It takes both the carrots and a real possible threat of the sticks, even sometimes using those sticks.While I want to believe that only through talking and peace will people find equality, I'm afraid Ambrosia is right. And honestly, I utterly hate that the threat of violence and actual violence can sometimes be more effective.
Well, I didn't mean always violence so much as force. The Marches, the strikes, saying no and refusing to budge... they all work in large enough numbers when sustained and repeated. But it's gonna take much more than Occupy (or the Tea Party), or the immigration marches just a few years back.
Edit on refresh: Ninja'd by thejeff
Edit 2: No, ciretose, I know my history and I know how coalition-building works. If I am curt and imprecise and equivocating, it's because I'm tired, I'm trying not pick any fights, and I don't want to write/edit more long-ass posts.
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Violence rarely leads to foundational change. Revolution is the chant of the ignorant who don't realize that nearly all of them lead to Dictatorship, and that the change only comes decades later.
The English tossed out a king to get Cromwell. The French tossed out a King to get Napoleon, the Russian's tossed out a Czar to get Stalin, it goes on and on...
Change comes when your enemy ceases to be your enemy. When the scary black man is some poor kid getting hit with a water hose and chased by dogs.
Change comes from interactions, not sermons. From discussions, not lectures.
Violence leads to fear. Fear leads to all sorts of bad things that don't include reason.
Violence rarely leads to foundational change. Revolution is the chant of the ignorant who don't realize that nearly all of them lead to Dictatorship, and that the change only comes decades later.
The English tossed out a king to get Cromwell. The French tossed out a King to get Napoleon, the Russian's tossed out a Czar to get Stalin, it goes on and on...
Change comes when your enemy ceases to be your enemy. When the scary black man is some poor kid getting hit with a water hose and chased by dogs.
Change comes from interactions, not sermons. From discussions, not lectures.
Violence leads to fear. Fear leads to all sorts of bad things that don't include reason.
You do bring up good points and I did misunderstand the term "the stick". Apologies for that.
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How is cisgendered a derogatory term?
Given how it and transgendered derive (I assume) from a chemistry term regarding the relative positions of atoms in certain carbon molecules, I fail to see how it's even remotely offensive.
I don't find it offensive myself - though mind you I'm somewhere on the shallow end of the trans spectrum (enough to be uncomfortable with my birth gender but never suicidally so if I were further down that spectrum), and struggled with coming to terms with it for many, many years, but for various reasons transitioning isn't going to happen.
On that note, how about I delve into biology and starting calling heterosexual, cisgendered people "wild type". ;)
Edit: I'm joking about the wild type thing. This thread needed some levity.
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<stuff>
I'd offer a hug, but I'm told slaadi hugs are slimy. Still... {makes hugging empty air motions}
And if I run across that elusive Girdle of Opposite Gender, I'll let you know in case you'd like a shot at it. :)
Edit: Would hetero peeps be considered the "control group?"
On that note, how about I delve into biology and starting calling heterosexual, cisgendered people "wild type". ;)
Roar!
*cough-cough* My lungs are not especially suited to issuing such sounds.
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Edit: Would hetero peeps be considered the "control group?"
Better not. It could give people idea they are actually in control. Y'know scientific jargon is not people's strong side.
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This is a derail, but the reason we might be getting immigration reform is that demographics are shifting, Republicans lost the growing Hispanic vote massively in the past election and some of them are smart enough to look forward and realize that even Latino citizens don't take kindly to immigrant bashing and if Republicans keep the bashing up their going to be a minority party for a generation.The reason we are getting immigration reform is the same reason we are getting a slow shift in Gay rights.
People are interacting with Immigrants and Gays and seeing they are human beings and not the boogymen they had been told to fear.
True. But Critical mass is in a section of San Francisco is largely why Harvey Milk was elected and Critical Mass in Greenwich Village is largely why Stonewall happened.
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This is a derail, but the reason we might be getting immigration reform is that demographics are shifting, Republicans lost the growing Hispanic vote massively in the past election and some of them are smart enough to look forward and realize that even Latino citizens don't take kindly to immigrant bashing and if Republicans keep the bashing up their going to be a minority party for a generation.The reason we are getting immigration reform is the same reason we are getting a slow shift in Gay rights.
People are interacting with Immigrants and Gays and seeing they are human beings and not the boogymen they had been told to fear.
