Astounding to see racism and ignorance represented as virtue signaling so blatantly!
Are you aware that the majority of STEM seats in Indian colleges are set aside for either affirmative action for ‘lower’ castes (itself an arbitrary criteria) and women?
The average man in India is competing for approx 10% of college seats!
And saying an Indian STEM degree is worth millions in lifetime earnings reveals even more ignorance - outside of a handful of colleges, the India higher education system is considered woefully inadequate, underfunded, pumping out graduates who only succeed out of personal initiative.
Every major corporation in India essentially has a retraining program to actually teach what’s necessary for work. The worker training issue is one of the top challenges faced by businesses there.
Perhaps it’s time you described your own ethnicity and background etc. Let’s learn a little more about where your biases flow from.
If you actually grew up in India in the time period of the OP, or knew anything about it other than nonsense in woke
publications, you would feel ashamed for your tone and envy and render a sincere apology to the OP.
> Are you aware that the majority of STEM seats in Indian colleges are set aside for either affirmative action for ‘lower’ castes (itself an arbitrary criteria) and women?
And these seats are never filled and go to upper castes anyway?
My class was supposed to be 50% low caste with 25% Dalits in a class of 60. There were literally 2 Dalits in my class. And of late, the OBC categories are being crowded in by upper castes through political action.
A whole 50% of my class was actually "payment seats" where they paid double the fees to get seats with low entrance scores. Basically, a 50% quota for the privileged.
Curious non-Indian here, how did you know that there were exactly two Dalits in your class? Is this a thing people talk about? Were they open about it? Or do you just recognize them on sight?
I am not a Hindu, so my caste radar is fairly weak. I cant tell caste by last name or by religious practices.
Having said that, People ask folks how much they scored in their entrance exam. Then it becomes obvious who were Dalits are - they had the lowest scores. The 2 of them were also fairly underprivileged, so you could guess from their less trendy and not as new clothes too.
50% were payment seats with about the same entrance rank as OBC students. So it was hard to tell the OBCs apart from the payment seat students. India actually has "affirmative action" for the rich in all private universities, which most of Indian H1Bs have graduated from. My parents couldn't afford these seats. The H1B upper castes wont tell you that, and will pretend that rich Dalits are taking over all the seats. No such thing is happening. I have never met a rich Dalit in my life. I am sure they exist, but I have never met them.
Their academic performance improves with time, and some of them are engineering managers at Microsoft now.
> how do you know that some are engineering managers at Microsoft, now?
I am connected to those folks on LinkedIn.
> Also, is "caste radar" a word you made up, or is that a generally-used concept?
I made it up. But I have read content online, where Dalits feel a huge pressure when they are asked which temple they attend, or how they celebrate certain festivals. I don't know what these ritual differences are. Many folks pick up caste from last names, I can only pick up a small subset of them. What I meant to say was that - I can't tell the caste of a person as easily as Hindus. The Dalits I know, I surmised their caste from their entrance rank and many of them didn't hide it.
I merely quoted some stats, stats are not racist. I read through your rant but didn't see an explanation of why only upper caste Indians are emigrating to usa. whats that about? How do only 30% of Indians make up 90+% indians in USA.
This reminds me of all the educationally highly credentialed people I knew confidently predicting in 2016 that Trump would jail all democrats, declare martial law, and ‘women would be raped in the streets’.
I would recommend looking up American history, in the 70s, 50s, 20s, 1800s etc. Today is a milder form of the political polarization that is endemic to America, and ironically America’s strength.
If there was a betting market on a theocracy, I would bet the house in the opposite direction, but frankly so would everyone.
Relax and enjoy the weekend, America is going to remain America for a long, long time.
In the 1850s, I believe there was a serious political party with some concern that Pius IX would use Irish immigrants to dig a tunnel from Rome to Washington and send the Swiss Guards in to take over America.
Thank you. Same situation occuring with the exagerated outrage over the 2020 election shenanigans and resulting riot at the capitol.
Not a great look for the US by any means, but the whole chapter is a joke compared to past election turmoil, especially during reconstruction era post Civil War. In those years, you often had large armed militias battling it out with occupying federal troops over which election results.
There are a couple of arguments that might be presented to explain how affirmative action is different to apartheid.
1) affirmative action does not remove any rights of those groups not targeted by affirmative action. It is possible to argue that by supporting one group, you are implicitly disadvantaging the out-group, but usually this distinction is important. E.g. having a "ladies night" at a bar is generally more acceptable than a "men pay double price" night.
2) affirmative action policies tend to target education and employment. The right to vote is typically is given higher priority when it comes to balancing different rights.
3) Affirmative action can be seen as targeting equal outcomes, not equal treatment[1]. My country offers free breast cancer screening to all women above a certain age. Men can certainly catch breast cancer, but it's far more dangerous to women, so a gender-blind outcome of "we want less people to die of breast cancer" has a gender-aware policy implementation. Most people wouldn't say that this policy is "medical apartheid" on the basis of gender. Similarly, you could say that affirmative action is about getting disparate groups to have equal outcomes in terms of whatever metric you care you measure (educational attainment, income, etc)
[1] not everyone agrees with this. Some people argue that preferential treatment should be given to groups that were historically persecuted (e.g. land confiscation), as remediation.
And guess what has ZERO effect on pollinators? CO2. The only ‘pollutant’ ESG scores and activists harp about. Why? To distract from real polluting chemicals that cost a lot more to remove from our environment. Don’t even get me started on microplastics and its impact on the endocrine system of every animal, not just humans.
Its fascinating to observe people believing that mega-corporation and paid-politician promoted value systems are looking out for the interests of you and me.
I think ESG scores and activists are concerned about greenhouse gases because they are inadequately regulated by the government and private initiatives are necessary to take action on them.
It is unfortunate that the previous US administration was rolling back air and water pollution standards and I agree with you that it should get more press, along with the dangers of microplastics - but I really don't think this is about "mega-corporation promoted value systems".
Are you also going to prohibit your kids from riding in a car because the chances of a traffic accident are non zero?
Asking because kids 1-4 are being hospitalized for COVID at the rate of 1.6/100,000, deaths are at 2/1,000,000 and traffic accident mortality is 11/100,000.
I’m from India, and have plenty of family and friends there in close contact, and I have literally never heard of anything as ridiculous as this yet. No idea why this is a top voted comment.
People don’t acknowledge ‘a weird sort of spirituality to atheism’ because it’s an absurd concept.
Because spirituality is born from spiritual experiences, not religious theory. Atheism, on the other hand, is a belief system.
It’s like sex - talking about it is quite different from experiencing it.
If Christianity doesn’t help you, that’s alright. There’s a ton of Buddhists, Hindus, Taoists, Zen practitioners who have a radically different approach than ‘The Book’. And there’s also psychedelics for a taste of what’s out there.
I have a computer science degree but I still find it strange that anyone doesn’t find life an unfathomable mystery.
For example - do you know who you are? Ie who is the ‘you’ that experiences the world? Have you ever looked inside?
We began algebra in 5th grade in India. In much humbler circumstances.
Luckily, our teachers made it clear that math was about effort, not skills, talents, or parents.
We were all expected to practice a lot of math, including algebra, until we figured it out.
And it worked - the ‘gifted’ students needed less practice, everyone else needed more practice. But by 6th grade, everybody passed algebra and figured out the basics. By 9th grade, when we were doing pre-Calc, it was unthinkable that someone in our class couldn’t do algebra.
Applying ‘Social Justice’ to math is simply the continued dumbing down of California. To what end, I can’t figure out.
