For the last few years, with the open border and people trampling in willy nilly, I had a running theme when I linked those news: Those poor saps are walking in on a family quarrel. When the excrement hits the rotating object it’s going to get seriously ugly.
I now think I was wrong on that. Oh, not on its getting ugly. I still worry about that and they — and the people they think are their defenders — aren’t making these people being caught in the middle less likely.
But I’m less — not completely “not worried” but less — worried about the excrement hitting the rotating object and precipitating us into a civil war.
Look, I’m going to be blunt: I don’t know how many votes the left is creating ex nihilo. I’ve known for a good long while that we were nothing like the half of the country that shows up in voting — this is obvious from how hard they work all the fraud mechanisms — sometime in the last three years I came to suspect their high watermark, including all the indoctrinated young and their insane shock troops and everyone else was about 25%. Of those the hard shock troops which are the criminally inclined and the insane who can’t be talked out of their leftist insanity are maybe half of that.
Look, in a nation of 300 mil (I never bought the 50 aggregated on out of nothing the last 20 years even as birthrates trolled the depths) it’s still a lot of people.
But it’s not enough for a civil war.
The fact that we took away some of their financing sources (not even all of them) and the shock troops became reduced to the usual half a dozen boomers with assistive oxygen and walkers bleating on the corner just reinforced my belief. I’m now convinced the young lady who told me ten years ago that most of antifa was there because it was a paycheck was saying nothing but the truth.
So the illegal masses coming in aren’t getting into the middle of a family quarrel. But they are still in danger. In fact they might be in more danger than not.
Look, there are certain things we’d been assured were lies that we now know we’re not.
And one of them was that it was a lie that people were coming here to steal American jobs.
We were told that immigrants came here to do jobs Americans wouldn’t do.
Turns out they were wrong. Not just a little bit wrong, but wide open wrong.
Numbers don’t lie, and even with the anemic deportation we’ve had, salaries have gone up.
But it’s beyond that. The Telegraph last night had an article about “Generation jobless.” This is something I’ve been sounding the alarm on for a while, and all I get is “it’s all the fault of kids these days.”
Note that the Telegraph is in Britain, but the article could have been written about this country too. I’m not the only one who has observed a tendency for young people (And dear Lord I’ve been screaming at it for 10 years. They’re mostly now over thirty) to either be stuck in a never-ending educational loop or give up and hide in the basement doing nothing. Sometimes literally.
Now the problem used to be mostly young men, because well, the overculture was rigged to create at least “false success” for women, (make work jobs. Pretty looking jobs. “Our Laney is a representative of the under-represented, at anti-racism inc.” and don’t tell anyone she makes nothing) because of all the feminism rawr noises. And also because women are as a rule more social and less likely to hit the “I’m just gonna give up and hide.” But lately I understand young women are hitting the same, with a side line of being highly medicated and on endless therapy sessions.
Thing is when there is a “generation jobless” I don’t care how bad kids these days are (and whose fault is it, if you didn’t check they were at a minimum taught to read and write? Because even I managed that) there is more at work here. A lot more.
The lot more became obvious under Biden when for a year or so almost anyone who got a job was not born in the country. (And I bet it’s the same in England.)
Why? Oh, several trends. One of them was DEI, sure, but another was that people who are here and not citizens are easier to make into indentured servants and/or/pay less. There is also credentialism. If what you require to hire someone is a certificate, other countries are far more okay with faking certificates than Americans ever were. We’re autistic about stuff like that. They’re not.
But ultimately? It’s cheaper. And they’re easier to bully. It looked good for the bottom line; it looked good for diversity.
And so, companies have in fact giving away American jobs away to immigrants. And no, the trades are not a refuge from this, because lately they’ve been importing people for the trades too. (Those are mostly illegal.)
Yes, this means you’re going to see a lot enshittification, because most of the illegals (and not) are faking credentials, learning on the job, and have lower standards for “doing it well” because those are cultural. (Look, I come from a culture where doing it sort of okay is the apex to be aspired to, provided it’s done quickly. Yes, I was saved by being on the spectrum. I have a tendency to waste a lot of time on perfectionism. but there’s a middle ground, and most of the imports won’t even try.)
BUT they are cheaper. And so they are the ones being hired, and salaries are driven down, and then the only ones wanting to do it are those who are also benefiting from programs to help illegals and “refugees” and who can afford to do less in the visible market because they’re receiving subsidies and also working under the table.
The idiots liberals think this means they’re keeping America functioning, but that’s not remotely what’s happening.
What’s happening is simultaneously a driving down of quality and a pushing down of price, until at some point the quality can’t be driven down more by offshoring, but the price falls, and then we outsource to slave labor in China and other totalitarian regimes.
Look, this can’t go on. We can’t continue subsidizing driving our own children out of the job market. And yes, the problem starts with minimum wage, because that’s what sets up the inability to hire people legally. But it doesn’t end there. There are a million factors driving this.
And it’s all pushed by DEI, inability to test people for jobs and having to rely on credentials, and of course open borders.
Trump is doing exactly what he should be doing, in stopping DEI and making it possible to test people for jobs. Because that’s the death or credentials. Oh, and of course, closing the borders.
The young might not be well educated — most are not — and might have learned helplessness. But they’re still of our stock. If their parents succeeded, they’ll find their way once we stop hitting them on the head.
But in the meantime, the people demonstrating on the streets with foreign flags, and the usual idiot obligatory boomers talking about “compassion” are making the possible outcome exponentially worse.
We have figured out the people coming here are in fact taking ours or our kids’ jobs*. From here on out, it’s going to follow a crazy train of resentment against “the intruders.” It’s starting with Indians, because they’re a visible minority. It’s not going to stop there.
The best thing to do? Stop H1B visas. Stop nepotistic/racial hiring. Stop flapping lips about the inherent superiority of your race/subrace. Stop flying foreign flags. Stop insisting we cater to YOUR language, which is not English. Shut up and do your best to Fit in. Or Fuck Off.
Because at the end of this, this bullshit slide affects me. More importantly, it affects my kids.
And yes, note I put an asterisk up there. *Arguably I did steal an American job, but not one recognized as such in the eighties. And in my defense, if he’d not married me, my husband would be unlikely to marry and stay married. We’re one of those couples. So I stole the Wife to the Mathematician and Mother to his very Odd Offspring from some American-born woman, who’d probably run screaming from that job.
