Posts tagged ‘immigration’

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July 22, 2008

Dial 1 For A Real Problem

Should English be our official national language? My opinion is, who the hell cares? But some people care a whole, whole lot.

Here’s a good, detailed discussion of this at Language Log (this quote pretty much sums up what I think):

In short, English is already, for all practical purposes, the language of the nation (not to mention much of the world in many ways), and it’s going to take a heck of a lot more than a growing population of (mostly Spanish-speaking) immigrants – a population that has been shown in study after study to lose their heritage language and adopt English within three generations, as Jon Weinberg helpfully pointed out – to change that. If we make English official, there’s no telling how its currently exalted position would be affected.

. . . In my view, the move to make English official in the US is effectively a political move to disenfranchise minority or otherwise already disempowered groups along culturally-defined lines. Using language for this purpose is particularly insidious.

I am actually quite embarrassed that I only speak English. It was lazy of me never to really learn another language, and traveling made me all the more embarrassed of myself, because it seems like damn near everybody all over the world can muddle along in at least two languages – no matter how broke, rural and otherwise uneducated they are. And mostly what they speak is English (even though apparently it’s one of the most difficult languages to learn if you’re not a native speaker), which is so fortunate for me, because I don’t have to learn word one and still rarely have difficulty communicating anywhere I go. Obama thinks it’s embarrassing, too.

Many Americans, however, are not the least bit embarrassed for only speaking English. They are rather infuriated that anybody would set foot on American soil without speaking English in addition to whatever else they speak, or (if foreigners do speak it) for speaking it poorly, or with a thick accent.

These are people who often say, “I wouldn’t go to a country where I don’t speak the language, so I don’t see why ‘they’ come here.” Leaving aside the obvious stupidity in this statement (people come here because there is money here), what a limited, incurious perspective that statement reveals! Who are these people who wouldn’t go where they don’t speak the language? I’d hate to think that my possible living situations are limited to English-speaking countries. Not only would I happily go somewhere (for a short or long period of time) where I don’t speak the language, but I’d most likely be welcomed there. Speech isn’t the only way to communicate. If two people focus up, they can usually communicate across a language barrier without too much trouble, especially if one or both of them stands to profit from it.

I’ve actually talked to people who complain about having to push 1 for English. Here’s LL again on this:

I find the objection to “press 1 for English” incredibly curious. I would think that a large proportion of those who object would encourage businesses to act in their self-interest by whatever legal means necessary – and making multiple language options available for their (potential) customers is one easy, legal way to increase your business (even if you’ll lose some idiots who can’t bring themselves to press a simple button for their language).

It seems like, before anyone would actually complain about the time it takes them to press 1 for English, they might think for a beat about what life in general would be like to be somebody who has to press 2 for Spanish – talk about inconvenient! – and then count their blessings and shut the hell up.

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Speaking of language and stupidity, is Obama really a great speaker, or is it just that the level of our political oratory has been brought so low?

A major reason that Obama’s rhetoric seems to soar so high is that our expectations have sunk so low. In a new book, The Anti-Intellectual Presidency, Elvin T. Lim subjects all the words ever publicly intoned by American presidents to a thorough statistical analysis-and he finds, unsurprisingly, an alarmingly steady decline. A century ago, Lim writes, presidential speeches were pitched at a college reading level; today, they’re down to eighth grade, and if the trend continues, next century’s State of the Union addresses will be conducted at the level of “a comic strip or a fifth-grade textbook.”

(via 3QD)

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Psst.  Hey, English champs: do you know what a grawlix is?

What about mamihlapinatapai? Define that, suckaz! (Yeah, ok, so that one’s not English.)

Posted in People, Politics, Travel | 2 Comments »

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July 17, 2008

How Are Things In Your Country?

Where to start?

In the U.S., Bush wants health care programs receiving federal aid to sign certificates promising they won’t refuse to hire health care workers who won’t provide or discuss abortion and/or birth control and other forms of contraception.

