Family Arguments

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

I keep giggling when the media — even some on the right — refers to the lively… discussion last week about the appropriate use of H1B visas and when to import workers as “A MAGA civil war.”

Sure, there were the usual sh*theads babbling about how America is a “blood and soil” nation and all that nonsense. (The most amusing was the one arguing with me that America was created explicitly as a white nation. He failed to tell me which documents say so, and explain the divergence in what was considered “white” then, or even show me the set aside for free black people, which, yes, existed in the North.) But let’s be real and talk about the actual argument amid actual Americans. Not the (Mostly Russian. And they probably actually believe what they’re posting) paid trolls. I suggest we mostly ignore anyone screaming about the “white” race or set asides thereonto until they come up with better trolls.

This wasn’t a civil war. This was barely a family argument.

Here I should interject. Where I come from expression is loud and voluble, particularly if your mom is a bit deaf. I remember the first time Dan (the poor man is from a Connecticut patrician family!) found himself at the table with my family. I saw when his eyes got all panicky and he started looking at the steak knives, and wondering whether to dive under the table. At which point I told him we weren’t about to slit each other’s throats. We were discussing where to buy shoes the next day. It hadn’t even gotten impolite. We were all just enthusiastically shouting our opinions and disagreement.

He got used to this communication method later on to the point he didn’t much notice it. Heck, I didn’t notice it, until I was walking back from downtown one day and heard what sounded like two men having a very loud argument about three blocks away from our house. It wasn’t until I got closer I realized it was my teen sons who were discussing their favorite Spiderman timeline.

This example is more germane because at the time I thought “Gee, it sounds like they’re about to slit each other’s throats. I’m shocked no neighbor ever called the police.”

But it was the kid next door, in the quiet house where no one ever raised their voices who tried to commit suicide by dropping from a roof. And it was in that quiet house that the father and mother divorced, in a long, bitter mostly silent process that took years and left them both broken.

I’m not saying loud is preferable (My Connecticut DIL still tries to dive under the table while her husband and BIL scream at each other at the top of their considerably powerful voices over…. who gets to sit next to whom at holiday meals. Or whether one of them set the trivets in the right place for me to place the turkey pan.)

I’m saying that some family arguments — granted not the ones about Spiderman retcons — need to be had, no matter the volume. And that there’s worse than having arguments out in the open where the world can see and hear.

Sometimes “not in front of the kids, dear” is justifiable. And sometimes all it does is tamp down the tensions till everything explodes.

Let me unpack it for you: Of course Musk and Trump had a prejudice pro H1B visas. The first came here with one, and he and the second see only the results after they’ve been normalized, tamped, cleared and made rational by their middle managers.

Look, this is like what I refer to with the publishing industry drinking its own ink. If you only see the end result of the actions taken by your middle managers, you don’t know what goes on in the middle. I call this management by spread sheet, and though both Elon and Trump are too smart to do that exclusively, they run very large enterprises and have to delegate SOME of them.

The publishing industry got caught in this, because they started doing things like judging the success or failure of a book without taking in account anything but the book. Ie. not paying attention to even elementary things like covers, much less push, or money spent on publicity, or what type of publicity, or the fact the pipeline had gotten clogged with things like “ordering to the net.” It was all “the numbers don’t lie” but yes, the numbers do, which is why they ended up drinking their own ink and opening themselves up to having indie eat their lunch.

The problem with the management of any large enterprise is the you end up having to take certain things on faith. Which is how the hyper concentrated management of communist countries fails.

Yes, you can do marketing and opinion surveys, but for anything political or frankly economic or– well, pretty much anything in these days, they are proving more and more useless.

So, of course, Trump and Elon stepped in it, after Vivek really stepped in it by thinking America is how Hollywood portrays it.

But Elon and Trump have walked it back, and I really think they mean it. They truly were not aware of how bad it’s gotten. Yes, every new job created in a quarter going to foreign born people might have been a clue, but I think they didn’t connect it.

They didn’t realize how bad it was 20 years ago and how it has incrementally grown. Yes, sure, offshoring is bad but “inshoring” and laying off your entire department to bring in foreign labor who then perpetuates itself by despising Americans, in a purely xenophobic snit (Hi Vivek!) is just as bad. And creates massive resentment.

Which Elon and Trump got to see, up close and personal.

(Oh, and much as I stare at Vivek in horrified fascination, let me tell you as someone who acculturated, this is one of the phases. You’re trying to understand your new culture, and you go through a phase of believing the media, not realizing it has its own biases. “Oh, so things really are like Revenge of the Nerds. Or Pretty In Pink. Or whatever.” You have to work at moving out of that phase. So I have some limited sympathy for him. Acculturating is difficult and a hell of a lot of work. Which is reason #300000 why mass immigration is a bad idea and makes every country worse. As the world is finding out.)

And then they walked it back. And this is good. Because they saw the rage and the hair-trigger anger people are living with, but more importantly they saw the injustice and the ridiculousness of importing workers because you can essentially enslave them. While you can’t do that to citizens.

Oh, and to the people saying that to want to (really, not pretend, with fake ads) hire Americans first is “DEI”: you are full of shit. American citizens are tax payers. They are also members of the culture, born and raised in it. If their buy in doesn’t get them at least equal consideration for work and the benefits of an economy they and their parents helped build, it’s on you to explain why not. America should be run for the benefit of Americans (of all colors.) I’m not suggesting we slam the gates shut. I’m suggesting small, a trickle really, and for very specific needs and circumstances, where people aren’t committing wholesale fraud to get it. (Like, I came over as a bride. But I’m strenuously against “Marry the maid so she can stay here.” I would have come over, anyway and had a study/employment offer at the same time. I just happened to fall in love. BUT–) There should be routes for entry. I suggest more than for “must be a genius” which is NOT the best criteria, we should screen for “really wants to be American” but that might be just my own bias showing.

The point is, as much as I’m sure Vivek didn’t know what he was stepping into, this argument is one that needed to be had. The pros and cons, and the justifiable anger of the people should be on open display. And the “factors leading to” should be investigated. Because by themselves H1B visas might be a good idea. They are not a good idea as they’re being used/frauded/messed with. And as with publishing, the fraud factors are so many that people at the top don’t even realize their metrics mean nothing.

Yeah, sure, the education in America is a mess, and that needs to be fixed. But we need to find pathways to get kids employed, instead of assuming they’re all stupid and lazy. (They’re not. And keep in mind “kid” for me at this time is anyone under 45 or so.) If you think they are you don’t know how hard they’re fighting/working to stay above water, and have been deceived by reports of a few people. (Look, even in my day most retail workers were flaky and wouldn’t show up for their shifts or paycheck. It’s just now we make it harder for people to work two or three jobs in retail. So we have fewer of the reliable ones, because fewer of them can work more than one job.) BUT all of that is also obscured by people trying to hire cheap people they can bully and by the sheer mess that is our HR and their protocols, including DEI.

So, after this discussion, we are set on a better path to fix the problem. These discussions need to keep happening, and yes, they need to happen in the open and where everyone can see it because no one has the full picture of how messed up the entire process is. Even I didn’t, and I have feelers in a lot of places. (It’s like the people who say illegal immigration is a net plus. No it’s not, if you see the payouts and destruction of education, healthcare, welfare, etc. etc. etc., and I’m sure even I don’t have the full picture.)

This is the time to take a page from the dems and say “party unity my ass.” In healthy families, nations and movements, things get discussed in the open without fear it will destroy everything.

And yes, the dems will think it’s a civil war and that we’re “falling apart” but that’s because they don’t tolerate dissent or even questioning, and frankly any questioning would cause them to fall apart, because they have no coherent philosophy.

Ignore them. The adults need to work through this stuff.

And despite the shouting and the waving hands, I have great hopes for the future.

208 thoughts on “Family Arguments”

  1. Sarah, at the risk of being a bigger suck-up than the pundit class on X is being to Elon right now (seriously, it’s nauseating the ass-kissing they’re giving him)… This is why we love our Evil-but-Beautiful Space Princess, because you GET IT. You get America better than most native-born Americans.

    BTW, though, I did see an interesting thought on Xwitter today. No, we aren’t a Blut-und-Boden nation. BUT someone did bring up an interesting point: If the Founders hadn’t been almost all English men, would we still have become America. Their thought was no. If the Founders were French, we’d be Quebec. If Portuguese, we’d be Brazil (or Portugal Plus, maybe). It’s not blood and soil, but let’s not sell our British bloodline from the eighteenth century short as giving us the foundations that have let us be as welcoming to immigrants as we are, and the Nation of the Idea that we’ve become. It’s an interesting thought exercise to wonder what might have happened if the Spanish in St. Augustine had succeeded and Jamestown and Plymouth had failed.

