I can't tell whether this is a satire or a parody.
809 karma · joined November 14, 2015
The article you've cited addresses immigration in general, not low-skill immigration by itself. This could support argument in favor of a selective immigration policy, not massive immigration of low-skill workers from developing countries.
People working in this industry are often required to display unfelt enthusiasm for things that really aren't terribly exciting. One can be forgiven for being through with this nonsense by the age of 30.
I would never consider working as a software developer but for my sincere interest in the value that my software provides and my enjoyment of the craft. Otherwise I think it would be comparable to accounting, the quintessential boring yet rewarding career.
Do what you truly wish to do. To be concerned about being too old at the age of 30 is just silly.
Rational arguments seldom make their way into this discussion, if it can be called that.
On the one side we have the empathetic liberals, who in many cases ultimately wish to see the complete abolition of national borders and global inequality. Joining them are corporations, which want abundant labor in order to reduce the costs of employment.
On the other, we have low-skilled citizens, who don't wish to see their quality of life reduced by admitting large numbers of people willing to work for very little. Along with them are those concerned about the political and cultural consequences of admitting a massive, homogeneous, and very different group of people into their homeland. There are probably some racists among the group, though probably far fewer than the other side often claim.
Whichever side you find yourself on, I think the following must be admitted:
1) The ordinary citizen currently in the United States will likely experience a decline in quality of life as a result of a permissive immigration policy.
2) Massive economic migration to rich countries from poor ones is not a solution to the problem of global economic inequality or poverty.
3) Historical instances of immigration, colonialism, and invasion do not justify or necessitate permissive immigration policies in the present day.
That being said, I was only calling out a simplistic remark about the association between guns and the incidence of violence.
This article does not actually posit or examine the titular question. It merely states the statistic we all now know and then goes on a tangent about diversity in the tech industry.
Pure clickbait, not worth your time.
A few academics have noted that religious participation is declining in America, interest in spectator sports is increasing, and the two have a few broad similarities. Therefore, football is the new American religion.
I don't care much about sports or religion, but frankly this article is laughable. They even troubled to throw in the perfunctory "correlation does not equal causation" admonition, as if it makes their line of reasoning any less spurious. Pure junk.
In any case, my point is primarily about the focus of the article. It's fine to examine contradictions in a notable person's life, but too few acknowledge that we all have them, and this seems especially true among literary critics. In general, I think people take charges of "hypocrisy" too seriously.
A sense of depression (and I assume you're referring to the emotion, not the medical condition) quite often has nothing to do with easily identified circumstances, the mind just tends toward the things it is dissatisfied with.
If you believe you have the medical condition, treat it like anything else: see a doctor. I know many people who have wasted years of their lives fearing a few moments of awkward discussion with their general practitioner. There's no rational reason to join them.
It ought to be well understood that human beings are not perfectly consistent animals. We struggle to maintain an unchanging public image through the course of a continuously and inevitably changing experience. If we had to live up always to our highest ideals in order to advise others on the best course of life, none of us would ever be situated to recommend a framework for living. In Seneca's case, a school of philosophy would today be without many of its best-known works.
Incidentally, I think the fact of our inconsistency is a strong argument in favor of protecting privacy. Most of us have unrealistic and irrational expectations of consistency for others. The only way to maintain a sense of peace under these circumstances is to maintain the freedom to say one thing and do another, at least some of the time. A world without privacy might well be one in which we are all subject to the sort of treatment Seneca has received from this article's writer.
Here, this issue is that of availability. Given that it is sometimes difficult to gauge the desirability of a prospective partner, one metric is how eager they seem to be. If the other replies quickly, this is an indication that they are quite eager, which suggests that they have few encounters, and that therefore few have evaluated this person as attractive. On the contrary, a bit of a lapse before a response suggests that the other feels a bit of indifference toward you, and that therefore the person is likely to have more encounters, and therefore is considered more attractive.
You can be forgiven for wishing for more simplicity, given that relationships in most media are depicted rather one-dimensionally, as the result of unambiguous and mutual attraction. This is not how it tends to work in the real world.
A call is an unambiguous yet still unstated expression of continued interest. Is the other party still interested? If the call is answered, you can tell from the tone of voice alone, and if there's uncertainty, the sound of your voice may be enough to tip the balance. What's better, broaching the difficult questions is less difficult on the phone: you don't need to ask explicitly what you would in text, nor need you come up with some lame quip or foist one of your few common experiences to have a conversation. If there's no answer, leave a message -- at the very least, you're not likely to be ignored.
This approach has the added benefit of distinguishing yourself from your texting, cowardly competitors.
Neither method is as good as a face-to-face encounter, but at least this way you reduce the risk of miscommunication or one of those alienating situations where the next-day text goes unanswered.
You seem not to be familiar with Indian society at this moment in history. I won't trouble you with the details, since that might require setting aside one's ego for a moment. But for the sake of appealing to your strong sense of emotion, I'd like you envision a life where you live in abject, degrading poverty, you have no prospect of a better future, premarital sex and pornography are stigmatized, there are more men than women, prostitution is illegal, and there is essentially no realistic prospect you will ever have any consensual sexual encounter with a member of the opposite sex for the rest of your life. Maybe you'd feel slightly more like the feral dog than you do at the moment.
We are animals, in no way set apart from the other species. Those of us who exert "enough self-control every day not to destroy another person's bodily integrity" are merely lucky. To suggest otherwise simply reflects this profound, Utopian ignorance of the human condition that only the world's most pampered are privileged enough to relish without consequences.
Is there anyone who believes this nonsense? What percentage of the population would need to be police in order to prevent every rape? What change in attitude is going to stop sex-deprived men from acquiring what they are programmed to want more than anything else?
This particular gun won't do much -- you'd have to be more than a good shot to stop a gang rape with a six-shot .22 -- but to claim that personal defense is best delegated to the authorities in these cases is simple nonsense. But perhaps this claim is more palatable to their audience than that they would prefer live with a certain amount of rape and other violence so long as there are no guns being carried around.
Things of this sort were once quite interesting. But once the 'illusoriness' of the self is understood intellectually, one comes to realize that it has essentially no implications for our lives, our relationships, our societies, or our species.
We find ourselves in this world with desires: survival, reproduction, physical pleasure, social acceptance -- whatever they may be. All of our interests stem from the need to serve these desires. Interests align and conflict with those of other human organisms. However harmonious or contentious the social context, and whatever values you seem to hold, this fact always remains at the core of our behavior.
In a sense, the Western conceptualization of the self, false though it is, is nearer to the truth: our experiences are atomic, separate, isolated -- in the most literal meaning of the word, we are alone. You may feel human warmth, compassion, and love, yet these remain individual experiences. To define oneself in relation to others is no wiser than to envision oneself as standing in relation to nothing at all.
I think this need not be a sad or a happy fact. The abstraction we call 'the self' is simply not a useful one.