The top bosses (founders) come from household-name private universities.
The higher management come from second-tier private universities.
80% of the programmers are H1Bs, who do 20% of the work. And introduce 90% of the bugs. But reliably lick the boots of the higher ups, and therefore are highly valued.
20% of the programmers are (mostly white) young men, 2/3 of whom graduated from Shitty State U, 1/3 of whom are dropouts. They do 80% of the work. And clean up all the messes created by the previous group. Management is constantly trying to replace them with H1Bs, but can't, 'cuz ultimately they do need someone to get the job done.
Those boys know damned well to keep their mouths shut, that their opinions are categorically unwelcome. They're paid enough to enrage the manual working class (can afford to rent an apartment, with no housemates, in a shitty neighborhood in the City - filthy Oppressors™!) but never enough even to come close to buying property.
No point to all this, no conclusion. Just my first hand observation.
Thanks for the account. It's amazing to me how much accumulated experience and insight there is out there in the world... and how little it's acknowledged or accessed by policymakers. In 2020 I kept waiting for some journalist or academic or legislator to speak to POLICE about police reform. Might they have some useful information?
No doubt some graduate school alumni would try to tell you why your personal observations are AKSHUALLY invalid or incomplete or something... but THEY are the ones who should be listening to US. Decades of client-patron/host-parasite relationships (masquerading as theory, or altruism) haven't produced their promised results. The illusion is wearing a little thin.
In Miami I spoke socially with a pleasant, seemingly upstanding mid-career policeman. He said that if he were a young man today, he would definitely NOT go into police work. Because every day he risks injury or death fighting criminals. And then the media make him out to be some sort of horrible villain.
I'm not much of a cop-lover. But I had a lot of sympathy for this guy. He seemed like the kind of person we want to have as a cop. And society is driving away that kind of people from law enforcement.
It's odd, isn't it? The side of the aisle responsible for "intersectionality" as a political theory nonetheless often seems to pick sides in controversies based on a pairwise comparison of only one category per controversy: child v adult, women v men, white v colored, native v immigrant, etc. Once they pick a pair to compare on, one side gets labeled as "Oppressors" and the other side as "Oppressed" and from there any further checks tend to exclude all categories that contradict the label established by the first comparison.
The grooming gang scandal response is a case in point: intersectionality would suggest a net tilt toward #BelieveTheVictim it at least a significantly mixed response. White native girls who have been raped by brown immigrant men presumably check at least one more box in the "Oppressed" column than the "Oppressor" column, don't they?
Child (Oppressed),
Female (Oppressed),
White (Oppressor),
Native (Oppressor),
Rape victim (Oppressed)
Yet that's not how it played out... About the only rape allegations the Left is apparently willing to presumptively reject are those of white women against colored men. There's an unpleasant history there that seems to elevate "Race" as the relevant category for first comparison rather than "Sex" when rape allegations are involved. Thereafter "child" and "rape victim" are excluded from relevance as inconsistent with the "Oppressor" label given the native white girls; likewise "adult male rapist" are excluded from being applied to the colored immigrants already labeled "Oppressed". The overall comparison then reduces to "white native" v "colored immigrant" and the Left requires no nuance when choosing sides on that basis.
Why is that though? There's a study I read a while back that suggests an answer:
Liberals and Conservatives Make Different Assumptions of Vulnerability, Explaining Moral Disagreement
"Abstract: Political disagreement can make it seem like liberals and conservatives have different moral minds, but here we show how moral disagreement can arise from a universal harm-based morality—people make different assumptions about who and what is especially vulnerable to harm. Assumptions of vulnerability (AoVs) predict people’s moral judgments, implicit attitudes, and charity behaviors, and can also be experimentally manipulated. We highlight four clusters of targets—the Environment, Othered, Powerful, and Divine—where liberals and conservatives hold different AoVs, helping to explain political disagreements about hot-button issues from abortion to policing. More generally, liberals amplify group differences in vulnerability, splitting the world into the very vulnerable (oppressed) versus the very invulnerable (oppressors), while conservatives dampen group differences in vulnerability, seeing all people as similarly vulnerable to harm."
