Tag: Stupid people

Caste-ism

Immigration, Third World

It is, as they say, to LOL at this development:

In the weeks since the lawsuit was announced, more than 250 Dalits from Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Netflix, and dozens of others in Silicon Valley have come forward to report discrimination, bullying, ostracization, and even sexual harassment by colleagues who are higher-caste Indians, according to data provided exclusively to VICE News by Dalit advocacy group Equality Labs.
There have been 33 complaints from Dalit employees at Facebook, 20 complaints at Google, 18 at Microsoft, 24 more at Cisco, and 14 at Amazon. There were also complaints recorded from employees at Twitter, Dell, Netflix, Apple, Uber, and Lyft — as well dozens more complaints from a range of smaller Silicon Valley companies and some companies outside the technology sector.
…
“Caste discrimination is in every U.S. company where Indians are working,” said [Indian migrant] Maya.

When I was in India fifteen years ago, I was astonished at the degree of social discrimination — which is not the same as tribalism, although it can be.

I’m no stranger to this nonsense because South Africa, where the Whites and Blacks hate each other, both hate the Indians and mixed races.  Within the White community, the English-speakers hate the Afrikaners and vice versa, but both despise the Portuguese, Italians, Chinese, Central Europeans, Lebanese and other Arabs (yes, there are quite a few of those).  Within the Black community, the hate is limitless:  Zulus hate the Sothos, the Xhosa hate the Venda, the Bapedi hate the Zulus, and so on and so on ad infinitum.  And everyone — everyone — hates the Jews.  Just one big unhappy family, the Seffricans are.

It’s the same in the Middle East, caste-wise:  at the top are the Persians, then in order come the Saudis, the Egyptians, the Syrians, the Lebanese, and the Jordanians.  At the very bottom of the pile are the Palestinians, who are universally despised.  (I think I’ve got that right:  it was explained to me by a Persian — not Iranian, as he stressed to me — whose family had fled Iran not because they were Sunnis, but because they were… Catholic.  Talk about an inconvenient religion.)

Now let’s talk about the Balkans… nah, let’s not.  This shit gives me a headache.

As long as there are people who are even the slightest bit different from others within the same milieu, there’s elitism and discrimination.  ‘Twas ever thus, and I’m just glad to see that the Indians have imported their little flavor of discrimination to the U.S. — as if we don’t have enough of our own local varieties already.

Stay And Suffer

Immigration, Politics

This is getting out of hand.

Due to increasingly squalid conditions on the Upper West Side, including two new homeless shelters packed with junkies and registered sex offenders, longtime dwellers are departing the Big Apple with no plans to ever return.

Okay, that’s good for at least a semi-Schadenboner — liberal assholes reaping the fruits of their voting record.  Here’s an example:

One of the Escape from New Yorkers is Elizabeth Carr, one of the area’s most vocal leaders in combating mounting crime in the well-heeled ‘hood. She was an administrator of the Facebook group NYC Moms for Safer Streets, and the face of a public-safety movement that has attracted thousands to demand better policing and city services.

But a little Faecesbook group isn’t strong enough to overcome all the insane socialist policy and government from the likes of Hizzoner Di Blasio, so:

She said she started planning to move before the COVID crisis and recent neighborhood developments, but officially put down stakes Sunday in North Carolina with her finance husband and three kids under 7.

Wait, what?  North Carolina?  What’s wrong with Connecticut, or Rhode Island, or New Jersey?  Oh yeah, I forgot.  All those Yankee places are just as bad as New York fucking City.

So this Upper-East-Side family (no prizes for guessing how they voted in 2016) are leaving the NYC Sinking Ship and moving to North Carolina (as so many seem to be doing), where no doubt they’ll keep voting for Democrats and similar filth just as their fellow refugees do.

And North Carolina will go from Conservative Red to Poxy Purple to Deep Blue inside a single generation.

Ugh.

Good Question

BaconLettuceMayo, Politics, Sports

From Scott Adams:

More than one, now that I think of it.  I used to watch the NFL on Sundays when there was nothing else (i.e. an off-week for F1, no major golf tournaments), and very occasionally a couple of Cubs baseball games (old habits die hard).  Never the NBA, AMQ (after Michael quit).  I only like watching hockey live, never on TV, and since I left Chicago, not that either.  (Actually, I stopped watching the Blackhawks when they moved out of the old atmospheric Chicago Stadium and into the bland new United Center, but that’s a rant for another time.)