I didn’t steal the job as a writer from anyone.** Look, it’s not a location specific job. Arguably, I’d do much better if I were living in Portugal. And I’ve told people to stop worrying about AI and start worrying about people in Eastern European countries who speak English well enough to produce write for hire popcorn books for American companies who will pay them for the piece work, then pay someone who is not ESL to fix it. This is happening right now. Because $500 per novel and a novel per month is a princely living in many places in the world. I’m not that cheap, but what I make per year even just from writing would put me on a par with my brother and SIL who live very well indeed for Portugal.
So, why not do it? For the same reason I throw things at people (American and Portuguese) who ask me why I don’t retire in Portugal. It’s sort of like asking you why you don’t wear a suit that squeezes you and makes you itch all day.
I choose to live here, because I’m American. This is where I feel at home. Where my friends live, and the people I want to be friends with. The people that get me. This is where my children, who have never been anything but American live.
Which is why I’m hoping the crazy doesn’t get out of control enough that the broken identification mechanism casts me out.
Because I have nowhere to go. No other place is home.
[** Writing is a field screwed up by cheap labor, yes, but the cheap labor at least until recently was not foreign. Writing was screwed up by the demand that women have a profession as well as anything else. This drove an influx of stay-at-home-wives (most not moms) into the field. They were willing to work for less, because mostly they worked for the prestige. Most of them were exquisitely educated and well off, anyway. This drove the advances down to the point they are lower than they were in the 40s. It also, as it always does, affected quality as the books started reflecting ONLY the concerns of an extremely narrow population band, and one what wasn’t concerned with making a living.
Economics is a right bitch. You can’t solve it by screaming about race or whatever. It’s all about supply and demand. A supply of cheaper labor in excess of demand drives price down. That’s it. That it also drives quality down has more to do with the nature of an artistic field and the impressions it feeds on.]
According To Hoyt 
Sarah, If you haven’t read this, you probably should. He’s got lots more than I feel comfortable excerpting.
https://ombreolivier.substack.com/p/the-ai-tangle
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Jinx!!
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Thanks for the link.
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It is an interesting estimation problem.
There are bits that are hard to me, that I don’t have answer for, and I certainly don’t have any method I would want to trust to be reliable.
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Ditto. This was an interesting read.
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This is several years old news. And it is the typical one-sided unimaginative doom prediction.
AI is also excellent for learning and increasing the leverage of an individual, reasserting the on-ramp which it supposedly destroys….. that is if an on-ramp is even needed rather than going sole-proprietor.
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”…then pay someone who is not ESL to fix it…”
At least for now, while LLM AI can’t “originally” write worth very much at all, it can do a fair grammar and spelling check (a la Grammarly), so I’d expect these ex-Warsaw-Pact-writers-pool sweatshop publishers to employ very few native U.S. “editors” – at least until an LLM AI can’t write take over the entire production pipeline.
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No. It’s not grammar and vocab. It’s … idiom they need natives to fix.
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And style.
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And unfortunately, at least in the field of anime and manga localizers, AIs are looking preferable. The localizers have been letting their political freak flags show, and it’s been noticeable enough that some of the Japanese publishers are bypassing them.
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Someone took one of my short essays on grammar-as-a-tool and sic’d Grammarly on it. The output was a mix of conventional phrases meaning nonsense and administratish. It was, perhaps, fit to line a birdcage, depending on the grade level of the bird.
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While I hope you’re correct about “no second civil war”, I’d just love to see what would happen to any foreign troops that tried to “interfere” in another civil war. [Very Big Twisted Grin]
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That reminds me of Harry Harrison’s “Stars and Stripes Forever” alternate history trilogy, where the British attempted to aid the Conferderacy in the US Civil War, but botched it and fired on Confederate ships. The North and South then made peace and declared joint war on Britain, and kicked some serious butt.
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I remember it. I read the first book, and wanted so badly to like it — but I found the style very distancing, holding me at arms’ length. I think I was expecting something more like Harry Turtledove’s alternate histories, that suck you right into the story. Maybe it could’ve worked better if it was done explicitly as a collection of fictional documents of the events, but my experience of the first book left me without any interest in reading books 2 and 3 (maybe a decade or two earlier, I would’ve devoured them because I was hungry for any books to read, but by the time they came out, I had such a wealth to choose from that I could afford to take back a book that didn’t click for me).
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Harrison’s books that I have tried to read all sounded like they were right up my alley from the cover blurbs. And then quickly turned out to be a boring mess when I actually read them. It’s not that the blurbs lied, either. They just… weren’t fun for me.
It seems a shame, though, because there was obviously something there that just didn’t click with me.
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Read that one recently, and found it pretty good. Only pretty good; somehow the telling and the details of the events just weren’t as exciting as they ‘ought to have been’ — despite the fact I really liked the “Stainless Steel Rat” series, and found (for instance) “The Daleth Effect” pretty good too.
Somehow, it’s as if Harrison put in the work, dutifully “turned the crank” — and this came out.
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I liked his “Deathworld” and “Warriors of the Way” trilogies quite a lot. The Stainless Steel Rat, just so-so.
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Nitpick: In Harrison’s S&SF, the British got cranky about the Trent affair, showed up in the future Gulf of Buc-ees, attacked and pillaged Biloxi thinking it was Union-held, and that got the Confederacy just a mite testy, leading to 3 books (which I enjoyed) and an alternate timeline where we wouldn’t have to worry about Chuck & Diana were doing every moment in the 1980s.
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Kurt Schlichter’s ACW v2.09 book American Apocalypse novel had a good take on that. Spoilers ahead: Skip or hold your peace.
Loose summary of the section:
The USNavy (Submarine section) had been quietly organized to have patriots (Gold team) and woke/potential insurrectionists (Blue team) before the war. (With emphasis that the Gold members would be strictly non-political and would NOT get involved in the ACW.)
When things started to get interesting, the Blue teams were all ashore and the Gold teams went out. Simultaneously, other Americans met with the leaders of potential enemies and were informed that a) there’s a no-crossing zone in the Pacific, b) if they tried to invade/cause trouble, all of the SSBNs were loaded and targets were well selected. Rules of engagement were selected by the lead admiral.
