DebateGate
General Category => 3DHS => Topic started by: Religious Dick on April 21, 2010, 02:42:11 PM
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New Tribe Rising?
By Patrick J. Buchanan
?Is white the new black??
So asks Kelefa Sanneh in the subtitle of ?Beyond the Pale,? his New Yorker review of several books on white America, wherein he concludes we may be witnessing ?the slow birth of a people.?
Sanneh is onto something. For after a year of battering as ?un-American,? ?evil-doers? and racists, and praise from talk-show hosts and Sarah Palin as ?the real Americans,? Tea Party America seems to be taking on a new and separate identity.
Ethnonationalism ? the recognition of an embryonic people that they are different from their neighbors, and the concomitant drive to live apart ? is, as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote 20 years ago, a more powerful force than any ideology, be it communism, fascism or democracy.
Ethnonationalism is the pre-eminent force of the age we have entered, the creator and destroyer of empires and nations. Even as Schlesinger was writing his ?Disuniting of America,? Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union were disintegrating into 22 new nations, along the lines of ethnicity. In Dagestan, Ingushetia, Chechnya, Ossetia and Abkhazia, the process proceeds apace.
It has happened before ? and here.
In the American colonies, the evil institution of slavery, followed by a century of segregation, created out of the children of captured Africans who had little in common other than color a new people, the African-Americans, who went out and voted 24-to-one for Barack Obama.
In 1754, the 13 colonies consisted of South Carolinians, New Yorkers, Pennsylvanians and Virginians, all loyal subjects of the king.
But after the contemptuous treatment of colonial soldiers in the French and Indian War, the Stamp Act, the Townshend duties, the Boston Massacre, the Tea Party, the Quartering Act and the Quebec Act, by 1775 a new people had been born: the Americans.
In 1770, New York colonists had erected a statue of George III in Bowling Green in grateful tribute for his repeal of the Townshend taxes. In July 1776, they pulled it down and melted it for lead bullets after Washington read his soldiers the Declaration of Independence portraying George III as another Ivan the Terrible.
?There is no such thing as a Palestinian people,? said Golda Meir. When she said it, she may have been right. But as generations have grown up under the occupation and two intifadas and a Gaza War, the Palestinians are a people today.
Adversity and abuse increase the awareness of separate identity and accelerate the secession of peoples from each other.
Obama in the campaign of 2008 recognized that ?out there? in Middle America existed another country, far from the one he grew up in, far from the privileged Ivy League community to which he belonged.
?You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and ? the jobs have been gone now for 25 years. ? So it?s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren?t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.?
Palin and Tea Partiers now repeat Obama?s disparaging line about their clinging to Bibles and guns ? with defiant pride.
As others have done in our multicultural and multiethnic nation, this people is beginning to assert its identity, unapologetically.
Sioux gather at Little Bighorn to celebrate the massacre of Custer?s command. Hawaiian natives demand a new ethnically based government ? and receive Obama?s blessing. Hispanics march under Mexican flags in Los Angeles to demand citizenship for illegal aliens.
Now Southerners are proudly commemorating ancestors who fought and fell in the Lost Cause and demanding recognition of Confederate History Month. And state governors are acceding.
In 2004, when Howard Dean reached out to ?guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks,? Shelby Steele wrote that this was ?absolutely verboten. Racial identity is simply forbidden to whites in America? because of their history and white guilt.
This, Sanneh suggests, is changing. The imputation of racism to Tea Partiers has not intimidated or cowed them.
When Obama named Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, there was no hesitation in blistering her for showing contempt for the rights of Frank Ricci and the white firefighters of New Haven, cheated of the promotions they had won in competitive exams.
When black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates was arrested by Cambridge cop James Crowley, most Americans, despite Obama and media suggestions of racial profiling, sided with Crowley.
Why are the Tea Partiers not intimidated the way Republicans often are? Why is the charge of racism not working?
First, they do not feel the guilt of country-club Republicans.
Second, they know it to be untrue. While Tea Partiers are anti-Obama, they are also anti-Pelosi, anti-Martha Coakley and anti-Charlie Christ. The coming conflict is not so much racial as it is cultural, political and tribal.