Meanwhile, birth control isn’t something McCain really cares to discuss. He’d rather keep it light, I guess.

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A pregnant illegal immigrant gave birth under custody, and then had her baby taken from her, because of local charges on driving without a license:

Weikal said the sheriff’s office knew the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency planned to release Villegas on her own recognizance because of the pregnancy, but she had to stay in jail until she had seen a judge on the local charges.

Villegas’ attorney, Elliott Ozment, said Villegas was still in jail awaiting a hearing on the driving charge when she went into labor on the night of July 5. She was taken to Nashville General Hospital at Meharry, where she was handcuffed to the bed by her right wrist and left ankle until shortly before the birth.

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Indian sanitation workers were invited to walk the catwalk by the UN:

Today Sharanya at the Indian feminist blog Ultra Violet has a post about a recent UN conference in which Indian sanitation workers walked the runway alongside professional models at a charity fashion show. (Sanitation workers, also called scavengers, are usually Dalit women whose job it is to remove the human and animal excrement from the homes of higher-class Indians.)

What a treat.

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This is amazing: some very young children in Yemen are standing up for themselves against the grown men their families have sold them off to:

Together, the two girls’ stories have helped spur a movement to put an end to child marriage, which is increasingly seen as a crucial part of the cycle of poverty in Yemen and other third world countries. Pulled out of school and forced to have children before their bodies are ready, many rural Yemeni women end up illiterate and with serious health problems. Their babies are often stunted, too.

The average age of marriage in Yemen’s rural areas is 12 to 13, a recent study by Sana University researchers found. The country, at the southern corner of the Arabian Peninsula, has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world.

(via Feministe)

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And we complain about taking our shoes off:

NPR covered a story about security in Baghdad’s Green Zone, which centered specifically on one woman’s protest against the type of body scanning used: it doesn’t see hair or clothing, but sees the body, (I’m assuming metal) jewelry, and any prospective weapons. The body is rendered essentially naked (pictured here; picture from NPR).

Farah al-Jaberi’s objections (which are shared by other female workers) are mainly to male guards seeing their bodies through the scanner, and the worry that “images of their bodies can be saved and viewed by anyone later.”

(There’s an image at the link of what the scans look like.)

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And, as always, to “rape” is not to “have sex with” – and the media should respect the distinction.

Posted in Feminism, People, Politics | 1 Comment »

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May 30, 2008

Things Change

The mystery of Stonehenge is mysterious no more:

The secret of Stonehenge has apparently been solved: The mysterious circle of large stones in southern England was primarily a burial ground for almost five centuries, and the site probably holds the remains of a family that long ruled the area, new research concludes.

I don’t know about you, but…SNORE!!

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For the billionth time, boys are not inherently better at math:

Boys outperform girls on a math test given to children worldwide, but the gender gap is less pronounced in countries where women and men have similar rights and opportunities, according to a study published Thursday. . . . In about a dozen countries, both sexes scored about the same. In many of those places, like in Iceland, men and women have similar opportunities and rights, according to the study, which was published in the journal Science.

(via tmn)

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On the immigration raids, generally, and why the treatment of detainees is so inhumane:

Since 2006, ICE has been dispatching teams of agents into neighborhoods throughout the country as part of a ramped-up enforcement effort called “Operation Return to Sender.” Each team must apprehend an annual quota, currently set at 1,000, of fugitive aliens. These are immigrants who remain in the United States despite outstanding orders to leave. . . . Without an accurate list of which homes actually harbor undocumented immigrants, agents often rely on race to figure out who’s here legally and who isn’t. . . .Race, in fact, is not a very good indicator of whether someone is in the United States illegally. Up to two-thirds of the people ICE arrests have never received deportation orders, frequently because their presence here is lawful. By ICE’s own admission, the bureau has mistakenly detained, arrested, and even deported not only legal immigrants but also U.S. citizens.

It goes on from there.

