Ask khuzifenq

[Kamala's side hoe]

TL;DR to your third question- never been arrested but I have more than one traffic citation under my belt.

Follow-up: How does it make you feel that I've been arrested more times than you have?

Judging from your post history, it certainly seems like you've lived a fuller life than I have up to this point. Off topic- we should totally reenact this Netflix scene when we pay retromike22 a visit in LAX. He can definitely pull off the "middle-aged pearl-clutching brown dermatologist" vibe

crumpets, pikachu, IBNU- I'll get to your questions later this year.

[All Along The Watchtower]

What are some underrated political trends, in your opinion?

[Progressive Pessimist]

Who exactly is this riribibi?

[Kamala's side hoe]

Who exactly is this riribibi?

Posting an answer to this while I still have my vaguely TikTok / Gaza / Yuh-line Niou / diaspora idpol / feminist-themed April Fools meme display name up.

Answer 1: A Canadian immigrant to the US who is apparently inspiring young Americans to allow naturalized Canadians to run for POTUS. Her immediately family is from Morocco, while she and her now-husband are currently based in the NYC area if not NYC proper.



Answer 2: A Tiktoker who I first heard about back in January, from one of the half-dozen real people who inspired this fictional voter that I wrote back when most of my posts on here were in PR's "describe this fictional hypothetical voter" megathread.

I want to be clear this is not trolling, I do believe internal misogyny is a part of why so many otherwise “pro-freedom” progressive posters on here are against TikTok. Especially when other Chinese companies operating in the US don’t get this level of scrutiny from them. (This doesn’t not apply to posters who are at least consistently anti-China everything like OSR, even though that’s also a dull stance)

And I do believe it would hurt Biden if Tiktok was banned in the US right before the election.

I hope this comment is more to the standards of moderation, I want to reiterate this is my genuine belief.

Answer 3: A fellow 90s kid whose content frequently references the Internet culture of the late 2000s and early 2010s that I grew up with. This also kind of describes the US Elections Atlas forum and the Leipverse community that has emerged from it. I was aware of this message board from 2011-ish onward despite not registering until much later. Like many other non-Zoomer members I see this forum as a relic of a bygone era of the Internet that long predates Instagram and Tiktok.

[NY Times] Welcome to CringeTok, Where Being Insufferable Can Be Lucrative
On TikTok, cringe comedy creators are gaining large followings and brand deals by impersonating terrible people.

Riri Bichri started posting CringeTok videos in 2020, and by April she had quit her job as [REDACTED] to pursue content creation full time. She has built a following of 800,000 subscribers by drawing on 2000s rom-com tropes, fan fiction and her own cringy behavior for inspiration.

Answer 4: Piggybacking on Answer 3, an opportunity to poke fun at certain Leipverse members' inclinations to overshare certain aspects of their personal lives that are completely unrelated to elections, politics, or current events. I could write an essay on @riribibi_'s 2000s-early 2010s Top 40-ish background music selections and how they remind me of feeling connected to other members of my mid-90s birth cohort through shared cultural nostalgia.

Going full BRTD / Meclazine / NOVA Green today and polluting this message board with the malarkey that I usually reserve for the rest of the Leipverse. That includes sharing a playlist of TikTok/reel background music

I don't think I've ever decided on an April Fools joke (whether in real life or online) so far in advance, and I think that says something about how well @riribibi_ embodies the themes of "diaspora community", race, gender, "Global South solidarity", and STEM-lord identity politics that underlie my NationStates worldbuilding and have helped me build my Leipverse brand of sorts. The content of hers that I've seen strongly implies that she grew up in Quebec, so she almost certainly grew up in an environment where all three of English, French and Arabic were spoken to some degree. Teenage me consciously picked these languages to be the designated L2 "national" languages that everyone in my NationStates main would have to learn because very few of the "founding wave" climate refugees would've spoken any of them as first languages. (On a personal level, I admire her creativity in incorporating her STEM-lord background and presumed neurodivergence into her content, I have a soft spot for "I was a cringe insecure ugly duckling once upon a time like you" stories).