So republicans are joining in selling out this nation to a group who's vote hinges on defending lawbreakers yay
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Wildly tangential, and in reply to you so it doesn't seem completely out of left field, but your comments made me wonder if a (physically) heterosexual transgender person has it easier or harder then a homosexual cisgender person. A biologically male person who identifies as female and who likes women versus a biologically male person who identifies as male and likes men, for example
I'm sure I used something improperly there and I apologize to anyone offended by my ignorance there in advance.
That's not an easy thing to judge, and it's subject to a number of conditions that may or may not be the case in a given person's situation, and this is all my opinion based on my perceptions.
The former has the option of outwardly presenting a standard heterosexual male image to the world, and unless they tell anyone, they'll be treated as that. If they bottled up their own dysphoria they would be arguably treated better than a biological male into men in most places. But that's at the expense of what can range from discomfort in their own body to numbing, soul-sucking agony that gets compounded by the world treating them as the very thing they do not want to be.
If the former didn't bottle it up and present as male, their life could be made a living hell just by leaving the house, especially if they were unable to pass as female.
Do you deny yourself and put up with some measure of self-loathing or do you accept the stares and open discrimination if you attempt to present as female or go through the process of transitioning. That's the question some folks have to ask themselves, and the push very likely depends on how far your brain doesn't resemble your outward birth gender in specific areas. I'm not on the extreme end, so for better or for worse I can live with the choice that doesn't cause horrible discrimination for me, and having a partner that understands (and is in the same boat even) makes the decision easier.
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Be honest about the difference,gays are not ignoring our laws to steal into this country ILLEGAL immigrants are. immigrants have had little issue, illegals are the issueThe reason we are getting immigration reform is the same reason we are getting a slow shift in Gay rights.
People are interacting with Immigrants and Gays and seeing they are human beings and not the boogymen they had been told to fear.
I know, people coming to america from other countries. How un-american...
@thejeff - The Immigration issue is reaching a critical mass also, in my opinion, because we are both right. The politicians have to listen to a growing voting block and that growing voting block is pro-immigration reform because they interact with immigrants, either through society or family.
As to Civil Rights, it was easy to dismiss blacks as savages who deserved second class status until you saw good, civilized, church going black folk being treated savagely by white folk.
That was the turning point, with regression in the 1970's and 1980's for a number of reasons.
The post where I thanked you for the info, Comrade Samnell, has disappeared, so, thank you.
And, if I may indulge in some self-absorbed nostalgia...
When I was 20, my comrades said "What the f##* are you doing, kid? You need to get an education or learn a trade or something." And I said, "Nah, that's cool, I'll just keep doing what I'm doing and work for the international proletarian socialist revolution." And they said, "No, it doesn't work like that" and we decided that I would attend UMass Boston.
UMB was designed as an urban school for the Boston working class. It was built in the late sixities--the architect who designed it had only previously designed prisons and it was erected out on Columbia Point so that it could easily be shut down and isolated from the rest of the city.
The original professors there were, for the most part, young New Left grad students from Harvard and other elite universities. Many of them were still there when I attended in the late nineties. One dude gave classes on (revisionist) Marxist economics and another was a (not terribly prominent) historian of the French Revolution and the Vietnam War. Another professor--in whose Politics in 20th Century Eastern European Fiction class I read The War of the Newts and The Seventh Cross--had been involved in social democratic oppositional work in the Soviet bloc, that counterrevolutionary swine. The library had bound volumes of every American communist newspaper from the 1930s-1960s, and complete runs of New Left Review, Past and Present and The New York Review of Books. It also housed the papers of Arthur Garrity, the judge who ordered the desegregation of Boston's public schools.
But it wasn't all socialist heaven: I remember the head of the history department was this gay plutocratic Southron who's area of expertise was pederasty and pedagogy in Ancient Greece and who dropped hints that he had been run out of the South in the '60s for homosexual trysts across the color divide. When he arrived in Boston, he was informed by the local Brahmins that he was a racist fool and that blacks were not inferior to white people, the Irish were. I remember one time hawking my socialist newspapers and him grilling me on Marxist interpretations of Joan of Arc and then my comrades screaming at him after he noted, with mock innocence, that Madeleine Albright was part Jewish.
Anyway, I never graduated, because school sucks, but UMass Boston was awesome, and a good portion of my lifelong friends were made there.
Maybe school doesn't suck.
