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Moist Hegel

@Dialectiks

Jan 1

The H-1B work visa is fundamentally about cheap, de facto indentured labor. Tech industry lobbyists pitch it as a fix for labor shortages and a way to hire the world’s “best and brightest."

In practice, these claims are invalid. Most H-1Bs, even those hired from U.S. universities, are ordinary workers doing ordinary jobs, and their overall quality is often lower than that of Americans.

This program isn’t used because there are no qualified Americans. It’s about cheap, immobile labor:

Type I Wage Savings:

- Paying H-1Bs less than comparable Americans (in fully legal ways, thanks to loopholes).

- Most H-1Bs are under 30, and younger workers cost less in wages and healthcare, so employers use H-1B to avoid hiring older Americans, where “old” means 35. The key is the four-tier prevailing wage system, which effectively sets wage floors by level of “experience”—in reality, by age.

Type II Wage Savings:

- Hiring younger, cheaper workers to avoid employing Americans over 35, who command higher salaries.

- The primary appeal of H-1Bs, especially in Silicon Valley, is their “handcuffed” status. Sponsored workers cannot easily leave, particularly if a green card application is underway, making them extremely attractive to employers. Even supporters of H-1B, like Vivek Wadhwa, have admitted underpaying H-1Bs. Multiple studies show that H-1Bs are often paid less than similarly-qualified Americans. This is partly because H-1Bs, lacking mobility, cannot negotiate better pay.

Abuse of H-1B runs throughout the tech industry, including large U.S. firms and top immigration law firms, not just Indian “body shops.”

It also occurs in hiring foreign students at U.S. campuses.

Underpayment of H-1Bs is a documented fact, supported by congressional reports and multiple academic studies. Even staunch defenders of foreign worker programs have admitted it:

“I know from my experience as a tech CEO that H-1Bs are cheaper than domestic hires…[the] mechanism is riddled with loopholes.” — Vivek Wadhwa, former tech CEO and vocal advocate of expansion

Representative Zoe Lofgren, historically the H-1B program’s strongest ally in Congress, has also acknowledged that undercutting American wages is built into the system:

“…the average wage for computer systems analysts in [Silicon Valley] is $92,000, but the prevailing wage rate for H-1Bs in the same job is $52,000.” — Rep. Zoe Lofgren

Though Lofgren proposed a 2011 reform bill, it would not have closed major loopholes and would have added a “automatic green card” track. It also scapegoated Indian IT services, which is inaccurate and overlooks that the entire industry uses H-1B for cheap labor.

Underpayment is usually legal due to loopholes in H-1B law, not due to lax enforcement.

For instance:

The “prevailing wage” excludes market premiums for “hot” skills, so the legally required wage is lower than the true market rate.

The “actual wage” (paid to workers in the same job) can be dodged if the employer redefines jobs or if most workers in that role are also H-1Bs.

PERM data show employers routinely pay H-1Bs only at or near the prevailing wage. This underpayment pervades not just Indian “bodyshops” but also big mainstream U.S. tech firms.

Though visa sponsorship costs a few thousand dollars, employers easily recoup that by saving tens of thousands annually per underpaid foreign worker.

No credible (non-industry-sponsored) study shows a tech labor shortage.

Wages for both entry-level and experienced professionals remain largely flat. Unemployment figures don’t capture underemployment or forced career changes.

Undergraduate STEM programs produce more than enough bachelor’s graduates. The supposed shortage at the PhD level stems from the influx of foreign grad students, which depresses wages and discourages Americans from pursuing doctoral degrees—exactly as predicted by an NSF internal report in 1989. Even the NIH found that a glut of foreign lab scientists drives talented Americans away from the field.

In reality, employers hire only a fraction of domestic applicants, often discarding those deemed “too expensive” (i.e., over 35). Companies also exploit H-1Bs for offshoring facilitation, contradicting claims that visas prevent shipping jobs overseas.

Industry advocates say H-1B is needed to keep “the best and brightest” in the U.S., but most H-1Bs are not in that elite category, and Americans with experience or advanced degrees often match or exceed their innovation potential. Research shows no patenting advantage for H-1Bs, and some evidence suggests the opposite.

