This is an open thread, open for whatever sort of posting your blessed little hearts desire. Is self-linking allowed, you inquire? My darling, not just allowed, adored, I reply.
I’ve watched this video by Everynone, “Words,” several times over:
More links (a lot of light links this week, for some reason):
- A cartoony flow chart explaining the process of legally immigrating to the USA. Note the path if you’re an unskilled immigrant without relatives here.
- Predatory Lending and Health Services. More exploitation by the folks bringing us weight loss surgery.
- Being bigoted doesn’t require being overtly hateful or expressly wishing people harm.
- Jane Austen’s Fight Club
- It’s not a mosque near the WTC that the right (and, to be fair, some cowardly asshole Democrats) object to. It’s mosques being built in the USA, period.
- There are some amazingly great comics at What Things Do.
- “One of those dreaded ‘swallow shit or ruin the evening’ moments.”
- Justin Bieber’s ‘U Smile’ Slowed Down 800 Percent Becomes Haunting New Song/a>
- Are We Looking At A Genderless Future?, Newsweek asks. My answer: No, we’re not. But if we’re lucky, maybe we’ll look at a future with a lot more variety and freedom of genders. (Via.)
- Why helium balloons should cost $100 each.
- “But to me the most disappointing aspect of the way Wonder Woman is currently being presented is not the diminishment of her powers but of her iconic stature.” I agree. (Fortunately, they’ll probably revert to the iconic WW within five years.)
- Rachelmanija has some thoughts on Heinlein. She argues that feminists get so pissed at Heinlein in part because of the bait-and-switch his books perform.
- All the Sad Young Literary Women. The comments contain a lot of recommendations for female-authored fantasy and science fiction.
- Gavin Berliner, the man behind floating head movie posters
- It’s kids downloading manga that’s causing the economic problems of manga publishing. Not, you know, the economic collapse. Those darn kids! (Meanwhile, I owned an overflowing boxful of cassette tapes with illegally copies music when I was a teen, and I bet most of the people complaining about the downloaders did something similar when they were kids.)
- 45 Beautifully Designed Book Covers. My favorite is the cover for The Annotated Nose.
- “Think of the U.S. embassy in Iraq as a kind of well-armed anchor baby.”
- How to be civil, in cake form.
- Private prisons cost more than public prisons. They just appear to cost less because prison companies bid low in order to get contracts.
- Neptune recently finished the end of its first orbit since its discovery in 1846!
- How Republicans Really Balance State Budgets
- Video from Shuttle booster falling back to Earth. So. Very. Cool.
- Kevin Moore responds to that “Oh, what has become of 20-somethings?” article in the Times.
- How to make an easy paper model of a tricorner hat, for drawing reference.
- It’s amazing how many clients who hire illustrators are really like this.
- “So the problem, you see, is not that Cordoba House is too close to Ground Zero. It is too far away.”
- If Captain America had a baby… that baby would live in terror.
- A Worldwide Revolt Against Poverty Wages
- Nerd movies are consistently worth about $10 million in ticket sales on the first weekend. Nerd appeal is not wide appeal, it seems.
- What Does Obama Really Think About Gay Marriage? A Telling Timeline.
- Lastly, I enjoyed looking through 1979 Semi-Finalist’s list of her 100 favorite comic book covers (and 15 alternates). They weren’t the 115 I’d have chosen, but she gave her reasons for choosing each one, which made it interesting. Of her 115 selections, these three are my favorites:
I’m perennially behind WW, since I can’t afford comics every week, but when I see stuff like this I don’t think “diminished stature”.
Kris Straub has a good comic apropos to the “Ground Zero Mosque”, I thought.
@1:
That’s a pretty good diagram. Seems to explain the basics pretty clearly. And yes, if you’re an unskilled foreign national with no relatives in the U.S. there basically is no place in line for you.
Now – is that a justification for unskilled foreign nationals with no relatives in the U.S. to force their way into the U.S.? It seems to me that the U.S. has a perfect right to say “If you’re unskilled and have no relatives here you can’t come in.” There is no obligation for the U.S. to provide a place in line for such people. And there IS an obligation to remove such people who have come into the U.S. illegally, since that’s the will of the electorate based on what their legislature has put into law.
I’ve heard people use the argument that it’s wrong to tell such people they have to wait in line, because in fact there is no place in line for them. My answer to that is “Too bad.” That’s the intent of the law.
