Stardate 20020815.1403

(On Screen): Max B. Sawicky responds rather scornfully to my post about transnational progressivism. To his credit, he actually does try to respond to some of the issues raised, and one of the things he does is to talk about the basic philosophical points on which progressivism is based, as originally identified by John Fonte and summarized by me in that post. He deals with each individually, but his responses can be summarized in each case to, "Of course! How could anyone think otherwise?"

To take one case:

"The goal of fairness is equality of results, not equality of opportunity." Actually for the Right, equality of opportunity is not of much interest either. But the main response here is that equality of results, broadly speaking, is the only proof of equality of opportunity.

Ah. On the contrary, equality of results proves inequality of opportunity. Left to themselves, people won't invariably distribute themselves as expected. In order for equality of opportunity to naturally manifest as equal results, you have to assume that everyone also has equal capability and equal desires. But that's observably not true.

There are, for instance, precious few Mexican-Americans playing in the NBA. Basketball, by its nature, is a sport for men who are very tall, and Mexican-Americans average much shorter then the median. Professional Basketball is disproportionately made up of blacks and whites, because for historical genetic reasons the majority of men who are extremely tall come from those groups. Should the Lakers be required to keep two Mexican Americans on their team at all time, and cut the number of blacks among their stars?

The NBA is meritocratic; those who play do so because they're good. There are fifty times as many people who'd like to play in the big leagues as there are positions to fill, and they select only the best, based pretty much solely on capability (and to a lesser extent on the rapaciousness of the demands by their agents).

Likewise, basketball is far more popular among young American blacks than it is among Mexican Americans, and young blacks spend far more time practicing it. There's much more opportunity for them to learn the game, and for those few who are also extremely talented to express that talent. And like almost anything else, skill improves with practice.

The disproportionately high representation of blacks in basketball is caused by differences in capability and differences in desire among blacks.

And the same thing happens in other areas. I used to work for Qualcomm designing cell phones. I was one of the senior engineers in the group, and we went through a period of very rapid hiring about four years ago. In many ways, that was the best job I ever held, and part of the reason why is that I'm a xenophile. I love diversity, I love being around people whose backgrounds are different than my own. I think xenophobes are idiots; they're losing all the flavor in life. That group was more mixed, less white-dominated, than any other place I've ever worked, and I loved it. White Men were distinctly underrepresented there, which was definitely fine with me.

We had Chinese from Taiwan, Chinese from the mainland; we had Vietnamese and Laotians and Cambodians and Thais. We had a lot of people from India. We had Pakistanis. We had Arabs and we had Israelis (who seemed to have no difficulty working with each other). We had a Sikh who wore a turban. His parents migrated to Canada and he grew up in Toronto. We had a lot of other Canadians, and we had Aussies and people from South Africa, and Brits. We had Russians and a Czech and a couple of Hungarians. We had Christians and Hindus and Muslims and Jews and atheists. We had a hell of a lot of women, white women, Indian women, Chinese women, foreign women, American-born women. We had native-born citizens and naturalized citizens and green cards and H1B's.

We had a lot of people who were rather difficult to categorize. We had a guy from Honolulu who was half native Hawaiian and half Chinese. (He only spoke English, except that he could curse in Chinese.)

And this was true at all levels of management; there was no glass ceiling. It wasn't a white male command structure over an army of nonwhite grunts. There was no important difference I ever noticed in the ethnic mix of the management or at any level of seniority among the professional staff.

Before I started doing any interviewing for the company, they sent me to a class where they emphasized what the company was looking for, and what we didn't care about. A lot of the class consisted of explanations about what kinds of things we couldn't ask and what kinds of things we did not take into account. This wasn't a token attempt; they were very serious about it.

When I was told to take a candidate to lunch, I would ask "What kind of food do you like?" If the candidate was an Indian, I wasn't permitted to ask, "Are you vegetarian?" even though many as Hindus were, because that was a question which might be interpreted as an inquiry about religion and not merely about what kind of meal I should buy for them. But if in response to my more generic question they responded, "Vegetarian" then it was OK. That's the kind of care we took.

And I saw not the faintest trace, not the slightest whiff of anyt