Saturday Miscellany

First, it should not be coming as news. Silicon Valley has long had a predominance of Asian tech workers. Not just Asian-American tech workers, but Asian-Asian tech workers. 

And yet, when Vivek Ramaswamy suggested that if we are going to compete in the world of high tech we are going to need to hand out more visas to Asian engineers, many people were sorely offended.

Turn back the clock, just a bit. Kenny Xu reported on this in Quillette in July, 2021. I discussed it on my blog:

Silicon Valley runs on Asians. This is a well-known aspect of the tech world in general, but it’s especially apparent in elite sub-sectors. Even by 2010, Asian Americans already had become a majority (50.1 percent) of all tech workers in the Bay Area: software engineers, data engineers, programmers, systems analysts, admins, and developers. Census Bureau statistics from the same year put white tech workers at 40.1 percent. Other races made up, in total, slightly less than 10 percent.

Leon is a 24-year-old Facebook product manager fresh out of the University of Virginia. He interacts daily with teams of software engineers at Facebook, coordinating and leading projects and getting them in line. Among the four teams of five or so software engineers he works with on a daily basis, Leon told me, 15 out of the 20 are Chinese. “I don’t mean Chinese-American,” he clarified. “I mean Chinese-Chinese, like from China.” These Chinese engineers largely speak Mandarin during work, making the company billions as they write code with machine-gun efficiency.

And now it has become a problem.

Second, some consider that American firms hire Asian engineers because they can get away with paying them less. Kenny Xu is suggesting that these workers are better at their jobs. I am hardly in a position to judge, but I suspect that Ramaswamy is correct.

In his view, American culture does not set out to produce competent engineers. One might mention-- he does not-- that the American push for diversity requires us to dumb down the curriculum, especially in the sciences and engineering. 

Allow Vivek his word:

The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over “native” Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy & wrong explanation). A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture. Tough questions demand tough answers & if we’re really serious about fixing the problem, we have to confront the TRUTH: Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer). That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG. A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers. A culture that venerates Cory from “Boy Meets World,” or Zach & Slater over Screech in “Saved by the Bell,” or ‘Stefan’ over Steve Urkel in “Family Matters,” will not produce the best engineers. 

More movies like Whiplash, fewer reruns of “Friends.” More math tutoring, fewer sleepovers. More weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons. More books, less TV. More creating, less “chillin.” More extracurriculars, less “hanging out at the mall.” Most normal American parents look skeptically at “those kinds of parents.” More normal American kids view such “those kinds of kids” with scorn. If you grow up aspiring to normalcy, normalcy is what you will achieve.

Trump’s election hopefully marks the beginning of a new golden era in America, but only if our culture fully wakes up. A culture that once again prioritizes achievement over normalcy; excellence over mediocrity; nerdiness over conformity; hard work over laziness. That’s the work we have cut out for us, rather than wallowing in victimhood & just wishing (or legislating) alternative hiring practices into existence. I’m confident we can do it.

One suspects that many Asian-American families shield their children from certain aspects of American culture.

Third, of course, there is more to business than tech engineers. The same is true of the H1B visa that brings foreign talent to our shores.

So, we keep in mind that Amazon had 9,200 warehouse jobs approved for H1B for 2024. 

As opposed to tech engineers, one imagines that Americans could have done these jobs.

Fourth, Bill Maher has suggested that the American left is chock full of intolerant bigots. Who knew? Considering that a deliberative democracy requires us all to respect the opposition, we draw the unfortunate conclusion that the left is opposed to democracy.

Newsmax reports Maher’s statement to Jay Leno:

It's so funny you mention that because today we live in this time where you're not allowed to have friends from the other side or cross lines politically. I forgot that there's an example of that way back when — a guy who crossed lines politically. Oh, the worst thing you could ever do. Be friends with a Republican? Ah! Call 911!

Fifth, meanwhile we have been told that democratic India was soon going to overtake authoritarian China. At the least, it has a larger population. And it has many citizens who excel in business in America.

If you believe that democracy will win out, you will find the following remarks, from Indian expatriate Jayant Bandhari in the American Renaissance sobering. Since we never ask ourselves how things are going in India, I will quote at length.