Regarding the path for highly skilled individuals such as professional athletes: yes, Mr. Beckham would have been able to make it in his home country. But in his case his taxes are MUCH lower here in the U.S., I should think. However, there are other professional athletes who come from highly oppressive states where they are in danger of their lives either because of civil war or their tribal or religious identity – or even their sex.
BTW: the statement containing the link is a bit confused. If you’re an unskilled immigrant then you are already IN the U.S. Such a person cannot legally immmigrate into the U.S. unless they first leave the U.S., at which point they are no longer an immigrant – a step left out of that cartoon. So that cartoon doesn’t apply to an illegal immigrant. It only applies to foreign nationals.
I like the immigration flowchart but the gender balance there is kinda notably skewed.
Something I’ve been meaning to link here for a while – Vi’s drawings. Sketches and comics about her life, including her encounters with racism (sometimes from her white in-laws).
Now – is that a justification for unskilled foreign nationals with no relatives in the U.S. to force their way into the U.S.?
Justification for “forcing” their way in, no. But the justification for unskilled foreign nationals to enter the US is very simple: They want jobs and will take crappy unskilled jobs, we’ve got jobs that we can’t convince anyone to take. Even better, they’ve got a little money and ambition, we’ve got an empty storefront to set up a restaurant in…
Not true. We don’t have any jobs we can’t convince anyone to take.
In some cases what we have are jobs that people don’t want to take because they don’t want to work next to a bunch of people who are here illegally. Remember those raids of the meat cutting plants that were full of illegal aliens? Those jobs are all filled, for the same salaries. People lined up to apply for them. People who were citizens and legal residents
In other cases your last phrase is more properly stated, “we’ve got jobs that we can’t convince American citizens to take for what employers want to pay.” It’s not that we can’t convince American citizens to take those jobs – it’s that we haven’t tried. Deliberately. There are employers out there that find illegal aliens easier to exploit than American citizens, so they offer pay and benefit levels that citizens won’t take. Blocking illegal immigation will force those employers to either go out of business or make their jobs’ salaries and benefits attractive enough that American citizens WILL take them. I’m trying to figure out how that’s a bad thing. It’s been my observation up to this point that the left is usually in FAVOR of forcing employers to improve job conditions.
Or, maybe those jobs just won’t get done. Does some corporation owning 40 acres of land off of I-294 that is using 5 of them for their office building and parking lots really need to make the other 35 acres look like a golf course fairway? No, they don’t. Plant some trees and let it end up like a forest preserve. In fact, don’t even cut down and plow up all those trees that were there in the first place. And the guy next door to me that has a crew mowing his lawn and raking his yard? Stay home from the golf course a couple of weekends and do it yourself (no, he’s not physically unable to do it, I know the guy).
This, right here, is the problem with undocumented immigration; it normalises exploitation, not just of undocumented workers but of everyone. What Ron says isn’t quite true – documented workers do take jobs that don’t meet legal standards. One’s personal legal status isn’t nearly as significant as the economic culture of your local area. I’ve worked under the counter for less than minimum wage (in the UK rather than the USA) and seen other citizens and documented immigrants do the same, but the reason why it flew was that there was a large pool of undocumented immigrants who were unable to claim their legal rights. Anyone in that situation has a choice between keeping the job and having not enough money, or quitting, turning in their employer and having no money at all (and knowing that they can’t acquire their money via the courts because their employer doesn’t have the money either, more often than not, so the best they could do is put their former workplace out of business).
There are two possible ways of tackling this. The realistic way would be to make it possible for all workers to claim their legal rights by either decriminalising undocumented immigration or having some kind of amnesty condition for people who turn in employers who break the law. I used to know an undocumented worker from Russia who was earning half minimum wage until she got fired because she refused to sleep with her employer; there is currently no legal redress in this situation.
The unrealistic way is to talk about how you want to ‘block illegal immigration’, I guess by shipping 12 million people out of the country and then building, maintaining and patrolling a big wall so they can’t get back in again? It’s plain old bad math.
Also, the idea that people are somehow socially averse to working near/with undocumented immigrants? Colour me sceptical. In poor areas, documented and undocumented workers mingle pretty freely. You would, however, be better off not working in such areas because the legal conditions make working conditions worse – that is, if you could find an alternative job at all. There is a recession on, you know? Oh, sorry, I meant a ‘jobless recovery’.
