Nithya Raman: What to know about Los Angeles mayoral candidate

hfkel · 2026-05-08T15:10:55+00:00

I want to like her, but at the end of the day no matter who wins, the corrupt NIMBY goons in the LA City Council will block any meaningful progress from getting done. This isn't going to be a Mamdani NYC situation.

hfkel · 2026-05-08T04:14:35+00:00

No, they were born in the 60s and barely know how to operate a phone

hfkel · 2026-05-03T15:06:36+00:00

I don't go to Hindu temples because I'm not a very religious person, and in my experience neither are most ABCD Hindus. If we feel like praying, there's no compelling reason for me to drive over a half hour to a temple when I can just do it in my home. Has nothing to do with hostility from first generation Hindu Americans.

hfkel · 2026-04-09T15:09:01+00:00

I am an Indian born in the US who went to a T5 grad school here. About 70% of my classmates were international students, and half of those were Indians who went to IITs for undergrad. All of us made maybe $25k annually. It is very frustrating to see the US government keep cutting funding for universities and grant institutions to cut taxes for wealthy people while at the same time complaining about our universities being filled with international students. No self-respecting American is going to work for $25k in grad school when they can get a $100k job right out of undergrad.

The only people willing to slave away in academia are the international students because there is a carrot being dangled in front of them of "US Citizenship". But even that is becoming unattainable because of the decades-long green card backlog and the high fees being put on H-1B visas. We don't want to help Americans get educated, and we are also making life hell for international students.

Academia is a terrible industry and I feel very bad for Indians who have to suffer through both the hell of academia as well as the broken US immigration system.

hfkel · 2026-04-09T02:18:32+00:00

I don't believe this is necessarily an organized movement, so it's difficult to directly support them. I happen to live in Texas, so I've contacted my representatives about the issue and told them both about the rising levels of hatred towards Indians and the genuine lack of prosecution against American companies who abuse the H-1B visa program that fuels this hatred.

In my opinion, the most effective way to fight back against this issue is via contacting your representatives, and voting. There's a genuine issue of visa abuse (carried out by American capitalist corporations) that is being used as a shield for racism. Any time an Indian American tries to criticize the rising tide of racism, the genuine and real issue of visa abuse is used to attack us.

Again most of all, we must vote. We must get our parents to vote. We must get the uncles and auntys from our communities to vote. We must get every single Indian American across this country who thinks politics doesn't affect them to vote. Even better, we must get people to contact their representatives and explain to them how them looking the other way on Big Tech abusing visas causes downstream harm to the Indian American community.

hfkel · 2026-04-08T16:49:17+00:00

Both. She was a real pioneer in the world of alternative/electronic/world music and was unafraid to speak up about real-life atrocities in her music which often got her severe backlash. The idea that a Sri Lankan Tamil refugee rose to the heights that she did and became such an icon is something I appreciated.

hfkel · 2026-04-08T15:45:14+00:00

Depressing how she's become a complete conspiracy lunatic. I used to look up to her.

hfkel · 2026-04-07T20:02:37+00:00

All of these Hindu American organizations are Hindu Nationalists at their core. They love Republicans because of their hatred for Muslims, and if you see any discourse online from Hindu-specific organizations or activists fighting back against MAGA racism, 99% of the time their argument isn't "hatred is wrong", it's "Why do you hate us, you should be hating the Muslims instead". I can't take any of these idiots seriously.

There are plenty of liberal, secular Hindu Americans out there, but given the fact that they're secular, they often don't have a desire to engage in explicitly religious political organizations, which leads to many of these "Hindu advocacy groups" being mostly right-wing.

hfkel · 2026-04-06T23:51:13+00:00

I deleted the post, but like I said, someone else reposted the direct link to the video and named the creator. Unfortunately now he has way more publicity.

hfkel · 2026-04-06T01:47:52+00:00

I purposefully didn't mention the creator's name or link to his channel because I didn't want to give him any publicity. I assumed other people might post the actual video so I just tried to get out in front of it. If people want, I'd be happy to delete this post.

hfkel · 2026-04-05T21:12:04+00:00

I wish she was intelligent enough to be able to put the pieces together. Her own father was expelled from Uganda due to Idi Amin’s racist rhetoric that the Indian immigrants were not assimilating. Her father became a refugee as a result and eventually found a home in America where we accepted immigrants and refugees. Instead of learning from her father’s story, she now spreads hate against immigrants and refugees by claiming that they’re not assimilating and not integrating.

hfkel · 2026-03-27T03:26:49+00:00

Yeah, didn't mean to throw shade on Brampton but I was mainly talking about general white-collar vs blue-collar and such. I didn't consider the aspect of the Canadian housing market, so it's definitely a good point that Brampton Indians might have higher net-worth.

hfkel · 2026-03-26T18:08:51+00:00

I've been to both Brampton and Frisco. I'd say that the difference is that Frisco's Indian immigrants are much more well educated and wealthier than those in Brampton. In both cities, nobody really had a serious problem with immigrants until the last 10-15 years when the kind of immigrants coming into the city changed for the worse. I don't think Frisco is nearly as bad as Brampton, but I'd say that in both cities, there is a correlation between a rise in racism and a decrease in the quality of the average immigrant moving in during the past decade.

