Comments Posted By Foobarista
Displaying 11 To 20 Of 63 Comments
BUCHANAN AND HIS 'WHITE MAN'S LAMENT'
So, RM, we agree: there are historic reasons why many blacks choose safe careers.
And Reynolds is a Certified Nice Guy for introducing his pet theories and prejudices about a blog commenter about whom he knows nothing.
Later...
Comment Posted By Foobarista On 22.10.2009 @ 11:34
As far as I can tell, many blacks would rather work at the DMV or be cops and have slow but steady promotions and defined-benefit pensions. Nothing wrong with that, but that won't get you anywhere other than into politics if you're ambitious.
I often wonder if this preference for rule-heavy, public organizations is out of a desire to avoid racism. And maybe I'm seeing something that's completely bogus, but 20 years of observations aren't lightly set aside.
The black Vinod Khosla, David Lam, or Suhas Patil won't be a cop or bureaucrat - and he won't be an entertainer. He'll have to be a techie, probably with a PhD in a hard science from a top university, who grinds it out for awhile at a place like Oracle or IBM, quits, hits a startup home run or two, and goes into venture capital or angel investing with the sort of highly tuned BS detector that only years in tech develop.
For my part, I've seen more failure than success - like most SV startup lifers - and have worked "for free" several times. And I'll say that it's awful seeing a company you've spent endless 20 hour days implode - and you often fail for reasons that have little to do with intelligence or even capital. Often, it's more in the luck, the timing (you're too early or too late), getting the business model wrong, underestimating how expensive or slow it is to sell your product, etc.
I can see why people who are afraid of _anything_ extraneous, like latent racism adding to the chances of failure, would not like this life. A Chinese friend told me once that when he encounters a non-Chinese jerk on the street, he wonders if the guy is "just" a jerk or a racist. He said that racists are somehow worse.
Comment Posted By Foobarista On 22.10.2009 @ 03:00
OK, let's have a "conversation on race". I'll define "race" to mean "whites and blacks", since Holder wasn't talking about Taiwanese-Tamil relations, although that's probably about as relevant in my "racial microclimate".
In Silicon Valley, the number of blacks in tech startups is vanishingly small. I've spent 20 years launching startups or working in them, and I've never seen a black engineer who wasn't from Nigeria. There've been a few black admins, but that's it. Similarly at universities: if you go to an academic conference in the database field such as SIGMOD or VLDB, you simply won't see any non-African blacks.
For that matter, you won't see a heck of a lot of American-born whites either, although there will be some. You'll see tons of Chinese, Indians, and Europeans, and a number of Africans.
It's hard to argue that SV is a bastion of white privilege or WASPy old-boy networks: after all, many, if not most, tech startups are launched by Indians and Chinese.
In the Valley, most American blacks I encounter work for government or big companies. I meet very few in small companies or starting their own.
The impression I get - or maybe it's "prejudice" - is that American blacks prefer large organizations with lots of structure and formalism over small, dynamic organizations where rules are less well-defined or being "made up as we go along".
This would mean that blacks will make a decent living in the Valley, but won't get into the executive or venture-capital elites, since you only get to that level by startup success.
Comment Posted By Foobarista On 22.10.2009 @ 00:41
Busboy33, ok - I didn't bother clicking through.
For my part, I've never paid much attention to Buchanan because he's more of a European-style blood&soil right-winger like Le Pen, with little appeal to "libertarians of the right" like me. I'm not sure how much of a following he has nowadays, but he's always good for a couple of juicy zingers from time to time.
That said, I wish someone else had written "the quote", because it still "works" very well without racialist context, and the "racist" discussion is a distraction from what ol' Chairman Mao would call the class warfare element. One thing I'll agree with Marxists is that classes do matter, and have a cultural and political component as well as an economic one. In regards to the quote, many non-whites as well as whites are quite upset at what feels like a victory of the "New Class" elites - of both parties - against the blue collar world and Main Street USA.
Main Street USA may be full of Chinese restaurants, Korean groceries, Vietnamese nail shops, and Mexican taquerias, but it's still has traditional "Main Street" bourgeois values of the sort that academic and bureaucratic elites disdain. These values include wanting to live a better material life, not being interested in Grand Social Experiments, and generally being left alone to raise their families as they prefer, not as some bureaucrat decrees.
