Since you're naming names here, can you cite one concrete example of an "indentured servant" H1B in Facebook.

This gets repeated again and again, but I never see evidence presented for it. Anecdotally speaking, as an H1B in Microsoft, I know that I do not get paid any less than my American coworkers. I also know plenty more H1Bs both here and in other tech companies that regularly poach from MS (Amazon, Google, Facebook etc), and none of them get underpaid.

All the real-world horror stories that I do hear, are from Tata and other sweatshops like that. But while they do account for a lot of green cards, they do not represent the "vast majority" of them.

It's the other way around, actually. Historically speaking, for most of US history, immigration to it was free for all. No visas, and getting citizenship was pretty much automatic after residing in the country and paying taxes for some time (like 1-2 years).

It gradually evolved into the present system from there, and on most stages of that process it was driven by xenophobia. First they restricted Chinese immigration - you know, the "yellow peril" who are stealing good men's jobs. Then racism raised its ugly head up high, and for a while only people of "Caucasian" descent could get citizenship at all (there was one known case of an educated Indian guy who successfully argued in court that, because he belongs to brahmin caste, that makes him "Aryan", which is basically Caucasian - but a few years down the line that decision was reversed, and they actually stripped his citizenship).

I'm not saying that this is binary. I do think there is a difference between someone who's on a very visible and public crusade (like, say, Orson Scott Card), and a guy who is promoting some political position privately. This particular case, I believe, falls under the latter category - I'm not aware of Eich giving public speeches on this matter, or "wearing a cap" etc. He made a political donation, one among many thousands. The record of that donation was made public because the law required it, not because he wished to publicize it (IIRC, wasn't this even done by court order?).

Was it? I fail to see the connection - Eich did not publicly climb the soapbox and make ridiculous statements. He keeps his bigotry private.

He's not merely a member - he's the one in charge.

Your opinion is very important to me. Please keep me updated on any further developments!

I would disagree with that, when there's no option for a private donation at all, by law.

In any case, being a name on a list of hundreds of thousands of people is a far cry from a soapbox.

I'm well aware of that - I was just saying that his amount of contribution is not particularly unusual.

Also, are you sure that his salary as a CEO is significantly larger than what he got as CTO?

In general, I don't really like this line of reasoning. Applying it consistently would seem to indicate that people holding such opinions are not worthy of any job, because every cent they earn can be used for political donations to the causes they support.

Money is speech, yes. It's not necessarily public speech.

The guy did not advertise his donation in any way. To develop your analogy, he was dragged onto the soapbox, and a sign saying "gay basher" was hanged on his neck in front of a large crowd.

You could conceivably find out by looking at these records (which is how they found Brendan's position).

Granted, I took a quick look, and I don't see any CEOs on the list, but I do see some otherwise high-ranked people. For example, Lisa Brummel, who us a corporate VP in Microsoft.

Probably not, but does Brendan actually go around telling everyone that gays are bad? The only thing that came up so far is his donation, and it's only public because of the reporting requirements for such things resulted in a list of donors being published.

A mere mortal's salary, in Brendan's case, is almost certainly six figures already, so donating $1k is less than 1% of his yearly income.

FWIW, with a similar salary, I donate around $2k yearly to various political organizations - EFF, ACLU, SAF etc. I know quite a few people who spend more than that with the same income.

By "civilian casualties" I count the entire death toll post-invasion, including intra-faction fighting, terrorist attacks etc. This is only fair, since destabilization of their society was a direct outcome of the war, so every death that happens now because of that instability that didn't happen before has to be weighted against what Saddam would've killed. Note, I'm not saying that US leadership is morally responsible for those deaths - this is an utilitarian calculation, not an ethical one. That's why I'm not going to address your "invasion vs genocidal campaign" angle - dead don't care about the motivation, determination, or remorse vs lack thereof of their killers.

As for your 1 million count, that includes all the deaths in the Iran war, which 1) didn't happen in the preceding 10 years, 2) being a war, is not exactly the usual state of affairs for any country, and 3) Saddam was significantly aided by US in that war. On the other hand, 100-160k count is actually on the low side, because that's the number of deaths that have been meticulously documented - it's basically a standard to which no other war or unrest of that magnitude to date has been held. The more realistic number, given that in most cases deaths do go unreported in such an environment, is several times that.

Okay, I'll grant you that it's quite possible that the overall death toll is close to what it was under Saddam - maybe a bit more, maybe a bit less. We don't really know because we don't have the accurate numbers. Either way, this doesn't exactly look like a picture of resounding humanitarian success to me. Of course, we don't really have the final numbers, either, seeing how the Iraqi government is anything but stable, the sectarian relationships are still flaring with daily terrorist attacks, and adjacent countries (most specifically, Iran and Saudi Arabia) are treating it as a convenient place to hash out their disputes, keeping the fires burning. If it blows up into a full-fledged civil war - and I'm pretty much certain that it will, within a few years at most - what death toll is there now will be peanuts in comparison.

Really, the only ones who have been the consistent beneficiaries of the invasion were the Kurds, who finally have their de facto (and soon, possibly, de jure) nation-state - but then their independence really dates back to the first war, and was maintained largely through the no-fly zone established afterwards - the new invasion only cemented it.

I mean to suggest that Saddam was not in any significant way different from a dozen other dictatorial leaders in the same region, some of them of the countries that US considers allies (like Saudi Arabia). So using that as an excuse to invade the country only makes sense if you would also go after all the other guys.

Then, of course, there's the whole balance issue. Taking out a bloody dictator in a nice, clean coup is great and all. A full-scale invasion and occupation with more overall civilian casualties than that Saddam guy killed in 10 years prior, not so much.

In any case, the original excuse for Iraq was that it had some WMDs that it was just itching to use against US, not some human rights issues. That became a fallback story postfactum, once it was clear that WMD bait was basically bullshit through and through.