* Google, under pressure for its low diversity numbers, addressed the issue by making groundskeepers and janitors employees instead of outsourcing the work.
Of course, Google is much more racially diverse than The New York Times, The Washington Post, Gawker and other media outlets complaining about the lack of diversity in the tech sector. This is because, for the media at least, Asians are no longer a minority because, well, because.
* Classic quote from Mason Harrison, the token Silicon Valley Republican whose strategy is to surrender: “… it almost seems like [Trump] has gone out of his way to smite Silicon Valley leaders on the issues they care about.”
No shit, Sherlock. Trump recognizes these Silicon Valley leaders are the enemy. He’s not going to pander to them, he’s going to attack them. That’s how politics works.
* More mass confusion on how the world works from the left. The same industry and area that they are constantly accusing of sexism, racism, and elitism is now the vanguard of leftist thought in business apparently. I have read other posts saying Trump opposing illegal immigration would kill high tech because forty percent of business in the Valley were founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants, despite the complete non-existence of Mexicans and Central Americans, much less illegal immigrant Mexicans and Central Americans in Silicon Valley. No one says that virtually all the people in the industry that come from abroad come from South Asia, East Asia, Europe, and even the white population of South Africa ( More on that later ) . There is also a strong libertarian contingent in the Valley and always has been and Thiel is part of that, just more outspoken politically about it ( He was a big backer of Ron Paul in 2008 and 2012 ). Blacks and Latinos are practically non-existent in any leadership, technology, or founder capacity in the Valley at all ( I say practically because I don’t know for a fact that the number is zero, but I suspect it is, notwithstanding the fact the NYT found a black libertarian in the valley who founded a wait for it…. non-profit, a tech captain of industry indeed! ).
In fact you could argue there are more white South Africans contributing to tech in the valley and elsewhere than there are native born American blacks. Just off the top of my head there is PayPal alums David O. Sacks, Elon Musk, and Roelof Botha, all major movers and shakers in the valley as well as Mark Shuttleworth, who founded the Linux software giant Ubuntu in the UK. I saw recently a list of the top 100 VC’s in the US from Forbes magazine with photos, what was there was overwhelmingly white and Asian, overwhelmingly male, ( Among the roughly one third that were Asian, only two were women ) and a few white women, no Barry’s, Michelle’s, or Loretta’s to be found anywhere on the list. When the NYT and other SJW’s get riled up about the workforce demographics of tech giants like Apple and Facebook they count the numerous Asian tech guys working in the valley as white for purposes of moral condemnation, but now because the MSM wants to blackball Thiel, suddenly everyone is the valley is a closeted liberal. I also love them calling Trump a technological ignoramus? And Clinton is a masterful tech guru? Well we know both Obamas, Barry and Michelle, were instrumental founders of the PayPal Mafia, that group that went on to found dozens of startups in the Valley, No, oops, I’m sorry, that was Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, two stale pale males from Germany and South Africa that did that, so easy to get successful tech entrepreneurs and affirmative action driven community activists who never practice law confused with each other, they are so similar.
* I wonder what the Silicon Valley bigwigs really think about IQ. They seem to be hiring more or less on the basis of it (specifically, talent at STEM-type fields).
The resulting employees have the expected diversity: besides whites, there’s lot of Chinese and Indians. Women are underrepresented and so are blacks and Hispanics.
So they’re hypocrites.
I support their right to hire as they please, but they need to realize that they can’t pass for “progressives” unless change their hiring practices.
* Two men vie for the title of Father of Silicon Valley: William Shockley and Fred Terman. They were both friends and proponents of eugenics. Terman’s father created America’s first IQ test, the Stanford-Binet.
* Re: 1950s.