Yes, totally illegal, unconsitutional, but sensible. Since the admiral at the base of it had stage 4 cancer, he wasn’t afraid of much.
In Schlichter’s book, I think a couple of submarines were lost (both American and foreign), but the scheme worked.
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That chapter about the Submarine force giving the Russians and Chinese a reason not to interfere is the least plausible part of that book, but it plugs the biggest plot hole in a scenario that even Schlichter wouldn’t claim to be very plausible. The book is just plausible enough to be really scary without causing suicidal depression in the reader. Each chapter is framed as an oral history interview with a survivor. My favorite chapter is the Hollywood mogul who was politically nimble enough to weather the storm and come out on top. The blatant hypocrisy is hilarious. I imagine Hollywood Lawyer Schlichter based him on real life.
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Yeah, there were a lot of moving parts in the submarine chapter, and Murphy somehow missed the party. Still, it was fun.
Ditto on the Hollyweird mogul.
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Not plausible. With the US otherwise occupied, there would be enough pent-up mischief set loose all across the globe so as to end up Very Bad for many non-Americans. Writing a story in a way so things won’t happen doesn’t mean they won’t happen.
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There were a few of those scenes where I wanted to crawl into the page and strangle the principal. Hollywood was one.
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It’s not from lack of effort by the Democrats, who seem to be bent on advertising openly their desire to seize power and establish single party totalitarian rule “for our own good”. They have made it very clear, and very publicly, they mean to crush and destroy all who disagree, even in the slightest, with them.
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See possibly-mislaid previous comment for more, but shortly, that’s the ending of my nascent alternate-history hard-steampunk “War Between” a.k.a. Civil War Between the States.
By 1871 certain European Powers decide the war (3-way, here) has made fractured America weak and ripe for picking. They have big, slow airships and fast ironclads, and lots of Old World smug.
By then one or more of “we” have high-altitude bombing airships mounting mile-a-second light-gas guns; fast submarines firing self-propelled ‘fish’ torpedoes; underwater guns with supercavitating projectiles; anti-aircraft rockets running on saltpetered-sugar “rocket candy” — and newest and “shiniest” of all, drop-launched ramjet-powered supersonic heavier-than-air fighters and bombers (not many, but more than a few). And that “interfering in a family quarrel” line does get tossed around a lot, suddenly, though the governments end up following far more than leading.
We’ve had almost a decade of forced innovation and “heck, let’s try it anyway” gumption. Woops.
Reailty, of course, would be far scarier. At least, as seen from the sharp end…
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There was a comment in Schmitz’ The Demon Breed in which the warning by an alien evaluator amounted to, “Don’t mess with the humans. Even if it looks like their interfamily fight makes it look like you can nip off pieces, they’ll both turn and rip you to shreds. Don’t do it!“
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Culture is not genetic, but it is generational. Combine that with us slowly learning parts of personality are hereditary, but we don’t really have a good, testable map to which, I think we are at a point where the assimilationists and the blood and soil factions are going to be arguing for the same policy for decades, at least, and we won’t have a solid counter argument to the blood and soil extreme for a while.
The only concrete argument I’ve got to them is, if accepting the blank slate in extremism lead to one catastrophe, why would absolute scientific Calvinism be expected to do better? But right now, ‘Cromwell was wrong too’ doesn’t feel like a persuasive argument.
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In a sane world, “Whites invented Communism” would be sufficient rebuttal. Even if you buy their definition of race (which our hostess has punched holes in on a few occasions), “blood” is clearly no guarantee of a healthy society, as evidenced by the last 100+ years of Europe, so now you’re back to using beliefs/values/culture as a filter. Sadly, we’re not in a sane world.
I bumped into a tweet that makes a longer version of this argument. I won’t vouch for every point, but it’s a pretty thorough summary of the flaws of ethnonationalism and how America is special: https://x.com/planefag/status/1953203682801230161#m
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Even better: “White men invented communism.” Also socialism and fascism. The 3 closely related causes of the 20th century’s 100 million corpses in mass graves.
That TwitX post is wrong, though. We didn’t invent a new people and call them ‘white people’ — we call our tribe Americans. (or even USAians) :-D Color got nothing to do with it.
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THIS THIS THIS.
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I read it as “The ‘white race’ imagined by the ethnonationalists is ‘American’.” But yes, color’s got nothing to do with it.
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Yep.
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I doubt that will be an effective argument, because it still matches the “whites invent everything” theory, and they do not require the in-group to have no con artists.
Basically it does not contradict the 100% predestined Nature hypothesis.
That’s the real argument: What percentage of people is Nature?
What percentage is Nurture?
And what fraction of Nurture is re-writable?
We’ve already seen blatantly demonstrated that we are not 100% re-writable nurture, but we have no clue what percentage of what is what. Further, the idea that part of nurture, but not all of it, is rewritable is also a novel concept.. So the Blood and Soil crew are treating Learn Once as strictly Nature.
That’s why I suspect they’re going to head towards biological Calvinism.
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Right, but if Communism was invented by, took root among, and slaughtered millions of whites, how is whiteness any sort of guard against it? Restricting the definition to “American white” doesn’t help, since the same ideas are shared by Americans who would pass any blood-and-soil test you hurl at them (see New England). If political behavior is determined by genes, white genes are clearly tainted and the blood-and-soil project is doomed from the start.
Adding a filter for beliefs/values/culture addresses the problem, but it makes the racial filter pointless. At best you can use race as a proxy for cultural fit, but even looking at Europe (or New England), it’s a poor one. Put another way, any test that includes Elizabeth Warren but excludes Clarence Thomas is moronic. And if you give up and ditch the racial filter, you’ve reached the proposition nation/Constitutionalist position that America is defined by a shared set of values.
The nature vs. nurture question is important, but ultimately it grounds out in the practical problem of how we find people with the right values, import them in the right quantities, and help them assimilate. At one extreme, a zero immigration policy presumes that assimilation magically stopped working sometime in the 18th, 19th, or 20th centuries, depending on what flavor of blood you prefer in your soil. At the other extreme, a pure open borders policy means America ceases to exist as a distinct culture. Both extremes are untenable, so one way or another, it’s going to require prudence to set a sensible immigration policy.