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    1. I suspect that if that had happened, what is now the US would have been speaking various flavors of Spanish (Cuban vs. Mexican, anyone?😉), as is the case with modern American English (Massachesetts vs. Alabama, f’rinstance), and would almost certainly not be an sort-of-unified nation of sovereign-but-connected states. Spain did not have the “free yeomanry” history of England.

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    2. The Reader notes that the colonists took John Locke and his concept of Natural Rights much more seriously than the average Englishman did. While we sprang from British roots, we took some things and left others. What colonists from France or Portugal might have taken from their home culture and shaped it is the subject of speculative fiction.

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      1. Lumping Scotts in with England. Yes, but no. Yes, because part of the same island, and for centuries part of the same country. But ask a Highland Scot, then, if that is true get a resounding “He** NO!” Many of the phrases of the Declaration of Independence come from Declaration of Arbroath of April 1320. Lumping Scots, or Irish, in with English, is as dangerous as lumping Germans, French, Spanish, Russians, all as White and Caucasian.

        ….. Oh. Wait. That is exactly what they do. Idiots.

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    3. There’s a huge amount of ‘Merica that appears to be all about, “The Glorious Revolution suckkkkkked, and we don’t want the fix to be in. Even if it supposedly favors my weird little religion.”

      So of course we never study the Glorious Revolution, or mention it. It’s apparently the thing buried so deep that we don’t even think about it anymore, but it was immediately obvious to me when I read Churchill’s Marlborough and we hit that part. (Churchill didn’t mention the US connection, either, which I also thought was weird, because he was constantly making side remarks about everything else.)

      Of course, a lot of the rest is “Cromwell suckkkkked,” “Charles I suckkkkked,” “Charles II was too expensive,” and so on.

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      2. Well, the glorious revolution did suckkkkkk, if you were one the losing side anyway, which my family most certainly was. My mother had very little historical sense but even she reacted to the teaching about the “bloodless” revolution. Teaching by a bunch of Irish Catholic nuns at that. Hurrumph.

        A good conversation to have with your kids is what side your family would be on in 1776. Sure, the Patriots, but my family are middle class Roman Catholics from NYC, so it’s not at all clear. The patriots were running around whigging , and prigging, and all newfangledness, as the song says, whilst flying down with the king and no popery flags, bringing back all that “Glorious” revolution Whiggery. It was no accident that they wore blue and buff, the Whig colours.

        my intellect is all for whiggery, but in my heart and personality I’m a G-d d-mn your eyes Tory squire,

        the RC’s, Irish and Scots tended to be loyalist though that doesn’t explain Carroll of Carrollton. In any case, it was a very productive dinner conversation that we still come back to from time to time. We agree that the revolution was a “good thing” but also that things aren’t that simple and good people can disagree.

        and yes, people think we are weird when my kids tell them what dinner conversations we have,

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        1. Irish and Scots had a lot to overcome to become patriots. Not the least of which were their own direct very harsh experiences to losing a rebellion to the English crown. They had been on the losing side. Not again. Often enough any Scot who became a patriot risked facing younger brothers, cousins, and other family members, in the Scottish regiments brought over by the English crown to fight the upstart rebels.

          I’m not saying it was my Scottish ancestors who fought with the patriots. Not true, because that branch is only 3 American born generations back (g-grandpa); relatively newcomers. The patriots that fought for liberty were here very early (1625 -ish); paternal side. Not as much information from the maternal side, except that they too fought for liberty.

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          1. There were Scots and Irish on both sides. It seems there was a religious element with Catholics tending to stay with the crown since the crown gave them what little protection they had and as you say they’d seen what happens when you lose. Not that there were many Catholics here and, again, Carroll of Carrollton signed the Declaration.

            The British raised a full regiment “the Volunteers of Ireland” in Boston, they had a good record. The loyalist Scots seem to have been largely highlanders since there were very few RC’s left in the lowlands, but a lot of RC highlanders came to the US after the ‘45. It was Catholic Scots that made up most of the troops involved in the Wyoming “Massacres” in 1778 (every Patriot defeat was a massacre, they understood propaganda very, very well). Flora MacDonald, who had smuggled out King Charles III (ahem) after Culloden, was no patriot, nor were her neighbors in the Royal Highland Emigrants, another loyalist regiment raised among highlanders in North Carolina.

            I remember reading that the colonies were split in thirds, with a third Patriot, a third Loyalist, and a third not really giving a damn, a good number of the loyalist third ended up in Canada. That who the United Empire Loyalists were. E.g., The descendants of the battle of Wyoming troops ended up in Stormont, Dundas, and Glengarry Ontario where they still subsist.

            For myself, my daughter could sign up for the DAR through my paternal grandmother’s side and my maternal Uncle’s oldest son could go for the Order of Cincinnati (la di da) in descent from my G-g Grandfather who was an officer in the French/Irish Regiment Clare and served at Savannah. The Cincinnati is strictly primo-genitive so I’m out.

            My mother used that when they tried to blackball us from the local CC for being Irish. they wanted no Paddy’s. This would have been about 1970 or so. They changed their tune when they found out, but my mother now wanted no part of them so my Da had to play golf somewhere else.

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            1. My grandfather (Swedish/English) got disowned for marrying an local Irish gal in the late 1930’s. So I have a bunch of upper class cousins in Dallas, of which, I’ve only met one. His grandfather referred to our branch of the family as “red headed n****s”.

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        2. We are almost certain that Mom’s New England, supposedly descended from John Alden and Priscilla Mullins family were Torries during the revolution. (A Great Aunt did a bunch of research on the genealogy in order become a daughter of the American Revolution then abruptly stopped trying)

          Dad’s side of the family has a nurse for the revolutionaries so I qualify, Pennsylvania Scottish/German.

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          1. Just want to say that at the time, it was more complicated than everyone being on one side or the other. One of my ancestors, William Canedy, held a royal commission at the beginning of the Revolution, and reportedly, ” He and his men were loyal to the king, but their (sic) appeared to be no battle with revolutionary soldiers. He was an influential man in that part of Middleboro, now Lakeville and served with distinction in the French and Indian war. When asked concerning his loyalty he replied that he had fought for his king and held a commission as Captain from his majesty’s governor, and he could not be a traitor in his old age.”

            (at that time, he was not yet 50. Our idea of old age has changed!)

            He lived to 1804. There is no indication he or his family had to leave the area due to his loyalty to the king. One of his grandsons’ families were abolitionists, involved in the Underground Railroad.

            Most of the rest of my ancestors on that side of the family were involved in the revolutionary cause. So, people of different political persuasions can work productively together in the wake of wars and revolutions. The current extreme political polarization is a bad trend, in my opinion.

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        4. One of my Civil War books (U.S., 1860-65) used the word “bloodless” WRT a naval action…and then went on to detail the casualties. Dude, when there ARE deaths calling it “bloodless” is just a bit inaccurate. I wrote a marginal note on that one.

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    5. I wouldn’t use the term “bloodline”; mindset or culture works about as well and doesn’t leave an opening for the “blood and soil” crowd.

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      1. Yes. Look, I am not at home to those who say my kids aren’t real Americans because of me. My husband’s people fought in the revolution (for the revolution, if you want to know.) So– No. They do have the blood of the founders, but more importantly, they were brought up to be AMERICANS.

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        1. America is an idea even more than it is a physical place, with borders, laws, and the like. There are those born in other places that are in all other senses American.

          These people we should steal, if not aggressively recruit. They belong here. We need more Americans of the mindset and pride in who and what we are, not less. We need those who believe in the concepts of liberty and justice for all bloody men. All of us.

          Even if at some future point we contact aliens, uplift animals, or create neural networks that spark into consciousness gestalt, they can darn well be as American as you and me.

          Liberty means freedom. Freedom from, first among things, a government that seeks only to grow and control. Justice means proper consequences, regardless of station and social status. To be safe and secure in your selves and your property, not bowed to the whims of some unfeeling lord. To keep the fruits of your labor. To live, success and failure, on your own terms.

          Real Americans… We love America. Our hearts and souls yearn for it. To be free. To know liberty and justice. To strive for ourselves and those we call our own. Those who cast their empty words upon Real Americans are but fools. Willfully ignoring the truths that America was founded on.

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          1. People argue that America the Beautiful should be our national anthem. No, I’ll take the current one and suffer through bad renditions, because it’s about the ideals and not the physical landscape.

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    6. The scotch-Irish had a bunch to do with America and it’s founding principals, and it’s effective military, and they are the ethnicity most likely to just list American as their ethnicity on the census.

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    7. One thing I didn’t realize until I finally read De Tocqueville is that the northern colonies tended to be, get out and good riddance. Survive if you can, but Virginia and most of the South were instead Royalty subsidized welfare states (or estates at least because it was free land) for the extra (non-heir) sons of the aristocracy. Many empowered Southerners were the “You toil and work and earn bread, and I’ll eat it,” types as Lincoln characterized it. The Civil War made much more sense after I understood that.

