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Steve Bannon Suggests Having Too Many Asian Tech CEOs Undermines 'Civic Society' (theverge.com)
In an interview last year with Donald Trump -- that The Washington Post resurfaced yesterday -- Breitbart News Network's executive chairman, Steve Bannon, suggested that there are too many asian CEOs in Silicon Valley. "He alluded to the idea that foreign students should return to their respective countries after attending school in the U.S., instead of sticking around and working at or starting tech companies," writes Ashley Carman via The Verge: Trump voiced concern over these students attending Ivy League schools and then going home: "We have to be careful of that, Steve. You know, we have to keep our talented people in this country," Trump said. When asked if he agreed, Bannon responded: "When two-thirds or three-quarters of the CEOs in Silicon Valley are from South Asia or from Asia, I think [...]" he didn't finish his sentence. "A country is more than an economy. We're a civic society." While Bannon didn't explicitly say anything against immigrants, he seemed to hint at the idea of a white nationalist identity with the phrase "civic society." The Huffington Post makes note of a May 2015 study in its report, which "found that 27 percent of professionals working in Silicon Valley companies were Asian or Asian-American. They represented less than 19 percent of managers and under 14 percent of executives, according to the report."
I think by Asian he meant Indian as well. What are the numbers if you include Indians?
It'll be interesting to see the alt-right portion of the slashdot crowd defend this racist scumbag.
By interesting, I mean embarrassing to humanity.
So according to Steven Bannon we can't have a "civic society" in America if there are areas whose population aren't a majority of whites. I expected a more sophisticated racist euphemism from a Harvard-educated man.
Don't we want the best and brightest from around the world to work here, to our advantage, rather than their home countries?
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In what world does "civic society" equate to "white nationalist identity?" There's a dozen things I could honestly take from this quote, and I could do without its really heavy baiting to control where I'm going with my interpretations.
I get that Bannon isn't likable or something. I don't want to dispute anything about him either way. I just want data without the entire heavy-leaning interpretation of hand-wavy words. He's clearly wrong about his numbers. Can we focus on that? Do we have to label him "white nationalist" with all but coming out and saying that? Is that helpful? Pretend he's an actual white supremacist and proud of it. Can we not criticize his points on their own, like actual discourse requires? If he and his words are simply not worth talking about, this is not how to go about that.
Good lord there's so much to actually criticize out there and we're just framing every damn thing in tribalistic nonsense. (Before it gets assumed, no, I don't think this is limited to one "party" or whatever. It's common in every sensationalist nonsense "journalism" organization.)
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Dear people mad that "Asians" or whatever are running the tech companies...
The obvious answer is "make more college graduates."
Many state schools are turning to foreign nationals to pay out-of-state tuition to fund operating costs because their state has cut funding.
So step 1 is... restore state funding to colleges, and you can get rid of some foreign students that whoever you want in roles won't have to compete with!
Step 2 is... tell your constituents that college isnt a "liberal elite conspiracy," so they'll actually attend.
Step 3 is... fund the ones that can't afford it. If some dude/dudette whose parents lost their manufacturing job to a robot has the talent, he should be there, gaining skills for America! Quit viewing college funds as a "handout" and look at it as an investment in America's workforce.
That's pretty much it. You'll reduce the number of whoever you don't like in tech companies by a small amount, by making the people you do want in them more capable of competing.
I'm pretty sure even the Asians you're mad at will be cool with that.
While it doesn't exactly seem to have a very positive connotation, there's also not much of a negative one. It's definitely not what the widespread quote has been.
Definition of a civic society (since I had to look it up):
I'm clearly missing the problem here? He has the wrong statistic (literally the opposite quantity), but what part of his statement doesn't make sense? A country should probably be a civic society, by that definition, to preserve its own self-interests. I also agree that with the other statement that we should look to retain their best and simply block their worst. Why effectively use our institution's tax dollars to train a foreign power's workers?
We've made an investment in these people. We should be doing everything we can to keep them here. Let's start stapling green cards to STEM degrees from accredited universities.
So yes, and I gather from context that the "Live" here is the concern. Work here is important too, but if the talent stays for a couple years and moves home to India, or China, or South Korea (etc..) with their fortune has our society received as much benefit from the arrangement? Cherry picking context for some for of "ism" or "obia" has become so old that I am simply ignoring MSM. Boycott is your only leverage to change this shit from the media oligarchs who are pissed that their crony lost.
6% trust rating my ass, Huffpo has gone into negative range along with those other stations which I won't even mention.
