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Apple becomes first tech giant to explicitly ban caste discrimination

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Re: Apple becomes first tech giant to explicitly ban caste discrimination

#571
post #189

I worked at a company where this was an issue at one point (granted this was one situation among a lot of employees). A manager was pretty much dismissive of everything anyone of a lower caste did / wouldn't communicate with them effectively. HR absolutely struggled with the issue. The HR folks tasked with dealing with discrimination issues largely had spent their time constructing company wide emails and classes tha…

Most likely they struggled because the legal language in policies was ambiguous on how to handle the situation, therefore opening the room for the manager to pursue action against the company for consequences for their behavior. It would have been dealt with sooner if the employee was white because (assuming they meant white as in western white skinned person) culturally there isn't an equivalent of caste that would…

> culturally there isn't an equivalent of caste that would make sense for a white person to act on

Sure there is. People from English-speaking countries & Western Europeans vs "Eastern Europeans" and Latinos.

Ignoring for a moment that using the term "Eastern Europe" is itself hugely problematic, though usually because of ignorance not racism, I have worked in one and heard of several examples where there were huge discrepancies in salaries (much more than CoL-related), raises, promotions etc. between native English speakers and people from the CEE region.

There's absolutely a "caste" system among white people in tech. North Americans, UK, NZ, and AUS first, western Europe second, everyone else fifth.

Re: Apple becomes first tech giant to explicitly ban caste discrimination

#572

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That worked out well for the German communists who helped the Nazis under the belief that "After Hitler, our turn"

Re: Apple becomes first tech giant to explicitly ban caste discrimination

#573
post #407
post #298

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It's nothing that requires much research. The current national government openly supports discrimination on religious and caste based backgrounds. 7 years of this, and people who used to think "Caste is a taboo subject, and we should be working around it", now think "Caste pride is cool".

Hmm the current Prime Minister of India is from a "lower" caste. The current president of India is from a "lower" caste. Curious how you come up with "the current national government openly supports discrimination on religious and caste based backgrounds".

The Indian caste hierarchy works in complex ways. The very top and the very bottom are confirmed, but everyone in the middle just kind of gets mixed together.

If you’re Indian, you know it too - the OBC category is just political hogwash (disclaimer: I’m from an OBC category)

Re: Apple becomes first tech giant to explicitly ban caste discrimination

#574

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Do you know why this happened?

Religion, especially in public life, has made a big comeback under the current ruling party. This party is also generally considered an upper-caste party. I assume much of it is due to implicit soft support from the ruling establishment.

Modi is of lower caste. Most of the BJP leadership is lower caste.

Re: Apple becomes first tech giant to explicitly ban caste discrimination

#575

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The real shame is that living in Delhi, I’ve seen caste come back very strongly in everyday discourse. I’ve been here almost 20 years. This city used to be largely caste agnostic. Now when I meet new people, especially outside the elite tech circles, they will casually mention their upper caste status (“As Brahmins, we don’t do xyz of course!”). Even cars carrying caste stickers are more common.

I have not had to work with the caste system before. In your opinion, are there any benefits for low-to-mid caste in such a system?

I have never even stopped to consider the benefits - real or on paper - of a system of explicit discrimination.

It is morally repugnant and treating it as anything else is perhaps even more morally repugnant.

Re: Apple becomes first tech giant to explicitly ban caste discrimination

#576
post #176

I could have misread or maybe it was some sort of propaganda but I thought I read somewhere that Silicon Valley's caste discrimination is the inverse of what used to be in India? i.e. the lower castes discriminating against the higher castes.

Inverseish caste discrimination does happen in some places in India, where demographically large "lower" castes seize political power and take the spoils and boss around everyone else (both upper castes who're easy to oppress in the name of equality, as well as other lower castes).

But I can't see that happening in Silicon Valley. There's too many Brahmins for other castes to be able to discriminate against them.

Re: Apple becomes first tech giant to explicitly ban caste discrimination

#577

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Do you know why this happened?

Strictly from a resource allocation standpoint, it makes sense to keep economic flows within a subpopulation rather than diluting them over a broader population. Consider, "buy local" initiatives. I imagine that hypothetical Republicoin and Demacoin currencies would find strong support among the hard-core true believers of the respective groups for the same reasons.

Man do people really say stuff like this casually? That human beings are just “resources”?

Am I talking to a bot?

Re: Apple becomes first tech giant to explicitly ban caste discrimination

#578
post #479

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Morally, it may be obvious to us that that's how it should be, but the law doesn't work like that. The law runs on precedents. Taken another way, the law is like code. The "architects" of the code are the legislature who write the laws, and the "programmers" are the judges, who decide exactly what goes in the if-else conditions, based on their interpretation of the law, and those become precedents the next time someo…

Applicable precedent is basically already set for this, especially in the liberal Ninth Circuit. This is the language of Bostock regarding LGBTQ discrimination, decided in 2020 6-3 and written by a conservative constitutional originalist (Gorsuch): "An employer who fired an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex…

I think that word replacement, in a court of law, might be harder to do than you think because caste is not officially recognized by American law. I'm not sure how you could prove equivalence without a definition to work from.

It seems this is all being activity worked through now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste_discrimination_in_the_Un...

Re: Apple becomes first tech giant to explicitly ban caste discrimination

#579
post #344

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It isn’t necessarily the food itself, it’s just that the food marks somebody as lower class. For example, not knowing how to order sushi or use chopsticks. Maybe a better example is not knowing anything about wine. People will think you’re stupid or have bad taste. What would you think of a coworker bringing bologna and ketchup sandwiches to the office?

Nothing. I would think nothing of it, because I am not a low-classed, stone-aged, rocked-brained imbecile judging people by superficial nonsense instead of the content of their character & quality of their work. You can have all the money, power, and authority, but it doesn’t change the contents of your character. This type of judgement is indicative of low-class at a soul level — if such an impoverished soul makes j…

What does it mean to judge someone on the content of their character? It can be just as easily superficial as choosing to bring in a different kind of sandwhich to work.

Taking food down to a homeless man on the side of a street and filming it, is noble and worthy of praise but has limited practical impact on your ability to judge the person accurately. He could be doing it for the wrong reasons. He could be doing it for reasons that do not reflect his character.

Someone who is willing to change for his/her colleagues and practically improve the work enviroment is easy to judge favourably. Superficially and cosmically valid or not, a well oiled ship runs on aligning a lot of little 'superficial' parts.

Re: Apple becomes first tech giant to explicitly ban caste discrimination

#580
post #401

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Maybe "no true Scotsmxn" etc

Lol. I think it'd have to be "Scotsperson" or "Scotshuman" or "Scotsfolk" - the X is usually reserved for a vowel that indicates masculine or feminine, like the super popular "latinx" that's totally used by more than just rich white liberals.

"Scotsmxn" just reads to me as "Scots-mexican".
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