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    8. How “broken” ??

      My feelers have been deep and wide at great length and I didn’t really intend that…

      Know this? the scandalous NGOs filling the pipeline with little to no experience and getting them up to speed for plausible employment interviewing for jobs that would seek 5-7 years experience and once employed 50% of salaries are steadily KEPT by the NGO.

      And this? Decades ago lighting the fuse on H1B incineration of just compensation and market functionality, back room plotting created a fake labor shortage in order to prevent research scientist’s compensation from rising into 6 figures. Eric Weinstein has documented this history and he presented it publicly to live audiences of those most affected/ involved and while I appreciate his let’s say consternation at their ( our? ) resounding crickets 🦗 and inaction, I deeply appreciate Eric and hope indeed quite nearly believe he does understand the deer in the headlights/madness of crowds which confronted him then.

      It’s where we are, ( in part by nefarious malevolent design) dysfunctional family systems gone public and feral… so yeah, adults in the room please rise, and stand listening and speaking for and of Reality. Remember how and when to fight

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  2. People tend to think the issues that get the most shouting are the most important. There’s H1B abuse. There’s illegal immigration abuse. One is a mud puddle. The other is the ocean. There’s been a lot of shouting about H1B visas recently. Yes, there are problems that need fixing with it. Let’s get a good start on illegal immigration first thing and clean up the H1B process as we go. The US is big. We can do two things at once. It’s just hard to *start* two things at once in the government.

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    1. H1B visas are a good place to start, and something visible. There is a lot of documentation as well as anecdata about the topic. Start there, and work outward to the packing plants that don’t want to hire native-born people, the dairies that don’t hire local, other agribusinesses, and so on.

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      1. No need. In both cases, the incoming administration just needs to apply the law as written.

        H1-B Visas are statutorily limited to 85,000 annually, distributed by lottery. If the government just stops issuing several times the maximum, and enforces their expiration dates, most of the problem will be solved. For the rest, making the business show documentation establishing that they made good faith attempts to hire locally and are paying more than median wages (both requirements under the law).

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        1. I’m not sure that’s what’s going on. I’ve seen the numbers of hundreds of thousands floating around. But my understanding is that those include automatic reapplications of existing H1Bs that have expired (iirc, they only last for three years). The law only limits brand new H1Bs, and not reapplications.

          The more important thing is that the program is being *grossly* abused. A good first move would be to take the minimum wage that an H1B employee can earn (set at $60K when the law was passed) and automatically retroactively adjust for inflation. According to what I’ve been seeing, that would immediately bump the minimum up to around $150K, which would instantly get rid of the worst of the cases.

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          1. Yeah, it’s 85k per year. They last at least 3 years (I think) and can be renewed. So it adds up pretty quick. I don’t know what the total at any given time is but I’d be surprised if it was under 400,000. More like shocked, really.

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            1. I don’t think they can be renewed. I think they have to be transitioned to another type of visa that gives a path to permanent residency and citizenship. (And doesn’t allow indentured servitude.)

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    2. evidently, there’s a statutory limit of 80,000 H1b visas per year, but they’ve been issuing 800,000. That’s a nice concrete place to start. How the hell did they approve 10 times as many as the statute allows? What little piece of legislation, or executive order, or pure bureaucratic fiat allowed that?

      Legal immigration and fake refugees are very emotional topics. H1B not so much. Couple that with the legal jiggery poker and some billionaire bashing — look at the firms involved: tech, big banks, big accounting — and you get a nice, clean, political operation. Win that and expand from there.

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      1. My understanding is that the “hundreds of thousands” numbers include reapplications when the visa expires. Those are not part of the 85,000 limit.

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            1. Oh? How common is non-renewal? Unless it’s a punishment for uppity of course.

              85,000+85000+85000….. Where does the count stop rising?

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              1. Again, you’re being silly. There’s a huge difference between the number increasing by 85,000 every year, and increasing by 500,000 every year.

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                1. They aren’t honoring the minimum wage required and barely give lip service to looking for someone already in America who is able to do the job. But you absolutely believe that they are abiding by the annual limits.

                  That’s on you.

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                2. From https://icenter.tufts.edu/immigration/h1b-employees/h1b-extension/ :

                  “H-1B regulations allow H-1B status to be granted up to six years, but in increments of no more than three years at any one time. Certain persons in the process of applying for US permanent residence may be eligible for extensions beyond the sixth year; otherwise, departure from the US for an aggregate of at least 12 months is required in order to re-establish H-1B eligibility.”

                  This agrees with other sources; search “H1B renewal”.

                  So the idea of an endless series of extensions is apparently incorrect; it looks like the most allowable to exist by statute at any given time would be 6×85,000 or 510,000 (unless I’m not evaluating the sequence of dropoff/additions correctly, something far from impossible😜).

                  Of course, the statute is only as good as the willingness of TPTB to follow it. :-x

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      2. H1Bs are emotional to people in the tech industry. Add in the Indian nepo-tribalism, it’s been a sore and well known topic since the ’90s considering natives were having to train their own cheaper replacements. (See Disney…)

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    3. H1B visas just about killed the American Citizen Hired At Disney here in Florida in the 90’s and 2000’s. Gone from All-American We Can Do It to a series of subtle fails that cascaded over the years as more H1Bs begat H1Bs, all who were not nearly as good as the Muricans they replaced, but were far cheaper.

      It’s something that Disney did that really killed Floridian happiness over Disney. Sure, there’s lots that love the Mouse, but there’s a huge number of us who hate and despise The Rat.

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      1. Top down fail. The “who gets hired” was just another symptom.

        The folks at the -top- of the rat-pile got exactly what they set out to make. They wanted to remake Disney in their own more-better image.

        They did exactly that.

        Thus epic fail and the doom-spiral. Again.

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    4. Guess what? Those who have been wholesale thrown out of work by the H1-Bs are computer and social media savvy. Chicken pluckers, grape pickers, and unemployed government subsidized malingerers and gang bangers, not so much. Hence the response seems bigger about the smaller problem. I think fixing the H1-Bs will help politicians understand the bigger problem as well.

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  3. I think the tech managers are starting to realize that they’ve been fed a lie so big it would choke a hippo. The HR Marxists have rigged the system to deny American men employment, and American men make up the biggest swath of STEM graduates.

    Jobs go wanting not because there are no applicants that qualify. Jobs are going wanting because the vile HR monsters are turning away applicants that do qualify. I’m glad that Vivek might be waking up to this fact. He’s a smart guy. I think he’s going to get it.

    Every HR department in the country should go through a thorough housecleaning. And by housecleaning, I wouldn’t mind if it included tar and feathers.

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    1. I’m not convinced that there’s any need for HR, especially in relation to employment. At the time I entered the work force (’67, after my stint in the Corps), the prospective manager did the interviews and made the hiring decisions; HR, usually called “Employment”, was a recordkeeping office and little more. Of course, back in those neolithic days such decisions were based on demonstrated ability (usually via a series of tests) at least for tech positions, not on the current racism/genderism.

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        1. What I was going to type. How much of HR is about “will this cause a problem with the EEOC and other .gov groups? Will it endanger our contracts/grants/tax status?” When I was on an academic search committee, Flat State U’s personnel department was very, very worried because the recommended candidate had XY chromosomes. This might make for too many men in the department, no matter how qualified the gent might have been.

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          1. The Reader thinks that the government compliance function of HR could and should be replaced with a tailored AI.

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            1. This reader thinks that the HR Department could and should be replaced by nothing at all. Or two rooms, one with cats and one with dogs. Think how much happier that business would be if employees could take cuddle breaks instead of dealing with screaming blue-haired ambiguously-sexed marxist-indoctrinated haters.

              Or just use the money paid to said screaming haters and give everyone a raise. Or pay for quarterly parties. Make the rest of the employees very happy doing that.

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              2. Companies stopped doing that 20 years ago as #MeToo and DEI became A Thing. No matter what you served, someone was going to be offended.

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        2. And to push their socialist agendas.

          Go to any HR Department. And take a visual polling. It’s amazing how undiverse said HR Department is.

          I’ve seen whole HR departments taken over by extended families. Cross any member of that family, even outside of the business, and you are toast at that company.

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        1. Heck, they couldn’t require ability tests when I interviewed for my first tech writing job in Silicon Valley in 1978.

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          1. Started in tech in ’83. Every tech job I have interviewed for had “ability tests”. Might not be given a piece of paper, or put in front of a computer, with a list of questions that required answers, but the interview had multiple “tests”. Not just how have I handled XYZ in the past, or if I hadn’t handled XYZ, how would I? To full out, diagram this. Is there a flaw? Last job I took was in ’04. Was not my last job interview. Did at least others, later (’04, while better than what I earned in ’03, $0, put my salary at less than I made starting in ’90, yes I kept looking). Even turned down a job offer, in 2009. Was not looking for a lateral financial move. They didn’t want to meet my price.