(Notably, a sensible immigration policy doesn’t require solving the nature vs. nurture question. You can completely botch the nature/nurture analysis and import people from a 0.00% compatible culture, and it won’t be a problem as long as the numbers are manageable and the assimilation/naturalization process is sound. Or maybe you botch the analysis the other way and find that the people who you thought could never in a million years become Americans do just fine over here when you don’t have NGOs working to keep them from fitting it. Immigration is a hard question, but it doesn’t have to be “understand human nature in its totality” hard.)
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Because they aren’t fighting communism, and see the entire debate as a red herring to the real issue of elites who are trying to replace the troublesome masses with more ruleable imports.
This is a faction that is perfectly happy to line up every single blond blue eyed elite align with every single import and send the whole lot off to get their heads lowered.
Tribesmen who cavort with Outsiders are Traitors, not Tribesmen. Made Men who screw with the Boss still get it in the back of the head. Being part of the Tribe does not prevent you from being expelled from the Tribe for breaking the tribe’s rules.
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FWIW, many of the blood-and-soil types I’ve seen do claim to be fighting Communism. They’ve just rubber-banded all the way past Constitutionalism and into tribalism (or occasionally monarchy). I maintain that if you have to apply an ideological purity test to filter out bad members of your race/tribe (traitorous elites, etc.), you might as well ditch the race/tribe part and just make your test “has American values”. But yeah, the people that most need to hear this argument won’t be persuaded by it.
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yep.
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Our policy should be mildly hostile and make immigration DIFFICULT and also encourage assimilation by punishing ANYTHING ELSE. To the stupid point, yes. there’s nothing inherently wrong with a head scarf, but it should be publicly looked down/frowned on for the simple reason it makes you stand out.
Yes, I DO realize that’s intolerant, but we should do this before people can naturalize, to shake out the FIFO score.
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Some — possibly a lot — is culture, but we’re not quite sure how culture TRANSMITS.
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Until about 1930 or thereabouts, it seemed to transmit fairly well via the usual parent-to-child process for acculturating and socializing young savages/barbarians. Then the government got into the act…👿
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I’ve been looking for work for over a year, after 27 years as a Senior Analytical Scientist. Despite my extensive experience and willingness to take a significant pay cut to make a “lateral move” I’ve been reduced to collecting Social Security and driving Door Dash.
So here we are.
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I got that T-shirt with the 2001 dot com bust. Agilent (spun off from HP) closed its semiconductor manufacturing operation at the same time as most other semi firms were busy sending everything offshore. I was laid off at the beginning of September, so by 9/12, there was a readymade reason not to hire.
By luck, in November, I got a consulting gig, with the client being the company whose testers my old department was using. That lasted a year before the client went toes up (edifice complex + unfortunate expansion plans + some underhanded stuff done to the client CEO). At which point, $SPOUSE and I finished getting the San Jose house ready to sell (buyer was at eBay–seems to be still in the house) and we retired. I was 51 when we moved. Money was tight until retirement savings could be tapped, but (with some help from family) we made it. I got pretty good at construction and fabricating. (My welding isn’t pretty, but it works. The 9′ pine needle rake is handy. OTOH, I’m a better carpenter than welder.) Didn’t try to do any of it for money, but we got a lot of necessary work done with “free” labor.
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I feel for you, brother. This senior systems analyst has been on half pay for a year and looks like this job will terminate December 31st. 67 isn’t exactly a good age to go looking for another good job.
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“67 isn’t exactly a good age to go looking for another good job”
While I’m “only” 61, that’s a big reason why I don’t quit my phony baloney job with the evil and corrupt state of Illinois. (Well, maybe it’s not THAT phony, since a big part of it is negotiating changes in proposed state regulations to make them less burdensome. It can be like herding cats though. And I know all about herding cats :-)) It’s also a big reason why we don’t move out like all sensible and moral conservative people should have done yesterday. There is absolutely no way I could ever get another job with pay and benefits this good anywhere else. I lost a job very suddenly back in the early Aughts, had to take a much lower paying job for several years, and I never want to go through that again.
Still, with all the recent attention to JB the Hutt and his hypocritical posturing about gerrymandering, I have of late been feeling particularly ashamed of the fact that I live in and work for this state. It’s gotten to the point where nearly every time I hear his voice or see him on the TV or EweToob I want to scream “Bullshit!” or “F You!” at him — and if no one is within earshot (e.g., I’m in the car with the windows rolled up) I sometimes do. The same goes for other Democrat public officials like Pelosi, Jasmine Crockett, Beto O’Rourke, etc. etc. Yet I also pray for these people, and for President Trump and other public officials, every day. Go figure….
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Being retired, I can yell at the TV, even with the windows wide open because my give-a-dang is shot.
I retired at age 59 1/4, just months before we could tap my IRA. Without going into specifics, we are staying ahead of inflation in spite of Biden/Kamala.
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I got that t-shirt Aug 2002. Also a company which folded. It was not fun finding another job. It took over a year, in my late 40’s, to find another software job. For reasons I had to get a new job. Note, being a female software developer was absolutely no help. Not being able to move didn’t help either (but still). Eventually did find an entry level job. Not that I’d been entry level for almost 20 years by then, paid better than non-existent (by then) unemployment.
Keep at it. Good luck.
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You are very far from alone – Andrew Yang had a substack that is partly about it – https://blog.andrewyang.com/p/hidden-hardship
And the best man at my wedding hasn’t worked since the Covidiocy when before that he was a senior software engineering manager (and AFAIK a good one)
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A lot of software/hardware people I worked with never did go back to work in tech, once the DOT COMs bust hit them. Not a very big example but I only know of 5. Two of them were picked up by the company that purchased the hardware R&D of the company in 2003 that went bankrupt. Another bailed to another company, early (also hardware). Another ended up working for an insurance company (someone who also moved from forestry to software), and me.
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When I was laid off in 2001, it was billed as a “retraction”. The severance benefits were fairly good, but the chances of getting a similar job in Silicon Valley were poor. (One company offered, but way too many red flags. Startup in a recession, and I wasn’t really well suited for the position. They kept trying, telling me that others were seeing those red flags.)