Many of my meme display names reference female figures and embody feminist themes because I find meaning in lampooning the relative lack of cis women in this community and how that affects the state of discourse here (as Forumlurker alluded to in my quoted blurb). Being on here during the Trump presidency and the 2020 primaries probably negatively polarized me into being more supportive of certain female US politicians than I otherwise may have been. Side note- I'm aware that my "XX media representation" posting may have rubbed some Leipverse members the wrong way over the last few years, and I'll own up to how unnecessarily cis/hetero-normative I might come across at times.

[Progressive Pessimist]

Who exactly is this riribibi?

Posting an answer to this while I still have my vaguely TikTok / Gaza / Yuh-line Niou / diaspora idpol / feminist-themed April Fools meme display name up.

Answer 1: A Canadian immigrant to the US who is apparently inspiring young Americans to allow naturalized Canadians to run for POTUS. Her immediately family is from Morocco, while she and her now-husband are currently based in the NYC area if not NYC proper.



Answer 2: A Tiktoker who I first heard about back in January, from one of the half-dozen real people who inspired this fictional voter that I wrote back when most of my posts on here were in PR's "describe this fictional hypothetical voter" megathread.

I want to be clear this is not trolling, I do believe internal misogyny is a part of why so many otherwise “pro-freedom” progressive posters on here are against TikTok. Especially when other Chinese companies operating in the US don’t get this level of scrutiny from them. (This doesn’t not apply to posters who are at least consistently anti-China everything like OSR, even though that’s also a dull stance)

And I do believe it would hurt Biden if Tiktok was banned in the US right before the election.

I hope this comment is more to the standards of moderation, I want to reiterate this is my genuine belief.

Answer 3: A fellow 90s kid whose content frequently references the Internet culture of the late 2000s and early 2010s that I grew up with. This also kind of describes the US Elections Atlas forum and the Leipverse community that has emerged from it. I was aware of this message board from 2011-ish onward despite not registering until much later. Like many other non-Zoomer members I see this forum as a relic of a bygone era of the Internet that long predates Instagram and Tiktok.

[NY Times] Welcome to CringeTok, Where Being Insufferable Can Be Lucrative
On TikTok, cringe comedy creators are gaining large followings and brand deals by impersonating terrible people.

Riri Bichri started posting CringeTok videos in 2020, and by April she had quit her job as [REDACTED] to pursue content creation full time. She has built a following of 800,000 subscribers by drawing on 2000s rom-com tropes, fan fiction and her own cringy behavior for inspiration.

Answer 4: Piggybacking on Answer 3, an opportunity to poke fun at certain Leipverse members' inclinations to overshare certain aspects of their personal lives that are completely unrelated to elections, politics, or current events. I could write an essay on @riribibi_'s 2000s-early 2010s Top 40-ish background music selections and how they remind me of feeling connected to other members of my mid-90s birth cohort through shared cultural nostalgia.

Going full BRTD / Meclazine / NOVA Green today and polluting this message board with the malarkey that I usually reserve for the rest of the Leipverse. That includes sharing a playlist of TikTok/reel background music

I don't think I've ever decided on an April Fools joke (whether in real life or online) so far in advance, and I think that says something about how well @riribibi_ embodies the themes of "diaspora community", race, gender, "Global South solidarity", and STEM-lord identity politics that underlie my NationStates worldbuilding and have helped me build my Leipverse brand of sorts. The content of hers that I've seen strongly implies that she grew up in Quebec, so she almost certainly grew up in an environment where all three of English, French and Arabic were spoken to some degree. Teenage me consciously picked these languages to be the designated L2 "national" languages that everyone in my NationStates main would have to learn because very few of the "founding wave" climate refugees would've spoken any of them as first languages. (On a personal level, I admire her creativity in incorporating her STEM-lord background and presumed neurodivergence into her content, I have a soft spot for "I was a cringe insecure ugly duckling once upon a time like you" stories).

Many of my meme display names reference female figures and embody feminist themes because I find meaning in lampooning the relative lack of cis women in this community and how that affects the state of discourse here (as Forumlurker alluded to in my quoted blurb). Being on here during the Trump presidency and the 2020 primaries probably negatively polarized me into being more supportive of certain female US politicians than I otherwise may have been. Side note- I'm aware that my "XX media representation" posting may have rubbed some Leipverse members the wrong way over the last few years, and I'll own up to how unnecessarily cis/hetero-normative I might come across at times.

In true Atlas fashion: I'll just say to all that, she's pretty and needs her own thread about whether she is or not.