Black America seems united. White America is the house divided, for it is in the womb of white America that this new people is gestating and fighting to be born.
http://buchanan.org/blog/new-tribe-rising-3930 (http://buchanan.org/blog/new-tribe-rising-3930)
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Whoah, real split in the conservative ranks here.
Even the arch-conservative Pat Buchanan is recognizing the Tea Party for what it is - - white racism resurgent. Those "country-club Conservatives" better head for the hills.
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Whoah, real split in the conservative ranks here.
Even the arch-conservative Pat Buchanan is recognizing the Tea Party for what it is - - white racism resurgent. Those "country-club Conservatives" better head for the hills.
You want to explain why white people are "racist" when they organize in their interests, but the NAACP, La Raza, and AIPAC aren't?
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<<You want to explain why white people are "racist" when they organize in their interests, but the NAACP, La Raza, and AIPAC aren't?>>
Yeah, thanks for lobbing me an easy one right over the plate, NAACP and La Raza are against racial discrimination and oppression, while Tea Parties are in favour of both.
How AIPAC got in there with La Raza and NAACP is a mystery to me - - AIPAC is the flagship of the ZioNazi movement for the racial and religious oppression of Palestinian Arabs and the organized theft of their land and property by Jews. It's more racist than the fucking Tea Parties.
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I pray Tee has some good medication for this rationalized swill
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<<You want to explain why white people are "racist" when they organize in their interests, but the NAACP, La Raza, and AIPAC aren't?>>
Yeah, thanks for lobbing me an easy one right over the plate, NAACP and La Raza are against racial discrimination and oppression, while Tea Parties are in favour of both.
That is easy to challenge.
What indicates that the Tea Party is in any way at all in favor of any racist policy at all?
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<<What indicates that the Tea Party is in any way at all in favor of any racist policy at all?>>
Racist signs. Yelling "Nigger!" and spitting at Rep. John Lewis and others. Absence of black faces in early videos. Of course, now they are more media-conscious and keep racist signs off-camera, put the handful of blacks who attend in front of the cameras, and avoid spitting and use of the N-word.
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Yeah, thanks for lobbing me an easy one right over the plate, NAACP and La Raza are against racial discrimination and oppression, while Tea Parties are in favour of both.
There is no evidence whatsoever that the tea party folks favor discrimination and oppression. None whatsoever. They are for fiscal conservatism, a concept that has zip to do with race.
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<<What indicates that the Tea Party is in any way at all in favor of any racist policy at all?>>
Racist signs. Yelling "Nigger!" and spitting at Rep. John Lewis and others. Absence of black faces in early videos. Of course, now they are more media-conscious and keep racist signs off-camera, put the handful of blacks who attend in front of the cameras, and avoid spitting and use of the N-word.
Very thin reeds.
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<<They are for fiscal conservatism, a concept that has zip to do with race. >>
Their fiscal conservatism has an oddly selective basis. It never seems to focus on military budgets, on wars of choice, on wars that are estimated to come in at $50 billion and wind up at $3 trill and counting. Wars which seem to target brown-skinned people, if you get my drift.
No, their fiscal conservatism seems to be focused on welfare programs, saving the auto industry and the jobs of the autoworkers (many of them being visible minorities and all of them working class by definition) - - in general, any programs which seem to benefit a lot of darker-skinned folks with funny accents.
Also, for "fiscal conservatives," they sure like to brandish their weapons and threaten gun violence to their opponents a lot, and they sure attract a lot of people to their rallies who seem to like waving racist signs around, don't they? Folks who love to scream nigger and spit at black people, who seem to show up at tea parties, not at any other political rallies to the left of the KKK. Now why do you think that is?
Fiscal conservatives, my ass. They are racist bigots, and if that's not painfully obvious to you, it is obvious to the rest of the country.
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<<Very thin reeds.>>
Every sign, every indication, is a "very thin reed." If they dress up in sheets and burn crosses, it would be a "thin reed." If they wear storm-trooper uniforms with glow-in-the-dark swastikas, it would be a "thin reed."
I'm not even gonna ask you, what does it take, because the REAL answer is, "Nothing." Nothing would convince you that these guys are racist, so what is the point?