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              1. That’s funny. My interviews in ’96, and from Aug ’02 – Feb ’04, and beyond, all had tech tests. Maybe not legally. But I was definitely tested on what I knew and how I knew it.

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                1. There were always, in that first and in all subsequent interviews, verbal questions around skills/experience related to the potential job. But nothing written, nothing on paper, no explicit testing. It may have been something peculiar to the company (one of many spin-offs from Fairchild) at the time; but they did mention that it was not allowed.

                  Maybe it was a severe overreaction to Griggs v. Duke Power Co. by someone in HR.

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                  1. Yes. All the above. I was asked to define terms. Asked to do math. Had one firm explicitly state they give out a coding test. Finish the coding test come in for an interview. At least I wasn’t ghosted by any of these. All ’02 – ’04 company interviews. Except the last, all verbal. Yes, as disheartening as it was to be constantly “second choice”/”went a different direction” more than a few of my internal responses were “thank God” because the interview had been so intense.

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          1. Not that I’ve seen, unless you count needing a list of “certifications” to get through the door. Technical questions on interviews, yes, but nothing so formal as a test.

            Liked by 1 person

            1. That is why I got “tests”, I didn’t get certifications, only listed what programs written using what technical techniques and using what tools.

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      3. I’m convinced there is not any need for HR (as currently constituted, certainly). Appropriate manager does interviews, offers and process vetted by the employment attorney to avoid all the legal morass, get back to work.

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        1. Yep. Let your corporate lawyer worry about following the law. You get on with the business of running the business. You save money. The company gets more profitable. Everybody wins.

          Even the HR people that find other places to work. I don’t think I have ever encountered a happy HR employee. Ever. And I’ve worked in and around a lot of places over the years, from multibillion dollar corporations to little mom and pop shops with barely a couple hundred employees and one building.

          It is, by my own admittedly biased experience, a soul-crushing job.

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          1. I like to imagine the productivity explosion of stripping the excess nonsense out of business administration and setting those people free…

            I’m a fantasist at heart.

            Liked by 2 people

          2. A couple hundred employees? Try two. And the other employee works from home. I average about 2 days a week in the office, doing the actual work. If either one of us slack off and don’t do our jobs, the company goes under.

            It was a literal mom-and-pop business until the pop died this year. I’m convinced it was caused by the COVID shots. The mom still runs the business. She deals with all the government chickenshit, for which I don’t envy her. I just want to do my job and get paid.

            I found the job on Craigslist under ‘part-time employment’. You can’t do that any more, though. They don’t have a part-time employment category. See, they made a law in Kalifornia that a web site is legally responsible for all content on the site.

            Craigslist used to have ‘personals’ categories, people trying to connect with other people. Prostitutes started advertising there, too. ‘Soliciting prostitution’ is a crime (don’t get me started on how stupid that is…) so Craigslist the company, and the individual owners and employees, could be prosecuted, fined and thrown in jail for ‘crimes’ they had no control over, committed by other people. Trying to weed out the solicitations proved unworkable, so the only practical solution was to eliminate the ‘personals’ categories entirely.

            Prostitutes started posting in the ‘part-time employment’ category, so they had to cut that one too. Fortunately, it was after I got the job.

            And so the government f*ks up Yet Another good thing.

            Liked by 1 person

        1. <i>”HR is NEVER there for the employee, they are there to defend the company, full stop.”</i>

          Wrong. HR is there to defend <i>HR</i>. Any benefit the company may receive is coincidental.

          <i>”And they will screw over any employee as hard as they can, given the chance to.”</i>

          That’s HR’s default setting and the reason for its existence. See Sentence One, above.

          Bob C. (above) has it right: <i>”…the prospective manager did the interviews and made the hiring decisions; HR, usually called “Employment”, was a recordkeeping office and little more.”</i>

          Unfortunately, Something called “Principles of Modern Business Management” (TM), was introduced, by someone, somewhere (probably from a TA working at some 3rd tier Biz School) and mestastasized throughout American business. The result, part of Sarah’s “management by spreadsheet” epidemic of remote control by (supposedly) management, is a bunch of blue- and pink-haired harpies controlling the business with personnel decisions, rather than the people actually charged with running it.

          Back in the day, as Bob C. reports, it was “Personnel” and had no corporate-wide management responsibilities; it just supplied the prospective workers as requested by the operating managers, and kept the paperwork straight.

          No to be discounted, though, is the Federal Cancer <i>everyone</i> in the US is burdend with. Crap comes out of Congress in response to campaign donations, gets filtered through completely disconnected, unaccountable (and largely uninterested) bureaucrats in Washington with lifetime sinecures, and the result is …….ta-da…HR and its volumes of procedures, requirements and associated bullsh*t.

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      5. Similar experiences. No official testing, but interviewing for an engineering job generally meant you’d get a lot of unofficial testing. This could range from an hour to an all day affair, depending on the company culture. (HP tended to be all day. There was usually a decent meal somewhere in the interview. And more technical questions…)

        AFAIK, before 1979ish in Silicon Valley, you’d get “Personnel” departments, who primarily handled the paperwork and records. I worked for two different semiconductor companies between 1974 and ’79, and the only time I saw Personnel was intake and exit.

        1979, I started at HP. Fairly early on, “Personnel” turned into a fairly benign version of HR, but by ’83 or so, sexual harassment turned into the wedge that led to wokification of the department.

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        1. “HP tended to be all day. There was usually a decent meal somewhere in the interview. And more technical questions…”

          ……………….

          Can attest to this. More all day interviews than I can count. That or multi-day interviews of no fewer than 3, and no less than 3 hours each.

          The look on some friends faces when they’d come from a “long exhausting 2 hour job interview”, when my response was “Wait! What? Only two hours? I’ve never had an interview that was less than 8 hours!” I think they exhaust tech applicants on purpose.

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          1. The only multi-day interview the Reader experienced was for the NSA. It included a polygraph and a psych exam. After that and noting the Marine guards in the halls complete with 45s, the Reader decided the (then) Medium Sized Defense Contractor was a better fit, even with a slightly lower starting salary.

            Liked by 1 person

      1. Yeah…H-1B and DEI are separate issues, but connected by some threads. Like DEI. I don’t think H-1Bs pushing out American workers is so much a grand conspiracy as it is brutal economics applied without thought–“oh, I can get lower cost workers from Cognizant and get rid of them the second I don’t want/need them, and they won’t talk back!” The second-order results, however, have been appalling. I know Dan’s seen it. A thirty-five year walk from visaholder to green card to citizen to middle management and the nepotism is real. But the nepotism does align *quite* nicely with the anti-White male wokeness of DEI, so they’re on the same side.

        Somebody commented over the weekend on X “We need to fix illegal immigration first, this is just a drop in the bucket!” I replied “Yes, border security and illegal is much bigger, but I believe in America’s ability to do multiple things at the same time!”

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    3. The First Rule of fixing Human Resources is… getting rid of Human Resources. We are not resources. We are People. Calling us Resources automatically aligns that department with Socialists, both national and international. Because Socialists treat everything as a replaceable substance.

      Bring back the Personnel Department. Because Persons. We are all varied and different and somewhat not interchangeable.

      Look at every big business that started way back when. Flourished using personnel. And most died when they started using humans as… resources.

      Unions didn’t help, of course. The double attack of Resources and Unions is a deadly socialist combination.

      Liked by 2 people

      1. Could be worse. My current employer rebranded HR for several years to… Human Capital. With a Chief Human Capital Officer. So now I’m not even a “resource” with an asset tag riveted to my ass, I’m fungible imaginary money. Thaaaaaaaaanks.

        BTW, it’s back to HR again. No idea why.

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      1. AFAIK it was always hot tar; the cold stuff doesn’t coat very well, and feathers won’t stick to it very well, either. I believe conversion to fertilizer was a common result, as being coated with 200+-degree tar that simply won’t come off readily isn’t conducive to long life. Sort of like WP… :twisted:

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        1. The tar I’m familiar with needs to be heated to at least 350° F to flow properly and bond well to surfaces. Even if they’ve got rhino hide, that’s gonna smart.

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          1. Maybe I could say I meant 200C; that would be around 390F.😉

            But no, I wrote “200+” because I had no real idea of the temperature, only that it wasn’t “cold”. The only time I dealt with tar was for the underlayment on a roof (applied with long-handle rollers), to be covered with rolled roofing. And that was heated over a fire until it flowed freely, and was hot. And we were damned careful with it; carrying buckets of hot tar up ladders is a bit nervous-making.