Green card fast-tracks won’t fix age discrimination; foreign workers would still be young and cheap relative to older Americans. Calls to keep foreign students in the U.S. so they don’t help competitors are disingenuous; many do transnational work anyway.

Except in very narrow cases, employers are not required to recruit Americans first. Inflated claims that each H-1B job “creates” additional jobs have been discredited. Meanwhile, most foreign students who want to stay, do stay.

At a minimum, the definition of prevailing wage needs to be changed in the legislation to reflect genuine market pay.

IMPORTANTLY, provisions targeting fraud/enforcement are less crucial because the main problem is legal loopholes, not illegal conduct.

THE ISSUE IS NOT FRAUD

They are trying to hide the ball by saying there needs to be reform to prevent fraud.

The LOOPHOLES are the issue, and this is something that they conveniently obfuscate and detract from.

Comprehensive study done on abuses of the program from 2003—abuses that have never actually been reformed:

heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Mich.pdf

x.com/dialectiks/sta…

x.com/dialectiks/sta… x.com/dialectiks/sta…

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Moist Hegel

@Dialectiks

Dec 16, 2024

While it is accurate that some individuals develop an unhealthy fixation on the pursuit of sexual or emotional validation from women, many fail to disentangle the object of that fixation from the underlying pathology driving it.

The conceptual error often made is treating “women” as if they were an inherently causative agent, when in reality women, like any external stimulus, are not the prime movers of the compulsion. Rather, the root problem is in the internal psychological and behavioral patterns of the individual who becomes addicted to the pursuit itself, similarly to someone who becomes addicted to a substance vis a vis their own psychological vulnerabilities and neurochemical reward circuits that reinforce the behavior, a dispositional proclivity that exists independent of the properties of the drug itself.

In this regard, women function as the stimulus that triggers, or at least reinforces, a preexisting proclivity toward dependence and fixation. The underlying issue is the internal relationship the individual has cultivated with that stimulus.

For example, an individual might develop a reinforcement loop wherein the attention and sexual validation they receive from women creates a reward-driven loop that manifests as a pathological fixation. This would produce symptoms analogous to substance addiction, i.e., obsessive thinking, tolerance (needing more attention or more intense encounters to feel the same “high”), and withdrawal-like distress when the desired stimulus is unavailable. The individual might similarly do whatever it takes, to their own humiliation, detriment, social standing, dignity, what have you, to get "a fix."

Many fail to recognize that the “pathogen” is not women, per se, but the addictive behavior patterns and the distorted cognitive motivation that leads to the preoccupation that produces "simping." The solution is therefore remediating the underlying maladaptive emotional and psychological schemas, but many actually fail to address this, and instead solve their preoccupation by developing a deep seated hatred and resentment of women, which is just as pathological a response.

It seems a lot of individuals swing to the opposite extreme through developing a seething hatred of women as though they constitute the root cause of the internally occurring pathological dynamic. This externalizes the problem and obscures the root cause of the internal dysfunction.

It seems many have developed this response and have adopted an entrenched form of resentment/fear, that almost manifests as a phobic aversion, a deep seated “fear of ass.” This is further catalyzed when you factor in the fear of rejection that many men have and how many externalize their fear of rejection, and it transmutates into a fear of women.

The above dynamic is why so many men now manifest with what has been described as being "spiritually gay."

https://x.com/Dialectiks/status/1868095274629148894

https://x.com/Dialectiks/status/1868095274629148894

A lot of this dynamic can likely be explained from an absent father figure or a disinterested and unengaged father figure.

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC54…

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Moist Hegel

@Dialectiks

Oct 25, 2024

The Fragility of Liberal Universalism: Epistemic Contingency and the Collapse of the Noble Lie

🧵Essay thread on some of the conclusions I’ve come to over the last couple years—after a lot of reading, writing, and thinking. 🧵

1/x

Classical liberalism’s foundational reliance on “natural law” unveils an intrinsic epistemic contradiction—a dialectical dissonance deliberately obscured by a constructed noble lie.