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Their fiscal conservatism has an oddly selective basis.
Is it? Deficit spending is deficit spending. They are against it.
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<<Is it? Deficit spending is deficit spending. They are against it. >>
Yeah? They're anti-war? They're pissed off that Bush blew $3 trill in a fucked-up war that was only supposed to cost $50 billion? They want a war tax so the war can be financed directly out of taxpayer contributions without running a deficit? Geeze, I did not know that.
I don't think they give a flying fuck about "deficit spending." If the deficit finances programs they like (war, torture, murder) they don't give a shit. If the deficit finances stuff they oppose (help for the poor and the sick, education, etc.) then they're mad as hell and they ain't gonna take it no more.
Hypocritical racist rednecks.
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Yeah? They're anti-war? They're pissed off that Bush blew $3 trill in a fucked-up war that was only supposed to cost $50 billion? They want a war tax so the war can be financed directly out of taxpayer contributions without running a deficit? Geeze, I did not know that.
I don't think they give a flying fuck about "deficit spending." If the deficit finances programs they like (war, torture, murder) they don't give a shit. If the deficit finances stuff they oppose (help for the poor and the sick, education, etc.) then they're mad as hell and they ain't gonna take it no more.
Hypocritical racist rednecks.
I think you don't understand these people and the unknown frightens you.
Pussy.
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LOL. They are not that hard to understand. Racists are racists. Fascists are fascists. Dummies are dummies.
I was laughing at "pussy." I might be scared of some things, but not the Tea Parties. I'm too old to give a shit. Who ought to be scared are the poor and the black and the sick. The Mexicans and the illegal immigrants. I feel sorry for them all if the Tea Parties win the day.
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Who ought to be scared are the poor and the black and the sick. The Mexicans and the illegal immigrants. I feel sorry for them all if the Tea Parties win the day.
Yes they should be afraid.
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THAT'S why I'm better than you. I feel sorry for them and you don't give a shit. I really believe that there are more people like me than like you. That's why your side is going to lose in the end. We liberals are the good guys and you conservatives are the bad guys. In the end you will fail because people (normal people) can't live with such greed and selfishness.
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That's why your side is going to lose in the end.
Yeah your side is doing such a good job with poverty.
You control the education system. You proud of the results?
I think you are more interested in being thought of as being altruistic than you are in results.
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<<Yeah your side is doing such a good job with poverty.>>
My side? Since when has socialism been given a turn at bat? In Cuba, in Russia, they DID do a good job with poverty. And when communism "fell" in Russia, so did the standard of living of the people, dramatically.
<<You control the education system. You proud of the results?>>
You talking about the universities? Excuse me, who runs them, socialists? Last time I checked the Board of Regents of Any-U, USA, were all businessmen. Conservative businessmen, too. The public schools? Local politicians, trying not to raise taxes, trying not to offend the business community.
<<I think you are more interested in being thought of as being altruistic than you are in results. >>
I AM altruistic, why should I not be thought of as such? You are NOT altruistic, why should you, of all people, be thought of as altruistic?
The results? I know how to get results - - kids have to be taught science and facts, by good teachers earning a good salary and treated with the respect that all professionals deserve. Not tested for "results" as if brain surgeons or trial lawyers are submitted to such indignities. They teach and if they go way overboard, there is professional discipline for them, and otherwise you assume that anyone with a teacher certificate is a good teacher. Not the best but good enough to teach in a public school. And that should be damn good.
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You talking about the universities?
No i am speak of k-12 which produces college freshmen half of whom need remedial coursework. Ask XO.
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K-12? More money, better schools, better teachers. Raise the requirements for the teaching profession. I went to a High School where every teacher had a Master's degree as a minimum in whatever subject they taught. The year I graduated, one of my classmates won the Prince of Wales scholarship, the prize for the highest academic average of any Ontario student. And that wasn't the first time, either. We got a terrific education, but I can tell you that it cost plenty of money. We were in a community of fairly well-off business and professional people, mostly Jewish and Scottish in heritage, who valued education highly and were willing to pay top dollar for it, and our high school was a reflection of those values. There are similar communities today of mostly Asian background and their graduates are today's equivalent of what my school graduated back in the Fifties. Money is always the answer. You want better schools? Pay better for everything.