I refer you to this report from your beloved Fox News. A better report can be found here.
From that second link:
Thene:
You guess wrong, and come close to putting words I didn’t say into my mouth. Yes, we need to put more resources into direct border security. However, I’d go for a few other measures as well that I think will be far more effective:
1) Make hiring illegal aliens a felony. Use of E-verify is an affirmative defense. People who fail E-verify are told, given access to the records and get time and resources at government expense to get their records fixed. Corporations that have repeated failures lose the right to do business with the Feds.
2) Any financial institution that loans money to people who reside in the U.S. illegally lose the use of/membership in any Federal financial programs. No Federally backed loans. No membership in FDIC. And so on.
3) Access to non-emergency government funded services is restricted to legal residents of the U.S. I’m not talking about checking the residency status of someone showing up in the E.R. with a broken arm, note. But, e.g., Section 8 housing? Food stamps? Nope.
4) Documents such as a matricula consular cannot be accepted as proof of identity. The current Federal law requiring all aliens to carry U.S. issued documentation indicating proof of legal residency at all times is to be enforced.
5) Drop Federal suits against the states that oppose laws such as that passed by Arizona recently.
Can’t get a job. Can’t get a loan (car, mortgage, etc.). Can’t get government services. In danger of being discovered at any time should they happen to speed or have a taillight out, etc. Don’t need to ship them out. Remember all those articles about people leaving Arizona for other states? What if the other states had laws like Arizona? What if the Feds backed them?
The math is good but based on a bad model. We won’t have to ship that many of them out. They’ll leave on their own. There will be nothing for them here.
That doesn’t mean they’re doing so voluntarily. And an area doesn’t have to be poor for it to contain jobs exploiting illegal alien labor.
Jake:
How much did they raise wages by in an effort to try to entice them?
Amp, I asked this before but you may have missed it; would there be a way to get the little graphics that follow each post personalized to a given poster? I’d be willing to fund such – or perhaps a donation to your favorite charity? Think of it as a graphical tag line or .sig file.
Jake, the first link fails; I get a “bad URL” message from the blog software. And where did “your beloved Fox News” come from? How often do I cite Fox News here?
Thanks for that second link. It was very good news. A real success story, in fact. Employer hires illegal aliens. Employer gets raided, aliens sent home. Employer goes through legal channels, is able to obtain needed labor. Aliens come to U.S. legally, get jobs paying more than they get at home, have legal protections against exploitation as well. Works for me. I’m not against non-citizens working in the U.S. I’m against non-citizens being in the U.S. illegally. If this guy made this work, why can’t other employers do so?
As someone with a green card, I have to say that the cartoon is very well researched. But my specific path is not on it, or is rather unfinished. It took less than 18 months – there was a quick H1B -> green card path in the early 2000s. My best friend says that it took him 13 years and more than 30,000 dollars, though. The funny part is that he found me the job, and I got my green card about 5 years earlier than him, who was going through the same H1b -> green card process, and had started six years earlier.
And ironically, we both met American women whom we ended up marrying after we already had the green cards… As a dubious benefit, we get to unload both barrels on those who imply that our immigration status had anything to do with it. What kind of bitch says something like that, in front of a woman who never did anything to her, even if she thinks it is true?!
Open thread, so I’m going to post links:
Sam Harris makes an ass of himself.
Sam Harris says something that needs to be said.
Sebastian – so not interested in the good immigrant bad immigrant game, whether it involves saying that people with H1Bs are better than people with K visas or saying that people who have $30000 to blow on an immigration case are better than people who don’t. People marry fraudulently for Ks; other people marry sooner than they would wish to for Ks, or they marry people they would not otherwise have married to get Ks, or they marry for Ks in spite of not wishing to marry at all. The fact that you feel insulted by association with K visa immigrants does not make me, a K visa immigrant, feel warmly disposed to you.
This is an open thread, right? So I can ask someone to explain to me how Sam Harris is making an ass of himself, except when he extends a courtesy to Christians and Jews that he is unwilling to extend to Muslims? I mean the way he excuses the atrocities committed/commanded by the Christian God, but fails to excuse the ones that the Muslims’ Allah requires of his followers.
As far as I can see, he makes an argument that Islam, as written in the Koran, is a horrible ideology. Is everyone who thinks that this point of view should at least be discussed an ass?