This noble lie, contingent on an amorphous framework of “God-given” or “natural” rights, is purposefully vague, a calculated ecumenical abstraction meant to accommodate diverse and often incompatible theological and epistemological foundations. Natural law’s character as a noble lie becomes painfully evident when those who self-identify as atheists, agnostics, gnostics, and pantheists apply painfully contrived polemics extolling the principle of a set of “God-given” or “transcendentally endowed” rights or privileges—thus, the contradiction becomes evident as foundational to its very structure.

The liberal invocation of a universal, indeterminate “transcendent essence” serves as a pseudo-metaphysical pivot, providing a shared yet unexamined substrate upon which disparate ideologies coalesce. Such an arrangement allowed classical liberalism to project a veneer of universalism without necessitating ontological consensus on the source or substance of rights. Initially pragmatic, this abstraction unified factions across the Protestant fragmentation by appealing to a minimalistic, malleable principle rather than demanding a rigorous metaphysical commitment. However, the viability of this construct is inherently contingent upon the willingness of all constituent groups to tacitly uphold some transcendent referent.

The rise of postmodern and deconstructionist cosmologies—worldviews fundamentally averse to transcendental principles and favoring instead immanent, relativistic frameworks—effectively destabilizes this liberal noble lie, exposing the conceptual edifice of natural law as contingent and context-bound rather than universally axiomatic. Herein lies liberalism’s epistemic fragility: it asserts universality while tacitly relying on a metaphysical scaffold that is neither universally acknowledged nor objective. The maintenance of democratic pluralism is thus, tenuously supported by some vague acknowledgment or deferral to “consensus,” or in other words, “common sense,” while simultaneously extolling that the “common” is made empirically self-evident by “the divine.”

The resulting self-referentiality permeates multiple socio-political domains, revealing liberalism’s supposed universality as selective, culturally particular, and deeply embedded in Western, Protestant-influenced ontologies. When transplanted onto international frameworks, liberalism’s universalist pretensions encounter insurmountable dissonance, as societies rooted in fundamentally distinct metaphysical traditions find liberal constructs culturally myopic and epistemically incongruent. Thus, what is projected as universal becomes, on closer inspection, a parochial value system, one implicitly reliant on Western hegemony for its preservation and extension.

2/x

On the national front, the liberal framework promises a “marketplace of ideas” ostensibly open to pluralism; however, the operative tolerance in this model is intrinsically conditional, limited by liberalism’s own epistemological strictures. While classical liberals extol open discourse, this tolerance is selectively extended only to perspectives that uphold or minimally disrupt the liberal order. When dissident ideologies emerge that threaten to destabilize the natural law construct or illuminate the relativistic nature of liberal epistemology, liberalism’s commitment to pluralism dissipates. In practice, this marketplace of ideas becomes a meticulously curated sphere, where destabilizing critiques are systematically neutralized, not through dialectical engagement but through ideological gatekeeping—often through straw man fallacies, ad hominem dismissals, or outright exclusion. Liberalism’s purported anti-authoritarianism is thus conditional and self-canceling; it is contingent on the preservation of ideological coherence, resulting in a latent authoritarianism that suppresses divergence under the guise of safeguarding pluralism.

In social and cultural spheres, the contradictions in liberalism’s pluralism become more explicit. Liberal tolerance is predicated on an assumption that identity-based affiliations will conform to liberal individualism, maintaining social cohesion without challenging the primacy of individual autonomy. As long as intergroup relations do not expose structural deficiencies in the liberal framework, diversity is nominally celebrated. However, when identity-based collectives underscore the limitations of liberal egalitarianism—by emphasizing hierarchies or communitarian structures irreducible to individual merit—liberal tolerance wanes. Rather than re-examining the structural rigidity of its own ideological framework, liberalism opts to delegitimize such critiques, framing them as threats to social cohesion or as obstacles to “progress.” Here, liberalism reveals its own limitations: it endorses diversity only so far as it aligns with individualistic ethos, refusing to entertain forms of plurality that expose liberalism’s inherent incapacity to reconcile group identities within a strictly individualistic model.