As usual, we older engineers got the axe first. (Age discrimination? Waggles hands.) OTOH, the company kept contracting, with each tranche getting poorer severance packages. When they announced the entire product line was being sold off, everybody left got a little. The last holdouts went into other jobs. One (really smart lady, who went from waitress to lead technician over the years) went into real estate, since the hardware companies were getting the hell out of the Valley.
I might have been able to stay in the industry, but wasn’t willing to move. Idaho or SoCal were options, but the house needed work to sell. The consulting gig paid enough to get materials and keep us afloat, and I was able to do the work. (All but some demolition was self-done. I never want to rebuild a load-bearing wall again.)
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I basically made the gut call, maybe six months ago, that my end game or plan is to expect significant economic change, and that such would kick a lot of positions open.
I have stuff I am doing, but maybe the only wisdom in my scheme is avoiding depression.
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I went through that after the hospital merger which lost me my library job in ’13. So after over a year of applying for jobs whose description exactly matched what I’d been doing for over a decade and not even getting interviews, I went back to school and got a BA equivalent in accounting, and the best I’ve done since is entry level clerk stuff which doesn’t require more than HS, and that at one of the local casinos both of which are always hiring.
I think its a combo of being too old, too white, and not willing to put up with diversity. If my coworker can do the job and treats me like a fellow human, I don’t care what their race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation/kinks are. If they can’t do the job, I still don’t care about the other stuff. I know my refusal to say I thought dei was a grand thing has lost me at least one job offer. The UConn team looked at me side-eyed when I brought up the whole MLK “content of character instead of color of skin” bit. I could have used the job, but I suspect the coworkers would have been hell.
Now I’m dealing with post concussion syndrome since October, and only just got cleared to start looking for part time work. But the only stuff around here offering 4 hour shifts, 4 or fewer days a week is retail, which I’m not cleared for – too much noise and fluorescent lighting.
At 64 I’m too young to retire, not that we can afford it, but no one is hiring at the sort of jobs I can do with my experience level, not even full time.
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Oh, and the people I want here are the people who can look at our founding documents and say “Duh” (or some other phrasing indicating, say, 80% or better agreement)*. We’ll take all of those we can get, thank you very much.
*I have had one person close to me say “they all do, because they worry bout their rights” not getting it’s not their own rights I want them agreeing to. It’s everyone else’s even when it is to their own personal disadvantage. Those people? More please.
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Given that the left cares very little about Constitutional Rights, they don’t actually care if the newcomers do.
All correct thinking people agree that Free Speech is evil, as is the Second Amendment, or the right to actual Life, never mind Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.
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Worse, they try to prevent you assimilating. As with us. I not only had to fight to assimilate, I had to fight for my sons not to have weird nonsense put in their heads.
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This quarter’s Sunday School book was written by a media fan who’s into gaming (so is the rest of his family). He’s pretty good most of the time, but in the last lesson he told a “beautiful,” story about a school gaming group that modified their entire world so that a girl who,spoke only Spanish could take part with an interpreter. How inclusive! How thoughtful!
My instant response was, “They should have encouraged her to work on her English as a motivator, so she could play without an interpreter.” (Not laughing at her inevitable mistakes would probably help). Because your “caring,” group is helping her stay in the barrio forever.”
My beloved noted his grandfather immigrated from France and took a job in a French-speaking factory as a machinist. His three children all learned English by the total immersion method – as in, they were tossed into an American school and expected to pick the language up, or else. Of the three, one graduated from MIT, one taught at MIT, and his mom became a very, very good medical secretary.
He noted that if they had been, “accomodated,” the boys would probably have gone to work in the factory with their father.
Since we live in the South, the consensus of our (tiny) class was 100% with my beloved.
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I live in an area of California with a high percentage of Hispanic (legal) immigrants (and descendants thereof). Most of them speak flawless Spanish. However, most of them also speak flawless English, so you don’t even realize about the Spanish until you hear them call a sibling.
(One of them has a kid named Julian. She will even pronounce that differently depending on which language she’s speaking.)
I’ll also mention that I live in middle-class suburbia with a good school district, so there’s some selection effect in play. But that’s the point, isn’t it? The ones I know who did the assimilation are doing pretty well…
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My paternal grandfather started school in first grade only speaking German. By the time he left school in 5th grade to work the farm, he was functionally literate, although spelling was an issue. And while he always had an accent, his English was perfectly understandable.
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My grandparents were bilingual. My grandmother insisted on raising their three sons to speak only English.
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Yes. The school I retired from did not expect the non-native speakers to work on learning English. We had to put a Spanish section in the library for them. Some of the kids have been here 5 or 6 years. They weren’t even able to read in Spanish when they came. They use their phones to translate and don’t even attempt to speak English in the classroom.
Reason #6754 to abolish the Department of Ed.
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They put my kids in Spanish. My kids. I don’t speak Spanish, and I don’t speak Portuguese except on the phone with my parents. My husband only speaks English.
BUT they wanted to put my sons in Spanish because I have an accent.
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This was literally laugh-out-loud funny, in a bizarrely-grim kind of way. “Of course Spanish and Portuguese are the same language, or almost!” Right, so we can all speak Dutch just fine, ‘kay?
It makes about as much sense as many other things “they” think and do, more’s the pity. Sigh.
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Sarah,
You stole nothing. If anything, your husband stole you. My wife came here with me, because it was nearly impossible for us to survive in Japan, fifty years ago. I like Japan, a lot, but there was no way.
No apologies. Looking back on our lives, children and grandchildren, we won.
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Agreed. American feminist culture torpedoed a lot of women’s chances of finding a nice guy and getting happily married to him and raising a family. Unrealistic expectations. So here comes Sarah, and shows them the emperor ain’t wearing squat by marrying and staying with Dan and raising two successful boys of their own.
Happiness is living better than your detractors.
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The Indians are not helped by the belligerently arrogant nationalism some of them show on social media.
Case in point, the other day I mentioned that Alexander the Great had every intention of conquering the world, and only stopped because his troops got tired of it, and mutinied. For those unaware, that was after he’d reached India, and subjugated at least one local ruler.
