🚀 go-pugleaf

<<... lower caste people in India have special reservations in jobs,
education, political office etc., reserved for them in India. This is a
far more decisive commitment to solving the caste problem than the
bogus and flimsy affirmative action policy that is policy in the USA
...>>

Not to mention the fact that the voters of California passed a measure
last fall outlawing affirmative action, and earlier this month the
court has declared that measure consitutional hence enforceable. I.e.
there's no longer any affirmative action in California, the most
populated state in the USA. It has changed from "bogus and flimsy" to
"non-existant" in California.

<<The prime minister of India is a lower caste person. When was the
last time America had a black president?>>

Nitpick (pet peeve, ignore if you don't consider it worth debating):

People of African ancestry are NOT skin-colored black (except a very
few who have extremely dark brown skin which is indistinguishable from
black by ordinary means of measurement). Such people are colored a wide
range of shades of tan and brown. If they are in the USA, we should
refer to them as "African-Americans" or "Americans of African
ancestry", not as "blacks".

Even moreso for we of European ancestry, whose true skin-color is a
wide range of colors ranging among beige, pink, orange, tan, peach,
red, yellow, etc. Most such people actually have a wide range of colors
on different places of the same person. I have never seen even one
person whose skin-color was indistinguishable from white. The closest
to white I've ever seen was one girl of Finnish ancestry whose skin was
a near-white shade of cream color.

So let's get rid of the grossly contrary-to-fact "white" and "black" as
racial terminology for "european-ancestry" and "african-ancestry"
respectively, and likewise get rid of offensive terms such as the
"n-word" and the euphemism for it "negro".

Although "afro" came to mean a particular hairstyle, I think it could
be adapted as a term to denote the african race when you don't have
time to say a tongue-twister such as "person of African ancestry" in
the middle of a sentence.

The term "caucasian" is confusing because not many people know much
about pre-historic miagrations whereby it's believed that all people
inhabiting Europe a thousand years ago (before intercontinental
miagration started mixing all the races together) originally miagrated
from the Caucasus region, so most people have to just memorize that
"caucasian" means "European ancestry". They might as well memorize
that "foo" or "zorch" means "European ancestry". We might use "euro"
to mean "european ancestry", but I have a better idea. Way back in the
pioneer days, when wagon trains came across from Eastern USA to the
plains to settle the land formerly belonging to France (Louisiana
purchase) and Spain/Mexico (Texan revoluation and the Alamo), to kill
any native-American who didn't want his land taken for use by the
settlers, resulting in total extermination of most of the
native-American nations and near extermination of the rest, the
Mexican bandidos overheard the settlers singing their favorite song
"Green Grow the Lilacs", and not understanding enough English the
bandidos slurred the "Green Grow" sounds to "Gringo", which I think
would be a perfectly appropriate 'albatross' for the
European-Americans to suffer for the next hundred years.

P.S. I'm of European ancestry (one quarter each: German, Dutch,
English, French, although the French quarter is from the Lousiana area,
originally from a French trapper who according to family legends
married a native-American woman many generations back, so I might have
a trace of Native-American in me) and I personally think it would be
cute if my race were referred to as "Gringo", with a smile if possible.
(Previously on those stupid government forms asking me to state my race
so that the bureaucrats can keep track on various matters, I've always
put "Caucasian", and cringed when it was multiple choice with "White"
instead of "Caucasian". But the next time I am required to fill out one
of those stupid forms, and it's fill in the blank instead of check the
box, I swear I'm going to put "Gringo" instead. Let the bureaucrats
blow their minds out over that!!) I'd rather have some Mexican-American
come up to me and say "Hey, Gringo" with a big smile, than call me
"Whitie" with a look like I'm going to get knifed if I turn my back.

After another hundred years this will all be moot because people have
GUIs so powerful they'll never need to communicate by words, they'll
just click on an icon of a person with a narrow pointy nose and
light-beige skin (or an icon of a person with a broad nose and brown
skin) and that'll be that. (For those who remember StarTrek the Next
Generation: Darmok -- We'll be communicating full multi-media scenes,
such as the lady on the balcony with her boyfriend below as she calls
out "Romeo where art thou", rather than attempting to condense such a
rich scene into a few words, and we'll eventually lose the skill at
words, and be unable to communicate with less advanced races we meet
out in deep space who don't understand our allusions to great
multi-media literature such as Shakespeare to the tune of Carmen on
Gilligan's Island.)