In the case of the ghetto schools, you have to look at the community behind the schools, and pour money into early childhood development. There is a culture of defeatism and anarchism enshrined by centuries of racist persecution that will not be easily overcome, but you can't shrink from the fact that it CAN be overcome. It costs a lot of money and the greedy white racist society that has profited so much from the enslavement of black people just won't pay back anything without a fight, but that's what liberals are for - - to fight the greedy racist bastards till they cough it all up and pay for their crimes by making good on today's living victims of the racism of their past.
There is no free lunch.
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K-12? More money, better schools, better teachers.
Right. That's why parochial schools turn out better students at lower cost.
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<<Right. That's why parochial schools turn out better students at lower cost. >>
My old high school beat every parochial school in the Province. We paid more for our teachers and we got better qualified ones for our money.
This is not rocket science - - if you want better teachers, you pay more money. If you want better educated, better trained teachers, you pay more money to train and educate them. Pay higher salaries to attract more people into the profession, and raise the teachers' college standards accordingly to get better qualified applicants if that's where the problem lies. You can't do this on the cheap.
The Manhattan Project did not build The Bomb by hiring high-school physics teachers to do the job. This cheap-ass approach to education by so-called "conservatives" is dumb and self-defeating. Trillions to kill brownskins, pennies for education? Fuck dat. Turn it around - - get the military-industrial complex off the sugar tit and start putting the taxpayers' money to useful work. And to kick-start the process, tax the fucking rich. Tax 'em till they bleed.
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My old high school beat every parochial school in the Province. We paid more for our teachers and we got better qualified ones for our money.
I'm sure it did. Was your school private or public. What percentage more did your school pay than the surrounding parochial schools?
And doesn't the Canadian government support parochial schools?
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My high school was public. I lived in a village that has since been amalgamated into the City of Toronto, but at the time operated its own school system, consisting of three elementary schools, one junior high school and one high school.
I don't know what percentage more we paid than the parochial schools, but I know it was substantially more. There were no parochial schools in our village because there were very few Roman Catholics. Most of the RCC families in our village sent their kids to the public school with us, but some took their kids out in the early grades and sent them to parochial schools in Toronto. Apparently the RCC kids who went to school with us came from die-hard liberal families because I found out years later that they were under constant pressure, public and private, from their priests and churches to get their kids out of our school and into a good Catholic school in the city.
The Canadian form of government allows the Provinces to create and regulate the operation of public schools for Roman Catholic students and for non-RCC. In Quebec, the two systems are called "Protestant" and "Catholic" schools, in Ontario they are called "public" and "separate" schools, but "separate" means RCC only. No other religion is officially recognized for the purpose of a constituting a public school supported by the general tax revenues of the school district (usually, a city, town, county or in my own experience, a village.) A few years ago, a strange coalition of Protestant fundies, Jews and Muslims challenged the constitutional basis of this special status of the RCC, and the Supreme Court of Canada backed the status quo on the grounds that it was one of the fundamental conditions upon which the original four Provinces of Canada (at that time, simply four colonies of Great Britain) entered into the new federal state that then became the Dominion of Canada.
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I don't know what percentage more we paid than the parochial schools, but I know it was substantially more.
Did you pay tuition or just higher taxes?
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Nobody pays tuition for a public high school; we paid substantially higher taxes.
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Was the village the sole provider of education funds?
And is your high tax rate the reason you were absorbed into Toronto?
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I'm not sure how the system worked - - either each municipality funds its own schools, or, more likely, those municipalities which can't fund an adequate school system are eligible to apply for Provincial funding.
The City of Toronto, when I was going to high school, was the biggest one of about 23 municipalities which were later amalgamated with great fanfare into the Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto, a.k.a. "Metro." They amalgamated, as I understand the theory, because of the sheer waste of maintaining 23 police forces, 23 police chiefs, 234 Fire Departments, 23 Public Library Boards, 23 public school systems, 23 Medical Officers of Health, 23 Chief Coroners, etc., etc., all serving the same contiguous urbanized (or mostly urbanized) area. "Metro" was organized on the same lines (or similar) as NYC and its "borough" system, and consisted of I think six constituent municipalities - City of Toronto, Borough of North York, Borough of East York, Borough of York, Borough of Scarborough and Borough of Etobicoke.