I was barraged with indignant responses, all insisting that the other Indian rulers would have beaten Alexander, and that was why he started heading for home. They refused to allow for the idea that the reasons why the campaigns ended had nothing to do with the new potential opponents.
I don’t know whether the issue is a normal percentage of twerps coming from India’s unusually large population, or whether the culture is more likely to create the obnoxious arrogance that I see. But it pops up a lot on social media, in places that you wouldn’t expect.
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There’s been a lot of stoking of Indian (Hindu) nationalism for the past few years. Part of it is the more radical voices get heard, part of it is being “not Chinese, not Pakistani.” When I was looking for books about the very early days of what became Hinduism, and the origin of the Vedas, good grief, the Hindu (and true Aryan) chauvinism in the reviews on the ‘Zon took my breath away. It was eye opening, even for someone who has kept occasional tabs on politics on the Subcontinent.
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I wonder if part of the Hindu nationalism is pure self defense against Islam?
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If it didn’t include an equal amount of spite against Christianity, maybe.
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Yeah, I think it was here that someone had a quote from some Hindu guy saying basically that the followers of Islam were the obvious devils because they would force you to convert or die. But the followers of Christianity were the unobvious devils because they converted you through love. What I’m hearing through the rumor mill is that there are a lot of upper-caste Hindus who are very concerned about Christianity in India. It’s attractive for obvious reasons to the lower castes, and doesn’t have the baggage that Islam brings with it (particularly in a country like India, where the followers of Islam have been causing very violent and bloody trouble for centuries). But the Hindu temples apparently rely very heavily on donations from the lower castes. The lower castes leaving for Christianity is a potential disaster for the Hindus. And while other religions can make inroads into India, I have a hard time imagining any country that would voluntarily adopt Hinduism en masse at all but the highest levels of society.
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There are places where you are required to report to the police that you intend to convert, they publish that in the newspaper, and then the militants come and murder you.
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In India, or in Muslim majority countries?
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In India. The militants are Hindu
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https://crisismagazine.com/opinion/persecution-of-christians-escalates-across-india
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Hmm
I wanna bet that it’s the Brahmins and Kshatriays that are pushing the anti-Christian hate.
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I hadn’t thought of that, but it makes perfect sense.
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I’m told that there is a strange dynamic that comes into play as well — with higher-caste Indians lording it over those from a perceived lower-caste, even though the lower-caste might be in a higher position — and an awful tendency for those Indians in a managerial capacity to bring in more and more other Indians, to the exclusion eventually of American-born natives, who likely are more able. I am told that this eventually degrades the company/division/activity.
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”I am told that this eventually degrades the company/division/activity.”
Heh.
Yeah, one could conclude that any hiring criteria other that “the best qualified person for the job” would, applied in aggregate, reduce the capabilities of that hiring organization, a plus the effects of importing caste and home-politics complications might also degrade things.
It’s usually pitched by hiring orgs as “best fit with the team,” but that’s just playing the HR game. If a similar “best fit” factor ended up only hiring Caucasian males, the Spanish Inquisition would make a dramatic entrance in short order.
Tech companies that grow to the scale where this can happen, even quite large ones (where I worked topped out significantly over ten thousand employees worldwide), oddly also seem to then easily decline and go away, though inertia and desperate retargeting and rebranding efforts can extend extend the time before last gasp by years.
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I don’t know for sure, but I suspect part of that last bit is the way that the H1-B farms work. Those outfits work as contractors (particularly for IT). Any of their contractees that manage to get into hiring positions are probably pushed to hire from the H1-B farm that employees them. And the farms only hire foreigners (which is why they’re H1-B farms).
A couple of the Indian-based ones have got caught breaking the law, recently. I can’t remember the name of one of them (starts with a ‘C’). But Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) recently was found guilty of visa fraud in a court in Texas. TCS would bring over new contractees using a short-term visa (for things like speaking engagements, and the like), but would tell both the contractee and the employer that the visa was an H1-B, which iirc runs for three years.
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Could be Cognizant, could be Cap Gemini. Both of them are massive employers of Indians although I think Cognizant is actually based in India while Cap is a true multinational.
And yes, the fraud is rampant. Has been for 30+ years. I remember working at a bank in South Carolina around the turn of the millenium, and they had an H-1B posting up for a “lead programmer/analyst.” They had custom-written the job posting for the guy they knew they were going to hire before they put it up on the board as legally required. It was listed as “pay grade 10.” I was the same title, doing roughly the same work in a different area, and all of us leads were “pay grade 14.” They were screwing the dude out of 20k a year as a result. Sad thing is, the guy was an absolute rock star, a total asset.
The whole program needs to be blown up and zeroed. THEN you have to give it 5+ years of zero visas to decide if it’s even needed.
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Cognizant was the other one I was trying to think of. Both them and TCS ended up in the news for visa fraud within a week or two of each other, though I don’t remember the specifics of what Cognizant had been doing.
On the other hand, an attempt to refresh my memory just now by doing an internet search found a *lot* of different items from just the last few years. It’s at the volume where any company with upper management that formerly worked at Cognizant should be banned from the US employment market just on general principle.
Interestingly enough, one of the items is that late last year a court in Los Angeles found Cognizant guilty of discriminating against local workers in favor of Indian employees.
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Been there, living it, got the chicken tikka.
There’s a reason my department went from 30% onshore Indian to 80% onshore Indian in six years after we got two back to back Indian SVPs. There’s a reason I’ve been at the same paygrade for going on 12 years while I’ve watched Indians rocket past me. (It’s not all nepotism, some of it is the job changing out from under me into something far more technical than it originally was and I didn’t keep up. But that’s not all of it.) I’ve seen it, lived it, and will probably eventually get laid off by it.
Indians can in-group hire in a way that Whites NEVER could. Why? Because even if they are 80% of the department, they are still An Diversity. So the still-very-much-extant corporate DEI bureaucracy can ooh and aah over how awesome it is that they get close to their “minority” hiring goals.
Yes, I’m bitter. Yes, they’re rapidly trying like hell to turn me racist.
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I read a book written by an Indian who insisted that the invasion of the Indo-Europeans could not have taken place because the Indo-European languages originated in India. This would be a surprise to the historical linguists who generally believe Proto-Indo-European was first spoken in the plains of what is now Ukraine
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FIFO. I like it. It’s a good companion to FAFO.