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  4. The Reader has noted elsewhere that if you want to see the impact of the H1B program, look at the salaries for similar jobs at defense contractors vs commercial outfits using H1B visa employees. Defense contractors can’t use the H1B program…

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    1. If that’s being enforced. Not always, especially if an actual formal clearance level isn’t involved. Sensitive but unclassified? Maayybeee.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. Up till the day the Reader retired from the Great Big Defense Contractor it did not hire or utilize as contractors non US citizens. The Reader can’t speak for what might have happened since but he doubts that has changed.

        Liked by 2 people

        1. Still the case in some industries. Musk recently had the Feds come after him because SpaceX wasn’t hiring foreign workers, and was therefore discriminating. The reason why SpaceX wasn’t hiring foreign workers is because it’s prohibited from doing so by Federal Law.

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          1. You can’t determine what laws are being followed by looking at laws being enforced against apostates and heretics. This is the legacy of “selective enforcement”…..

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          2. Like the security contractor who got dinged for not hiring former convicts … because their federal contract said “absolutely no one with a criminal record beyond parking tickets.” It ended up with the DoE vs. DoJ vs. federal employment lawyers.

            IIRC, the federal courts finally said, “No, you cannot punish the contractor for abiding by the conditions of the federal contract, even if you, Civil Rights side, disagree with the rules in the initial Department of Energy contract.”

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          1. Again and again: “What’s on the books” != “what’s enforced consistently”.

            Unless that difference is acknowledged, you won’t have the true picture. Or as much true picture as is available, because fudging / not recording the data is encouraged by that refusal.

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  5. I’ve now and again felt kind of sorry for anyone working in customer service these days who has a strong Indian accent – especially if they are legitimately doing outgoing cold-calling. I hear two words spoken with that accent, and I instantly think “Spam call!” and hang up so fast I am certain their ears are ringing. The Indian accent instantly sets my mental alarms ringing, especially when I can hear the unmistakable sounds of a boiler room in the background – it means “attempt at defrauding” underway.

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    1. Any foreign accent, cold calls get hung up on. If I answer cold calls at all. Of coarse these days I’m getting unsolicited texts. Newest one is the one for a Chevy 2018 (something or other). Have owned Chevy’s. Newest one we’ve ever owned is 2010 and it was sold 4 years ago. Epic failure on their part. Blocked and deleted.

      Liked by 2 people

    2. If I answer an unknown number, I speak Klingon.

      Friends, familiy, and associates are amused. Others… get called various things in Klingon.

      Liked by 1 person

      2. Given my last name and location, I frequently get calls in Spanish. When I answer in French (or occasionally pidgin Gullah) it seems to throw them off stride. And no, I’ve never had a multilingualist reply in French or Gullah.😉😁😁

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        1. I answer briskly with the name of my Tiny Publishing Bidness – may I help you? And that stops about half of them right there. Repeating “This is Tiny Publishing Bidness – what can you do for you” in a very stern voice seems to demolish any desire in them to continue a conversation.

          Liked by 1 person

          1. That works.😉

            I think the best I’ve heard of was on the Internet a few years back; the guy who took the call pretended to be a homicide detective investigating a murder, and grilled the caller about his relationship to the “deceased” callee.🤣🤣🤣

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              1. “Special Agent Parker, FBI. What is your relationship with the suspect?” :-P

                I particularly liked what Miles did in ‘Komarr’ — connected the debt collector that called Ekaterin to the ImpSec colonel in charge of investigating Etienne Vorsoisson’s embezzlement.

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                1. That’s a good one,too. I may alternate them…😉

                  How about (thick accent), “Embassy of the Russian Federation. This call is being traced.”

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                1. There was a meme of a cop that had an alternate persona named Boris who helped a deli lady who was getting dirty calls.

                  Since then, my husband has been answering unknown phone calls with a REALLY THICK Russian accent.

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  7. I do find it interesting how the (D), after a few decades now of finding their success in lock-step obedience and enforced conformity, can no longer comprehend the concept of a governing coalition.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Not just the (D). Few too many (R) pols and pol adjacent “aides” yapping about how the citizens are making too much noise. Maybe it’s disrupting their (uni)party celebration.

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  8. My sister works in HR. She insists that none of this is happening, because she talks to lots of other people in HR in other companies. People who say it is, and who relate horror stories about it are just trolls on the internet. According to her.

    “Oh, and much as I stare at Vivek in horrified fascination, let me tell you as someone who acculturated, this is one of the phases”

    What’s Vivek’s background? He ran for president, so he must have been born an American citizen.

    I think I mentioned Brad Wardell in the previous thread. He’s the CEO of video game publisher Stardock Games, and – among other things – survived a failed “MeToo” lawsuit by a female ex-employee. When the H1B furor erupted, he was in favor of them, and cited what sounds like a genuine good use for them. Then he took a closer look, and – after specifically comparing salary rates between what he paid and what the H1B jobs were offering for similar roles – started calling for an audit of the whole program over blatant abuse.

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    1. Vivek is 2nd gen immigrant. Both parents are 1st gen. And his background kinda explains his cultural myopia.

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    2. Basically he was raised by 2 immegrants under the ‘tiger mom’ system and has acculturated… poorly. He’s the oldest son, and from my experience the family dynamic usually goes Oldest is very traditional/old culture, middle is a bridge between old and new, and youngest tries for full integration. They didn’t get to that last one. He SEEMS to fit the pattern.

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      1. Vivek was born and grew up here in Ohio. he graduated high school about four miles from where I sit typing this. But I don’t think he has fully assimilated.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. That is substantially my point. I’ve seen the pattern in kids-of-immigrants (specifically when both parents are immigrants and didn’t acculturate themselves before the kids were born.) Most of the time the oldest (especially) kid retains a good chunk of ‘home culture’ of the parents. And often doesn’t know they haven’t assimilated fully into American Culture. The younger kids are progressively less and less home culture and more American. I think this is the trap he fell into. The question is will he realize what’s going on and course correct (at a personal level.)

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        2. Plus he doesn’t understand the people caught between H1B and DEI since he jumped to corporate management elite early in life.

          Liked by 1 person

    3. Like the other two said– Parents are first gen, both have high-status/demand jobs, he’s been raised in the same kind of failure-to-integrate, and he thinks he’s very successful because by his raised subculture he is incredibly successful.

      My husband got a really, really bad feeling with his business luck (yeah, it takes hard work, but it was… odd looking, for that) when he was running for president.

      Going off of this blow up? I’m guessing that “it’s the c-word” that caused unusual look. Nothing illegal, at least not that can be proven, just… questionable, like hiring only from your own sub-culture, since they share your ideas of success and thus of COURSE are more suited.

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  9. Heh. I commented elsewhere that I thought the passionate debate about the visas over the weekend was an indication of a very good thing: the right does NOT require ideological purity, nor agreement across the board. And when someone (on our side or otherwise) says something many of us don’t agree with/think is dumb, we’ll speak up about it. And then a lively debate/argument ensues, in which some people stubbornly stick to their original opinions and some, who hadn’t thought much about it in depth, might change their minds one way or the other. It is our greatest strength (and also greatest weakness–but changing it to lockstep would be SO much worse).

    Vivek foolishly assumed the H1B visa jobs are there bc Americans are too stupid and lazy to take them, and this is not the case. (To be sure, there are plenty out there.) And he got righteously smacked for it. And then Trump and Elon got righteously smacked for blindly defending the program, without seeing the real issue most of us working-level chumps see: that it’s a way for tech companies to keep entry-level and even mid-level tech job wages ridiculously low, and, frankly, is also a form of indentured servitude for many/most/all here on the visas. It isn’t that Americans don’t want the jobs, it’s that the ones who got the “required” degrees in it can’t *afford* to take those jobs, because they have crippling student debt to pay off. And those of us who are gamers and keep even half an ear on the industry gossip are well aware of how badly THOSE tech companies abuse their workers, even ones who are American citizens. I don’t imagine the other tech companies are much better. (And for the gaming industry…well, I am hoping that it is nearing the break-point. Too many overpriced, poor quality “big” games are making too many gamers unhappy. On the flip side, indie game development is very hit and miss.)

    Liked by 2 people

    1. Ubisoft is on the edge of collapse. So scratch one “AAA” developer.

      Sony’s Japanese office is supposedly asking questions regarding just what is going on at the company’s headquarters in California, following the Concorde fiasco. It’s not out of the question that the company will relocate back to Japan, purely due to the woke infection that has taken hold at the headquarters in CA.

      EA is probably safe for the time being, unfortunately, due to its sports franchises and CoD, all of which have annual releases that sell well enough.

      People have noticed that the people who made CDPR great have all left the company, and *concern* is being expressed over the just announced new Witcher game (as well as a remake of the original game that will remove unspecified content).

      That’s a few.

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      1. I suspect that a lot of the “AAA” game developers will either fall apart or be bought out by a Chinese game company at the rate things are going. Especially CDPR and Ubisoft, as these are big gateway firms into the American video gaming market.