Because I have often made the argument that God, as described in the Bible, is a horrible person, who should not be obeyed by a sane, modern human being. I have been able to have a reasoned argument with His priests or worshipers in France, Bulgaria, Russia, the States and Chad, and no one suggested that I was an ass for it. Or tried to murder/execute me.
But that argument, rephrased for Allah has gotten me into fights in France and Bulgaria, and would probably get me executed in quite a few Muslim countries. I guess being called an ass is an improvement.
Thene, the fact that you see nothing wrong with someone telling a woman that her husband married her for her citizenship does not make me feel warmly for you, either.
[edit]
I just reread my comment, and I’m damned if I see where I said that I was the one being offended. I have heard that comment addressed to my wife at least four times, and every single time it was a woman who wanted to put her down.
Are you talking about the screaming man with the mohawk (there must be a better term for that) haircut who appears between each post; or do you mean the thing-peering-out-from-behind-the-crack who appears between each comment.
In either case, I’m sure it could be done, but it would require finding and hiring someone with the skill to program the plug-in.
And to do the comments, it would also be hard because I think to be satisfying, there’d have to be many, many more graphics — right now there are only 11 images or so that show up inbetween comments. I’d think we’d need at least 30 or 40 if we wanted the graphics to be associated with individual comment-writers.
So although it’s a neat idea, I don’t think it’s likely to happen. Sorry!
@21: How Republicans Really Balance State Budgets
Misleading title, since only one Republican is named. And his trick of delaying payments to public employee pensions has been used by both Republican and Democratic governors in Illinois, so it’s not just a fault of Republicans.
Amp – regarding the graphics: yes, I meant comments. Setting the issues of programming commenting aside, the generic ones could continue to display randomly. Only those who contributed would get custom graphics, much like the sketches you put on the flyleaves of those who bought copies of Hereville.
Fair point about the title of link #21.
About the graphics between the comments, I’m not sure why, but — even if the programming barriers could be overcome, which is a big “if” — I don’t find the idea of doing that tempting.
Sebastian – you used a misogynistic insult, here on a feminist website no less, to deride someone who decided to group you in with us K-visa folk. This made you sound like you were fairly offended by the assumption, even with the implication that your wife was more offended than you were.
The issue of different types of visas aside, Sebastian, you must realize that using “bitch” on this blog isn’t welcome. Please try not to do that again here. Thanks!
OK. I had used asshole+he first, and then I edited it, because it was pointed out to me that asshole is gender specific, and everyone who had insulted her that way had been female. I try hard not use insults denoting medical conditions, etc… but I have to say, I edit and reedit my posts until all of my insults end up being ‘assholes’ and ‘bigots’. I need to enrich my vocabulary. No, seriously. If your server keeps track of edits you can check.
But yes, I apologize to using that particular term.
Thanks for the apology!
Is “asshat” gender specific? That one seems popular lately.
I thought people were trying to make asshole not-gender-specific.
Also, I thought it was clear that Sebastian was offended because people were implying that he and his wife weren’t really in love. If people’s default assumption about my husband and I was that we weren’t really in love, I would probably get angry at the people making the implication, too.
Huh. Wonder what I did wrong. Try this:
http://onthescene.blogs.foxnews.com/2010/07/02/jamaican-farmworkers/
Sebastian, it’s news to me that “asshole” is gender-specific. What gender is it specific for, in your dialect?
According to my wife, “asshole” is only for men. Given that English is my third or fourth language (third best, fourth learned) I don’t claim to know better. I pretty much use it when I think ‘ordure’ (lit. trash), which I hesitate to translate as ‘scum’ because I was told that this has classist connotations, similar to our ‘cannaille’, which would not be used by a progressive.
I’ve heard “asshole” as a gender-neutral insult my entire life (I’m 43). Maybe this is a regional thing (I’m a midwestern-USian, specifically Illinois)? Or are there older readers who are more common with “asshole” being male-only?
“Bastard” and “dick” (and its various permutations like “dickhead”) are the only male-specific insults I can think of.
I live in Illinois as well (since I was about 15) and I’ve used “asshole” to describe both men and women all my life. I’ve pretty much stayed away from “bitch” and other female-specific insults/descriptors except on very rare occasion. I’ve used “dick” to describe guys a few times. But “asshole” has been my all-purpose insult, and my experience is that it’s non-gender specific in how I’ve heard it used.
Too bad on that, Amp. Thought I’d ask ….