Basically, I’m left with cricket (which is hardly ever on, thank gawd for YouTube), English football (which is hanging on by a fingernail because BLM support) and Formula 1.  And with F1 I’ve gone from keen support to sorta-maybe ever since Lewis fucking Hamilton suddenly realized he was Black (half-Black, to be precise, but let’s go with the Democrat / Afrikaner “single drop of blood” measure, as Hamilton is).  I used to watch F1 Sunday, which is a scene-setting show for the Grand Prix of the day, but as that has turned into a “Kneel for Black Lives Matter” orgy I stopped watching that shit, and now watch only the race itself.

If I do a rough count, I’ve gone from about 20-30 hours a week of sports viewing to about 4 or 5, and even that may slip a bit more if things get too unbearable.  (The English Premier League season has ended, so nothing there until September, it looks like.)

So in answer to the above question:  yeah, Scott;  BLM and the other Commie hangers-on have messed up sports for me too.

Takeaways

Marxists

First these fuckers wanted to take away our guns.

Now they’re after our trucks.

“As that chrome grille closed on me like a man-eating Norelco shaver, time slowed. It seemed I was watching myself from afar, being nimble for a man my age, darting from the path of a towering, limousine-black pickup with temporary plates, whose driver barely checked his pace.”

LOL.  And some people take this shit seriously.

And then the best part:

Now we have a grown man who saw a scary truck and thus wants to impose European neutering standards in order for him to feel protected.

Yeah, let’s have the Euroweenies tell us how to build pickup trucks:

You know, I’ve only ever owned one full-size pickup, a 2002 Ford F-150:

…and the only reason I sold it was because when I did the weekly fill-up of the F-150 and the Suburban, I could move the share price of Texaco a full point.

Now I don’t need a pickup truck anymore, but when I read bullshit like the above, I get a “Beto” reaction (when some asshole tells me I can’t have something, I want to go straight out and get one.)  I bet that truck sales are going to increase, just like the sales of AR-15s exploded after O’Rourke’s pronouncement.

After all, nobody needs one of these assault trucks, do they?

Liberals never learn.  Fucking morons.

Shorter Degree

Education, Seen On Campus

Via Insty I saw the redoubtable Joanne Jacobs’s take on this topic.  Back when I decided to go back to college, I was astonished to learn that a simple B.A. degree would take me four years to attain.  Four years?  Everywhere else in the world only requires three.

Then I studied the curriculum, and started to understand why the late Joseph Sobran lamented that in a single generation, our society had “progressed” from teaching Latin and Greek in high school to teaching remedial English at university — a.k.a. the “core curriculum” which required a full year to be wasted on shit like “how to write a sentence” (English 101), “how the U.S. and state governments work” (Pol Sci 001/002), “Math For Dummies” (Math 001), and so on.  Even a “trimmed” course load for this mandatory study looks dubious, as Jacobs notes:

[Greg] Poliakoff would require all students to take “expository writing, literature, a college-level mathematics course, a natural science course, an economics course, a survey in U.S. history or government, and three semesters of a foreign language.”

What a total waste of time, in my case at any rate.  Fortunately, there are ways to “test out” of various courses — for some reason, the fact that I had published three novels somehow persuaded the English Department that I wouldn’t need English 101, for instance — so I was able to reduce some of the bullshit course load, but still not enough to shorten the four years into three that way.

Next, I ran into the stupid restriction that only allows students to take on four courses per semester which, when I studied the course content, made it plain that I would be prevented from tackling five and even six, even though it was easily doable.  My pleas to the Arts Faculty to do so were rejected Because Rules — clearly, the rules are there to protect the Grease Pit Set and Snowflakes from actual hard work, whereas I could see at a glance that the content for all but the 4-level History courses was not only light but superficial.  (Without exception, my requests for a supplemental reading list for a course were met with a “you’re not from this planet” look from the various professors — one admitted to me that she had never received such a request from a student before.  At Wits University in Johannesburg back in the 1970s, every liberal arts course had a supplemental reading list which, while not officially required, was necessary if you wanted to actually pass the course.)

So I attacked the degree with ferocity, taking all the summer / winter vacation classes I could.  (Strange, isn’t it, that professors can teach a course in three weeks that takes a full semester otherwise?)