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There is literally no place left on Earth where you can escape the human racket:

Krause has a word for the pristine acoustics of nature: biophony. It’s what the world sounds like in the absence of humans. But in 40 percent of the locations where Krause has recorded over the past 40 years, human-generated noise has infiltrated the wilderness. “It’s getting harder and harder to find places that aren’t contaminated,” he says.

Don’t I know it, buddy.

Also, this:

Researchers have produced aerial photos of jungle dwellers who they say are among the few remaining peoples on Earth who have had no contact with the outside world.

(via FP Passport)

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Who says nothing ever changes?  Nepal is a monarchy no more:

The main palace in Nepal’s capital lowered the flag of the country’s royal family Thursday, a day after lawmakers, led by former communist insurgents, abolished the monarchy that had reigned over the Himalayan land for 239 years.

(via FP Passport)

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I’ve mentioned before, I’m a huge Michelle Obama fan.  In Phoenix, she apparently drew a bigger crowd than McCain (and the President):

This just amazes me. The wife of the Democratic front-runner outdraws, handily, both the Republican front-runner himself and the guy he wants to replace in the White House — and does so on the Republican front-runner’s home turf.

Hell yeah, she did.

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Well, this really says it all:  a British man who originally started a charity to bring medical aid to Guyana now does most of his flying into rural Tennessee:

On a wet, spring weekend he lands his vintage World War II aircraft – once used to drop American troops on D-Day – in Lafayette, Tennessee. He bought the plane to parachute medics into the jungle. Today he is unloading dentists’ chairs from the plane into a pickup truck. By eight o’clock on Friday evening the first patients have arrived after travelling hundreds of miles. They start queuing.

(via Unfogged)

Posted in Feminism, Health, People, Politics, Science | Leave a Comment »

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May 26, 2008

People Are Interesting/Annoying

Apparently, men who believe in evolutionary psychology may be predisposed to do so by their possession of the recessive luz-R gene:

[S]ome men may be genetically predisposed to believe in evolutionary psychology, a finding that may well suggest future methods of treatment of the psychological malady. Believers in evolutionary psychology maintain that feminism sets itself in opposition to millions of years of anthropoid evolution, and is thus futile and inhumane to men. Allegations made by believers include references to putative differences in math skills between men and women, a supposedly irresistible but entirely non-visually stimulated female attraction toward powerful and/or arrogant males, and the existence of a genetically preordained male right to multiple female sexual partners.

(via Economic Woman)

Related (but much longer and not funny), a history of how race (as a concept) was invented:

If one is an evolutionist, and accepts that there have been hundreds of thousands of years for different ethnic groups to emerge and to spread about the globe, the monogenetic hypothesis is not hard to maintain. The same is true if, conversely, one believes that the world is only a few thousand years old, but is operating with a geographical scope that does not extend much beyond one’s own region. But for creationists in the 17th century, monogenesis effectively required that the new anthropological data from around the globe be somehow rendered compatible with the view that all human beings be descended from two ancestors, presumed to have lived somewhere in the Near East roughly six thousand years before the era of the scientific revolution.

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More on the immigration raids:

Most of all, it’s clear that the plant’s owners were in the business of seriously exploiting the illegal status of their workers — abusing them, underpaying them, exposing them to hazardous working conditions — and the raids actually had the effect of covering that up….

On the same blog is this discussion about the universality of inalienable rights:

My human rights law professor was Lung-chu Chen, a co-author along with Mac and Professor Laswell, of “Human Rights and World Public Order” which propounded the notion that Jeffersonian natural law and innate and inalienable rights belonged not just to US citizens, but to all people. They argued that providing human rights should be the policy of all nations and all organizations of nations (such as NATO, UN, etc.). . . . You see, there are some rights so fundamental that they come to us simply from being human; they are NOT “given” to us by the State.

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We should all be this resourceful:

Unable to afford a proper camera crew and equipment, The Get Out Clause, an unsigned band from the city, decided to make use of the cameras seen all over British streets. . . . Afterwards they wrote to the companies or organisations involved and asked for the footage under the Freedom of Information Act.