(Edited)
Without reading the whole article mind you...if minorities were overrepresented, and then post 2007 their admissions declined, mightn't that signal a return to the norm?"Since 2007, admissions of minority students have declined since U of M stopped considering race as a factor in its admissions policies. Mark Rosenbaum, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union who also argued the case, felt that the ruling reaffirmed 'the cornerstone principle of our democracy.'"
They probably know it is actually a decline because after 2007, the percentage of students of a certain minority declined from the percentage of people of that minority in the total population. Since if there actually were equality the percentages should not be significantly different. I haven't actually read the whole article but that is my guess for how they know it is really a decline.
They probably know it is actually a decline because after 2007, the percentage of students of a certain minority declined from the percentage of people of that minority in the total population. Since if there actually were equality the percentages should not be significantly different. I haven't actually read the whole article but that is my guess for how they know it is really a decline.Without reading the whole article mind you...if minorities were overrepresented, and then post 2007 their admissions declined, mightn't that signal a return to the norm?"Since 2007, admissions of minority students have declined since U of M stopped considering race as a factor in its admissions policies. Mark Rosenbaum, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union who also argued the case, felt that the ruling reaffirmed 'the cornerstone principle of our democracy.'"
It's also possible that the drop wasn't due to the lack of affirmative action allowing lingering racial bias to cause those drops, but that those groups that dropped had disproportionate economic disadvantages which on their own contributed to the drop in the absence of AA. As I recall in Cali at least, white proportions stayed around the same level, and asian went up at the expense of black and hispanic. It might not be racial, but economic that happens to fall heavily along racial lines. I don't know.
I'd need to see in-depth studies before I actually took a strong side, rather than musing on the topic, but I suspect the drops were due to economic disparity more than anything else. I would also be interested to see how if affected native born versus first and second generation immigrants of all ethnic groups, since immigrants of all ethnicities tend to have a crazy parental-imposed drive for success that isn't always there in people who have always lived here and take many of their advantages as an American for granted.
Food for thought.
Though this is off topic from gender/sex politics, so my apologies.
All kinds of things are possible.
[Waves $20 bill live a toreador]
Btw, I don't think Ms. Slaad will mind a derailing, so: I actually don't like affirmative action, but am willing to defend it. Free education for all is what I am for.
Vive le Galt!
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Be honest about the difference,gays are not ignoring our laws to steal into this country ILLEGAL immigrants are. immigrants have had little issue, illegals are the issueThe reason we are getting immigration reform is the same reason we are getting a slow shift in Gay rights.
People are interacting with Immigrants and Gays and seeing they are human beings and not the boogymen they had been told to fear.
I know, people coming to america from other countries. How un-american...
@thejeff - The Immigration issue is reaching a critical mass also, in my opinion, because we are both right. The politicians have to listen to a growing voting block and that growing voting block is pro-immigration reform because they interact with immigrants, either through society or family.
As to Civil Rights, it was easy to dismiss blacks as savages who deserved second class status until you saw good, civilized, church going black folk being treated savagely by white folk.
That was the turning point, with regression in the 1970's and 1980's for a number of reasons.
You are again being dishonest. people coming here is not and has never been the issue, it is about legal procedures and some choosing to ignore those laws.
They probably know it is actually a decline because after 2007, the percentage of students of a certain minority declined from the percentage of people of that minority in the total population. Since if there actually were equality the percentages should not be significantly different. I haven't actually read the whole article but that is my guess for how they know it is really a decline.Without reading the whole article mind you...if minorities were overrepresented, and then post 2007 their admissions declined, mightn't that signal a return to the norm?"Since 2007, admissions of minority students have declined since U of M stopped considering race as a factor in its admissions policies. Mark Rosenbaum, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union who also argued the case, felt that the ruling reaffirmed 'the cornerstone principle of our democracy.'"
It's also possible that the drop wasn't due to the lack of affirmative action allowing lingering racial bias to cause those drops, but that those groups that dropped had disproportionate economic disadvantages which on their own contributed to the drop in the absence of AA. As I recall in Cali at least, white proportions stayed around the same level, and asian went up at the expense of black and hispanic. It might not be racial, but economic that happens to fall heavily along racial lines. I don't know.
I'd need to see in-depth studies before I actually took a strong side, rather than musing on the topic, but I suspect the drops were due to economic . more than anything else. I would also be interested to see how if affected native born versus first and second generation immigrants of all ethnic groups, since immigrants of all ethnicities tend to have a crazy parental-imposed drive for success that isn't always there in people who have always...