"Divisive debates also seem to revolve around assumptions of vulnerability. Arguments about immigration cast illegal immigrants as vulnerable victims of oppression seeking a better life, or as invulnerable hardened criminals who threaten innocent citizens (Hogan & Haltinner, 2015)."
"The Othered. Sociology understands social identities as relational (i.e., groups define themselves in relation to other groups) and as connected to power structures (Callero, 2003; Okolie, 2009). Critical theorists argue that, in America, the dominant group against which others are defined and judged are White cis-gendered Christian men, and those who do not belong in this group are “othered” (e.g., Devos & Banaji, 2005). AoVs about The Othered could include the perceived vulnerability of groups like Muslims or transgendered people. Liberals seem to emphasize the vulnerability of the Othered, whereas conservatives are more likely to emphasize how the Othered are less like victims, and more like perpetrators (Prestigiacomo, 2016)."
When the primary comparison pairs are "white native" v "Othered" (immigrant Muslims) the Liberals tend to see the white native group as relatively invulnerable to harm from the marginalized Othered and conversely see the Othered as exceedingly vulnerable to harm from the white native group. Conservatives OTOH are seeing little difference in theoretical vulnerability to harm between the groups and therefore aren't thinking so much in terms of demographic groups at all, instead focusing on the actual harm done to specific individuals: the raped girls.
Hard scrabble life, Dad in prision, welfare, free school lunches, graduated high school, 1st job washing cars, factory work, volunteered for the draft, sent to Nam, found out had IQ of 127, college on the GI Bill, BS Degree, office jobs, executive vice president.
I too am working class and I can never forget my roots or damn the lived experiences that formed and fashioned ME!
Educated people too often overlook the benefits of these kinds of experiences in shaping a worldview. They think that degrees > struggle and life experience. I think that data shows that educated people who have lived disconnected from poverty and war and crime actually have some of the worst policy instincts of anyone.
In the Silly Valley software industry:
The top bosses (founders) come from household-name private universities.
The higher management come from second-tier private universities.
80% of the programmers are H1Bs, who do 20% of the work. And introduce 90% of the bugs. But reliably lick the boots of the higher ups, and therefore are highly valued.
20% of the programmers are (mostly white) young men, 2/3 of whom graduated from Shitty State U, 1/3 of whom are dropouts. They do 80% of the work. And clean up all the messes created by the previous group. Management is constantly trying to replace them with H1Bs, but can't, 'cuz ultimately they do need someone to get the job done.
Those boys know damned well to keep their mouths shut, that their opinions are categorically unwelcome. They're paid enough to enrage the manual working class (can afford to rent an apartment, with no housemates, in a shitty neighborhood in the City - filthy Oppressors™!) but never enough even to come close to buying property.
No point to all this, no conclusion. Just my first hand observation.
Thanks for the account. It's amazing to me how much accumulated experience and insight there is out there in the world... and how little it's acknowledged or accessed by policymakers. In 2020 I kept waiting for some journalist or academic or legislator to speak to POLICE about police reform. Might they have some useful information?
No doubt some graduate school alumni would try to tell you why your personal observations are AKSHUALLY invalid or incomplete or something... but THEY are the ones who should be listening to US. Decades of client-patron/host-parasite relationships (masquerading as theory, or altruism) haven't produced their promised results. The illusion is wearing a little thin.
Your reply made me think of this: https://barsoom.substack.com/p/the-great-christmas-h1b-war-of-2024
In Miami I spoke socially with a pleasant, seemingly upstanding mid-career policeman. He said that if he were a young man today, he would definitely NOT go into police work. Because every day he risks injury or death fighting criminals. And then the media make him out to be some sort of horrible villain.
I'm not much of a cop-lover. But I had a lot of sympathy for this guy. He seemed like the kind of person we want to have as a cop. And society is driving away that kind of people from law enforcement.