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On gawking at the Amish:

I usually enjoy playing the trespassing voyeur, but even at the heritage museum I could tell that in Amish Country, trespassing and vouyering were not going to bring me as much joy as they usually did.

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Photos of “punk houses” (otherwise known as “apartments of people with whom I will never make eye contact, because they are too intimidatingly cool for me”).

Speaking of, here’s an article on how much the Millennial generation sucks:

One need look no further than the local newsstand to see the favoritism the Millennials have received. Whereas Generation X was routinely denigrated by the press, the Millennials have been compared to World War II’s Greatest Generation. In Robert Strauss and Neil Howe’s Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation, the authors state authoritatively that “over the next decade, the Millennial Generation will entirely recast the image of youth from downbeat and alienated to upbeat and engaged.”

(via Unfogged)

I’m on the cusp – while I’m just one year shy of being an actual Millennial, I am a solipsist and I do blog. However, I take comfort in the fact that no one could ever, ever accuse me of being upbeat or engaged. The ’81 crop of babies must have been the last to be born “downbeat and alienated.”

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Happy Memorial Day, y’all!  Hope everyone enjoys the holiday:  here, it’s a lovely day out, and we’re having friends over to christen our newly cleaned back yard.

Posted in Feminism, Misanthropy, People, Politics, Science | Leave a Comment »

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May 18, 2008

Some Stuff Going On

Immigration crackdown in Iowa:

“They don’t go after employers. They don’t put CEOs in jail,” complained the Postville Community Schools superintendent, David Strudthoff, 51, who said the sudden incarceration of more than 10 percent of the town’s population of 2,300 “is like a natural disaster — only this one is manmade.”

The article opens with a quote from one fellow who’s been working in a meatpacking plant in Postville for 11 years. Good lord, is that not punishment enough for any conceivable transgression?

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I’m a big fan of Slate’s daily digests of various papers and blogs, and I think Friday’s round-up of bloggers’ reactions to the California Supreme Court’s gay marriage decision provides links to a particularly nice range of opinions on the issue. I’ll give Oscar Wilde the last word on this one:

Morality is simply the attitude we adopt toward people we personally dislike.

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Bush has been implying Obama is one of those appeasers we all hear so much about:

The president is just being a demagogue. There’s no general prohibition against talking to regimes we don’t like. There never has been. It’s just a made-up rule that right wingers invented to browbeat their critics and to make war seem inevitable. It’s not like the Bush administration has ever been bound by that constraint.

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Because I can never get enough of this, here’s Mark Liberman on Leonard Sax again:

In his books, Leonard Sax is a political activist using science to make a case, not a scientist evaluating a hypothesis.

Science is sometimes on his side, sometimes neutral or equivocal, and sometimes against him. He picks the results that fit his agenda, ignoring those that don’t; and all too often, he misunderstands, exaggerates or misrepresents the results that he presents.

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I’m sure this jives with the personal experience of anybody in the arts (I find it hard to relate to people who have some expectation that they’ll actually be paid for the work they do):

Unlike 20th century innovation, the most important developments in innovation have been driven not by research funded by governments or developed by corporations but by the collaborative interactions of individuals. In most cases, this modality of innovation has not been motivated by economic concerns or the prospect of profit. This raises the possibility of a world in which some of the sectors of the economy particularly the ones dealing with innovation and creativity are driven by social interactions of various kinds, rather than by profit-oriented investment.

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Another article about how little today’s sex objects have to do with actual sex:

But the women in FHM are an equally false representation of male desire. FHM is not a men’s magazine like GQ or Esquire. It’s a magazine for lads – for 15-year-olds. It serves adolescent boys with the fantasy that there is something or someone out there who is the “sexiest,” a comforting norm of male desire which does not exist and has never existed.

