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Space Age Maximalist's avatar

Beautifully written. "Progress with American Characteristics" is now in the lexicon. The moment we stop actively committing suicide, we're going to be unstoppable. One city.

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Billionaire Psycho's avatar

Thanks bro for the encouragement

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Last Things's avatar

Vlogger hvvcg

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Tucker Chisholm's avatar

Shenzhen is an IQ shredder tho. This is why the American suburban model is actually to only saving grace for our birthrates, culture, widespread property ownership, and is a key to our future. A Shenzhen would be amazing and America has had several in the past (Detroit of course prime example). But I think the best future (where federalism, corporate competitiveness, and family formation/rootedness is recreated/reaffirmed) would be multiple smaller metros undergoing a industry cluster specific boomtown process. Boise, Tulsa, Cincinnati, Corpus Christi, Indianapolis, etc all becoming special economic zones bc the state governments say fuck you to the feds and unleash their masculine American Spirit

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Steve the Builder's avatar

I don't think you really understand what happened in Shenzhen.

It's true that the release of the pent up energy of the Chinese people caused a mass economic blossoming, but that was China reverting to the historical mean of the Chinese people. The American people aren't subsistence farmers, killing themselves working in tight knit communities in order to eke out their survival, decended from a thousand year legacy of personal striving. Shenzhen basically emerged into the perfect storm as the largest and most motivated slave workforce the world has ever seen came online.

You are right that location matters, but not for the reason you think. That massive slave workforce just happened to be right next to one of the largest financial and logistics centres on the planet, a city thoroughly integrated into the networks of the richest countries, organisations and people on the planet. Hong Kong was the key to Shenzhen's success. Everything was routed through Hong Kong for decades. Shenzhen was built by Hong Kongers because they could operate in a well regulated, non-corrupt financial system. Shenzhen piggy-backed on that system, it would have never gotten off the ground without it.

But Shenzhen's success came at a very large price. For 20 years the sky was not visible in Southern China, literally. You could look up and not see blue because the air pollution was so bad. Visibility was a km or two on a good day. Very occasionally there would be some freak weather system and the air would clear for a day and we would see what had been lost. That area should be paradise, but rivers were poisoned, agricultural land contaminated and countless humans ground up in the machine.

Lots of people got rich, lots of buildings got built and it's an amazing place, but it's not a template for anywhere in the west.

There is no billion peasants in the US hungry for a life in factory dormitories, there is no Hong Kong to co-ordinate and exploit those slaves, and there is no-one to exploit them on behalf of. Who is going to buy the cheap plastic shit from your economic miracle while it gets on it feet? The world is drowning in garbage consumer goods. Poor people have mobile phones now. It's already been done.

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Billionaire Psycho's avatar

Do you think America is operating at peak efficiency of its available human talent?

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Billionaire Psycho's avatar

First of all, thank you for an intelligent and well-thought out criticism, and you make several excellent points.

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Billionaire Psycho's avatar

Look bro I know Hong Kong was crucial to Shenzhen's success. That's why at the start of this Substack I placed a series of maps including one map which shows "How to Travel between Hong Kong and Shenzhen".

/

In the essay, I also said that, "In 1980, Shenzhen, China was a small, impoverished fishing village with a total of 30,000 residents. People who came to Shenzhen were refugees fleeing from the Communist party, and they would sail boats or even swim across the water to the British protectorate of Hong Kong."

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Steve the Builder's avatar

No. I think America is on the verge of collapse.

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Billionaire Psycho's avatar

I would suggest "the release of the pent-up energy of the American people would cause a mass economic blossoming, simply by allowing America to revert to the historical mean of the American people."

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Steve the Builder's avatar

I don't think you're right. Americans are suffering from being too safe and rich, I think their society is thoroughly dysgenic.

The Chinese reached that point 200 years ago. This is them coming back from it now.

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Billionaire Psycho's avatar

Obviously you're welcome to disagree with me.

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Billionaire Psycho's avatar

To address the substance of your criticism, I think you raise some good points that China's situation doesn't map onto America precisely. China benefitted from:

1.) massive population

2. ) global labor arbitrage from developed world to developing world

3.) Industrialization, mindlessly copying proven technologies which already worked.

None of these conditions are applicable to America.

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Ally's avatar

https://open.substack.com/pub/deepleft/p/americas-decline-is-the-end-of-china one of the argument is that china is in its maximalized state, basically at the top of the maximum capacity its populace can keep up with

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Billionaire Psycho's avatar

Fascinating, thank you

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Laggy's avatar

No

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Mystic William's avatar

Both Beijing and Shanghai are built in circles. Inner circle, 2nd, 3rd, and then outer or 4th. A real estate developer from Shanghai who is developing duplexes in Vancouver but whose family builds towers in SH, he was about 30, said very proudly, his family were 2nd ring family. He explained. First ring were colonel’s and general’s families who had fought alongside Mao. 2nd ring were Majors and Captains. 3rd. Sargeants etc. 4th was anyone. You couldn’t even live in the 2nd ring if you wanted to unless you were one of these families. Everyone knows the pecking order. And they seem okay with it. Another friend was 3rd ring, but long time working for the party and they were now allowed to buy a condo in the 2nd ring.