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We apologize again for the fault in the Cabinet assignments. Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked have been sacked.
Have gnu, will travel.
America's culture is that it's a melting pot of cultures. Always has been and always will be. You respect and protect that by allowing other cultures to continue to immigrate and contribute to that culture.
I think if you're an immigrant from "whereverstan" and land ashore on one of these boats you've mentioned, learn the local language, get selected to attend the top schools, get hired by the best companies and end up running the companies, you've assimilated pretty f*cking well.
Take your racism somewhere else.
eh, I only see him saying a country is its people too, not just economy and having a large number of foreigners leading the economy talent isn't the best thing. Hmmm, isn't that like Obama's STEM emphasis?
Really, I'm coming up dry looking for this Bannon guy's supposed racist quotes. I see what his ex-wife said sure, and what some others claim about him. But no proof. Where is his big racist diatribes, c'mon I'm wanting to see some of his nasty jew-bashing, black bashing, asian-bashing etc.
He meant to say "civil society", but was too drunk and coked up to get it right.
I don't think we need to worry about Bannon. He looks like he's one rail away from joining Andrew Breitbart in Hell.
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You are welcome on my lawn.
Yet SJW's whine about "cultural appropriation" all the time. How can it be a melting pot is "cultural appropriation" is evil?
By "antiscience" you mean "accepts what actual scientists say."
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Given Sundar Pichai is Google's CEO ...
Seems to me this is just Breitbart trying to muddy the waters as Google is taking a stand against 'fake news' and twitter is banning the alt-right.
If Breitbart can claim victim status perhaps they can get around Google (and thereby Facebook et.al.) from classifying them as 'fake news'.
By being incendiary about Asian (that's Indian in British parlance) CEOs then can later claim that Google banning them (Breitbart) is personal.
While I probably don't agree that Breitbart is 'fake' they are certainly walking the line and occasionally stepping over. Breitbart is unabashedly biased and incendiary and some opinions and commentary seems to not be shy of using 'post-fact' rhetoric.
What legit racists in power look like.
The dude on CNN tried his best to say with a straight face how the American people NEED to know "how long the dinner was, where he went, what time it was until, etc"
It's hard to believe that piece of shit network is still on television.
My grandfather still had a noticeable accent and identifying cultural traits over 100 years after his grand father moved to this country. He was white. They moved to a part of the US popular with people who came from the same place. Just like other immigrants tend to do. Over time, they adopted the language, dialects, and some of the traditions of other immigrant populations. There wasn't and isn't some base culture that they all assimilated into. The common cultural elements changed over time and there have always been sub cultures.
A melting pot doesn't mean that everything thrown in turns into what was already there.
"70-80% of tech workers here on H1-B visas"
What actual fucking reality are you from with bullshit numbers like that?
If you and others like you dismiss him as a bigot you'll get more nasty surprises at the ballot box as folks like me give up on liberal socialism that feels like lip service and turn to guys like Trump to protect our jobs.
You think Trump and the Republican legislature are going to do anything other than royally FUCK the middle class in the next 4 years? You are truly deluded. I dare you to come back here when his term is over and admit how wrong you were.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
because that's the question that gets asked everytime we talk about free or cheap college anymore. 66% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck (e.g. don't have $400 to their name). That's a _lot_ of folks who can't afford it.
People don't skip college because it's a liberal elite conspiracy. They skip college for money. Unless you can get Americans to suck down the taxes (in the face of declining wages) that's not gonna change.
Here's another option. Ever wonder how people from 2nd world countries can afford out of state tuition? Companies are paying it for them so they can work 'em to death as interns while they're in 'school' as 'interns'. You bring guys and gals in their 20s who've already been trained here and they work for you for peanuts. The cost of education is less than you woulda paid an American.
Shut that scam down for a start. Shut the whole H1-B program down and make companies _train_ again. We've got other visa programs for the Geniuses. We don't need more code monkeys, and Americans can do math just fine if we don't abandon our public schools.
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Nope, I mean "accepts what scientists say." That you can find at least one or two researchers in any field who promote wingnut views doesn't mean those views aren't pure wingnuttery.
In my area of interests, Proto-Indo-European studies, there are a small group of linguists, primarily Indian nationalists, who insist India is the Urheimat of the Proto-Indo-European languages. The overwhelming majority of PIE researchers view this for what it is, politically motivated rubbish, and point to Pontic-Caspian Steppe as the most likely original homeland of the Indo-European speakers, pointing to the fact that the Baltic and Slavic (sometimes grouped together as the Balto-Slavic languages) as possessing far more PIE primitives than virtually any other family of languages with the possible exception of the extinct Anatolian subfamily.