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      2. Bioware has pretty much just murdered the Dragon Age franchise with the woke, poorly written, shallow-characters crap that is Veilguard. (Although they have been in decline almost since EA bought them–and DEFINITELY once Mass Effect 3 came out.)

        But yeah, a lot of the AAA game companies are flailing, and badly. I think it will still be a long and drawn out death, though. And you’ve got stuff like Hogwarts Legacy–although if the company doesn’t cough up something that’s more than just “really really pretty” I don’t think the sequel will do at all well. (And Legacy IS gorgeous…and has pretty much no plotline and the characters are one dimensional, to put it mildly.)

        On the plus side, we do have studios like Larian (although even after their massive success, I think they’re still AA, not AAA), who are dedicated to really good writing and really good characters. Baldur’s Gate 3 was not only a worthy successor to BG1 and BG2, it was an excellent game altogether. Not perfect–but it’s the closest game I’ve ever encountered to what a tabletop game feels like. We can hope they stick with that. Bitter experience says no…but on the flip side, Larian has only put out a few games over the last 15 or so years, and they do seem to fall on the side of quality over quantity.

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      3. Gearbox has farked up all the goodwill they gained with Borderlands 2 with the worst game related movie ever. Plus BL 4 is being written by the same bad woke writers of BL 3 and the DEI specialists at SweetBaby…

        Go woke, go broke

        Plus the leader of this mess has been supposedly been seen with USB drives of pild chorn.

        You can’t make this poop up.

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        1. Good grief. You’d think they’d have learned from the FIRST Sweet Baby debacle. (Of course they didn’t. They just screamed ‘–ism!’ when people boycotted…I don’t even remember which game it was now. Just that it was a big AAA, and Sweet Baby’s DEI crap tanked it.)

          Well. GOG still has a huge catalogue of older games (not that I don’t already have a long list of those on my to-play list). There haven’t been a lot of recent games I got super excited about–Hogwarts Legacy (which was gorgeous, but overall disappointing) and Baldur’s Gate 3 (truly excellent) have been about it.

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    2. Vivek being a high caste Indian also has an issue with white devils in the first place. This is a real thing. I have seen it.

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      1. And thus neatly illustrating the difference between residing in America and becoming American. I suspect Vivek’s parents weren’t all that big on assimilation.

        Several other groups more or less like that; as my wife Emily says, her Orthodox rabbi father wouldn’t have let me get near his daughter had he still been alive.

        Vivek may get there, but isn’t yet.

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      2. High caste Indians in the US are very often arrogant and entitled as well. It’s kind of like the old English aristocracy. They got where they are by virtue of birth; they’re just automatically better than everyone else. At least in India.

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        1. It’s very much worse than the English aristocracy. English aristocrats have known for centuries that it was their property that made them, and not the other way round. It’s been centuries since the quip went the rounds about the House of Lords: ‘We, my lords, may thank heaven that we have something better than our brains to depend upon.’ Nobody could take the English aristocracy seriously as an aristocracy; they were merely the descendants of people who had managed to buy titles one way or another.

          High-caste Hindus believe they are inherently superior to other people, and that being born into a high caste is a reward for being superior in past lives. It’s downright hideous.

          Liked by 1 person

            1. It does seem to leave the door wide open to “Anything bad that happens to you is your own fault, therefore I am not responsible for any bad actions I commit against you, because it’s your fault.”

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              1. It really echoes the whole inshallah attitude of Islam too: “Anything that happens is because {Allah / past lives / etc.} ordained it should be that way, and therefore I am not responsible / deserve it.” No agency.

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                1. Hmm. I note that Marxism isn’t big on agency either. They *hate* free will. Definitely a pattern here…

                  (And given that the Adversary’s biggest schtick is “no agency/no consequences”…)

                  Liked by 1 person

                  2. This feels like it can be culture hacked. The quote “God helps those who help themselves” almost single-handedly immunizes Christian civilization against that degree of fatalism. I suspect you could come up with something similar to plug into other cultures and belief systems.

                    (The ethics of that are up for debate, but the price would be cheaper than another color revolution or war for democracy.)

                    Liked by 1 person

                    1. Well, and also consider that the cornerstone of Christian faith *is* personal responsibility–that we are sinners, but that we are expected to acknowledge that, and strive to do better. And the Atonement takes care of what we can’t, because we cannot achieve perfection on our own. And if one chooses NOT to do that, then they bear the full weight of the consequences of their choices (but since the Savior suffered for everyone’s sins, His hand is always extended to them, so there is always that choice–though the further down the road you are, the harder it might be to make that choice, and the choices that repentance requires)*

                      I think it’s why doctrines like predestination have never been super popular, or caught on in a widespread manner in the Christian faiths, particularly in the US. The idea that it doesn’t matter what you do is just…not right.

                      (*I know different denominations have different takes on that, of course, but I think the ultimate part–that we have to, at the very least, *make* the choice to follow Christ–is more or less the same. Mind, I do NOT include those churches that have decided to adopt wokeism and the other crap so as not to “offend” people.)

                      Liked by 1 person

  10. Very well stated. Yes, we should have had this discussion long ago but it has been a long time since anyone from the government was willing to participate, much less actually listen.

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  11. I’m glad to see and hear the cussin’ and discussin’. It’s a refreshing change from the blank wall of “unanimity” and “consensus” we’ve been facing for the past while.

    Liked by 1 person

  12. Actually regarding the marriage. I’ve seen this in the military and I’ve seen this with stagehands and their mail order brides. Women from other countries will marry s**theels sight unseen to get their hands on a US citizen. But the guys will say it’s “true love”.

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    2. Folks, the Left just got it’s nuts kicked by Trump winning. They are momentarily disorganized. In no way have they stopped their typical game of “Let’s You and Him Fight!”.

      Watch for this.

      Notice how many other Anti-USAians try to get you to play it.

      Watch for it. Don’t play.

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  13. The difference between the infighting “between Democrats” and the infighting “between Republicans” IMO is that the News Media “white-washes” the infighting between Democrats.

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  14. Day late, dollar short.

    How long did it take me to figure out that racism (and all the other -isms carpet-bagging it) was created by a cruel and retarded Narrative to excoriate fake vices and prevent real virtues?

    How long did it take me to understand that climates are regional, earth is not a glass-and-plexiglass box, all life is carbon-based, and our little plant frens 🥰 CO2 so why do you hate the trees?

    So here ya go: Sure, there were the usual sh*theads babbling about how America is a “blood and soil” nation and all that nonsense.

    Yep. Do we really want the US to be an Idea Nation? Because that means we must boot the bad idea people. Wrong idea =/= USAian.

    I’m game. Let’s start with the atheist materialists, Deists, and libertarians. You pick a different set. Let the games begin.

    Blood and Soil (Or Proposition Nation), like “climate change”, is a cope.

    From micro-plastics to estrogen-mimetics to soil-destruction, the U.S. has a huge environmental problem. Climate change is a handy thing to fight over as we poison our land, water, and air. Especially since plastics revolutionized medtech.

    The blood-and-soil vs. proposition nation is much of a muchness.

    Maybe this time, I’ll do some good.

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    1. Just out of curiosity, what is your “idea of the US” that excludes atheist materialists, Deists, and libertarians?

      To me, libertarians are very nearly the embodiment of USAian ideas. It’s wildly impractical as a governing philosophy, but it’s very individual freedom oriented.

      I also don’t see the distinction between an interventionist G*d (theism) and a non-interventionist G*d (deism) has anything to do with, well, anything. I suppose “God Bless America” rings a bit hallow when that blessing doesn’t actually accomplish anything.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. Hobbit is tossing out an argument – that’s Hobbit’s list. Who is on your list? Why should one group be targeted? Can we find something with all the groups people think should be excluded, a characteristic that makes them fit less-than-well into the American idea? OK, so what is it about that characteristic, can it be worked around, and so on.

        There’s also libertarians (small government, local rule first, personal responsibility) and Libertarians (legalize all the thiiiings!!!!! and no taxes, and um … um… legalize aaaaalllll the thiiiiings!)

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        1. Libertarians are on the list because these things always start off with “…well it’s not ME, so I don’t care.” And the Libertarian political ideal is not the Founders’, so…

          Pulling a Heinlein here.

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      2. “I also don’t see the distinction between an interventionist G*d (theism) and a non-interventionist G*d (deism) has anything to do with, well, anything. “

        Well there you go. The Founders created Christian nation. The limits on Fedgov (not state) religions was designed to protect the different Christians from each other. People who cannot even manage to understand why theism matters, are thus un-American. Afuera!

        And yes, it’s a fair cop to say, well, that was then. We have a NEW, better, American proposition. “The Constitution is a living document”.