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Billionaire Psycho's avatar

Brilliant information

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Mystic William's avatar

IOW the Maoists merely took the place of the former ruling class, stealing all their land. Presumably after killing them.

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Mystic William's avatar

Shenzhen is hopping. I like it. Nice people. A very weird fact. Drive or walk around a busy business area and maybe one in five or six concrete high rises are dark. No lights. Walk around in the day and you will find all these buildings semi complete. These aren’t the massive 40-50 tower developments at the outskirts of every city in China. Many of which are partially complete and/or empty. These are buildings tied up in 20 year long lawsuits. They were developed, or started to be, without a really good land titles system. Once they got 80% done tons of small lawsuits sprang up. People claimed to have been the original land owners usually. Tied up. Empty.

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Billionaire Psycho's avatar

Great information, thank you

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Mystic William's avatar

You’re welcome.

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kaso's avatar

Removing the diversity regulations is insufficient. Diversity already present will exercise ethnic nepotism over talent.

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SirTophamHatt's avatar

Non-issue. Talented white people will quickly outcompete them once the legal barriers that currently exist are removed. That’s the whole point of a competitive market.

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Billionaire Psycho's avatar

I like when people criticize me from the right as insufficiently dedicated, it's very positive energy.

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Billionaire Psycho's avatar

Nobody's perfect, including me, and he's correct that the currently-entrenched DEI hires would continue to informally discriminate against white men.

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SirTophamHatt's avatar

Right, but in the rules of your hypothetical “American Shenzhen” white men would now be able to start their own new firms and hire each other, rather than depending on the pre-existing DEI establishment companies like they’re currently forced to.

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Billionaire Psycho's avatar

agreed

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Joshua Erwin's avatar

The Grim Jeeter is a survivor. He can make it almost anywhere he is not explicitly excluded from, because he will tolerate almost any living conditions. Uncle Idi understood this!

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Laggy's avatar

Lol

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White Collar Barbarian's avatar

Fantastic article! I love all of it, with one point to argue. This:

"One small economic zone, exempted from American taxation and diversity quotas and political regulations, could attract the world’s best talent..."

I'd postulate that this might be how Silicon Valley was born. Unfortunately what eventually happens is that foreign (or newly naturalized) CEOs would bring in as many H1B types as they could. Next thing you know you'll have a multi culti hellhole like you do in most American cities. The truth is that we have enough people in this country now, of all professions and capabilities amd trades. The government just needs to get the fuck out of our way.

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Billionaire Psycho's avatar

What point are you disagreeing with?

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White Collar Barbarian's avatar

That we don't need the WORLD'S best talent, just this COUNTRY'S best talent. We have enough people here and can fill any need, meet any goal, with native born folks. Hell if we put our minds to it we could be exploring the stars or colonizing the ocean floor.

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Billionaire Psycho's avatar

yes that's the central thesis of my essay here. I would agree with you

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Laggy's avatar

Maybe he’s saying that the city would not necessarily be composed of smart and able white men. At the beginning, sure. But once you have full production going, it’s time to make more money, which means the cheapest labor you could find, why here that be locally sourced or foreign sourced.

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Joshua Erwin's avatar

I basically agree, it would be cool to try a charter city in Florida or something where US 1890s laws applied. But wouldn't it become an IQ shredder like all cities? And wouldn't they bring in infinity Hindus and Celestials? In my line of dreadful, well paid corporate analytical work, I'm pretty sure they don't really hire based on race, just anyone they can get who more or less has the chops to do what the bosses tell them. The bosses ostensibly being the ones who make the creative decisions. I guess you'd have the freedom to try to have a more or less homogeneous company in your city. You'd probably lay total waste to the competition with a 90% Ethnic American male company. Dudes would work themselves to death for the privilege of working there. Still the city would turn into Bombay unless there was a law against that.

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Billionaire Psycho's avatar

I think you answer your own question here.

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Billionaire Psycho's avatar

"I guess you'd have the freedom to try to have a more or less homogeneous company in your city. You'd probably lay total waste to the competition with a 90% Ethnic American male company. Dudes would work themselves to death for the privilege of working there."