Anyway, rephrasing what was posted previously: Every President so-far
has been a pre-Gringo (founding father) or a Gringo, not a single Afro
or Latino or Oriental so-far. I agree and would like to see it change,
not by "affirmative action" whereby we reserve a slot for a different
race, but where we find a geninuinely talanted person of non-Gringo
race. Because of the strong racial barriers to politics at the low
level, there are only a few candicates to choose from (Shirley Chisholm
and John Vasconcellos to name the only two I would consider good enough
that I might vote for if they were running). But if somebody with no
prior experience except entertainment can become Congresscritter or
even President (the poor example being actor Ronald "Bedtime for bonzo"
Reagan, but the really good example being singer Sunny Bono), maybe
that can happen again. How about blues singer Ray Charles as President
(using a sound-generating GUI to overcome his disability when viewing a
battlefield or strategic map, a "boom" here and there to indicate a
battle, with patriotic music coming from the same spot on the map to
identify which side is winning that particular battle), thereby
combining the very first Afro President with the second disabled
President (after FDR). If Ray Charles isn't intersted in politics,
maybe somebody can post a followup suggesting several other singers
(blues preferably) who are not Gringo and who don't hate Gringos but
just want a fair chance for all races, and who might like to get into
the White House?

<<the intensity, frequency, violence and pervasiveness of racism in the
USA is far more serious than untouchability is in India.>>

India's system is basically an a priori pecking order. The pecking goes
just one way. But racism in America is a shitload of hatred of each
race for all other races they've ever gotten a greviance against. We
have to get people of different races working together so they can see
each other as real people they like instead of as strangers they fear.
The only good solution I can think of is computer-dating clubs (not for
sex, just for companionship and brainstorming on common interests)
whereby the computer deliberately matches people of different races as
much as possible given their common interests. This could also be done
with UseNet whereby you see articles posted by people of OTHER races
from your own with higher priority than articles from those of your own
race, except if people of different races chatted and brainstormed for
months and never suspected they were of different races it wouldn't do
much toward reducing racism unless one or the other of two penpals
happened to mention something about race by accident. But a computer
program to book reservations on an airline or tour ship or tennis club
might deliberately try to racially balance the people and shuffle the
seating/cabins/matches so all your neighbors/partners were of a
different race and you'd have to lean over somebody to talk to anyone
of the same race and it'd be awful awkward to act like a racist by
shunning all your neighbors in favor of the same-race person two rows
up or five seats over.

As for the year-2000 problem: Each company that wishes to find talented
programmers to fix the problem for their company should arrange a test
with an equal number of applicants from each of these four racial
groups: Gringo, Afro, Oriental, and NoneOfTheAbove (Indo-Pakistani,
Philippino, Native-American, Australian-Aborigine, Persian, etc.
whichever is available), whereby a simple easy-to-fix case is given to
each of them and they must fix it quickly and correctly (no time-bomb
bugs for the year 3000 or 10000, for example, fully functionning up to
year 9999 and fail-soft beyond there would be good enough). A "ladder"
is then set up whereby the applicants are promoted to higher rung if
they do the best job, and demoted toward the bottom (and eliminated
after two or three down steps) if they can't do the job at all,
eventually after several such tests resulting in a clear rating of
applicants from the very best down to the so-so (and totally
eliminating the totally incompetant). By using a ladder instead of a
single-elimination tournament, somebody who isn't up to speed due to
recent employment or lack of prior experience at the particular
language (COBOL or Visual Basic or C++) or system (MS-Windows or HP3000
etc.) can use the "ladder" as a way to quickly self-train to then be
able to get back up the "ladder". Thus no racial discrimination (except
insofar as there are too many Gringo applicants and they have to wait
in line to join the ladder) and only a little discrimination against
people who didn't have prior experience in the particular platform.

<<America didn't enter the civilized world until the late 60s when
segregation was finally limited.>>