I had first returned to India with the idea of improving it, but after 11 years, I realized that India was a sinking ship, with worsening and increasingly shameless corruption, degraded people, and a society that was falling apart. I had never met an honest bureaucrat or politician. I applied to emigrate to Canada and my application was approved in a record three weeks….

In India, I have rarely seen someone in authority take the initiative to solve a problem he was responsible for. When I was at university, an underaged boy who worked in the kitchen was raped and sodomized by the janitors. I reported the matter, but not only did no one in authority do what was right — something well within their power — the authorities and fellow students threatened me with severe consequences if I pursued the matter further. Devoid of empathy, they also made fun of the boy and me….

Indians cannot maintain the institutions established by the British. These institutions have been hollowed out and corrupted, becoming predatory. The constitution and laws hold little value. The only forces driving these institutions are bribes and connections. Whether you approach the highest political leaders or the pettiest bureaucrats, they openly and unashamedly demand bribes.

The institutions left behind by the British have been hollowed out, becoming purely predatory and sadistic. This occurred because, in post-British India, those in power prize expediency and acquiring wealth as life’s sole purposes. Today’s India lacks even the vague rule of law that existed before the arrival of the Europeans. This is why it will be an improvement when India eventually collapses and the Taliban-like authoritarian system that existed before the British reemerges from the ashes.

So much for democracy. If you want to console yourself you can remark that they do not have a Communist Party. And you can also point out that if Indian nationals work in a more congenial culture, they excel. After all, people of Indian background are the most successful economically in America.

Sixth, for those of us who have been pondering the outpouring of unbridled lust, directed by young women at assassin Luigi Mangione, a Gen Z woman, named Rikki Schlott offers some excellent analysis in the New York Post.

Schlott shows how the feminist criticism of manly behavior leads to the idolization of a murderer like Mangione.

After years of harping on toxic masculinity, shaming men and stiff-arming chivalry, some women on the left seem to have fixated on Mangione because he represents a sort of masculinity they are finally allowed to celebrate — one that is coded as politically acceptable.

Murdering someone in cold blood is the most “toxic” form of masculine aggression imaginable … unless, apparently, it’s allegedly done in the name of being anti-corporate and anticapitalist.

If leftist women are damsels in distress, held captive by the insurance industry and pricey healthcare system, Mangione is their knight in shining armor: fighting on their behalf, slaying the enemy, taking up arms to defend their cause.

As we have occasionally noticed, when men are not held to standards of gentility they have recourse to machismo. Being incapable of protecting and providing for women, especially when women never let them forget it, leaves with no other choice.

After shaming the masculinity out of the men around them, ultra-feminists are left with no choice but to grasp at an exaggerated fantasy of gallantry in the form of Mangione, because, when healthy expressions of masculinity and femininity get suppressed, unhealthy extremes get fetishized.

This is no mere theory. 

The young feminists who are craving the touch of Mangione are far less repressed sexually than were their mothers or grandmothers. More importantly, they are apparently happy to allow or even encourage their partners to choke them during sexual congress. Schlott reports that some two-thirds of college girls have been choked during sex. Say what?

While young women today are outspokenly progressive on gender dynamics in public, a very different story is playing out behind closed doors.

Privately, they are demanding en masse that their sexual partners choke them during sex. In fact, a full two-thirds of college girls — perhaps the most progressive sampling possible — report having been choked during intercourse.

 

This does not make them empowered. It seems to compensate for the fact that however often they declare themselves to be strong and empowered, they have sacrificed their femininity, what they might call the feminine mystique.

Young women insist that they are just as powerful as men in day to day life and yet, in the bedroom, they are turned on by handing their sexual partner the power to kill them.

Because, when women are conditioned to believe that holding a door and offering a subway seat are misogynistic slights, a suppressed desire for natural gender dynamics will express itself in some other way.

Her point is well taken here. Women who refuse to accept the more genteel expressions of masculine behavior do not erase the gender dynamic. They find themselves playing out the same dynamic in different ways. They despise the feminine mystique and they moon over an assassin like Luigi Mangione-- because they want to be hurt by men.

Clearly, third-wave feminism has left women with a distorted relationship with masculinity: It’s something to be disparaged in its healthy forms, and fetishized in its depraved extremes.

Excellent analysis. 

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