        There’s a better-written than I can manage observation by Mr. Chesterton back at the turn of the 20th century (https://www.chesterton.org/lecture-37/) about how Americans dealt with it, and a banger of a speech by Theodore Roosevelt on Hyphenated-Americans. The House Committee on UnAmerican Actitivities was another.

        Proposition-nation USA has consequences, the same as “land and people”.

        Or it could be a false binary. My money is on that. But the above is a useful discussion.

        (*Better to use that than “blood and soil” which appears to be a term of art, like ‘right wing’ in America vs. France)

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        1. Why does it matter to you what people believe? (or what they say they believe) What they think inside the privacy of their own heads? What people do is all that matters. How they conduct their lives. How they treat other people.

          Why are you so certain that atheists and libertarians can’t conduct their lives just as well as self-righteous religious bigots? Just because their motivations are different, does not make them wrong.

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          1. I am going back to the original topic of the discussion which is what the consequences of considering America a “proposition nation” are.

            If America is a proposition nation, which I think could also be expressed as a “Creedal nation” (i.e. one founded on and defined by “I Believe”) then what people believe matters because the belief is what defines the nation.

            There has to be one set of “I Believe” that everyone agrees on and that everyone can confess. That set of “I Believe”s are the “proposition” in “Proposition nation”

            If someone doesn’t or can’t confess those “I Believe”s then they wouldn’t be American, no matter what their behavior is.

            Because being unable or unwilling to confess, or agree to, the propositions means that you aren’t part of the proposition nation that does believe, or confess, or agree to (however you want to phrase it) the propositions that define the nation.

            It necessarily excludes those who don’t believe the propositions, regardless of how nice or virtuous their behavior is.

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            1. The USAian creed does not depend on any particular religious belief. ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident’ means they stand on their own, not needing to be handed down or propped up by some invisible magic man living in the sky. To be American means to believe that our rights to ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ are inherent, not bestowed. That the government’s authority is delegated to it by We The People, and we can rescind that authority if the politicians and bureaucrats abuse it.

              However difficult that ideal may prove in practice.

              Liked by 1 person

              1. How can an atheist agree to the proposition that one of those “self-evident truths” is “We are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights” when he doesn’t believe in that Creator in the first place?

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                1. Roughly grouping, you’ve got three types of atheists:

                  • the ones who go “OK, that’s poetic, I can agree all humans are people because any other option has resulted in horrors.”
                  • the ones who go “people created people; we’re people because we are people. Circular, yet beats any other option. I can agree to this starting assumption.”
                  • the ones who want to decide what people aren’t people, preferably on the fly.

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                  1. There’s also the “anti-theists”, although the overlap with the third group is pretty high.

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                    1. Yeah, once you go hard core enough on rejecting a religion, and that religion is one that goes “all people are people”…. you pretty much can’t agree with the idea.

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                  2. All of morality can be derived from one fundamental axiom:

                    Life has value.

                    Thus murder is wrong, because it destroys life. Slavery is wrong, because it devalues life. Imposing one’s will on another through violence, or the threat of violence, devalues life.

                    Anybody trying to argue that life doesn’t have value, has to be alive to say it, thereby instantly refuting their own argument.

                    Applying that axiom consistently gets messy and complicated, but hey, so is life.

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                3. It’s a fair cop.

                  And it goes to the heart of creating a “proposition nation”.

                  I think the U.S. was most successful in explicitly saying, We The People are are a people (blood) and a place (soil), *and* an animating spirit. And our Spirit IS THIS. FIFO.

                  It worked because even the quisling Deists* grokked that physical things require an animating spirit.

                  The fundamental unit of civilization is the family: Husband, wife, and the spirit of love between them

                  Mind, body, soul

                  A two-legged stool cannot stand: I’s trinities all the way down.

                  Christianity was, and (maybe is**) a necessary part of our big idea.

                  And so was the libertarian (“republican”) ideal of power devolving to the most accessible unit of government! Despite the retardery of Libertarians: mea culpa.

                  I forget what other Propositions I picked, but you saw how quickly it devolved into intransigent opposition. People go for “blood” and “soil” because they think it’s simpler. They’re right. But not better, mind you.

                  So far the “anti” place-and-people crew go for Proposition Nation because … IDK. No-one’s yet made the argument “It’s worth sacrificing for, because no matter how damnably hard it is, we were not made for the road to Hell. Or fairyland”.

                  And no-one’s willing to lay down the “proposition” and mean it. As in, “I have to give up my foundational Proposition if I want to be a part of it.”

                  But that’s where I stand. Have not read Mrs. Hoyt’s latest. But “people and place” are necessary. They aren’t sufficient. Every nation needs a Proposition. Choose wisely.

                  (*Pick your own damnable cotton. Or accept that we’re all on team Proposition. Bloody christo-phobe aristos)

                  (**Not a lot of unconquered USA left. Live like a USAian anyway)

                  Re-read Moon is a Harsh Mistress: seemed appropriate.

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                    1. Yes. I believe I mentioned him, earlier.

                      And referenced him in “making explicit” the soul of the nation.

                      And how hard what we want to do is. Heroic is a good word for it.

                      Chesterton at least appreciated the exclusivity necessary to having a creed, and the cost.

                      I’ll go re-read the whole preface. Even Jove nods. Maybe Chesterton denied that Americans were a people and had a land, as well. Seems improbable to me, but you never know: he wasn’t an American.

                      If it helps, remember that our “land” is our States: Virginians, Texans, Vermonters et al. The Proposition Only People use the corruption of words and history to deracinate, conquer, and destroy us.

                      Thanks for the push back. I did not perceive how bloody gnostic this whole false binary is.

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                    2. You need to go read the whole foreword.

                      “He must deny a polygamist, for he can’t deny a Turk,” and quite explicit lines drawn between the way that Christianity accepts any who accept her founding ideas, because a creed is both the narrowest and the broadest of all things.

                      He was not an American, no; however, he described America so well that Americans recognized her, as shown by the sales, and by how all of us recognize America in his descriptions.

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                    3. “…He must deny a polygamist“

                      Precisely this.

                      And good luck with that project.

                      “because a creed is both the narrowest and the broadest of all things”

                      Yes.

                      And natura expellas furca

                      So Virginians and Texans and Vermonters, and no hyphenated-Americans, and an uphill battle against entropy all the way.

                      “But what about meeeeeee” is not in it.

                      I am going to re-read the intro either way, though.

                      Rereading Chesterton is always good value.

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                    4. Matter of seconds.

                      Loaded as fast as it typed, and figuring out how to post it took longer than either.

                      Stop reading a digested summary and go back, actually read Chesterton; the one you linked to is quite lacking.

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                    5. My apologies. Brevity setved us ill. I should not have pulled just a fragment of a quote to imply the whole.

                      “He must deny a [Mohammedan for his religious beliefs and practice], because he cannot deny [a man of the Turkish race] [1]”

                      Or to modernise it:

                      “He must deny a furry, a trans-, an adulterer, a gang-banger …?”

                      Because he cannot deny a [race exhibiting it]

                      Also, what is wrong with the Project Gutenberg edition?

                      “If they did apply that principle consistently, they would have to exclude pessimists and rich cynics who deny the democratic ideal; an excellent thing but a rather improbable one. What I say is that when we realise that this principle exists at all, we see the whole position in a totally different perspective. We say that the Americans are doing something heroic, or doing something insane, or doing it in an unworkable or unworthy fashion,”

                      I’m continuing to reread.

                      https://www.gutenberg.org/files/27250/27250-h/27250-h.htm

                      1. Note in reading old books, it may be necessary to rectify names.
                      3. A race
                      4. The

                      A race of men, like a race of sparrows, will breed true, but need not. It is a recognizable type. Outliers do not disprove its existence, but enough can change it to a different type. English-speaking bad eggs deliberately used the word to mean “species” under-cover of the old meaning, so they could pretend that some men are not human. The word now creates an ick (reasonable) and crimestop (deadly), and mis-readings of older books, which used it innocently.

                      The ethnos – my usage – is race + culture. The two forces create a feedback loop. Race is a relatively easy thing to change, culture is not.

                      .

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                    6. “He must deny a [Mohammedan for his religious beliefs and practice], because he cannot deny [a man of the Turkish race] [1]”

                      Or to modernise it:

                      “He must deny a furry, a trans-, an adulterer, a gang-banger …?”

                      Nope, not the brevity that’s the problem, Hobbit, it’s that you are altering the deal.

                      You don’t get to alter the deal unilaterally. Folks trying to do that has gotten us trouble already.

                      To allude to another Chesterton, when you’ve shown you understand the fence, we might let you muddle with it– as is, you’re mischaracterizing the fence, and then upset it isn’t working to match the mischaracterization.

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                    8. The fence mischatacterization part makes more sense.

                      Yes, if I have it wrong, there’s no point going on until that is sorted.