I don't like black/white (ON/OFF, YES/NO) distinctions, except where
they apply to nature. There really are leptons and bosons, and nothing
that is sort of part one and part the other. But there's no such thing
as civilized and non-civilized with a gap between. Civilization is a
matter of degree. Where you choose to draw the line is different from
where any other intelligent person would draw it. Only an idiot would
agree exactly with where another person draws the line. For example, a
famous mathematician (I forget the name, I'm suffer from a disability
where I have trouble remembering names of who said what) once said
something like this (I also can't remember the exact words, another
effect of that disability I suffer): Anyone who doesn't understand
mathematics is not really a human being. At best he's a sub-human
animal who has been potty trained. Personally I treat that as a cute
place to draw the line, although of course I wouldn't draw the line
there, not because I think that's a particular bad place to draw the
line, but because I don't think it's reasonable to draw the line at
all. After all, even understanding mathematics is a continuous spectrum
not a YES/NO category distinction. For example, I placed top five in a
nationwide mathematics contest, yet never really got the knack of
linear algebra such as eigenvalues. My parents used to piss me off when
I was a teenager and they bitched at me that "If you're so smart, why
can't you figure out how to mow the lawn more efficiently." I could
solve problems I'd never seen before when I wasn't even in high school
yet, such as the island with the five shipwrecked sailors who didn't
trust each other so snuck out at night and each divided the coconuts
into five equal piles and squirrelled away their share but there was
one left over so they tossed it to the monkey, but I was STUPID about
other matters such as how to mow the lawn efficiently, and how to get
girls interested in me so I wouldn't get kicked in the shin when I
tried to follow them around to show I liked them.

So anyway, the USA was wonderfully civilized about individual civil
rights, but ONLY FOR GRINGOS until very recently, and for technology
and industry, but ONLY FOR GRINGOS until very recently, while some
other nations were STILL not yet civilized for hardly anyone at all,
such as the USSR under Stalin, Cambodia under Pol Pot, and the
Christian and related religions (sort of geographically distributed
forms of government) which to this day claim there's a supernatural
humanoid being who created the whole Earth and vicinity and His Word
says there was only about five days from when He created the first life
on Earth until human beings were walking around and talking and naming
animals, despite the facts from natural history (specifically
archeology of fossils in layers of sediments later turned to rock
whereby radioactive decay is used to date individual fossils and hence
most other fossils within the same layer) that show at least
3,500,000,000 years passed from the first bacteria on Earth until
creatures we recognize as near-modern human beings.

<<Ever see pictures of "colored" water fountains?>>

Here goes another of my pet peeves, this ass-backwards label used by
the Gringos to put down the Afros and other races (does George Carlin
have this in his list of oxymorons?): Afros are generally various
shades of brown and tan, not much variation in color, not much color at
all. But Gringos are all sorts of bright colors such as orange or pink
or red, along with the duller shades such as beige and tan. If anyone
should be called "colored" it should be the gringos, not the afros!!
But the gringos had the idea that white was clean and black or colored
was dirty, apparently derived from their starched white shirts, which
if yellow indicates aging, and if tan indicates dirt or diarrhea, and
if pink indicates they forgot to separate the whites and coloreds when
washing, so they somehow extended that to race in a stupid way. Except
for my French quarter, my ancestry is innocent (my other three quarters
came from Europe only 2-3 generations ago, long after the "colored"
designation was coined in America), but I still regret that somebody
related to me far away could do such a stupid thing, and would be
willing to be called "Gringo" for the next hundred years as a result,
even though none of my ancestors ever sang that "Green Grows ..." song
in that context. (But then my own sister and parents and grand-parents
and uncle on my mother's side each did some awfully stupid things, so I
can't worry too much about what some distant relative did long ago. If
anybody knows the whereabouts of my uncle Herbert Engle, husband of
Hazel (and father of Cynthia Whitman by Hazel) and Barbara and Jeannie
in that order before we lost contact, please let me know.)

<<Why is it that I don't see many black people in corporate offices?>>

Lucky you! I don't get to see ANYONE WHATSOEVER in corporate offices,
because I've never been invited in, because I don't have management
skills, and I don't have commercial skills, and I don't have C++ or
Visual Basic experience (only 14 years LISP experience and 7 years
other various languages such as Algol and Fortran and DEC PDP-10 and
IBM 1620 and MOS 6502 and Intel 8080 etc.). I can't say myself who's in
there because I'm never invited in there to look.

Or was that just a figure of speech you uttered?

<<Why is it that so many white people cross the street when they see a
black guy walk up the street?>>

Not here in fully integrated Mountain View, CA.

