Vivek's Blood, Sweat & Tears Comment
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Making sense of the intra-MAGA brouhaha
What actually transpired was a particularly boisterous, and at times typically ugly, Twitter fight over skilled immigration and American culture. Axios has a good and sparse summary of the brouhaha. But here’s the gist: Activist Laura Loomer threw a hissy fit over Donald Trump’s selection of Sriram Krishnan, an Indian American immigrant and successful tech bro, to be his senior policy adviser on artificial intelligence. Krishnan’s sin, for some, is being an Indian immigrant in the first place. But for most it’s that he’s favored loosening up rules on H1B visas for skilled immigrants. For a certain faction of MAGA types, this is a betrayal of MAGAism. Let’s call this faction the nationalists—though it’s a loose label and I’m sure there are self-described nationalists who think it’s vital that we bring in more skilled immigrants for our 21st century competition with China.
Up against the nationalists is Team DOGE, led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. Again, it’s a shorthand. I’m sure there are DOGE fans who believe we should gut the H-1B visa program. In fact, one could be forgiven for thinking Ramaswamy was one of them given that when he was running for president he vowed to “gut” the program he used 29 times when he was a CEO of a pharmaceutical company. That’s the thing about Vivek: He never fails to tell his target audience what it wants to hear. But now that his target audience isn’t primary voters but Elon Musk, the Count Dracula to his Renfield, he’s saying something a bit different.
Ramaswamy came in from the top rope to declare in a tweet that the real problem was American culture itself. “The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over ‘native’ Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy & wrong explanation). A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture. Tough questions demand tough answers & if we’re really serious about fixing the problem, we have to confront the TRUTH: Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer). That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG.”
He added, “A culture that venerates Cory from ‘Boy Meets World,’ or Zach & Slater over Screech in ‘Saved by the Bell,’ or ‘Stefan’ over Steve Urkel in ‘Family Matters,’ will not produce the best engineers.”
Ramaswamy says we need a culture that produces more “movies like Whiplash, fewer reruns of ‘Friends.’ More math tutoring, fewer sleepovers. More weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons. More books, less TV. More creating, less ‘chillin.’ More extracurriculars, less ‘hanging out at the mall.’”
Now, I’m perfectly happy to concede there are grains of truth here, but given that it’s Ramaswamy talking, we shouldn’t be surprised that there are boulders of BS, too. First of all, I think it’s funny that he has the names of these characters at his fingertips while also insisting that these shows are toxic. It’s sort of like an anti-porn crusader who can talk your ear off about the poor lighting in On Golden Blonde or the implausible plot points in Edward Penis-Hands.More to the point, huh?
The idea that but for Saved by the Bell and Boy Meets World we’d have more top-flight engineers is really quite silly. I mean, these tropes are a hell of a lot older than the 1990s, and America has produced a lot of excellence. James Dean was cool, the Nutty Professor wasn’t. Mark Twain’s heroes often mocked “book learning.” “Egghead” was a pejorative in common use for the generation that put a man on the moon. And, by the way, Big Bang Theory did more to lionize nerd culture than any TV show since Star Trek. I mean, the series culminated in the main character winning the Nobel Prize for physics. All the Professor from Gilligan’s Island did was invent a rudimentary telephone with coconut halves and some twine.
I think it’s telling that Ramaswamy lays the blame on a handful of sitcoms and not at all on, say, TikTok, Twitter, or Instagram. Seems to me that these things fit his theory far better than some old reruns. The culture of social media is far more destructive to excellence than some bourgeois family sitcoms. It’s not Urkel’s fault that many college kids can’t read books anymore. Or to be more exact, the fact that kids have stunted attention spans has a lot more to do with TikTok and Instagram than some show most of them have never seen. But the social media companies are part of the faction he’s standing up for. They can’t be part of the problem, so let’s throw Screech under the bus. -
@Mik said in Vivek's Blood, Sweat & Tears Comment:
Tldr
If you need that long to make your point you’re working hard not smart.
Maybe you haven’t seen it but this has turned into a much bigger row about Indian Americans and American Culture (both phrases trending all day on twitter) and not simply a post about how to get ahead in life.
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@Mik said in Vivek's Blood, Sweat & Tears Comment:
Tldr
If you need that long to make your point you’re working hard not smart.
Maybe you haven’t seen it but this has turned into a much bigger row about Indian Americans and American Culture (both phrases trending all day on twitter) and not simply a post about how to get ahead in life.
@jon-nyc said in Vivek's Blood, Sweat & Tears Comment:
@Mik said in Vivek's Blood, Sweat & Tears Comment:
Tldr
If you need that long to make your point you’re working hard not smart.
Maybe you haven’t seen it but this has turned into a much bigger row about Indian Americans and American Culture (both phrases trending all day on twitter) and not simply a post about how to get ahead in life.
Maybe we both took mik's response personally.
Education is extremely important.
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@jon-nyc said in Vivek's Blood, Sweat & Tears Comment:
@Mik said in Vivek's Blood, Sweat & Tears Comment:
Tldr
If you need that long to make your point you’re working hard not smart.
Maybe you haven’t seen it but this has turned into a much bigger row about Indian Americans and American Culture (both phrases trending all day on twitter) and not simply a post about how to get ahead in life.
Maybe we both took mik's response personally.
@Horace said in Vivek's Blood, Sweat & Tears Comment:
@jon-nyc said in Vivek's Blood, Sweat & Tears Comment:
@Mik said in Vivek's Blood, Sweat & Tears Comment:
Tldr
If you need that long to make your point you’re working hard not smart.
Maybe you haven’t seen it but this has turned into a much bigger row about Indian Americans and American Culture (both phrases trending all day on twitter) and not simply a post about how to get ahead in life.
Maybe we both took mik's response personally.
I was referring to the posted article. Sorry if that was not clear.
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Vivek has a point about culture. He's not saying much that the "Tiger Mom" didn't say years ago, and things have slid since her time in the spotlight.
We all know it. It's partially why the public school system is in the mess it's in, as better students exit for a better education.
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We HAD a culture that valued such things. I think we started to lose it, some time in the late 1960's. I think it fell down a rathole during the second half of the Obama Administration.
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We HAD a culture that valued such things. I think we started to lose it, some time in the late 1960's. I think it fell down a rathole during the second half of the Obama Administration.
@Jolly said in Vivek's Blood, Sweat & Tears Comment:
We HAD a culture that valued such things. I think we started to lose it, some time in the late 1960's. I think it fell down a rathole during the second half of the Obama Administration.
When a white guy pretends to be a black guy leading the world's most powerful nation, noses of animals will notice a scent of something not real.
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H1Bs get used by both outsourcers and people looking for the best talent. Plenty of H1Bs used by McKinsey, Goldman Sachs and Google. They’re typically not looking for cheap labor.
Then there’s a bunch of H1Bs used by likes Infosys for outsourcing.
Hard to make a blanket characterization.
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Seeing it being brought up quite a bit on local feeds. Loudoun County Republicans are pointing to all of the Virginia Government jobs listed on the H1B networks.
What people need to start to realize is we NEED immigration. We simply can’t maintain the Ponzi scheme at our current reproduction rates. Estimates are 1.6 million are needed per year. If the majority are low skilled low wage earners, then the number of immigrants needed will be higher. If they are higher skilled and higher wages, then fewer are needed.
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And what’s it matter? 2/3rds of the country will be unemployed as AI takes over. We’re all going to be fighting for scraps, and those skinny little Indian boys will be easier to push around than those Venezuelan gang members…