Religiously, the liberal reliance on natural law as a cohesive foundation emerged as a pragmatic response to Protestant fragmentation, enabling a minimalistic unification of divergent denominations through the ambiguous invocation of “God-given rights.” This framework operated effectively within a theistic paradigm, where a shared belief in a transcendent order lent credence to the liberal construct. However, as secularization progresses and materialist cosmologies proliferate, this shared fiction begins to disintegrate. Secular, immanent frameworks increasingly challenge the liberal appeal to transcendent rights, viewing them as socially constructed rather than metaphysically grounded. The dissolution of a shared metaphysical foundation thus reveals liberalism’s reliance on natural law as an instrumental strategy rather than a genuinely ontological commitment. Once reinterpreted as a social construct, natural law’s unifying potency fades, destabilizing the liberal model’s claim to universality and coherence.

3/x

Politically, liberalism’s anti-authoritarian rhetoric is unveiled as selectively conditional. While liberalism proclaims itself as a champion of individual freedoms, its tolerance extends only to those perspectives that do not threaten its ideological hegemony. When unorthodox views pose a destabilizing risk, liberalism reverts to authoritarian strategies—regulating ideological boundaries to maintain epistemological authority. Liberal institutions, instead of fostering open debate, resort to punitive mechanisms to neutralize dissent, often rebranding challengers as extremists to enforce ideological conformity. This concealed authoritarianism reveals that liberalism’s anti-authoritarianism is not an absolute commitment but an operational fiction—a mechanism to ensure structural compliance while nominally upholding individual liberty.

In cultural terms, the paradoxes of liberalism are starkly apparent in its relationship with tradition and identity. While liberalism posits itself as ideologically neutral, privileging individual autonomy over collective or inherited affiliations, this neutrality becomes problematic when identity-based communities assert their distinctiveness against liberal norms. In such cases, liberalism seeks to deconstruct these affiliations, relegating them to the status of personal preferences devoid of any substantive ontological weight. By doing so, liberalism undermines foundational elements of human continuity and social order, destabilizing the organic affiliations that sustain communal cohesion. In replacing these natural affiliations with an imposed and fragile sense of individualistic freedom, liberalism overlooks that collective identity and tradition are not arbitrary but integral to a cohesive social order that liberal individualism cannot replicate.

The centrists, classical liberals, and aligned cohorts, in their philosophical commitment to meritocratic individualism, hold a foundationally flawed assumption: they treat any analytical focus on hierarchical power—especially if rooted in identity—as intrinsically invalid. Their conceptualization of hierarchy presumes it to be a neutral, merit-based structure unanchored from the deeper socio-cultural and metaphysical affinities that historically bind people. This presumption blinds them to the inherent cohesion that identity-based hierarchies provide, reducing all human differentiation to a matter of individual achievement or cultural preference. By disregarding these foundational elements, they effectively erode any grounding for an organic order, forcing a sanitized social structure devoid of the natural cohesiveness that identity-anchored affiliations provide.

Consequently, centrists promulgate an artificial egalitarianism, wherein disparities in group outcomes are endlessly attributed to nebulous virtues like work ethic or ambition, dismissing the enduring, intrinsic qualities that substantiate stable social structures. This egalitarianism constructs an abstract, rootless social vision in which continuity, heritage, and identity are diminished, leaving a hierarchical vacuum that overlooks the stabilizing force that ordered, identity-based structures naturally provide. The authoritarian right, conversely, perceives hierarchy not as a neutral tool but as an intrinsic stabilizer—a societal scaffolding grounded in identity. They argue that identity-anchored hierarchies reflect an order that acknowledges and preserves human differences, advocating for a coherent social structure rooted in tradition and intergenerational continuity.