<<Why is it that so many cops beat and murder black/hispanic people
with impunity? Why is it that blacks and hispanics live in the inner
city and poorer sections of town?>>

I can believe those statistics! Maybe the solution is a quota system
for each large apartment complex (over 30 units): Equal amounts of
Gringo, Afro, Oriental, Latino, and Other, waiting list for any extra
applicants in any category beyond those equal amounts. For smaller
complexes and individual rental housing, allow several homeowners to
form a collective where they share the allocation and share maintenance
costs, so if one race or another really does mess up the property more
than another (which I really doubt, it's the drug dealers not the Afros
or Latinos that trash the apartments, and there are a lot of Gringo
drug dealers too), then the particular homeowner that rented to the
offending race would share the cleanup cost with the homeowners so
would have no particular reason to complain about having to rent to a
messy race (which as I said just above is in my opinion bull pucky in
the first place), so would be willing to join this rental-housing
racial-quota system without having to be dragged kicking and screaming
into it (and then would learn the fears about vandalism were
unwarranted, and might even become enlightened about the races).

<<I usually don't rub American's noses in their racist dirt, but when
you act sanctimonious, hypocritical and racist about India/Indians (by
harping on untouchability) I have to point out your own more serious
racist flaws.>>

I'm an American, and I agree we still have a lot of racism, and I agree
we need to tell people about it, and if they don't understand we need
to rub their noses in it a little until they do understand.

P.S. When I was in jail recently (because I disobeyed a police officer
for about two minutes, causing his duties to be delayed by that time) I
met some friendly guys (2 Latinos, 1 Afro, and 1 Gringo), and some
weird but nice guys (about half Afro and half Gringo, the latters
ranging from English to Italian in skin color), and one extremely shy
person I managed to break-ice with (1 Gringo), and the rest sort of
neutral except for a very few Afros who seemed incredibly uptight,
unwilling to let me socialize with them, and I can guess why and
understand if they've been victims of Gringo/Afro discrimination and
abuse, so I left those few alone.

<<If you can't compete with them professionally, bring some unrelated,
usually stereotypicaly misinformed, racist and prejudiced notion into
the argument to malign them. Both India and America have got social
problems.>>

I agree, that's unfair to Indians. But I must mention a consequence of
the Indian stereotypes that hurts me as an unemployed disabled Gringo:
Employers refuse to hire me, because I'm not worth $50/hour in their
opinion, but if I say I'm willing to program computers for $20/hr they
say if I am willing to work for such a low wage after more than 21
years experience programming then I must be totally worthless and they
won't hire even at minimum wage. Then they go out and hire an Indian at
$30/hr to "save money" compared to American applicants who "all require
at least $40/hr". If I were Indian, I'd be able to get a job at $20/hr
easily despite my disabilities, but because I'm Gringo, I'm rejected.

(Before you ask "why don't you tell the employer they MUST hire you
because otherwise they might suffer a lawsuit or civil-rights criminal
action accusing them of discriminating against the handicapped":
Unfortunately my particular disabilities aren't the recognized ones
like blindness or missing limbs etc. so there's no legal protection for
me against discrimination in hiring. It's perfectly legal for Round
Table Pizza to fire me because I suffer from a disability that makes it
impossible for me to memorize the prices on the menu, and for Lockheed
to refuse to consider me because I need to take short naps once or
twice in the middle of the workday, and for Xerox to refuse to consider
me because I can't provide three letters of recommendation because I
don't have the social skills to make friends and to convince my former
supervisor Tryg Ager and project chairman Pat Suppes of IMSSS at
Stanford University to write a fucking letter of reference telling
prospective employers what good work I did for him for ten years,
despite my disabilities, before Stanford lost NSF funding and IMSSS to
terminate my employment.)

<<Both India and America have got social problems. Keep them out of
professional technical debate.>>

Oops, after I post this will I get ten thousand e-mail letters
complaining that I posted to an inappropriate newsgroup?

Muddah, Faddah, kindly disregard this leddah! - Alan Sherman

P.S. If you want to know what I do besides program computers and
organize information databases: I'm a "ditty writer". For example,
here's my nihilist version of the opening theme for the PBS television
series "Puzzle Place":

  I know NOTHING!

and here are my alt.barney.dinosaur.die.die.die versions of the opening
and closing themes for Barney and Friends, also on PBS:

  Barney was a dinosaur, he died.

  I loved you, but you died.

Finally, I'm not sure I exactly remember, and it's too much trouble to
try to find where I stored the original, but here's my athiest theme
song, to the same tune as Barney is/was a Dinosaur:

  Jesus died across the sea, he was a common criminal.
  Churches force us songs to sing, they come from stupid hymn(i)nals.

Yup, that's a dandy ditty I wrote!! Anybody hiring athiest ditty writers,
or do y'all discriminate against athiests because of their religion??

-----
We can never have freedom of religion until we have freedom FROM religion.
We can never be free to believe what we want,
until we are free NOT to believe what others want us to believe instead.