Some services were 100% amalgamated into one, such as the police forces (Metro Police) while other services remained fragmented - - Metro Roads were responsible for maintaining major traffic arteries, but each of the Boroughs and the City of Toronto still had their own Public Works Departments, which serviced and maintained the local roads. There were still individual school systems and tax departments for the 5 boroughs and the City of Toronto. There were six City Halls (instead of 23) and one big new Metro Hall. Later still they scrapped the "borough system" and everything not amalgamated in the first amalgamation became amalgamated into the City of Toronto in the second amalgamation. Now there's no more Metro and no more North York, etc. but just one big City of Toronto.
The primary motive for each amalgamation as I could see it was the elimination of wasteful duplication of effort. The village I grew up in was absorbed into the City of Toronto, so it lost its unique school system, garbage collection etc. but for years managed to piss off the rest of the City by having its garbage picked up the old way - - twice weekly at the side of the house instead of once weekly at the curb like everyone else. No one was ever able to provide a satisfactory explanation why this should be the case, but this was where the Big Money and the Old Families resided and the situation continued till a few years ago when a "left-wing" City Council finally ended the practice.
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I might have gotten some of the sequences wrong in the last post I made, it's either as I stated or else that 23 municipalities were amalgamated to the City of Toronto while the five Boroughs remained outside the City and later amalgamated.
Either way, the motives for the amalgamations were primarily to eliminate wasteful duplication of effort.
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And the village schools are no longer stellar now that they have to fit the one size fits all mode and the subsequent funding restrictions?
Do you still pay higher taxes because that is where the money is?
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K-12 education sucks in Florida because the state ranks somewhere between 48th and 50th in per capita expenditures for education. We have no state income tax, and sales tax does not cover food or drugs, so the state is always out of money. That means that we have a lot of teachers with "provisional" credentials to teach subjects they know little about (math and sciences in particular).
The state legislature is run by utter and total Republican morons who are uneducated themselves, and who do dumb crap like lower the number of semester hours required to get a BA or BS degree in the state universities, which, of course, drags down the private colleges to the same minimum.
Their recent failed attempt to make all teachers' salaries depend on unspecified tests, with raises going only to those who scored above some undefined mark, would have allowed these fools to reward, say, the best 10% or even 5% of the "best" teachers, and to leave everyone else with no raises at all. Only Charlie Crist prevented these stooges from passing this ghastly perversion. Imagine a state where everyone is as triumphantly ignorant as Kramer. Gaah!
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K12 education sucks in CA, because we have one of the highest per-capita expenditures for education, as well as some of the highest paid teachers in the country
Want to spin that one, Xo?
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<<And the village schools are no longer stellar now that they have to fit the one size fits all mode and the subsequent funding restrictions?>>
The schools are now run by the Toronto Board of Ed, which obviously can't afford to pay the same sum per student as the village council did and can't allocate any more money to the former village schools than it does to any other Toronto school. There were also some demographic changes that could account for the school's relatively lacklustre performance today. Also a series of Provincial "reforms" of the educational system based on a lot of New Age thinking that may have contributed to the overall decline of all the schools in the Province - - or not. It's a hotly debated topic and I don't know enough about the subject to jump into the debate.
It's still a good school, it just does not stand out any more.
As a matter of fact, the Superintendent of Schools of the old village system was hired by North York BOE to head up its own schools after the village schools were absorbed by Toronto, and our move to North York was directly inspired by our desire to have our kids attend the best of the North York borough public schools.
<<Do you still pay higher taxes because that is where the money is?>>
Same as you. All residential properties in the municipality are assessed in value, and a mill rate is struck. People in better homes pay higher taxes due to a higher assessment, but everyone pays at the same mill rate.
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There were also some demographic changes that could account for the school's relatively lacklustre performance today.
Please explain.
