No, he said every country has good and bad, and claimed (wrongly I'm sure) that the US got the good and the UK the bad. Ignorance, not anti-Pakistani sentiment
Replies
Try translating this into equivalent tropes about Jewish people and see where you end up.
aug 16, 2025, 11:58 am • 3 0 • view
Is he suggesting every country has child kidnappers or is he stereotyping Pakistan ?
aug 16, 2025, 12:01 pm • 4 0 • view
And it’s a pity he used Dick van Dyke as his language consultant.
aug 16, 2025, 12:15 pm • 1 0 • view
Sad fact is every country does. In this tweet at least he doesn't claim this is a Pakistan thing, tho obvs he's influenced to say anything here by UK right wing's false claims that it is
aug 16, 2025, 12:53 pm • 0 0 • view
He literally is suggesting it’s a Pakistani thing , it’s astounding you are still arguing differently
aug 16, 2025, 1:02 pm • 3 0 • view
He’s trading in racist tropes deployed by the reactionary right in the UK to stir up resentment/hostility. Even if he draws a contrast to “good Pakistanis” it’s still very clearly lazy racial stereotyping.
aug 16, 2025, 12:39 pm • 10 0 • view
No, this is how you've chosen to interpret what he's said in the light of posts he's previously that were not present/linked to this tweet. It's also not true (has he made similar arguments about Swedes? Why not? Because ppl he's pally with are not sharing racist articles about Swedes).
aug 16, 2025, 12:07 pm • 2 0 • view
Don't believe me? Find a black friend and tell them "you're one of the Good Ones! What? How can it be racist to say that there are Good and Bad Ones!".
aug 16, 2025, 12:12 pm • 1 0 • view
He explicitly in that very tweet made it about countries, not skin colour. He's wrong, for me this tweet is evidence of ignorance. No time to engage any more now
aug 16, 2025, 12:27 pm • 0 0 • view
So you believe when he refers to a Pakistani Brit he means country of origin / country of residence and not their ethnicity? I’d suggest that is an unusual interpretation
aug 16, 2025, 12:40 pm • 0 0 • view
If he's followed Noah Smith for a while - like me - he's reading it as part of an argument he's been making for a while where he's gone from arguing "free markets + immigration == good, racism bad!" to "immigration is good when you filter out the Good Ones but bad when you get the Bad Ones".
aug 16, 2025, 1:42 pm • 1 0 • view
I understand the reflex to try to interpret it in the most positive light -I followed Noah Smith because I was personally sympathetic to his ex-physics grad nerdery -but this sort of "itsnotracistreallybecausetechnicallynothingisassertedaboutthemean" casuistry is transparently not applied to Swedes.
aug 16, 2025, 1:45 pm • 2 0 • view
I carry no torch for Noah Smith. Just sae that tweet (in isolation) as his argument for selective immigration (based on his ignorance AFAICT), not as the transparent racism it was being portrayed as. Anyway, I've spent enough time on this and don't care enough.
aug 16, 2025, 1:52 pm • 0 0 • view
If someone said "The great thing about Silicon Valley is that when we get Blacks we get the Good Ones" you could *scrunch your eyes up really hard* and try to tell yourself that, actually they rolled a die with an unbiased distribution and it just came up Blacks ...
aug 16, 2025, 1:50 pm • 1 0 • view
No you couldn't. That is about skin colour
aug 16, 2025, 1:53 pm • 0 0 • view
I see - so in your mind it would instantly cease being racist if "Blacks" was replaced with "African Americans"? Remember, many UK Pakistanis are third generation.
aug 16, 2025, 1:57 pm • 0 0 • view
No. He contrasted two groups of first-generation Pakistani immigrants. It was crude and doesn't fit the facts, but was about dividing a group - which could be done with any nationality (or ethnic group), since they all have paedophiles and all have entrepreneurs.
aug 16, 2025, 2:02 pm • 0 0 • view
Also remember, if you edge into "well, it's only racist if you can be *100% certain* that it's a reference skin colour/biological heritability" because 99% of historical racism - yes, including the obvious one - was people who really did not care to make that distinction.
aug 16, 2025, 1:59 pm • 1 0 • view
... and actually since they don't specify the Good One/Bad One distribution it's *theoretically possible* they think it's the exact same distribution for all states/ethnicities. "Members of the court, please pretend for a moment that English doesn't work as we all know it does."
aug 16, 2025, 1:50 pm • 0 0 • view
By this line of argument "The Ashkenazi absolutely deserved what happened to them in the Holocaust, but the Sephardi really didn't" - spoken by someone who is neither/not part of another Jewish diaspora - isn't anti-semitic. I totally understand your argument - I'm saying that it's wrong.
aug 16, 2025, 12:33 pm • 0 0 • view
The sad thing here is that you're right *insofar* as this is a guy who is visibly trying to accommodate his (i) pre-existing support for immigration (ii) with the ardent race science + anti-immigrant twitter crowd he now hangs with
aug 16, 2025, 12:12 pm • 1 0 • view
With no soul-telescope I have no idea if this is strategic or internalised (he's a human being, so I would assume the latter) but - to repeat the point - it's brain-rotting to focus on Stuff You Can Definitively Never Know rather than actual behaviour.
aug 16, 2025, 12:12 pm • 1 0 • view
You're engaging in the fallacy of "racism is an invisible soul-affliction, only diagnosable by St Peter/soul-telescopes/self-confession". It isn't. Racism is a *behaviour* (in this context, tweeting things which would make someone feel denigrated because of their ethnicity).
aug 16, 2025, 12:07 pm • 1 0 • view
The only point that requires projection of internal states is the low bar of the court-style "what would a reasonable person *expect* as consquences?". How would a reasonable person expect a British Pakistani to read this tweet?
aug 16, 2025, 12:07 pm • 1 0 • view