The point of that long aside is to show you that you will find in any field of research a small number of people who for various reasons, some honest and sincere, some absurd and dishonorable, who ride against the consensus. And so it is with climatology. You have a very small number of climatologists (and a much smaller number of active and publishing researchers) who claim AGW is overstated or false, but the overwhelming majority assert that those very small number of contrarians are wrong, and in some cases, clearly intentionally distorting legitimate research and data to make AGW seem overstated. It doesn't help that some of these contrarians, like Frank Spencer, are basically on anti-AGW political thinktank payrolls, raising serious ethical questions about their motivations for writing anti-AGW screeds (not to mention these very few individuals, like their Creationist counterparts in biology, almost never publish any papers that lay out their great destructive critiques of AGW).
My view is that you just don't want to hear bad news, so you've decided that the overwhelming number of researchers in areas related to climatology are liars, and because you're of an childish and cowardly temperment, literallly a delicate little snowflake, you only want to hear from that tiniest fraction of the research community who promotes claims you are emotionally equipped to deal with.
At the end of the day, of course, the universe doesn't fucking care about your tender snowflake feelings. CO2 has the properties it has, and increasing even fractional percentages of overall CO2 in the atmosphere will inevitably lead to more heat being trapped. I do pity your fragile snowflake ego, though. I understand that your mommy and daddy never really explained to you that reality doesn't owe even the tiniest favor.
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One of my great-grandfathers grew up in a German-speaking Mennonite community in Ontario in the late 19th century. There were all kinds of distaff Pennsylvania Dutch communities throughout eastern North America who still primarily spoke German and Eastern European languages, and some, like the Amish, still prosper today. But when my great-grandfather left home to find work, he had to learn to speak and read English far better than he had as a child, and in the end, so I'm told, the German accent wasn't terribly perceptible.
My grandfather on my dad's side grew up in an area of British Columbia with a large population (for the region in the early 20th century) of Swedes and Norwegians, and all his sisters married Swedes, accept for his youngest, who married a Norwegian. Family reunions when I kid were fun, with lots of Olafs and Svens, and even a Thor, in attendance. So far as I remember, all the husbands were actually born in Scandinavia, and still had fairly thick accents.
But their grandkids, who I chummed around with when I visited when I was a kid, didn't know any Scandinavian language (except swear words, somehow those get passed on). Even their parents, second generation, knew very little, having to make their way in the English-speaking world.
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I'll take it one step further and suggest that "assimilation" is an anti-American concept. Though in reality we have a checkered history when it comes to this, we regard "religious freedom" as an American tenet. People established colonies here precisely because they didn't want to be assimilated into the cultures of where they came from. We are also one of the few countries that does not have an official language. That's not an oversight.
Given that religious values and language are intimately tied to culture, it's not at all a stretch to say that a diversity of cultures is baked into the fabric of America. What you've described as some new phenomena is what's being going on since the beginning.
Even among whites in the US there are regional dialects and cultural traditions that can be traced back to other countries, - Louisiana Creole for example. Then there's perhaps the best example, the Amish, who've doggedly resisted any sort of assimilation.
You can make the argument that the Amish should take on the values of the larger society but my point is that not "assimilating" is nothing new. And to the extent that melting does occur, it can take generations and is never really complete or uniform.
I find it ironic that some people want to turn the US into the kind of countries that our ancestors deliberately left.
I'm looking forward to the Klan marching in my town so I can kick their butts.
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I want to hug you right now.
I'm a liberal socialist (the best kid of socialist in my opinion!) and think your numbers are crazy. There are almost seven million tech workers in the US, and the H1-B program is capped at 65,000 visas/year for a three year stay.
As for the quote, it's not uncommon for people to take political quotes out of context, but I went to the source and I have to say the for once the article title is accurate. Either he was drawing a connection saying that a "civic society" (by which I think he means a "civil society") is an argument against having so many Asian/South Asian tech ceos, or he is given to rambling on in unconnected thoughts.
If you were really a socialist you'd understand the workers create wealth.It's the capitalists who leech off that. So more workers aren't the problem. It's management bringing workers in to depress wages. In particular with tech people working in tech tend to create more tech jobs. When you create software it create support and system management jobs -- it may even create more programming jobs. How many American jobs do you thin LInus Torvalds (an immigrant) has created? Red Hat alone employs almost ten thousand people.