Thanks. But I note you haven’t changed it. Given the thread-in-a-thread immediately upstream, perhaps you should change it to “How Assholes Balance State Budgets”.
Jake, that link works.
So – they had to advertise 6 months ahead of time in 4 states. A farmer can tell you when the crops are going to be harvested at least 6 months ahead of time, so that’s no big deal. And yeah, it cost more to hire workers legally than it does illegally, and the workers get better housing and working conditions. Good! That’s not a bug, that’s a feature.
If there are some administrative issues that need to be cleaned up, O.K. That can be fixed with a little huddle between the farm state congresscritters, the State Department, the employers and some workers. The congresscritters will need to drive it, and the employers will need to drive them. But like I say, these guys made it work. So let’s have everyone else get with it. Sounds like a victory to me.
You still haven’t explained “your beloved Fox News”.
I’m glad to see some research about some problems with private prisons (#19). It is clear that if a company is running an activity at a lower cost than the government can manage while also earning profits then the service has to suffer or the workers taken advantage of. Medicare/Medicaid/VA medical care are all examples of health care being run by government agencies with lower administrative costs than private insurance companies. I think that the “common knowledge” understanding that private industry can always do things better and cheaper is propaganda put forth by those wanting to make profit off of activities that governments are already doing. This understanding needs to be unlearned so that sensible decisions can be made about how to manage our resources. This doesn’t even get into the argument that we shouldn’t have so many people in prison in the first place.
That immigration link is a bit off because it focuses on the status of citizenship rather than the status of legal entry. That’s not usually the issue.
Most opponents of illegal immigration don’t have a problem with legal immigrants or resident aliens. Most people trying to get into the U.S. want to have legal status and work opportunities. Those are available with green cards: people with green cards function pretty much like citizens with the exception of voting. If you get a green card and have it for a while, that’s not a painful wait in line but a normal lifestyle.
It might not be as politically expedient to knock years off all of those time frames to reflect living in the US legally, earning wages, etc., but it would be a hell of a lot more honest. When you’re trying to “get in to the US legally and work there without problems,” which is what most people want, a green card is just fine.
And if you look at it that way, and if the first part of it is accurate, it does put the lie to the “Nobody would ever be incentivized to have an anchor baby, no sirree!” line.
What. How? How is this incentivised? You can’t sponsor a K-visa for a parent or sibling until you’re 21 years old. That’s 21 years before you could even start a residency claim if you’d mothered/fathered a child who was a birthright citizen of the USA.
Dianne wrote:
RonF responded:
I provided evidence that RonF was factually incorrect in comments # 8 & 25. Rather than acknowledging that he was incorrect, RonF sidesteps it in comment #9 and in comment #30 distracts from the fact by claiming that it isn’t a problem for farmers & by questioning my comment about his beloved Fox News.
I am not impressed even a little bit.
I’ll respond to your inquiry about my phrasing when you admit that you were flat out wrong.
Jake:
I disputed that. You did not respond to the question I asked about it in #9. The employer claims that he was unable to fill the jobs with American citizens, but did not explain what he did to attempt to attract American citizens to fill them.
Set aside how and where he advertised these jobs (for all we know he didn’t do an effective job, either deliberately or through lack of expertise). I have consistently held that the claim “They take jobs that Americans won’t take” is actually an unfinished sentence that should be completed “for what employers want to pay.” I would never expect and have never expected that all jobs that illegal aliens now do would be able to be filled by paying Americans (or resident aliens) the same amount and with the same working conditions.
So as far as I’m concerned, if the grower didn’t offer higher pay and/or better working conditions, he didn’t really try to fill the jobs with American citizens. That was the point of the question I asked in #9 – the one you neither answered nor referenced in either of your #25 or #34.
gin-and-whiskey:
Lots of the proponents of legalizing the presence of people here illegally dispute that. Go on Migra Matters and others and they’ll claim that opposition to illegal immigration = opposition to immigration, period. And note that the MSM consistently uses the term “anti-immigration” or “anti-immigrant” or “anti-immigrant rights” to describe the position of politicians and activists who support the enforcement of existing Federal and State immigration laws, instead of using terms that draw the (valid) distinction you make.
Thus demonstrating your ignorance about the costs of farming and the prices that farmers can get on the open market. Your ignorance and your concerns in no way dispute the fact that, whether or not he offered “enough” in salary, there were no Americans willing to take the jobs offered at the going rate. Fact. You were wrong. End of story.