[Kamala's side hoe]

What are some underrated political trends, in your opinion?

I'll probably write a more substantial answer to this later, but for now I'll just quotepost my shallow-dive into the Economist 2024 election demographic crosstabs tool, which was apparently based on a recent(ish) YouGov online survey.

From this very surface level crosstab analysis, it seems like the model assumes voters of Non-Christian, Non-Jewish faiths will vote similarly to each other and will swing uniformly. I'm too lazy to check, but I'm guessing this uniform R swing probably isn't adjusted for age bracket. We also see a large assumed D swing among Mormons of all racial backgrounds, and probably a large assumed R swing among POC evangelicals in general (I see no reason why this would be limited to those who are college-educated Asian men born in the 90s).

The model also seems to think that the alleged R swing among Muslim voters (at least in Texas) will be strongest among racial crosstabs that have grown the fastest in recent years due to accelerating immigration from developing countries.

The importance of cross-class friendships is probably also underdiscussed here, if not among the poli sci intelligentsia and Twitteratti at large.
https://twitter.com/politicaphile/status/1554096045071761409

[Kamala's side hoe]

What are your thoughts on Asian American Literature ?

Neutral to mildly positive. I am aware of some of the criticisms of Asian American authors that have been raised online- a lot of this seems directed at Amy Tan (The Joy Luck Club, Sagwa) in particular. I think these hold some water on the basis of the field being inherently biased in favor of older, more established immigrant waves, which is why pretty much all of the historical "Asian American literature" I read growing up featured characters from pre-1965 Chinese and Japanese immigration waves.

I subconsciously think of this as a K-12 genre because most of what I've read that can be considered "Asian American literature" was assigned reading for school and/or children's novels about fictional AAPI characters, and not necessarily literary works by US nationals of Asian ancestry.

Aside from Farewell to Manzanar (which is a WW2 internment autobiography), all the "Asian American literature" titles I read pre-joining the Leipverse (or can readily think of) are works of fiction. The graphic novel American Born Chinese is also relatively well known, as it was adapted into a live-action TV show recently.

Most fiction titles I remember hearing about or reading growing up were about Chinese American children from the pre-1965 immigrant wave, although some featured later 20th-century children whose upbringings were closer to my own (e.g. the Millicent Min series).

There were at least a couple that I read that might not have been written by AAPI authors- Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet is a historical fiction novel by James Ford that's set in 1940s Seattle. While definitely geared towards teenagers, it deals with timeless themes of father-son relationships, generation gaps, teenage love, cross-cultural connections, and integration of diaspora communities into their host societies.

There was another children's historical fiction novel I read whose name and author escape me that was set in early 20th-century NorCal and had to do with a Chinese American kid who built a plane and/or wanted to fly in one. That one stands out to me because one of the characters in the protagonist's generation was an opium addict who grew up in relative comfort in China thanks to his father's hard work abroad and resented coming to Gold Mountain to join his father.

Some more adult fiction works that I've read (pre-2017 of course) are Chang-Rae Lee's Native Speaker (published in 1995) and John Okada's No-No Boy (published in 1957). Native Speaker is a very "Andrew Yang" novel in that it seems  to specifically reflect the experiences of the children of post-1965 but pre-1990s, middle to upper-middle class East Asian immigrants who settled in the Northeast, much like Andrew Yang and the author Chang-Rae Lee. No-No Boy has to do with the conscription of Japanese American men during WW2 internment at face value, but it also reflects the social alienation experienced by visibly East Asian-looking US citizens prior to the rise of the Asian American movement in the 1960s.

Other authors whose works I haven't read but I feel should be mentioned here.

• Viet Thanh Nguyen- famous for The Sympathizer, has a fairly active social media presence, is a professor at USC
• Shawn Wong- from the Bay Area, also a professor of Creative Writing, heard him speak on the UW campus once where he recounted the story of telling his "become a doctor" immigrant father that he wanted to switch paths
• Carlos Bulosan- I know he's technically an author but I primarily think of him as a Depression/WW2-era Seattle-based labor activist
• Louis Chu- name dropping here because I recently heard about his novel Eat a Bowl of Tea, which is set in the 1940s NYC area and references how restrictive immigration laws profoundly shaped the Chinese enclaves of that era.

Would definitely like to read/listen to The Sympathizer and Eat a Bowl of Tea at some point.