussed.

So yeah, people should wake up more. But you need to live in a country for a long time to really know what it's like. That's all. I'm done.