                      Was it the 19th C definition of race: i.e. French, Irish, Turk, Bohemian as opposed to White, Black, Red et al.?

                      The difference between being a thing: bigamist, anarchist, contradictory to the little-c creed and practicing a religion (islam) or ideology (communism) similarly contradictory?

                      Or something else?

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            3. Who are you to tell me I’m not a ‘Real American’ just because I don’t believe in your invisible magic man in the sky? My answer to that is “Go F yourself.”

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  15. I haven’t been keeping close attention to the kerfuffle, but I am happy that it happened as it has shown everyone the problems with how the current system is set up. And I get a kick out of the MSM calling it a civil war.

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  16. I haven’t been keeping close attention to the kerfuffle, but I am happy that it happened as it has shown everyone the problems with how the current system is set up. And I get a kick out of the MSM calling it a civil war.

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  17. I haven’t been keeping close attention to the kerfuffle, but I am happy that it happened as it has shown everyone the problems with how the current system is set up. And I get a kick out of the MSM calling it a civil war.

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  19. Ah, loud conversations. I don’t know how I did it, but I, who grew up with quiet parents, have a very Latin style of communication. Same with my wife.

    We have had *ahem* conversations that were so loud and energetic, me at one end of the house, she at the other, maybe with a door or two closed, that the neighbors called the cops. And then the discussion of “No, we were discussing X/Y/Z. We weren’t arguing.”

    One of the neighbors actually asked us one time if we were okay as we seemed to be fighting a lot. Our response? “No, we weren’t fighting. You’ll know when we are fighting.”

    Full Latin conversational method. Hands flapping, voices energetically raised, shattered eardrums around us, no actual damaged items, no blood. And my wife has at least 50 knives around her bed.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. My extended family. In particular dad’s side. Let’s just say surprised the cops weren’t called by the neighbors more. Did get called once. Our wedding reception. When cops said “one of the neighbors called”. Dad said “What? All the neighbors are here!” Figured one of the neighbors further down, who was driving by. Not like the crowd was milling around outside, it was Dec 17, in southern Willamette Valley, wet and cold.

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  20. I still remember how in graduate school I found out that many foreign countries pay half of the salary for teaching assistantship. So most of the TA’s were Brazilian because Brazil would pay half their assistantship. It is very hard to compete when the other guy or gal costs half what you do.

    Also, gossip at NASA was that Space X burns their engineers out, so of course there is a shortage. They also get the best and brightest, all the best NASA interns were going to work for Space X. It was where stuff was happening.

    During the height of the Space Race NASA would burn people out too. The lack of work life balance was so bad that divorces were commonplace and divorce was almost unheard of back then.

    And I have almost not been following the recent argument online, so I may have been talking sideways to the discussion.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. SpaceX does burn engineers out. There’s canon on that which I should have saved. When I was getting a Masters I did a paper on Elon because he’s a fascinating guy for lots of reasons and was a fascinating guy before he went political.

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      1. “SpaceX does burn engineers out.”

        Color me not surprised.

        The environment is, “it is a sprint, not a marathon”.

        Engineers drawn to space travel tend to be type of “it is a sprint, not a marathon”.

        Any engineer getting on is going to be youngish, for the most part, even older engineers new to a job will want to jump right in. “it is a sprint, not a marathon”.

        The odds of enough engineers surviving without burning out to switch from “it is a sprint, not a marathon” to “it’s a marathon, not a sprint”, is very minimal.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. That’s true of almost any startup. One reason startups fail is failure to make that transition.

          You know, sort of like transitioning from “insurgency” to “government”. 😁

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            1. I figured. But sooner or later you run out of people to burn out, and you lose a lot of human capital that way.

              I honestly think that most startup companies are started by people who want that environment, and when it isn’t there because the product matures, they lose interest and either go do something else or implode. Elon’s companies have a broad enough range that may be less of a problem for him.

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  21. IIRC, a few days ago someone was noting a sudden jump in the price of eggs in California. I think I figured out what’s going on.

    California only allows the sale of “cage free” eggs. This increases the cost of housing the chickens, and as a result most poultry farmers don’t want to do it. This means that the eggs can only come from a small subset of the overall egg-producing farms.

    A new law just went into effect in Michigan today that only allows the sale of “cage free” eggs in that state. I suspect that this means that there are suddenly not enough egg producers compared to the number of stores that need to carry them. As a result, shortages, and the attendant increase in prices.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Oregon is apparently “cage free” too. Did not know that. Funny thing is, in general most backyard chicken keepers treat eggs like backyard zucchini growers, only it is all year. Thing is we currently do not know any backyard chicken keepers. Used to have a lot of neighbors keeping chickens. They’ve gotten rid of them as the rat problem got horrible. Our non-neighborhood source just moved to Idaho. So $10.39/18-ct at Fred Meyers (Kroger). Do not know what Costco is for a dozen.

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      2. The big independent is selling Willamette eggs for $8.88/18ct. Somebody was selling a dozen for $3.98 yesterday, but I noticed that the shelf was empty. I’m no longer doing an omelette twice a week, so last week’s purchase will tide us through a bit.

        I’m hoping (without much hope :) ) that the price will drop as we exit the holiday baking season. My understanding is that all the Left Coast states are cage free, so replacement birds are going to be harder to get. (Quick i’net search for CF states: CA, CO, MA, MI, NV, OR, RI, UT, WA. Apparently AZ is getting ready to do so.)

        The guy running the 80 acre ranch behind us (solo, so it is no surprise he’s planning to sell and leave) has (or had) a small flock of birds. We suspect he’s trading eggs and meat for labor.

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        1. I’m not sure about other states, but California has a law that says anything sold there must conform to their laws. So it’s not just a local issue. They eliminated 2/3 of the nationwide market, which easily matches a 3x increase in price.

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          1. Apparently Oregon has the same issue. I’m guessing that all or most of the cage-free states will have that clause in the law/regulation.

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            1. In California it’s a separate law. ANY product sold there must conform to their laws, which resulted in higher prices across the board. Those who are large enough to comply are a small portion of the producers. They apparently expected that they could infect the rest of the country by forcing economic compliance.

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          3. I believe someone is going to take that on under the interstate commerce clause. Or I hope so. Or I hope they get bit by a DOGE.

            Liked by 1 person

        2. Just going to point out that Massachusetts has been cage-free since 2016, and we are not facing such high prices for eggs. The prices are around $5.

          https://www.wwlp.com/news/massachusetts/average-egg-prices-surge-38-since-2023-but-not-is-massachusetts-heres-why/

          Katz said right now, bird flu is also impacting many chicken companies which has killed so many chickens that the companies are switching to cage-free eggs. Therefore, there are more cage-free eggs being produced and fewer caged eggs which may lead to an increase in price.

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          1. (Split up due to WP)

            Apparently, US egg production is transitioning to cage free, as older cages wear out. The demand for cage free eggs is high. 38% of eggs are now produced cage free. https://unitedegg.com/facts-stats/

            If you look at the pictures in this NPR piece, you can see that cage free still means lots of chickens in one place.

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  22. Well said. I’m with you, and the leftists can’t even begin to comprehend how non-biased folks who just want to do the right thing think. Sure, there were some raised voices (or their online equivalent), but there were also many folks who dug up the actual figures and showed them, and many other folks with first-hand testimony about the way things have been working, and, mirabile dictu, the stories matched the figures. So Musk and Trump, two successful entrepreneurs, having been shown the reality, changed their minds.

    Unlike leftist, less racist than thou, arguments, actual data was exchanged, and minds were changed. Funny how that can work if you haven’t been taught to be a retarded slogan slinger.

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  24. It might be fine to have a special tech category for immigration, but I don’t like that the visas are controlled by the hiring corp. Let immigrants work where they want to and that will help alleviate some of the downward wage pressure.

    Also, I don’t like having a number defined in the law itself that just goes on and on. Congress should have to vote on the amount of immigration allowed every year. This principle of a congress not deciding for future congress’ should be applied in many areas of the law.

    Liked by 1 person

  25. It might be fine to have a special tech category for immigration, but I don’t like that the visas are controlled by the hiring corp. Let immigrants work where they want to and that will help alleviate some of the downward wage pressure.

    Also, I don’t like having a number defined in the law itself that just goes on and on. Congress should have to vote on the amount of immigration allowed every year. This principle of a congress not deciding for future congress’ should be applied in many areas of the law.

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  26. It might be fine to have a special tech category for immigration, but I don’t like that the visas are controlled by the hiring corp. Let immigrants work where they want to and that will help alleviate some of the downward wage pressure.

    Also, I don’t like having a number defined in the law itself that just goes on and on. Congress should have to vote on the amount of immigration allowed every year. This principle of a congress not deciding for future congress’ should be applied in many areas of the law.

    Like

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