(via 3 Quarks Daily)

When I was in junior high and wondering why all the guys wanted to go out with the exact same girl, someone wise explained this to me: boys like to be told what they ought to want, because they worry that if left to follow their own desires, they’ll want something weird. (An observation that applies to more than just teenagers about more than just sex.)

See also, Scientific American‘s very comprehensive article on orgasm and the brain:

The men, by contrast, were physically titillated mainly by their preferred category of sexual partner-that is, females for straight men and males for gay men-and were not excited by bonobo copulation.

Posted in Dating, Feminism, People, Politics, Science | Leave a Comment »

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May 11, 2008

Interesting Things This Weekend

What the hell is steampunk? Yet another catch-all style term soon to be beaten into the ground:

“Part of the reason it seems so popular is the very difficulty of pinning down what it is,” Mr. von Slatt added. “That’s a marketer’s dream.”

(via The Morning News)

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Verbatim versus gist memories, or, why we sometimes remember sniper fire:

When an event occurs, verbatim memory records an accurate representation. But even as it is doing so, gist memory begins processing the information and determining how it fits into our existing storehouse of knowledge. Verbatim memories generally die away within a day or two, leaving only the gist memory, which records the event as we interpreted it. Under certain circumstances, this can produce a phenomenon . . . in which gist memory – designed to look for patterns and fill in perceived gaps -creates a vivid but illusory image in our mind.

(via The Morning News)

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A list of the many, many reasons to despise Phyllis Schlafly eventually makes its way around to this:

There are conservative scholars who do work that is respected within academia-many economists, for example-and they would not be inappropriate candidates for such an honor. Nor would I have a problem with conservative pundits, so long as they’re sane and genuinely distinguished . . . such as the late William F. Buckley. . . . [However,] it’s a distressing fact that many liberals, anxious not to be seen as “biased” or as condescending to conservatives, in fact bend over backwards to be “fair and balanced” towards them. Such behavior then allows them to congratulate themselves on their “tolerance” and “open-mindedness.” . . .

But this way madness lies. Because, as much as conservatives may whine and scream to the contrary, liberalism and conservatism are not moral equivalents. Because, on the one side you have the thinkers and activists who have advanced freedom, social justice, and human rights, and on the other, you have those who have attempted to thwart all those things. King George III is not the moral equivalent of George Washington. Jefferson Davis is not the moral equivalent of Abraham Lincoln. Joe McCarthy is not the moral equivalent of Walter Reuther. George Wallace is not the moral equivalent of Martin Luther King. And Phyllis Schlafly is not the moral equivalent of Betty Friedan.

So if you’re going to be handing out honorary degrees to political activists, conservatives are always going to come up short. And that is how it should be.

There’s a hole in this somewhere, though, and I think it’s that the author is assuming “liberal” and “conservative” are immutable brackets under which an individual or movement can be fixedly pinned. While it’s true that conservative philosophy by definition is devoted to pulling at the reins, there’ve obviously been situations in which human rights were severely curtailed in the name of social progress, in which instances those holding the reins were praiseworthy. In other words, all champions of human rights are liberal (adj.), but not all liberals (n.) are champions of human rights.

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Jason Kottke’s blogging the New Yorker conference: get the choice bits without having to sit through long talks (or pay for a ticket)!

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What do pacifists have to say about WWII? Nicholson Baker’s controversial novel tackles the question:

This is to be agnostic about the ultimate good or evil in the human soul. It is to be prepared for either. Gandhi, and by extension Baker, strip everything down to that individual human soul and its capacity to suffer and resist and to find its goodness. The only way to enforce the law, from that perspective, is to undergo suffering at the hands of those who would break it.

I’m not convinced, but then, who am I to take issue with Gandhi?

If, like me, you’re not naturally pacific, meditation might help:

Now, a new study from University of Wisconsin-Madison has revealed that meditation can dramatically change brain regions, which in turn can make a person more kind and compassionate. So-called compassion meditation includes concentrating on wishing loved ones and others well-being and freedom from suffering.