Comment Posted By Foobarista On 21.10.2009 @ 15:45
Buchanan may or may not be a racist - and he probably is - but are his statements above racist? The quotes in Rick's article would only be interpreted as racist if you assume a whole bunch of context that isn't present in the text.
I could easily see a black, Asian, or Hispanic American writing the "traditionalist" quote, and have heard similar sentiments from people of all races, especially from Chinese and Koreans in my neighborhood.
Comment Posted By Foobarista On 21.10.2009 @ 12:26
I have no problem with people believing in "the supernatural" - although I generally don't - but when their "beliefs" aren't even believed by the supposed source of the belief, things get weird. Mayans don't claim the world will end when their calendar cycles, so why do non-Mayans?
What I do have "a problem with" is when people start believing that the world will end soon, so they shouldn't bother living their lives or working for a better future for themselves or their families. I definitely saw this when I was a kid in high school and many people thought we'd all be nuked by the time we were 30.
Comment Posted By Foobarista On 19.10.2009 @ 13:47
I despise end-of-the-world porn of this sort. I'm always running into otherwise intelligent people who discuss Nostradamus and the Mayan calendar business as Something Profound, and who argue that I should have an "open mind". My standard reply: if your mind is too open to silly nonsense, your brain will fall out.
Another History Channel show that I dislike is "Life without People", which is really seductive EOTW porn of the worst variety, since it's message is "humans are a stain on the world and the world will go on happily without us".
Add to that the global warming sermon that is required at the end of every nature or critter show these days, and you get the worst sort of propaganda.
Comment Posted By Foobarista On 19.10.2009 @ 12:19
'WHY DON'T YOU PASS THE TIME BY WRITING ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING?'
Actually, there's even some argument that the CO2 spike is due to the oceans warming and releasing the CO2, and not human effects - in other words, the CO2 spike may be an effect of oceanic warming after the Maunder Minimum/Little Ice Age and not a cause, and "just happened" to coincide with industrialization.
There's a lot of weak links in the AGW chain, and where the CO2 came from is one of them.
But even if AGW can't be scientifically disproven, it can definitely be politically disproven by a few cold winters, which would amount to much the same thing.
Comment Posted By Foobarista On 16.10.2009 @ 14:20
I'm an AGW skeptic, but I actually think a number of the things AGW weenies want to do make sense, but their apocalyptic rhetoric is blowing up in their face. Whether they like it or not, they're proposing a massive political project that would be equivalent to a world war in the level of mobilization they claim is needed.
And as with real wars without an "end in sight", people will get tired of the project fairly quickly, especially if the only thing we hear is "we're not doing enough, more, more, more". (And it won't help if celebrity AGW "fighters" are jetting from their mansions to AGW conferences in places like Bali.)
Finally, if AGW is scientifically disproven, as it may be in the next few years - and there's plenty of cracks already - the "good" stuff from the AGW effort may be tossed out with the bad, along with a general discrediting of environmental science in the eyes of the public for many years.
I don't think it can ever be "disproven." There's more CO2 in the atmosphere than there was 100 years ago - about twice as much. Going back a couple of million years, there's never been a spike that pronounced. The problem, is that no one really knows what it means for climate. We can assume the worst but even if we did that, there is little cause to make this massive transfer of wealth and destruction of whole sectors of economies. Done rationally, and gradually, the same effect could be achieved without upsetting the applecart.
ed.
Comment Posted By Foobarista On 16.10.2009 @ 14:09
RM: who's arguing for corporatism? And you think the Ds are any less into it than Rs? Support for free markets does not imply support for big business. In fact, it's usually quite the opposite.
Corporations are, by definition, the ultimate whores. They exist to preserve themselves and produce cash any way they can get it. If they can get a better deal from Ds than Rs, they'll do so, and they'll make it sound like the regulations that cement their business models or the fat wad of cash they got from Congress is the socially responsible action in the history of the Republic.
Comment Posted By Foobarista On 15.10.2009 @ 14:58