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Sarah, I sent an e-mail to you this morning. J.J. Sefton is willing to have you on his podcast to pimp your upcoming monster book if you’re interested. Let me know, please.
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I didn’t get it. In fact I’ve got no emails from anyone. Wait, let me check junk.
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Got it. Answered.
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Shall I send thr t-shirt to the Goldport Press P.O. box?
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email me!
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Sorry. Email coming.
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Twu wuvvvv, like adoption, is a funny thing. You never know where a family member may turn up.
Sometimes I feel like those of us who married young and stayed married for decades are like the lucky ones who made it out on the last chopper out of ‘Nam.
I’m American born and bred, as is hubby. The grandchildren of immigrants on all sides. From al the various corners of Western and Eastern Europe.
But Faith, Family, and America was the glue that kept our families strong.
And Divine intervention. I certainly didn’t know what I was doing when I said yes. Not really.
The only thing dumber than a 17 year-old boy, is a 17 year-old girl.
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Let me tell you, sister: a 22 year old boy and girl ain’t much better. ;) And yet here we are, forty years later.
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We were! We were! Married at 22, lasted 52. Of course, we had 5 years of dating before that.
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I was only 22 when we got married after 11 months of dating, but 5 years of being in the same groups at school. Hubby was two months short of 27. If we’d started dating at first meeting? I was only 17 (weeks short of 18, but still only 17) … Oh, 47 years this next December.
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We married at 22 after about five months of distance dating and four years of trying to tell ourselves we were not going to do it.
I REGRET not marrying at 18. (I met Dan on the day of his 18th birthday. We should have waited for my eighteenth, borrowed his dad’s spare care and headed for Vegas.)
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My wife was an Older Woman – I was helpless before her experience and wiles.
She was 18 the August before we met; I had to wait until November. We set our wedding in July so we would both be 22.
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Mom was the “older woman” too, by 10 months. Same grade because her birthday is mid-November, but dad’s early September. She was 21 when they married, he was 20, early-July. The only time they were the same age during a “big event” was at age 22, when I was born mid/late-October.
Dad’s uncle married an older woman. She was a WW2 widow 8 years older than him.
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Pretty close; we were 19 (me) and 18. Dated 4 years before that; married 60 this coming October. Wouldn’t change a thing.😊💕
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Three years ago extended family celebrated aunt and uncle’s 60th anniversary and aunt’s 80th birthday (he was 87, 90 now).
Grandparents lived to celebrate their 74th anniversary.
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Dad died the spring before their 54th anniversary.
Mom’s sister and BIL are closing in on their 70th, in 15 months.
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LOL. Probably because it’s not the brain end of the nervous system that develops first.
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Whenever I hear someone say “(illegal) immigrants do the job Americans won’t do” I mentally add, “at the wage you want to pay them”
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–
100%
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“CaPitAlISm iS eXPlOitiVe & EvIl!”
“Why do you want to deport our slave labor class? Is it becuase your racist?”
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“CaPitAlISm iS eXPlOitiVe & EvIl!”
“Why do you want to deport our slave labor class? Is it becuase your racist?”
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Another 100%. Heck, 110%. Immigrant exploitation is the new indentured servitude. The “caring” leftists and champagne socialists sit at the top of the pyramid, but they don’t know it’s turtles all the way down…and at some point ol’ Yertle at the bottom is going to realize he doesn’t have to just live with it.
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My brothers and sisters.
Those of you who were regular for long enough to remember my bad years?
Yeah, I’m maybe the earlier cohort of generation jobless, though possible significant disabilities in play could also explain my own situation.
I do not think Sarah is wrong about the education hamster wheel/hiding in literal or metaphorical basements.
I was in a very angry place for a long time, and it took some work and effort to move myself closer to sane.
I’m optimistic, but some of that is calculated strategy for my own life.
Sarah is not wrong to say that there is some potential. But, she may be overly negative in her evaluation, due to having recently combined it into her main model.
I dunno.
We shall see.
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America! Poaching the best of the rest of the world for 400 years.
……..
The Marxoids were counting on the imported horde to !Revolution!
Their intended cannon-fodder having mostly gone underground and/or gone native, the Marxoids are perplexed and angry at them.
So I fully expect the Marxoid agitators will soon directly fire upon crowds of non-pale folk, with some effort at maskirovka, hoping to start the ungrateful serfs on the Shining Path to the Radiant Future.
Too insane? Really?
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I would like for it to be ‘too insane’.
I do not see reason to trust that it must be too insane.
On all of this controversy over limiting research funds in relation to Jew Hating, I understand where people may be coming from in wanting the funding to continue, but I do not sympathize.
The Jew Hating is a several problems for me, but it is also the least contentious grounds to poke at universities for an adjustment in their leadership and management operations.
I feel adjustment is significantly overdue, and is necessary for the universities to have a future.
Basically, I am on the other side of Trump from the people who are complaining about the cuts. Trump is willing to gamble on a lot of the universities being basically okay, and thinks he can get behavior corrected to make the remainder of the research salvagable. I am more skeptical.
2017 me had a nuanced view of university risk, thought that much research was obvious garbage, but also expected slow replacement by the next method of tertiary schooling. I had a lot of trust in basic self interest, and professional reputation management. I earnestly believed in outside influences on the schools, that might help keep some programs functional, effective, and serving the professional interests of various involved parties.
I have had a wild ride through having a lot of that disproven, and in some cases obviously so in the public eye.
I am sure that some people are pretty insane, and might do very destructive things as a result. I would prefer to be confident in some basic survival instincts.
I dunno.
We shall see.
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Trump’s an old man. Old men in general tend to be set in their ways (though Trump appears to still be flexible in this regard), and don’t like upsetting things too much if it can be avoided. So he’s trying to salvage the university system.
If that doesn’t work, President Vance (probably) will do something much more ruthless.
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Something very ruthless is going to have to be done…unless something disastrous happens to them first. After 20 years working in the belly of the beast, plus the last 6 watching the widening gyre from outside it, I’m not optimistic.
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Not at all too insane, but I hope not.