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Mike Moschos's avatar

Contemporary China, at least from the 1980s to 2015 — Xi and the interest groups around him at the center have been trying to change this but they have at least up to now been meeting resistance and haven’t made too deep of inroads — has been politically and economically decentralized in ways that quite resemble the USA’s Old Republic. There are several different things that go into this, but to save space here I’ll just say that they are, like we used to semi politically and economically fragmented. Local areas, just as we used to do, engage in local areas trade protectionism, just as our capital markets used to be until our intra country capital flow inhibitors were done away with between the latter 1970s and mid 1980s, are semi fragmented, local government are strong, there is, relative to us, significant variability in policy.

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Covfefe Anon's avatar

Until American communism has a Stalin or a Mao to purge the true believers [and the cynics who pretend to be true believers because acting like a true believer in American communism is a net positive for a person's life prospects] there will never be an American Shenzhen - not because it would fail but because everyone knows it would succeed. "No West Berlins!"

[and also because the American Regime is not agreement capable - only a fool would build something physical within reach of American governance unless he had no alternative. Pretty soon that city would be rich and the Regime pets of every kind would show up to take their cut - you think the American Regime would tell them to pound sand just because it made a *promise* to do that?]

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Billionaire Psycho's avatar

We need a proper sort of man to lead us to the American Shenzhen... someone with the pride and ferocity of a rooster... the kind of deep thinker who could communicate in succinct memes...

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Billionaire Psycho's avatar

The kind of digital philosopher who would tease us with a brilliant Substack title about black women flying airplanes and force us to suffer months in deprivation...

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White Collar Barbarian's avatar

Many years ago an older guy I worked with called the feds the "legalized Mafia." I'm ashamed that I dismissed it as typical Boomer libertarian nonsense at the time. Now that I know more about how the Mafia works, and how the US government works, I realize it is true. They never create anything or improve anything. They just want to take their cut, and if you ask them for help then they get their hooks into you.

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Billionaire Psycho's avatar

“Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and their freedoms”

― Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers

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Billionaire Psycho's avatar

“Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”

― Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War

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Mystic William's avatar

How many times have I heard ‘violence never solves anything’ or ‘fighting is never the answer’. But I can point to numerous examples in my own life where fighting was the only thing that solved a problem. Including the use of violence. I do know people who go around fighting willy nilly. It should be something that is used as a near to last resort, as Churchill said ‘it is better to Jaw Jaw than War War’, but it must be clear it will be used if necessary. Bullies and bad guys only bend to superior power.

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Cramper Down's avatar

Not a troll, just trying to get up to speed. No question that we’ve been committing productivity-suicide, but for this to work do we need to pay low-skilled factory workers so little that they choose suicide? Has the phenomenon lessened in Shenzhen, and if so, how?

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Billionaire Psycho's avatar

we don't need to abuse ordinary people like the Chinese choose to do.

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Mystic William's avatar

These stories might once have been true but they are largely not true now. Up until the last two years there has been fewer workers than needed. Nobody can chain anyone up. Nobody can mistreat people as they will get up and walk across the street and be hired by someone else. A friend of mine who lives in Shenzhen said ‘There are no Marxists in China. We of all people know it does not work. We were starving under Marxism and have been made rich with capitalism. There are more Marxists in American universities than in all of China.’

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Boflys's avatar

Wow.

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Eugine Nier's avatar

Let's compare the suicide rates of China and the US. Oh.

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Ieva's avatar

If they are exempted from taxation, what about public infrastructure like roads, public transport, sewer/water/electricity grids? Will all those things be privately owned?

In my country the goverment has leased their water system to a private entity. The private entity raised prices and didn't look after the pipes. Now that the lease has ended the system returned to the goverment and now there are construction works throughout all the city as the whole pipe system needs dire repairs.

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Billionaire Psycho's avatar

Okay so in your country the government politicians took a bribe to give money to a private entity which performed zero maintenance. That's just basic embezzlement.

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Blue Vir's avatar

I love this idea, but Shenzhen is the epitome of an IQ shredder.

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Mystic William's avatar

How so? What do you mean ‘IQ Shredder’? And have you been there?

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Mystic William's avatar

People who choose to not have families are NOT the best and brightest. There are a group of people who learn well. They memorize well and conform. These people do well in school. Most go on to University. They are dumb as a bag of hammers. If you have any doubts ask yourself how many end up doing well in life? The odd one, sure. But the bulk make one stupid decision after another. And are shocked at how they struggle with much of life. SF and Shenzhen are very different cities. They don’t compare. Entrepreneurs went to Shenzhen. SF got the strait jacketed ones.

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Blue Vir's avatar

>What do you mean ‘IQ Shredder’?

Google it bro

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Laggy's avatar

Great article. Great concept. You’re very much thinking outside the box.

I think America had it it all, but we outsourced it. We globalized. We took our edge and gave it away. Like many things our gov does, the stated purpose of globalization and actual intention were two totally different things. Now the people and companies that benefited most, have so much money and power, that they now dictate policy in every sector. The government is frozen to do anything of import, even if they were benevolent and not corrupt.