Upon reflection I do see your point in this case. The farmer found a point wherein he improved wages and conditions enough to get foreign nationals labor (not “immigrant” labor, these folks are going home after the job is done) via a visa program without improving them enough to attract American citizens or resident aliens. However, that doesn’t prove as a general case that jobs currently held by illegal aliens cannot be filled otherwise. There are examples to the contrary.
Not that it’s been easy – nor do I pretend that it should be expected to be. Think of the employers as drug addicts whose supply has been cut off. They have to learn to live clean, now. It’s a process. Here’s a story about a chicken processing plant that was raided and turned to the local citizenry for labor. Wages were raised. New employees who were now freer to complain about working conditions now not surprisingly did so. Turnover is higher; is that because the local citizenry doesn’t have the work ethic, or because they have more freedom to quit, or because the employer hasn’t yet improved compensation and conditions enough? Elements of all three are probably factors. But the plant is operating, and the labor force is no longer dominated by people who have no legal right to work here.
I appreciate you’re concession, Ron.
I think that you’re reading of the linked article is mistaken. You completely omit this statement:
I mean, sure, if you pay enough Americans will accept any job. If you pay me enough I will take the job of cleaning public lavatories clean. But is it reasonable for you to have to raise the wage to what I will accept?
When we say that there are jobs that Americans will not take, salary is a vital component of the jobs we are talking about.
Yes, that’s a point I’ve been making for some time. Paying people below legal market rate is part and parcel of the exploitation of workers that the left usually opposes. When people who can’t legally work here are prevented from working here at all, changes will ensure. Some services and goods will cost more. Some services (especially) won’t get performed. The market will change. For example, my perfectly healthy next door neighbor will have to decide to either consume more of what would otherwise be his leisure time raking and mowing his lawn himself, letting it go unraked and unmown, or spending more money on it. Tough.
I don’t see it as an excuse for our laws to be broken by private parties and go unenforced by the government, nor do I see it as a reason to pardon those already breaking them or excuse those refusing to enforce them.
As we see from the example you cite, there is a workable legal way to bring people in to perform these jobs. Some jobs that are seasonal don’t require immigrants. Other jobs may require bringing in immigrants, but that’s not going to work as well as one might think because if they’re here legally they’re not going to work for the wages and under the conditions that illegal immigrants will.
But in any case, those decisions can only legitimately be made by the legislature. Having them made illicitly by a partnership of private employers and the executive in defiance of the law – and thus of the will of the people as expressed through the legislature – is destructive. The job of the executive is to enforce the law, not suspend it (as the left has said time and time again with regards to civil rights, conduct of wars, etc., etc.). It is certainly not to prosecute States when they try to enforce the law – doing the job that
Americansthe Feds won’t do.The farmer in question and the chicken processing plant in question were not paying people below the legal market rate.
Yes, I oppose paying people below market rate. How is that relevant to the case that I cited or the case that you cited? You’re moving the goalposts again.
We could also say, “When all people can legally work here, changes will ensure.” I’m not sure we can get a majority to agree with either of those options.
You and I appear to agree that enforcing hiring laws on employers is a priority, even if we differ in our reasoning to get to that conclusion. What that has to do with the original conversation – whether or not there are jobs that Americans will not take – escapes me.
DougS, on the Heinlein thread:
No, you got it wrong, sorry. The racism in FF, while considerable, was structural, not Jim Crow stereotype racism. If anything, Heinlein went the other way trying to be not personally racist, that the background racism stood out even more clearly. The black characters in FF are not Mary Sues, but they’ve been racially Mary Sued somewhat.
The character of Joe, the Farnham’s household servant, was also shown to be a medical student, taking classes at night and working as a domestic to pay his tuition. In the future, the two main black characters are the prince and his local factotum Memtok. Both are portrayed sympathetically; the prince is wise (though not, of course, as wise as the protagonists) and is shown to be not a bad fellow, really, by his owl lights or the lights of the narrator. Memtok gets less page time but is (narratively) commended for having psychological issues that could compromise his job performance, but which he keeps under control.
The main racism I saw in FF was shown in the kind of society and culture that the black people built after most of the whites and Asians killed themselves off. “Black people can’t form advanced societies” was the unspoken motif, even though the people in FF had advanced in technology significantly over the 21st century, their culture was impoverished and their system of government crude.