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Definitely possible, and unfortunately, we won’t know if it’s going to happen until it does. That said, I’m not sure how it fits into the current political landscape. The loud-and-proud Marxists seem much more likely to attack their enemies than attempt a false flag. The middle Left is busy trying to weather the storm or get Trump the old-fashioned way.
That just leaves the masterminds (politicians, megadonors, bad actors in the intelligence community), who admittedly have the best shot at pulling something like that off. But their best opportunity for a false flag was the LA ICE riots, and they couldn’t even score an optics win, let alone make any martyrs. I suppose a wind-up toy shooter is possible, if you believe in such things, but even the Minnesota crackpot murdering Dem politicians fizzled.
That leads me to believe that they’re either not pursuing that angle right now or that it’s harder than it looks. Plus, if they had the kind of narrative control to make a weak false flag work, they’d have an easier time selling the “He’s deporting innocent people!” line. So the fact that they can’t make even that accusation stick suggests that they would need an airtight cover story to sell the public on a false flag attack, and it would also have to withstand an investigation from a Trump-controlled FBI. Maybe not impossible, but difficult. Especially if the DOJ is breathing down your neck.
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This is the key factor; it’s why I’ve been so encouraged watching the crooks and time-servers being shown the door. At this point, the Left is realizing they’ve lost the same firm control of the bureaucracy, civilian and military, as they lost with the media, and they’re panicking.
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2025/08/14/this-nyt-op-ed-says-the-quiet-part-out-loud-about-trump-and-the-military-n2661852
They wrote it in the NYT….. (link in article)
I don’t think the job will be done until they recall Milley, court-martial him, and televise the firing squad from the National Mall, but I can dream….
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…which is not so illusory to the thousands of people who get robbed, raped and murdered every year in D.C. while the cops do squat and the D.A.s fail to prosecute or imprison the few criminals that do get arrested. ‘Cause it’s a ‘Sanctuary!’ don’t’cha know.
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The left/democrats can’t function without slaves, so they try to import ones after their other slaves turned away from their madness. The problem with making barbarians slaves is that slavery is what they are running from in their own countries. And face it, minimum wage looks like heaven to the destitute barbarians. But the American way is insidious in how it sneaks into their psyche and poof, enough of their children actually get it and become Americanized not barbarian and the democrats lose again. Karma bitches…
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From Seth Paridon of The Unauthorized History of the Pacific War: “When the defecation hits the ventilation …” . I think it’s a good turn of phrase
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To get a job after five years of an extended weekend due to the COVID layoffs, my sister had to literally get someone to hand walk my application through the State of California HR system for an entry-level job.
Every job that I have applied for around me, it seemed like they were ghost jobs, or posting to hire someone specific, or any number of things to not hire anyone they don’t want.
It’s going to be insane for the next few years in every sort of way. Watch for what happens in the ’26 election, especially in any states that are about to redistrict.
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I suspect Trump’s $500M war chest is going to go to lawyers to protect the ’26 elections.
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Even though son had resumes/applications in with the specific temp agencies that the two companies he’s been employed with, he still had to resubmit, and have the applications hand walked into the HR companies by the people he was headhunted by. Then HR pulled his application from the temp company, he interviewed, hired on temp for 6 months before being fully hired on.
He gets to start this all over again sometime toward the end of September. Company is supposedly folding because of lack of work. OTOH they’ve been “closing”, “as soon as current job is done”, in June, July, August, now September, as new small jobs start.
Would they take him back at the last job? No doubt. Not an uncommon theme with their employees. Especially their night supervisors (which he was). Now do his healed ulcers want to go back? TBD He isn’t under any immediate financial strain.
Give him a few days then it will be time to (finally) repaint the family room upstairs, and window frames and baseboards through the rest of the house (what I did when I was between jobs looking for work). At least he’ll have help. House also needs new floors (hire out, not touching that. But getting stuff empty to move around also needs to be done.)
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A lot of this “Gen Jobless is “Get a degree!” and telling them nothing else will do. Then they find themselves being pushed or lead into useless degrees, and if not useless, over-abundant, so if there is a job with 300 applicants, 299 are not going to get it (and yes, some of those, 300 did not get it and they HB1ed it, or were just phishing for maintaining appearances). Other end is the Wierd Al syndrome of “You are WAY over-qualified for this job.” (Al’s reply – “Yes, well, I’ve gotta eat, too Yaknow”)
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I think there is a lot of definitional weight there.
If by civil war you mean the US one of 1861-1865 or the Spanish one of 1936-1939, probably not unless they are much more geographically compact than I suspect they are.
But if by civil war you mean the Irish Troubles or Italy’s Years of Lead, then that’s more than enough. They have enough to provide the combatants and the cover, especially in places where they’ve burrowed into government. You could even argue Trump’s first term was just such a civil war just fought in the bureaucracy more than the streets with a street version in 2020.
Trump was more prepared for it this round so the bureaucracy version hasn’t gotten off the ground. The street one has but not at the scale of 2020. It has, however, arguably been more violent relative to its size.
That, to me, is why I really think a sustained civil war isn’t likely although I suspect a brief troubles to start next summer and continue the summer after if they don’t retake Congress.
However, two things they thought would save them are turning out not to and I think they’re reeling from those.
First, their imported military age males are not signing up to be their shock troops. Some are out in the streets (see LA) but it is clear they are not under the control of Democrat leaders in front of or behind the scenes. If they were those foreign flags wouldn’t be so prominent after the initial feedback loop.
The second is the failure of young women. Yes, women, not men. The left’s loss of native young men is a real blow as to win a fight you need young men. But they had a plan for that, that worked in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. It worked a little in the aughts but is completely failed now: attractive young women.
As Orwell among others noted, women are the key to building the cause. They are more likely to be joiners and to be political. That why when you see at the 60s, 70s, and 80s movements like the peace protests and the nuclear freeze gang out front and center were attractive young women, often in a movement signaling loose sexual morals.
Because if you want young men to show up, here your spiel, and slowly be convinced to take up arms a honeypot is a damned fine method.
Hell, even Edwardian England in the 1910s used a version with the white feather girls.
As late as the aughts this was still something of an option, but the culture war has killed it.
So I think there can and probably still will be a civil war. They’ve worked themselves nearly all the way up to it (see Butler last year and LA this year), but I don’t think they can sustain it.
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