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America continues to welcome the huddled masses:

Some 33,000 people are crammed into these overcrowded compounds on a given day, waiting to be deported or for a judge to let them stay here. The medical neglect they endure is part of the hidden human cost of increasingly strict policies in the post-Sept. 11 United States and a lack of preparation for the impact of those policies. The detainees have less access to lawyers than convicted murderers in maximum-security prisons and some have fewer comforts than al-Qaeda terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

But they are not terrorists.

Meanwhile, recruitment agencies make big bucks funneling wealthy foreigners (who pay them for the service) to crappy colleges (that pay them for the students):

“The market range is anywhere from 10 to 25 percent of tuition,” said Visakan Ganeson, director of international programs at Skagit Valley College in Mount Vernon, Wash., which gets about half of its 200 international students through commissioned agents. “How much you pay depends on your position in the market.”

(both via Slate)

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Also, here are sculptures made of chewing gum.

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And finally, everybody’s linking to this, and I am not immune.

Posted in Art, Books, Feminism, People, Politics, Science | Leave a Comment »

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May 7, 2008

Some Interesting Things

Here’s a comprehensive answer to a question I asked many a post ago: what happens if you routinely screw up your recycling?

When loads of plastic are dumped on a recycling facility’s floor, the sorting fun begins. Workers often start by picking through the piles in search of obviously discordant items-kiddie play sets, lawn furniture, clothing mannequins. They also scan for plastic mounds that are drenched in nonrecyclable trash, such as food slurries or medical waste.

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Taylor Clark attempts to dispel the myth of the obnoxiously condescending vegetarian by penning an obnoxiously condescending article:

Those of us who want to avoid the social nightmare have to hide our vegetarianism like an Oxycontin addiction, because admit it, omnivores: You know nothing about us. Do we eat fish? Will we panic if confronted with a hamburger? Are we dying of malnutrition? You have no clue.

In all seriousness, I think vegetarianism is admirable (although PETA, which runs ads that objectify women in order to promote its agenda of giving humanity to animals, can suck it). But I’ve never understood my vegetarian friends’ complaints of the difficulty of finding anything to eat. I’m not even remotely a vegetarian, and I’d estimate that 90% of my diet is cheese, bread and sugar.

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I am nothing if not a lover of routine – in fact, my behavior is so habitual that it borders on insane. Like many writers, I find that I am unable to be creative at all if I don’t build being creative into a fairly rigid routine. According to this article, the important thing is to change up your habits:

. . . it seems antithetical to talk about habits in the same context as creativity and innovation. But brain researchers have discovered that when we consciously develop new habits, we create parallel synaptic paths, and even entirely new brain cells, that can jump our trains of thought onto new, innovative tracks.

Not long ago, I leafed through a book (can’t remember the title) that was basically a longer version of the above article. The book’s author advised that, to free up creative thinking and combat brain atrophy (and possibly Alzheimer’s), you should constantly be trying to surprise your own brain by doing something jolting – walking a different way to work, writing with the wrong hand, using the opposite hand to do different tasks, performing daily activities in a different order than usual, and so forth. Hmm. Maybe I should build breaking my routine into my routine.

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Lindsay Beyerstein responds to Thomas Friedman on subprime mortgages:

Earlier generations weren’t more virtuous because they had less debt. Their dollars bought more. They were more likely to have steady jobs with benefits, including employer-subsidized incentives to save . . . Americans have always valued hard work–and nothing has changed. In the USA, the average worker clocks more hours than anywhere else in the industrialized world.

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A very brief history of illegal immigration:

Chinese exclusion invented something like the concept and business of modern illegal immigration.

(Related, sometimes a picture is worth a thousand misspelled words.)

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And finally, this is way cooler than missed connections: if you live in New York, this guy might draw you…especially if you hang out much at the Taco Bell on 14th.  (via Kottke)

Posted in Advertising, Food, Health, New York City, People, Politics, Science | 2 Comments »

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