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Moist Hegel

@Dialectiks

Sep 14, 2024

Unraveling the Cultural DNA of the West: Self-Referential Paradoxes and the Crisis of Identity

A thread 🧵

1/18

The Unraveling

Imagine Western culture as a DNA strand—the fundamental code that transmits our collective identity across generations. Now envision this DNA being bombarded with radiation, causing it to unravel and mutate uncontrollably. The irradiation symbolizes the destabilization of foundational value systems. As the DNA unravels, the genetic information—our shared values, beliefs, and traditions—becomes corrupted and fragmented. This disintegration mirrors how the erosion of cultural transmission leads to individuals disconnected from their heritage, floating aimlessly in existential ambiguity. The unraveling irradiated DNA strand serves as an analogy for the self-referential paradoxes and intractable transmissibility issues plaguing modern Western culture, leading to hyper-individualization, social fragmentation, and a descent into nihilism.

2/18

A Fascinating Yet Horrifying Transformation

The current trajectory of the progressive transmutation of, broadly construed, Western culture is fascinating in a horrifyingly morbid, slow-moving train wreck sort of way. The relationship between the process of self-individuation and its necessary, formational dependence on generational transmission of social and cultural value systems is being actively sublated from its requisite contingent. Any absence or warbling of the foundational reliance on this predicate first-order principle generates an intractable transmissibility issue.

3/18

The Foundation of Moral Authority and Value Systems

The foundation upon which all transmission of value is invariably reliant is the a priori assertion of moral authority. The arbiter of this authority is a separate matter, but ultimately, all ideologies or codes of adherence have a value system. Further, all value systems assert a hierarchy of ideals, and all hierarchies of ideals assert the moral authority of said hierarchy. This creates a massive problem, which can be characterized as a self-referential loop and, consequently, infinite regress.

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Moist Hegel

@Dialectiks

Aug 25, 2024

Just gonna leave this here

“SIDs has significantly decreased since the 00s.”

Actually that’s not correct.

In 2004 they arbitrarily narrowed the scope of SIDs/SUIDs, and the literature states there has not been a decrease since the 90s.

•Original definition
SIDS was first proposed in 1969 to describe a group of unexpected infant deaths that had consistent clinical, epidemiological, and pathological features.

•San Diego Definition
In 2004, a panel was convened to re-evaluate the definition of SIDS, and proposed that it be defined as the unexpected death of an infant under one year old that occurs during sleep and remains unexplained after a thorough investigation.

•SUID
The term SUID is now often used instead of SIDS because some coroners prefer to use the term "undetermined" for deaths that were previously considered SIDS. SUID includes SIDS, accidental suffocation/asphyxia, and deaths due to uncertain circumstances.

There is no actual distinction in the accounting of cases of known suffocation/asphyxia vs unknown causes. In fact, sudden unexplained death from unknown causes has actually INCREASED since the 90s.

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Moist Hegel

@Dialectiks

Aug 21, 2024

🧵A Thread on Joe Biden's Horrific Federal Judicial Appointments🧵:

1/x

President Joe Biden's judicial appointments are reshaping the federal judiciary, prioritizing diversity over the traditional focus on professional experience.

2/x

Ketanji Brown Jackson

Ketanji Brown Jackson's nomination to the Supreme Court has been criticized not only for her lack of extensive judicial experience—having spent just a short time on the D.C. Circuit before being elevated—but also for her record on several controversial issues. She has a history of lenient sentencing in cases involving child pornography, which many see as troubling, especially in comparison to Trump appointees who often emphasized strict adherence to sentencing guidelines.

Moreover, Jackson has advocated for more lenient treatment of illegal immigrants and has been supportive of progressive stances on transgender rights, which critics argue reflects an ideological agenda rather than a balanced judicial approach.

3/x

J. Michelle Childs

Judge J. Michelle Childs has been criticized for lacking the rigorous academic and professional credentials typically expected for a D.C. Circuit appointment. With a law degree from the University of South Carolina, she doesn’t have the Ivy League pedigree common among federal judges.

Her judicial record raises concerns as well; in the Fain v. Crouch case, she ruled in favor of transgender plaintiffs seeking coverage for gender reassignment surgery under state health plans, aligning her with radical progressive views on transgender rights. Additionally, her rulings in employment cases, where she often sided with employers, have drawn ire from both sides, indicating inconsistency rather than a principled legal philosophy.

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