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<<Please explain.>>
A lot of what used to be the village is now inhabited by refugees whose first language is not English, and they are struggling just to learn English. The parents are less well educated and can't help the kids as much. The refugees come from conflict zones and some were traumatized by the violence. There is a much higher proportion of apartment dwellers, and these kids won't enjoy ideal study conditions at home. There are just a lot of extraneous problems that did not exist in the village before, so some of that is going to show up in the year-end results. But to tell you the truth, most of those problems could be overcome with more money. More counselling, better housing, lower teacher-student ratios, etc. The real secret of our school's former success was the money spent on hiring, building amenities, field trips, etc. Hiring the best and the brightest.
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K12 education sucks in CA, because we have one of the highest per-capita expenditures for education, as well as some of the highest paid teachers in the country
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They did a piss poor job of educating you. I have no knowledge of California schools.
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K12 education sucks in CA, because we have one of the highest per-capita expenditures for education, as well as some of the highest paid teachers in the country
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I have no knowledge of California schools.
I have, as you have of Florida schools. And you somehow couldn't deal with the conundrum of how CA spends far more money on education, than nearly any other state, and its education sucks, apparently as bad as Florida, as you claim.
Can't be the money now, can it
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Whenever I think of California public education, I always think of that amazing Beach Boys song, (not that ALL of their songs aren't amazing) Be True to Your School, and its irony-rich line "Whatsa matter buddy, ain't you heard of my school? It's number one in the State," which, consciously or not, is hilarious.
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Whenever I think of California public education, I always think of that amazing Beach Boys song, (not that ALL of their songs aren't amazing) Be True to Your School, and its irony-rich line "Whatsa matter buddy, ain't you heard of my school? It's number one in the State," which, consciously or not, is hilarious.
Yeah the song is about sports, and school spirit, identity and local pride.
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<<Very thin reeds.>>
Every sign, every indication, is a "very thin reed." If they dress up in sheets and burn crosses, it would be a "thin reed." ......
No that would just about do it, because things like that couldn't be accidental.
Do you think that UPS has to be Neo fascist because they are wearing brown shirts?
I think you could.
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<<Do you think that UPS has to be Neo fascist because they are wearing brown shirts?>>
Nope. That was your idea, not mine.
<<I think you could.>>
Well, sorry to disappoint you, plane, but I could not.
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<<Do you think that UPS has to be Neo fascist because they are wearing brown shirts?>>
Nope. That was your idea, not mine.
<<I think you could.>>
Well, sorry to disappoint you, plane, but I could not.
But you can accept unproven evidence as established if it is the right flavor.
I don't mind , I have towatch out elese I do the same thing.
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And you somehow couldn't deal with the conundrum of how CA spends far more money on education, than nearly any other state, and its education sucks, apparently as bad as Florida, as you claim.
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First off, I do not think that California spends more than "nearly any other state" The last survey I saw put California at 23rd or 24th, I recall.
There are good schools and bad schools in FL, just as anywhere else. The good ones are in wealthy areas, the bad ones are in poor areas.
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<<But you can accept unproven evidence as established if it is the right flavor.>>
Well, that's just how YOU might characterize my conclusions. I don't see it that way myself, though.
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<<But you can accept unproven evidence as established if it is the right flavor.>>
Well, that's just how YOU might characterize my conclusions. I don't see it that way myself, though.
That is the very nature of Illusion.
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And you somehow couldn't deal with the conundrum of how CA spends far more money on education, than nearly any other state, and its education sucks, apparently as bad as Florida, as you claim.
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First off, I do not think that California spends more than "nearly any other state" The last survey I saw put California at 23rd or 24th, I recall.
And IIRC, they ranked in the top 10 for overall spending on education, and was #1 in Teacher salaries
There are good schools and bad schools in FL, just as anywhere else. The good ones are in wealthy areas, the bad ones are in poor areas.
That goes without saying, and also includes a myriad of other reasons for those performances, and not simply $$$. Frequently the worst teachers are the ones unable to be fired, because of the power of their union contracts, and the teachers' unions in particular, and frequently are transferred to the poorer schools, in the poorer areas. Thus pertuating the above cycle