Anyway, with all that my B.A. still took me three and a half years*, simply because the course schedules often didn’t jell with my degree plan — the one course I needed for a French sub-major (Business French) wasn’t taught in any “summer-mester”, and clashed with a History class during the regular semester, so I ended up taking instead a useless class of English short stories (during which the professor admitted to me privately that I could have taught, let alone studied) and passing up on a French sub-major.

The cynic in me thinks that the overly-long undergraduate degree is driven simply by financial greed — one less year equals a loss of $30,000 in revenue per student — but I will concede that without the bullshit core curriculum, the failure / dropout rate would probably be much higher than it already is.  (And that, of course, is the fault of the high school education kids get these days, but don’t get me started.)

It’s a racket, pure and simple.

*summa cum laude (for my non-U.S. Readers, that means a 90%+ final grade for every course)

Overvalued

Business, Travels

Back in the fall of 1982, I and Wife #1 came to the U.S. for the first time in my life — in fact, the first time I’d ever left the African sub-continent at all — and because I didn’t know diddly about New York City (our first stop), I booked us a room at the Hotel Edison just off 47st and Broadway because it was cheap.  I didn’t know, at the time, that the area was known as Hell’s Kitchen for a very good reason, but in those days I was tough and didn’t really give a damn — I was coming from fucking Johannesburg, how bad could New York be?  (Not bad at all by comparison, actually.)

Anyway, from memory, the room cost about $47+tax a night, and while it was awful, I’d stayed in much worse (errr South Africa, remember) and while we we assailed by Volkswagen-sized cockroaches a couple times, the hotel was close to most of what we wanted to see around Times Square, and was easy walking distance to Greenwich Village to the south and Central Park to the north.  Also, the delis on 8th Ave were fantastic — my first experience with a gut-busting NY-style pastrami sandwich was an eye-opener — and so we spent our days walking around the place, seeing the sights, eating deli food and holding our noses to block out the smells (garbage strike).

Anyway, years later (after the Great Wetback Episode of 1985) I had occasion to go from Chicago back to New York, this time on business, and as the Manhattan branch office was quite nearby, I booked into the Edison again, for nostalgia’s sake.

It was the same crappy hotel, same foul rooms, only this time the room cost $285+tax.  When I first saw the rate when I was booking the trip, I thought the hotel had to have undergone a huge refurbishment to justify that kind of price increase;  but of course it hadn’t:  it was just New York Fucking City.

Still later, I checked out the hotel again, just out of curiosity, and the rate was $385.  And from what I could gather, still no refurb of the place.

I should remind everyone that I have never shrunk from paying top dollar for a quality product, whether it was The Mayfair Hotel in London, the Madison in Paris, Imperial in Tokyo or wherever.  Five-star is five-star, and there ya go.  Paying five-star prices for total shit, however… nu-uh.  And from my experience, most Manhattan hotels were shit.  Even the “highbrow” ones like the Waldorf-Astoria or the Algonquin were overpriced flophouses, and their astronomical prices were justified either by the “cachet” attached to being in New York, NY [eyecross]  or else the high (overpriced) cost of the real estate.

So you can imagine my response when I saw this article via Insty:

During the second quarter ended June 30, average asking rents along 16 major retail corridors in Manhattan declined for the eleventh consecutive quarter, falling to $688 per square foot, according to a report from the commercial real estate services firm CBRE. The drop marked the first time since 2011 that prices dropped below $700, the firm said, representing an 11.3% decline from a year ago.
…
A number of retailers have outright stopped paying rent to their landlords during the pandemic, which in some instances is resulting in litigation.

Boo fucking hoo.  Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of supercilious chiselers and snooty price gougers.  And then there’s this, at the end of the article:

“I think there is a short-term and a long-term look at this,” NKF’s Roseman said. “Short-term, we are in survival mode right now. But when things do sort of turn back around, it will still be the same. There is only one Fifth Avenue in the world.”

If you look up “Wishful Thinking” in your dictionary, this sentiment will be under the heading.  (It probably links to “Dinosaur Perspectives” too, speaking as it does about L.A.’s Rodeo Drive and Chicago’s Michigan Avenue as being Places To See And Be Seen.  Dream on, Bubba:  we’re facing a new world.)

Anyway, I see that the Edison is “temporarily” closed because of the Chinkvirus — and from the looks of it, has had a refurb since I last checked — but one of the “business-class” hotels on Broadway, where I paid over $500 a night in 2007, is now asking $121.

No wonder they’re not paying the rent.