1) Ordinary Americans’ purchasing power was never higher, before or since: peak purchasing power
2) Wages continued to rise
3) Jobs were so plentiful that you could walk out of one, and the next day get a new job, and for most jobs you didn’t need a résumé; and you could house, feed, and educate a family on most jobs. Also, if you took a job you liked, you enjoyed every confidence you would work it until you’d retire comfortably on its pension and benefits. And millions of American teens and college students worked ample summer jobs, often menial jobs that taught solid virtues
4) Unprecedented numbers of ordinary Americans could and did afford one-family homes; and rents were also very affordable; and atop all that Americans socked away solid savings – the complete opposite of today’s spreading indebtedness, insolvency, and rash of bankruptcies. Up to about 1970, banks paid depositors 5% interest on deposits – try finding that rate today
5) College tuition was affordable – no one I’d heard of had taken out a loan to send their children to college
6) Pro sports were still a game. Yes, they were businesses, but no league would even think to hire criminals, or to pony up considerable sums to cover up players’ or coaches’ crimes or disgusting behavior. Even media of that time – as liberal as they were – maintained a probity that makes today’s media foulness and enforcement of p.c. (which has replaced genuine, cultivated virtue with a fascist code) look pretty awful
7) Movies and TV were not vehicles for smut or foul language
8) There was nothing of today’s burdensome, intrusive, obtrusive Anarcho-Tyranny
9) Everyone could and did speak freely, without fear of being penalized, because there were no Diversity Commissars or Social Media Shaming mobs. No one then was so “offended” by another’s speech that he telephone-summoned the entire neighborhood to mass en masse at the “offending” speaker’s home. And someone disciplined, punished, or fired for a speech “violation” was unheard of
10) The illegtimacy rates of Whites and blacks were much lower; and many more dads had jobs than dads have today
11) Schools (and media) had not yet become Indoctrination Gulags. Campuses were bucolic, safe whereon civilized and genuine free, open debate flourished. A well-rounded education in Western Civilization was the norm, and so was pride in America and in being American. Student misbehavior received well-deserved punishment – and the overwhelming majority of parents supported such condign punishment
12) Children – including high school students – were still regarded, rightly, as children, and not as “young people” with “something to say”; and no student of any race ever read aloud – or even in private silence – a pathetic ethnomasochist screed
13) The U.S. enjoyed massive positive balance of trade (a negative trade deficit would have had Americans up in arms), solid, steady economic growth, and widespread domestic prosperity; national debt was low, manageable, and still under control; and GDP per capita was (if I recall correctly) at an all-time high, as trade protectionism kept American industries humming and kept Americans employed
14) For all those liberal “The Sky Is Falling” books & films you listed, there were others that countered or refuted their doom-&-gloom: Strategic Air Command; A Gathering Of Eagles; The Great Escape; Ben-Hur; The Ten Commandments; The Alamo; The Robe; Mister Roberts; The Longest Day; & many more such
15) There was none of today’s nonstop saccharine worship, elevation, importation or imposition of inimical Third World “cultures”
16) Common courtesy was common; there was none of today’s knee-jerk indulgence in smearing, in contemptuous accusations of “hate” and “evil” and “Hitler”; and there was no such Orwellian thing as a “hate crime”
17) Americans enjoyed broad trust in one another, and Americans had faith in the future and faith in the affordability of attaining the American Dream through conscientious hard work: everything was Looking UP!
18) Standards held: there was no Affirmative Action absurdity or any other race-based set-asides or preferences – to get ahead one had to make the grade, had to show that one had the goods and could cut the mustard
19) Perpetual Adolescence was not the rule, but was the extreme exception. There were no Trekkies, no mohawks, no piercings or tattoos, no goth or zombie “lifestyles” – and, aside from some military men and veterans, anyone who wore a tatto or had any part of their bodies (except for women’s earlobes) pierced was rightly regarded as gutter trash to avoid, or as an oddball to be, at best, tolerantly humored
20) The overwhelming majority of adults didn’t enthuse about, or endlessly analyze, or even much discuss pop music, or follow the antics of pop group members, or jaw endlessly or ludicrously emulate pop stars or pop culture: adults had more important things to do with their minds and their time, and so did children. TV/mass media had yet to completely monopolize people’s attention, time, or energies
21) Appliances and other goods were often repaired or mended, often in the home (thrift was still a common virtue); or you took your shoes to the shoemaker, you took your radio or toaster to the appliance shop; much less was then disposable. Mending work employed millions, often in their own Mom & Pop shops
22) If you’d told someone in those days there’d be a multi-decades-long, multi-mega-billions of dollar taxpayer-funded War on Drugs because scores of millions of Americans would abuse God knows how many kinds of illegal and prescription substances, he’d have directed you to an asylum: “Why would Americans want to take illegal drugs?!”
23) Welfare was still an embarrassment; welfare rolls were much, much shorter; and the number of taxpayer-funded welfare programs you could count on the fingers of one hand
24) The middle class was large and growing; today’s rump middle class verges on extinction. The wealth inequality gap was much smaller than today’s vast wealth gulf – so too was the power gap smaller, and political power was far more balanced between the top and ordinary Americans. Our elites were note nearly so remote from or so alien to us as they now are, because they were still of us
25) Infrastructure was still growing: the Interstate Highway System became reality; the Verrazzano Narrows Bridge; the World Trade Center. Today infrastructure crumbles.