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Billionaire Psycho's avatar

Thanks for the kind words, I agree with you on all points.

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Laggy's avatar

When I do repair work on a vehicle, or add something new, especially with electrical, I take great care. I label if I have to. I use factory plugs. I want the next person that goes in there to realize “Hey, this last person that was in here gave a shit enough to do the job right”.

We should be stewards. Don’t know how this relates, but felt like it was a necessary add to the comments here.

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Billionaire Psycho's avatar

Ikigai, it's about caring about small details:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikigai

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Laggy's avatar

What a great concept

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Laggy's avatar

Oni gashi ikigai!!

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Laggy's avatar

Good on you for putting in the time to keep the real conversations going. Right or wrong, putting these new ideas out there is how we eventually start finding solutions for the future.

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Billionaire Psycho's avatar

We're going to win so much we're going to get tired of winning

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Laggy's avatar

Hahahahahahaha

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Paolo Giusti's avatar

DEI is not forced upon companies, companies love DEI. Do you really belive liberal elites belive in human equality? Only Hanania could belive that bullshit.

Cosmopolitan elite is born from the ethnogenesis of westernized elites around the world: they support DEI because diversity is what stops the "somewhere people" from removing them from their real power base - something that happens quite often to the "rootless cosmopolitans".

You are fighting a war against cosmopolitism: libertar(d)ianism is not going to save you.

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Eugine Nier's avatar

> DEI is not forced upon companies,

Yes it is. Look up the concept of "Hostile work environment".

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Paolo Giusti's avatar

Being there, done that. May I suggest you to look up the concept of "companies pushing diversity during Reagan respite in CRA enforcement"?

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Billionaire Psycho's avatar

What's the point of talking to you if you are simply going to be dishonest?

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Paolo Giusti's avatar

Dishonest about?

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Billionaire Psycho's avatar

Civil Rights law currently demands that companies discriminate against white men.

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Paolo Giusti's avatar

Yes, as i explained in the other post, my point is that companies would still discriminate if CRA and DEI were repealed.

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Billionaire Psycho's avatar

Thank you "Paolo Giusti" for telling me why cosmopolitan foreigners need to be allowed to conquer the West. Hmmm I wonder why you would say that...

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Paolo Giusti's avatar

Lol wut? That is literally the opposit of what i meant. I am totally for "removing rootless cosmopolitans from anywhere", that's why I find libertar(d)ianism quite toothless against them.

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Billionaire Psycho's avatar

Hey dummy I'm not a libertarian

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Paolo Giusti's avatar

Yes you do not define yourself so, but imvho you have still too much trust in the "free spirit of the market" in your writing: e.g. I totally belive DEI will survive to an Hanania-esque repeal of CRA, because DEI does not came from CRA, but quite the opposite.

Maybe I am wrong and I have misunderstood your point, but i saw many in the Online Right fell to libertar(d)ian traps like Milei - dickrided by Men's World and IM1776, to which I suppose, but don't know if, you are close.

Agin, if i misunderstood your point, i am sorry.

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Billionaire Psycho's avatar

I understand your position better now. You phrased it in an adversarial way so I misunderstood your original position. Yes there's a lot of merit to your position, and although I disagree with your analysis, I think your reasoning makes sense.

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Paolo Giusti's avatar

I am not mothertongue, it happens often, sadly.

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Dee's avatar

You were doing so well, and then you went all “white men”. Why wouldn’t we just restore meritocracy, and hire the best person for the job, regardless of their ancestry or sex?

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Billionaire Psycho's avatar

Hiring white men is illegal.

NASA landed on the moon with all white men.

White men are persecuted in America.

Meritocracy allows for hiring white men, it doesn't require it.

Hope this helps clear things up.

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Billionaire Psycho's avatar

I specifically said hiring the best employee, "Imagine an America where you could hire the best employee available for the job, rather than being harassed and penalized and “nudged” with subtle pressures to hire a candidate of the correct gender, skin color, or sexual preference."

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Dee's avatar

Completely agree. The article could be read as suggesting something else, glad that’s not what you meant

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Billionaire Psycho's avatar

White people have been trained that to advocate for their own interests is racist and evil, even when we are simply asking for a fair competition for everyone rather than a nepotistic allotment of slots for every faction.

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Dee's avatar

I don’t want to see any group of people who share an immutable characteristic advocate for “their”interests. I don’t want any preferential treatment for my sex or ethnicity. I don’t want to have to wonder (or wonder who else is wondering) whether I got my job because I’m a woman or because I earned it. We are all individuals and should be judged by our own actions and capabilities. All this emphasis on groups is the problem.

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Billionaire Psycho's avatar

You should pay attention to the world you currently live in, where Civil Rights law viciously discriminates under the legal theory of "disparate impact".

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