It's odd, isn't it? The side of the aisle responsible for "intersectionality" as a political theory nonetheless often seems to pick sides in controversies based on a pairwise comparison of only one category per controversy: child v adult, women v men, white v colored, native v immigrant, etc. Once they pick a pair to compare on, one side gets labeled as "Oppressors" and the other side as "Oppressed" and from there any further checks tend to exclude all categories that contradict the label established by the first comparison.
The grooming gang scandal response is a case in point: intersectionality would suggest a net tilt toward #BelieveTheVictim it at least a significantly mixed response. White native girls who have been raped by brown immigrant men presumably check at least one more box in the "Oppressed" column than the "Oppressor" column, don't they?
Child (Oppressed),
Female (Oppressed),
White (Oppressor),
Native (Oppressor),
Rape victim (Oppressed)
Yet that's not how it played out... About the only rape allegations the Left is apparently willing to presumptively reject are those of white women against colored men. There's an unpleasant history there that seems to elevate "Race" as the relevant category for first comparison rather than "Sex" when rape allegations are involved. Thereafter "child" and "rape victim" are excluded from relevance as inconsistent with the "Oppressor" label given the native white girls; likewise "adult male rapist" are excluded from being applied to the colored immigrants already labeled "Oppressed". The overall comparison then reduces to "white native" v "colored immigrant" and the Left requires no nuance when choosing sides on that basis.
Why is that though? There's a study I read a while back that suggests an answer:
Liberals and Conservatives Make Different Assumptions of Vulnerability, Explaining Moral Disagreement
"Abstract: Political disagreement can make it seem like liberals and conservatives have different moral minds, but here we show how moral disagreement can arise from a universal harm-based morality—people make different assumptions about who and what is especially vulnerable to harm. Assumptions of vulnerability (AoVs) predict people’s moral judgments, implicit attitudes, and charity behaviors, and can also be experimentally manipulated. We highlight four clusters of targets—the Environment, Othered, Powerful, and Divine—where liberals and conservatives hold different AoVs, helping to explain political disagreements about hot-button issues from abortion to policing. More generally, liberals amplify group differences in vulnerability, splitting the world into the very vulnerable (oppressed) versus the very invulnerable (oppressors), while conservatives dampen group differences in vulnerability, seeing all people as similarly vulnerable to harm."
"Divisive debates also seem to revolve around assumptions of vulnerability. Arguments about immigration cast illegal immigrants as vulnerable victims of oppression seeking a better life, or as invulnerable hardened criminals who threaten innocent citizens (Hogan & Haltinner, 2015)."
"The Othered. Sociology understands social identities as relational (i.e., groups define themselves in relation to other groups) and as connected to power structures (Callero, 2003; Okolie, 2009). Critical theorists argue that, in America, the dominant group against which others are defined and judged are White cis-gendered Christian men, and those who do not belong in this group are “othered” (e.g., Devos & Banaji, 2005). AoVs about The Othered could include the perceived vulnerability of groups like Muslims or transgendered people. Liberals seem to emphasize the vulnerability of the Othered, whereas conservatives are more likely to emphasize how the Othered are less like victims, and more like perpetrators (Prestigiacomo, 2016)."
https://osf.io/qsg7j/download/?format=pdf
When the primary comparison pairs are "white native" v "Othered" (immigrant Muslims) the Liberals tend to see the white native group as relatively invulnerable to harm from the marginalized Othered and conversely see the Othered as exceedingly vulnerable to harm from the white native group. Conservatives OTOH are seeing little difference in theoretical vulnerability to harm between the groups and therefore aren't thinking so much in terms of demographic groups at all, instead focusing on the actual harm done to specific individuals: the raped girls.
Hard scrabble life, Dad in prision, welfare, free school lunches, graduated high school, 1st job washing cars, factory work, volunteered for the draft, sent to Nam, found out had IQ of 127, college on the GI Bill, BS Degree, office jobs, executive vice president.
I too am working class and I can never forget my roots or damn the lived experiences that formed and fashioned ME!
Educated people too often overlook the benefits of these kinds of experiences in shaping a worldview. They think that degrees > struggle and life experience. I think that data shows that educated people who have lived disconnected from poverty and war and crime actually have some of the worst policy instincts of anyone.