That pervasive economic disparity between different ethnicities is a huge part of the problem which AA is the current solution for. It is not just racial bias, but all of the other things that are influenced by face which you are not thinking of because you are (I surmise) a member of a relatively privilaged ethnicity, so you dont ever have to think about. So if you are right, the study seems to have proven that it does in fact ameliorate the problem.
Back on topic though, I have been hesitant to engage so far even though the topic interests me because the sheer amount of missing the point going on in this thread is mind blowing. It took me a long time to understand and come to terms with privilege as well but seriously people.
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I know, people coming to america from other countries. How un-american...
Since this, and my response to it is a bit off topic...
If people want to come to The United States from other countries, great, awesome, keep 'em coming, but so long as they do so LEGALLY!
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You are again being dishonest. people coming here is not and has never been the issue, it is about legal procedures and some choosing to ignore those laws.
Legal procedures? Like trading beads for land legal procedures or more the jobs for Irish/Italian/German votes?
You can't make the statement you just made with a straight face unless your history teachers failed you completely.
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I know, people coming to america from other countries. How un-american...Since this, and my response to it is a bit off topic...
** spoiler omitted **
Except the laws changed to the point that none of your grandparents (and half of mine, because I have signers of the constitution on the other side of my family) would be here legally.
It is ironic that "conservatives" are for more government and enforcing laws when it comes to immigrants, but not so much to general regulations and guns.
When my Great Grandfather came here at the age of 16 he filled out a one page form on Ellis Island (actually, probably someone else filled it out) and he was good to go.
You can work in this country for years, paying taxes, and still not be eligible for citizenship.
They aren't taking your jobs unless you are incredibly incompetent and unskilled, because again, if you can't beat out someone born and educated in the third world with limited english skills for a job, that is because they are better than you.
Isn't that how the free market approach works?
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It is ironic that "conservatives" are for more government and enforcing laws when it comes to immigrants, but not so much to general regulations and guns.
Spoiler tagged again, as this is off topic...
The laws on immigration may have changed since your Great Grandfather's time, but it sounds like he still followed the laws of his time... Just sayin'
I find it reprehensible that a LAW ENFORCMENT OFFICER is on the side of those breaking the law...
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It is ironic that "conservatives" are for more government and enforcing laws when it comes to immigrants, but not so much to general regulations and guns.Spoiler tagged again, as this is off topic...
** spoiler omitted **
I find it more reprehensible that one would argue for the more laws on others when you find it convenient, while arguing for less laws on themselves when it isn't.
And I can assure you most of our immigrant forefathers were legal more often due to lack of enforcement than due process of law.
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You are again being dishonest. people coming here is not and has never been the issue, it is about legal procedures and some choosing to ignore those laws.Legal procedures? Like trading beads for land legal procedures or more the jobs for Irish/Italian/German votes?
You can't make the statement you just made with a straight face unless your history teachers failed you completely.
History is history, today's laws are what must be followed.
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I find it more reprehensible that one would argue for the more laws on others when you find it convenient, while arguing for less laws on themselves when it isn't.
And as I said, most conservatives merely want what laws we already have in place enforced instead of enacting news laws... So how is that arguing for more laws on issues such as [illegal] immigration (or fewer laws on other issues such as the ones you've previously mentioned)? No new laws; just enforce the ones we have. And if, if after doing that, we find that they do not work, THEN (and only then) come to the table proposing new laws. But again only AFTER we have at least tried, and I mean seriously tried, to use and enforce our existing laws...
You are again being dishonest. people coming here is not and has never been the issue, it is about legal procedures and some choosing to ignore those laws.Be honest about the difference,gays are not ignoring our laws to steal into this country ILLEGAL immigrants are. immigrants have had little issue, illegals are the issueThe reason we are getting immigration reform is the same reason we are getting a slow shift in Gay rights.
People are interacting with Immigrants and Gays and seeing they are human beings and not the boogymen they had been told to fear.
I know, people coming to america from other countries. How un-american...
@thejeff - The Immigration issue is reaching a critical mass also, in my opinion, because we are both right. The politicians have to listen to a growing voting block and that growing voting block is pro-immigration reform because they interact with immigrants, either through society or family.
As to Civil Rights, it was easy to dismiss blacks as savages who deserved second class status until you saw good, civilized, church going black folk being treated savagely by white folk.
That was the turning point, with regression in the 1970's and 1980's for a number of reasons.
We ignore their laws when we f!+$ with their right to self-determination in their home countries, call it a draw?