ResoluteRaven
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User ID: 867
ResoluteRaven
9d ago
But the point remains that a lot of my and your life has been spent in intellectual competition with people obviously less intelligent.
This is certainly not my experience. I have not found it difficult to live an intelligence-segregated life, apart from inevitable but brief interactions with the DMV and other similar organizations, simply by dint of pursuing my academic and career interests. There were dumb kids and affirmative action admits in college, but I was under no obligation to befriend them, and their mere presence in some introductory or mandatory course hardly counted as competition. Wherever these hordes of unwashed midwit Indian H-1B's everyone complains about are (some windowless warehouse in Silicon Valley, I am led to believe), it isn't anywhere near me. I knew of academic labs where everyone was from the same country as the professor, but it was obvious that they were to be avoided, and there was no shortage of other research opportunities. Hell, I can have the same sort of conversations I do here in-person if I go to enough rationalist meetups and suss out the crimethinkers.
ResoluteRaven
9d ago
Big Tech is probably about half foreign-born (overwhelmingly Chinese and Indian), with the other half split between white and Asian-Americans. Whites are probably a plurality if you count East and South Asians separately, but each company is different e.g. Microsoft has a reputation of being more Indian and Meta of being more Chinese, and individual teams or departments could have any possible ratio based on idiosyncratic hiring practices.
ResoluteRaven
9d ago
If most tech work is bullshit anyway, then why don't these white workers who are apparently so much more talented and deserving than Indian immigrants go do something that actually contributes to society instead, rather than whining about missing out on opportunities to be a parasite?
ResoluteRaven
9d ago
And what if a majority of heritage Americans support civic nationalism, birthright citizenship, and all the rest (as seems to be the case)? Can they not overrule you? Or is the desire of, shall we say the Scotch-Irish, to close our borders more legitimate than that of the scions of New England Puritans and Pennsylvania Quakers to have them open?
ResoluteRaven
14d ago
I don't see what the practical consequences of this decision going the other way would have been, other than increasing the number of illegal immigrants on paper. If mass deportations were going to happen, they would have already, so what difference does it make?
As to the role of the Church in all this, what did you think real Christianity meant? Vibes? Papers? Essays? Trying to repurpose a universalist and egalitarian religion into a tool of nativist exclusion was always a fool's errand. Perhaps the laity can be kept ignorant of the tenets of their own faith, but not the elites who have to read and interpret the scriptures.
ResoluteRaven
14d ago
And I can say that because I’ve been living in Argentina. Immigrants actually are kind of awful.
My impression was that people only liked Argentina because mass Italian immigration in the 19th century made it whiter and more culturally European than its Latin American neighbors. Otherwise it would have the cultural cachet of Ecuador or Venezuela.
I’m sick and tired of being exposed to gun violence in Chicago.
I don't think recent immigrants have much to do with this.
San Francisco is a boring Asian town now which use to be like the people from Full House.
I can't say I've seen a boring Asian town with this many homeless people, drug addicts, and shoplifters roaming the streets. And at least Asian cities build apartments.
ResoluteRaven
14d ago
Your friendly neighborhood hapa, reporting in (though I hear 'wasian' is the new hip term).
I grew up with more or less perfect OPOL i.e. my mom only spoke to me in Mandarin and my dad only spoke to me in English. I speak the former with no discernable [foreign] accent, but with a limited vocabulary and reading skills. I would say my level is quite a bit higher than the average 2nd generation Chinese-American's. Family dinners growing up were some combination of your possibilities 3 and 4. My mom would address me directly in Mandarin and my dad directly or myself and my dad collectively in English, and I would address my parents collectively in English, but my mom directly in Mandarin. There were essentially always 3 conversations happening in parallel: one between me and my mom in Mandarin that my dad didn't understand more than a few words of, one between me and my dad in English that was somewhat above my mom's English level and about subjects in which she had little interest, and a third collective discussion in simpler English.
To put it simply, any option besides option 1 (and maybe option 2, but it's not a stable equilibrium) entails the total obliteration of joint family life.
I'd say that this arrangement can be thought of as one instance of Tolstoy's unhappy families, but is not uniquely bad compared to many other possibilities e.g. divorce, abuse, absent father. When there are serious issues, the ultimate cause is usually something else i.e. if you denigrate your spouse in a language they don't understand, is it your choice of language or the lack of respect that's the main problem? Intercultural marriages typically have multiple sources of friction, and speaking the same language won't eliminate them.
This naturally raises the question: why bother? Why not just teach your kids English at home so you can have conversations as a family and forget about all this nonsense?
Some might believe that there's cognitive benefits from multilingualism, but I'm pretty sure those are bunk
That's not my understanding, but I am of course biased in this matter.
This allows them to have a shared language with their grandparents.
This was the case for me, though my grandmother didn't even speak Mandarin that well, so communication was still difficult.
It's a matter of passing down the heritage. This one I find objectionable. I do not see much value in possessing "Russian heritage" and I hope that my kids see themselves as Americans rather than Russian-Americans or whatever. Our family came to this country because it is better than the place we left, why do we want to preserve the vestiges of the bad old country?
This is the crux of it. Some immigrants recognize themselves as being here for ideological reasons e.g. escaping communism, corruption, lawlessness, and consciously intend to leave the trappings of their birthplace behind, and other immigrants are here because their friend in New York offered them a job at his restaurant that paid more than whatever they were making at the time, and they spared about as much thought to the generational consequences of moving to a new nation as you would if you got a good job offer in the next town over. Why would the latter sort of person think of their language and traditions as something bad to be shed?
The overwhelmingly likely result of doing this to your family is that your kids don't speak your language as adults and they do not have a sense of the family as a cohesive unit.
My parents were never going to form a cohesive family unit under any circumstances, so I consider it better to have at least obtained a useful skill out of it.
This is America, you don't get to raise your kids in an insular culture unless you go fully Amish.
Do Hasidic Jews count as having gone "fully Amish"?
Why would Google report a higher fraction of white employees than they actually have? If anything, the incentives run in the opposite direction, and they would be motivated to classify every possible edge case/mixed individual/white Hispanic as a person of color to hit their diversity targets.
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