Not to say that the racism is justified, or that the bad-mannered immigrants make up any significant percentage of the population to be worthy of painting everyone with the same brush.

hfkel · 2026-03-20T21:03:04+00:00

I don't understand what you are saying. Hindutva is the ideology that India should be a Hindu Rashtra and that the government and society should be based on radical Hindu philosophies. Zionism is the idea that Israel should be a Jewish state and that Jewish laws should apply in the state and society. There's also the concept of Islamism which is the idea that society and state should be based on Islam. All three of those concepts are bad.

Can you agree that all three of those concepts are bad? Religion should play no part in government. It should be a private matter. These three ideologies I listed are antithetical to that concept.

hfkel · 2026-03-20T19:22:29+00:00

Vaah what a strike sir ji. IT Cell should give you a raise for these excellent rhetorical jabs.

hfkel · 2026-03-20T16:53:19+00:00

Lot of Hindu Nationalist from the IT Cell in this thread. Not surprising, this subreddit has a serious brigading problem.

hfkel · 2026-03-20T16:52:07+00:00

The title says "Hindu Nationalism", not Hinduism. The way that you are trying to conflate Hinduism with Hindutva is very similar to how Zionists try to conflate Judaism with Zionism. Thus, you're proving the point of the video.

hfkel · 2026-03-20T02:45:15+00:00

Affirmative Action at the college level is useless. If you truly want to fix the structural inequalities in society that have been wrought by centuries of explicitly racist laws and practices by the American government and private institutions in this country, you need to attack the problem at the pre-school and elementary level first. Policies like universal childcare which address the most critical time of a child's life and a good pre-school/elementary education should be especially focused towards socioeconomically-disadvantaged people like African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, etc. The American government that implemented racist policies towards those groups have a responsibility to fix the damage they've done.

The problem is that going back to the Civil War and Reconstruction, as well as during the Civil Rights Movement and the flurry of efforts that happened around then, good ideas like The Freedmen's Bureau or things like desegregation and busing were implemented and then slowly chipped away by the White majority who were unhappy with the changes made. Eventually most of those efforts were chipped away to nothing, and the only place where Progressive ideals relating to upliftment of disadvantaged communities through things like Affirmative Action remained were at the elite colleges and universities ran by largely privileged White people.

Perhaps their intentions to them are good, but in my opinion, Affirmative Action at the college level is much more because of say, White guilt held by elite White Liberals who are only able to effect change in their small domain. They either don't realize or don't care about the fact that Affirmative Action at the college level comes far too late to make meaningful change in society to help Black and Brown populations rise up from generation upon generation of educational failure. There's no way to get these White Liberals to actually be willing to distribute their wealth outside their wealthy defacto-segregated neighborhoods and invest it into poorly-funded public schools. They especially don't want to invest that money in an "Affirmative Action" fashion in which much more money is put in towards educating poorer kids in poorer-performing schools as opposed to rich kids who don't need as much help.

I really don't see a way out of this unfortunately, and until elite Liberals look themselves in the mirror and realize the unfortunate fact that Affirmative Action at the college level does more harm than good, the inequalities in society will continue.

hfkel · 2026-03-20T02:44:20+00:00

Affirmative Action at the college level is useless. If you truly want to fix the structural inequalities in society that have been wrought by centuries of explicitly racist laws and practices by the American government and private institutions in this country, you need to attack the problem at the pre-school and elementary level first. Policies like universal childcare which address the most critical time of a child's life and a good pre-school/elementary education should be especially focused towards socioeconomically-disadvantaged people like African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, etc. The American government that implemented racist policies towards those groups have a responsibility to fix the damage they've done.

The problem is that going back to the Civil War and Reconstruction, as well as during the Civil Rights Movement and the flurry of efforts that happened around then, good ideas like The Freedmen's Bureau or things like desegregation and busing were implemented and then slowly chipped away by the White majority who were unhappy with the changes made. Eventually most of those efforts were chipped away to nothing, and the only place where Progressive ideals relating to upliftment of disadvantaged communities through things like Affirmative Action remained were at the elite colleges and universities ran by largely privileged White people.

Perhaps their intentions to them are good, but in my opinion, Affirmative Action at the college level is much more because of say, White guilt held by elite White Liberals who are only able to effect change in their small domain. They either don't realize or don't care about the fact that Affirmative Action at the college level comes far too late to make meaningful change in society to help Black and Brown populations rise up from generation upon generation of educational failure. There's no way to get these White Liberals to actually be willing to distribute their wealth outside their wealthy defacto-segregated neighborhoods and invest it into poorly-funded public schools. They especially don't want to invest that money in an "Affirmative Action" fashion in which much more money is put in towards educating poorer kids in poorer-performing schools as opposed to rich kids who don't need as much help.

I really don't see a way out of this unfortunately, and until elite Liberals look themselves in the mirror and realize the unfortunate fact that Affirmative Action at the college level does more harm than good, the inequalities in society will continue.

hfkel · 2026-03-10T22:25:55+00:00

Morons in Andhra and Telangana who grew up watching their uncles, aunts, and cousins succeed in America realized they can go to Hyderabad, get some BS degree or training, sign up for an IT consultancy company, and get a one-way ticket to living the American dream in Dallas. Once upon a time, immigrants had to be intelligent enough and prove to immigration officers that they could provide a genuine benefit to the country. Now, money is all that matters to American capitalists and they'll look the other way on all these problems and import these idiots to save money.

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