26) Last but not least: Americans were still 90% White and both Whites and blacks were overwhelmingly Christian – the Protestant Ethic held, but soon would perform its swan song. That much homogeneity was its own reward, its own most widely-ever shared blessing.
Compared to today, the 1950′s and early 1960′s were an American Paradise, a genuine Golden Age. By every measure of civilization – except those of improved appliances and today’s improved (though far more costly) medicine – for the largest proportion of Americans ever, those days had today beat by several parsecs.
* Life in America prior to 1965 was superior for 95% of the people who were here then, almost all whites except the hyper-wealthy, and most blacks, and most of the others. The only Muslims here were a few oil sheiks, but the kind of Muslims we have now would probably have found it somewhat less to their liking. Orientals in general and Chinese in specific might have been a little worse off because no AA and no government programs for blacks and mestizos they can occasionally exploit and get rich off.
Homosexuals-they did exist then-had to keep it “on the down low”, and opportunities for the most promiscuous sex for them were probably much less. They were probably better off healthwise for it, because even with no AIDS, they had syphilis, hepatitis, and of course mechanical damage to the anus and rectum, and the surgeries for that were far cruder. Most homosexuals accepted the fact they were a tiny minority and that the rest of us did not need to know how they were or what they did with equanimity. Those that didn’t, a minority of a minority, had to move to a place where that sort of thing could be done more or less openly. Lesbians were more open as lesbianism “wasn’t a thing” in people’s minds. If two women lived together, well, that just made them friends, not girl-girl friends. Women could dance with other women all the time and no one thought of it. Plausible deniability was incredibly simple-unless they went around telling everyone they were lesbians, or were munching each other out on the front porch, well, they were not lesbians as far as anyone but other lesbians or beatniks or male homoisexuals knew or cared.
Illegitimacy simply didn’t exist for middle class people. A girl who “got caught” married the guy, some cuck she could talk into it or put it up for adoption. It could be “taken care of” if the girl had no scruples and enough money, but it never entered most girls’ mind to do that. The very poor and the very rich, then as now, did just what they wanted. If you were rich you sham-married a guy and divorced him and kept custody if you wanted, and there were always men who’d go along: if they were gay they’d do it for cover (they didn’t actually have to, you know, consummate the marriage-bloody sheets off the balcony are not a White thing, and even if they were….) and otherwise if just poor would take a pay packet or two to do it.
Middle class people did not use illegal drugs. Period. There was alcohol, of course, and women especially could get doctors to prescribe barbiturates and amphetamines easier than now, but overall there was much less abuse.
Pornography and “filthy” music and comedy records did exist-but were kept under the counter at any establishment and even their existence was unknown to most underage people and most women. Most men had either nothing to do with them or they would watch a “smoker” (a 16mm film of, almost always, one man and one woman “doing it”) with a bunch of frat or lodge brothers, fully clothed and usually puffing frantically on cigars, or-a littlemore common in mixed party company-would play “party records” like Rusty Warren, risque but not over the top filthy. Black and hillbilly raunchy records somewhat more explicit did exist and again were vended discreetly. (The famous outro to the Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up”-’you’d make a dead man come’- was pilfered from 1930s “hokum blues” records, that one by one Lucille Bogan ((Shave ‘Em Dry,1935)). YouTube features most of these raunchy blues records for those of a musico-sexological bent.)
Certainly, because so many women were full-time homemakers, and because of the lack of computer automation, jobs were plentiful. Any white male, almost, and also any white female who wasn’t married or whose kids were grown, and any black of any intelligence and determination could find a job. They all paid a lot more in relation to housing costs.
You repaired torn or frayed clothes, most appliances and electrical items, and so forth, instead of throwing them out. Furniture was a bigger investment than today, if bought new, but it was all solid wood and held up a lot better. If it broke, you repaired it. People ate at home a lot more and women were expected to cook and sew well. The prospect of steady home cooked meals rivalled even the prospect for legit sex in the minds of many men contemplating giving up on bachelorhood.
In all, if you were a person with an animus against the social mores of the time, or could exploit things like affirmative action and the welfare-warfare state, you might be better off now. And if you had a medical condition treatable now not treatable in 1965, you are better off now. But most normal people would have been much happier in 1965. I know I would.
* I too was born in the early ’50s. It makes me sad that my children will never understand how great things were in this country before 2000 and how everything was ruined. When I was a teenager, summer jobs were yours for the asking. In my 20s through 40s, there was plenty of high-paying work available in my field.
Young Americans face a very bleak future. Most of them have no idea what’s wrong because the propaganda is relentless and effective.