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While yes, the remarks were clearly racist - especially given Bannon's background for context - his comments are also completely factually inaccurate, so defending them means you are at *best* extremely ignorant of the facts.
"two-thirds or three-quarters of the CEOs in Silicon Valley are from South Asia or from Asia"
Wha?? The percentage of any executive level is 14%, and of CEOs, well under that. Certainly below the population percentages of the area.
And your comment, "70-80% of tech workers here on H1-B visas" is even more inaccurate. I did see a quote (unverified) that 70% of Silicon Valley tech workers are foreign born, but that doesn't mean they are on a Visa nor Asian. I work with dozens of foreign born co-workers from all over - China, Russia, Germany, UK, India, Brazil, France, Thailand, etc - and probably only 1 in 10 are on a Visa, the rest are citizens or permanent residents.
We have a half dozen openings at any one time that we can't fill, and we rarely even SEE US-born applicants. If you are having trouble finding a job in the Silicon Valley right now, you are either not looking or just plain unqualified.
Oh, and back to racism... I don't think people are racist just for voting for Trump - they simply decided other (mostly empty) promises of his were more important to them than rejecting his racism flat out. But once you start actively ignoring or worse defending the racist aspects, then yes, you, too, are a racist, that's kind of the definition.
I too find his remarks highly racist. I've been working in Silicon Valley for 20 years and at all of the companies I have worked at there has always been a large percentage of immigrant engineers of all races. Most of the start-ups in the valley were started by immigrants and 51% of the billion-dollar startups were founded by immigrants. While some companies seem to abuse H1bs I can honestly say that in my experience there is a shortage of good engineers, at least for the areas I work with (high-speed networking code, embedded processors, bootloader code, Linux kernel code, etc.). There are not enough Americans graduating from college with the degrees and skills needed to fill the gap, especially as the older engineers start to retire.
Like the above poster, we see far more foreign born applicants than native born. Unlike some companies which hire a huge number of H1b's who aren't all that skilled, my employer tries to be picky and hire good engineers and we jump at the chance to hire truly great engineers, regardless of race, sex, etc.
We are a country of immigrants. Immigrants help make this country great, bringing new ideas. Silicon Valley has always been a land of immigrants even as far back as the gold rush, where Chinese were brought in through San Francisco. My current employer, as were about half of my previous employers were founded by immigrants.
I say this as a native-born white guy who was born and raised in Silicon Valley. I work with a lot of very talented engineers from all over the world, including many from south-east Asia. In every engineering position I've held, I've been surrounded by "minorities" and am often the minority. Steve Bannon is a disgrace.
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Conservative America wouldn't "throw down". 99% of them are in love with Leave it to Beaver, and have no stomach for what the alt-right claims Conservative Americans stand for. They just want a simpler time when it was easy for a college-educated white man to hold a single job and provide for a family as the sole bread winner. They don't want the racism, sexism, and everything else, but would tolerate it if required to get the dream back.
Turn it into a civil war and 99% of the conservatives will back off. Sure, the 1% left would bring it like the gun-toting craze people they are, but nothing turns a Conservative military person Liberal like having to deal with VA, then watching the "pro-military conservatives" cut funding, yet again. The currently serving cops and military may be conservative, but many ex-military (still with guns and such) have "turned" liberal. I think the conservatives would expect an easy time of it, and would have their ass handed to them.
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Aaah right, gotta get the terminology right. If a democrat is president or white people are doing it then it's patriotic protest, but if black people do it or a republican is president then it's 'hooligan's rioting'.
Just like when a muslim crashes a plane on purpose it's 'terrorism' but when a white guy crashes a plane on purpose it's 'mental illness'. | I don't recall a single MSM headline that called the German pilot who deliberately flew a plane into a mountain 2 years ago a terrorist - even though he clearly was.
Or how if a white guy walks into a restaurant with a loaded AR-15 with the safety off it's "open carry" but if a black man does the same it's "armed and dangerous" and soon to be "shot by police" (and as recent history shows -the 'black man' need not be a man 'ten your old boy' will do, and the 'gun' doesn't even have to be real, a toy gun, or even an imaginary gun, will do just as well.
Or how, when a black president does not attribute the behaviour of a small number of assholes to an entire religion he is 'too wimpy to say "radical islamic terrorism"' but when the FBI publishes a study that finds 'rightwing white militias are the number one greatest threat to American national security' the republicans in congress actively suppress publication of the report and that's NOT considered a cover-up ?
At least TRY to pretend you are not maintaining a double standard.
