{"id":88948,"date":"2024-12-27T07:00:28","date_gmt":"2024-12-27T13:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=88948"},"modified":"2024-12-27T07:00:30","modified_gmt":"2024-12-27T13:00:30","slug":"homework-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=88948","title":{"rendered":"Homework"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Vivek Ramaswamy <a href=\"https:\/\/www.axios.com\/2024\/12\/26\/maga-civil-war-ramaswamy-musk-loomer-cernovich\">ruffled a whole lot of feathers<\/a> over this past weekend with his comments about the culture of South Asian immigrants. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Stipulated in advance &#8211; there is a lot of abuse of H1B visas, to provide a relatively cheap and, by modern standards, just a little indentured labor force.  That may need some fixing.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But when you start comparing second-generation Indian immigrants? <\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter wp-block-embed-twitter\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"500\" data-dnt=\"true\"><p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born &amp; first-generation engineers over \u201cnative\u201d Americans isn\u2019t because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy &amp; wrong explanation). A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture. Tough questions demand tough answers &amp; if\u2026<\/p>&mdash; Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/VivekGRamaswamy\/status\/1872312139945234507?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">December 26, 2024<\/a><\/blockquote><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>He&#8217;s not really wrong. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>You should open and read the entire tweet &#8211; but I&#8217;m going to pull this quote:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p>A culture that venerates Cory from \u201cBoy Meets World,\u201d or Zach &amp; Slater over Screech in \u201cSaved by the Bell,\u201d or \u2018Stefan\u2019 over Steve Urkel in \u201cFamily Matters,\u201d will not produce the best engineers&#8230;[Families should emphasize] movies like Whiplash, fewer reruns of \u201cFriends.\u201d More math tutoring, fewer sleepovers. More weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons. More books, less TV. More creating, less \u201cchillin.\u201d More extracurriculars, less \u201changing out at the mall.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Most normal American parents look skeptically at \u201cthose kinds of parents.\u201d More normal American kids view such \u201cthose kinds of kids\u201d with scorn. If you grow up aspiring to normalcy, normalcy is what you will achieve.<\/p>\n<p>Now close your eyes &amp; visualize which families you knew in the 90s (or even now) who raise their kids according to one model versus the other. Be brutally honest.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p>That drew some, er, sporty responses from what media calls &#8220;MAGA&#8221;.  No doubt you&#8217;ve heard &#8217;em.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But if you leave aside the abuse of H1B visas, and the pretty spotty record of outsourcing engineering and software development to India (whose engineering culture is often well-credentialed but stiff, hierarchical and frequently more focused on legalistic i-dotting and t-crossing than results), he&#8217;s not wrong.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This guy &#8211; one of the less-useless voices in academia &#8211; puts it well (and again, you&#8217;d do well to read the entire tweet):<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter wp-block-embed-twitter\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"500\" data-dnt=\"true\"><p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">An entertaining aspect of the past few days&#39; race war is that the elite Asian\/Indian immigrant critique of middle-class white American scholastic culture (&quot;You guys are lazy af, and focus totally on playing football and getting laid&quot;) is IDENTICAL to the middle-class white\u2026<\/p>&mdash; Wilfred Reilly (@wil_da_beast630) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/wil_da_beast630\/status\/1872511903676682514?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">December 27, 2024<\/a><\/blockquote><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>But again, I&#8217;ll pull the quote:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p>An entertaining aspect of the past few days&#8217; race war is that the elite Asian\/Indian immigrant critique of middle-class white American scholastic culture (&#8220;You guys are lazy af, and focus totally on playing football and getting laid&#8221;) is IDENTICAL to the middle-class white American critique of Black and Mexican scholastic culture. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>As a political scientist, there&#8217;s an important point here: bigotry doesn&#8217;t just go in one direction. For most people, the more forward-caste person &#8211; the bastard ahead of them in society &#8211; will always be a ruthless, stiff, amoral, dead inside, thieving, SOB who is a trash lover. But, the more poor and rural person? A dumb, inbred, animalistic, backward, criminal, low-IQ, ridge-runner.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p>And it should hardly bother &#8220;MAGA&#8221; too much to notice that Ramaswamy agrees with them &#8211; modern American academic culture in general would have to stand on tiptoes to get to &#8220;mediocrity&#8221;, and that pathology is even leaking into the once-sacrosanct &#8220;STEM&#8221; fields.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But it&#8217;s not just academic culture.<\/p>\n<p>Immigrants, as Reilly notes, have always had to kick it up a notch to get to &#8220;even&#8221; in America.\u00a0 Indians &#8211; like Chinese, Koreans, VIetnamese, Philipinos, and before them Italilans, Jews, Germans and all the others, all the way back &#8211; have done it exceptionally well.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The concentration of Indians in technology (and, this past few years, politics) should be taken as a challenge &#8211; to our education system, sure, but to our family culture as well.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Vivek Ramaswamy ruffled a whole lot of feathers over this past weekend with his comments about the culture of South Asian immigrants. Stipulated in advance &#8211; there is a lot of abuse of H1B visas, to provide a relatively cheap and, by modern standards, just a little indentured labor force. That may need some fixing. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-88948","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-war","category-geekery"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88948","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=88948"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88948\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":88949,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88948\/revisions\/88949"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=88948"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=88948"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=88948"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}