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I'll take it one step further and suggest that "assimilation" is an anti-American concept.
Generations of immigrants who didn't even teach their children their language because they wanted them to sound more American suggests otherwise. People used to be proud to become American. Now, not so much. Forcing assimilation is unamerican. But choosing to assimilate is very much an American value.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
My US Grandpa worked at Grumman Aircraft and helped building the Lunar Lander.
My US Great Grand Aunt was a Secretary of President Roosevelt.
My dad worked with NASA.
As a kid and teenager I was a very very proud american citizen, even though I lived abroad most of my life (I'm German now, for reasons unrelated to this post)
When my mom and my dad were in the US in Texas in the early '70ies , my mom worked the night-shift at a diner near Houston. During the day she would work part-time protocolling the radio transmitions of the Apollo missions, a job she had gotten through the contact of my dad, who was working at NASA at the time. We had a house in Clear-Lake-City, the engineers city Houston had build for the NASA employees.
There were two incidents she told me about a few times:
Once she was working the late shift at the Diner again and a bunch of men came in, and started asked my mom if she knew of some German lady working somewhere in a Diner not wearing a bra. It was a shock to my mom that some unknow group of men had gone out for a ride to come look for her because someone had spread the work *that she wasn't wearing a bra*. My mom speaks accent free english and said she'd never heard of anything like that. Please note: Not wearing a bra was perfectly normal in most parts of the western world in the 60ies and 70ies, but in totally backwards rural Texas it was considered a sensation/scandal.
Another time she was tending to african-american guests and talking and joking with them when an older cowboy got up in the middle of his meal, slammed money on the table and left without a word. My mom was bedazzled about what had gone wrong and the black people told her that white people don't talk to black people in these parts and that her behaviour was very unusual by rural Texas standards. Medieval standards, no less.
Fastforward into the early 80ies, smack in the middle of the cold war and nuclear exchange always looming we lived near Bonn in western Germany and my mom used to say that the Russians weren't the problem. But a USA turning fascist - that should be the thing to be afraid of. Very afraid.
My mom is a smart woman.
And I have to say, heaven help us all if it's the USAs turn to try out fascism.
And I know perfectly 'normal' nice people can turn into something far beyond anything one might call 'savage'. If you come to Germany today, you wouldn't think for a moment that our ancestors are responsible for the most extreme atrocities ever commited by and to humanity.
I'm actually staying paranoid and have been for the past 2.5 decades, ready to move out of Europe and to Patagonia or something, should fascism and xenophobia start to spread out in Europe and other parts of the western world again. And my buddies are starting to understand.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I've looked back through this thread and can't for the life of me figure out who SJW is that you are responding to .... is it someone you just made up?
I think what he meant was that ethnic Chinese/Indian/other Asian CEOs - regardless of whether they are citizens or not - support the H1B program not just for financial reasons, but also for cultural reasons: they want to get more of their ethnic compatriots here.
I read the full transcript of the conversation b/w Bannon and Trump, which happened when Trump called his radio show. Part of it is given above. The difference b/w them is on OPT authorizations of F1 visa extensions, whereby foreign students on F1 visas who graduate from US universities get a 1-2 year permit to legally work in the US. In terms of skills, they are at par w/ their US classmates, while being far less picky about employers (as a former OPT from the 90s, speaking from experience). This is where there is a break b/w Trump vs some people, like Bannon, Jeff Sessions and Ted Cruz, all of the latter who are opposed to OPT students continuing to work and become citizens. Not taking one side or another, just stating what it is.
If Trump wants his way, here is a way to sort this out. Right now, once the OPT period of a student ends, he can either leave the country, or his employer has to get an H1B visa, for which it has to get in line w/ the rest. Instead, if they introduce a new transitional visa b/w OPT and Permanent Resident/Citizen, that keeps that lane completely separate from the H1B visa lane. Unlike H1B workers who are offshore employees of companies who are brought here and who do bring down wages, OPT workers start on par w/ Americans, and it's only cheaper to hire them once they have to go on H1Bs. But in terms of skills, they are not like offshore workers i.e. an Indian who gets a CS degree in a US university is far more skilled than somebody run through the motions at HCL or Tech Mahindra. So it makes sense to treat them differently. I'm more w/ Trump on this than I'm w/ Bannon
I'm pretty sure they're going to take some time to fuck over the poor as well.
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
So anybody 'foreign born' is now 'on an H-1B visa'.
How about this, blow your racist bullshit out of your own ass all day long, it doesn't make you smart.