Skip to main content

Home/ History Readings/ Group items matching "hispanics" in title, tags, annotations or url

Group items matching
in title, tags, annotations or url

Sort By: Relevance | Date Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
sgardner35

Opinion: Both parties must lead on immigration - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by sgardner35 on 18 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • President Obama won re-election thanks in part to a 52-percentage-point spread among Latino voters, the nation's fastest-growing electorate, according to election eve polling. In the America coming over the horizon, it is practically impossible to overcome such a number and win the race for president.According to the polling by Latino Decisions, Hispanic voters nationally and across every battleground state swung heavily to Democrats.
  • Nationwide, the margin was 75% to 23%. And there were remarkable spreads in the tightest of swing states: 87% to 10% in Colorado, 82% to 17% in Ohio, 66% to 31% in Virginia. (CNN's own poll showed a smaller but still significant spread nationwide -- 71% to 21% -- and in the swing states).
  • law enforcement and business leaders have worked with immigrant leaders across the political spectrum to forge a new consensus on immigrants and America.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • And job creators, people who own businesses, are yearning for common-sense reforms too. We know we need to find a solution when Larry Wooten, president of the North Carolina Farm Bureau, says, "The longer national political leaders ignore the issue or use it as a political wedge, the more our farmers suffer because they cannot find a sufficient labor pool to harvest their crops."
  • When it comes to crafting a 21st century immigration process, Bibles, badges and business are ready to work with both Democrats and Republicans to reach a consensus.Americans are ready for a just immigration system that treats all people with dignity and respect. Our leaders in Washington -- of both parties -- can and must deliver.
Javier E

Who Are the Angriest Republicans? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-the-angriest-republicans.html

gop working class white voters election

shared by Javier E on 31 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • The virulent attacks on less affluent Republican voters by Williamson et al raise the question: As a matter of practical politics, how can a party that is losing ground in virtually every growing constituency — Hispanics, Asians, single women and the young — even consider jettisoning a single voter, much less the struggling white working class?
  • Trump has won his biggest primary margins among less financially secure, less educated voters, turning the traditional winning coalition in Republican primaries upside down. Mitt Romney consistently did best among the most educated and most affluent Republican primary voters. So did John McCain in 2008.
  • The Republican Party has seen its core — married white Christians — decline from 62 percent of the population of the United States to 28 percent in 2015, according to the Public Religion Research Institute.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • 69 percent of respondents described themselves as “angry because our political system seems to only be working for the insiders with money and power;” 54 percent said that both the economic and political systems were “stacked” against them.
Javier E

Opinion | Why We Miss the WASPs - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...george-bush-wasps.html

meritocracy aristocracy diversity WASP elitiism piety discipline establishment culture history

shared by Javier E on 06 Dec 18 - No Cached
  • two of the more critical takes on Bush nostalgia got closer to the heart of what was being mourned, in distant hindsight, with his death.
  • Peter Beinart described the elder Bush as the last president deemed “legitimate” by both of our country’s warring tribes — before the age of presidential sex scandals, plurality-winning and popular-vote-losing chief executives, and white resentment of the first black president
  • Franklin Foer described “the subtext” of Bush nostalgia as a “fondness for a bygone institution known as the Establishment, hardened in the cold of New England boarding schools, acculturated by the late-night rituals of Skull and Bones, sent off to the world with a sense of noblesse oblige. For more than a century, this Establishment resided at the top of the American caste system. Now it is gone, and apparently people wish it weren’t.”
  • ...28 more annotations...
  • you can usefully combine these takes, and describe Bush nostalgia as a longing for something America used to have and doesn’t really any more — a ruling class that was widely (not universally, but more widely than today) deemed legitimate, and that inspired various kinds of trust (intergenerational, institutional) conspicuously absent in our society today.
  • we miss the WASPs — because we feel, at some level, that their more meritocratic and diverse and secular successors rule us neither as wisely nor as well.
  • The WASP virtues also included a cosmopolitanism that was often more authentic than our own performative variety — a cosmopolitanism that coexisted with white man’s burden racism but also sometimes transcended it
  • However, one of the lessons of the age of meritocracy is that building a more democratic and inclusive ruling class is harder than it looks, and even perhaps a contradiction in terms. You can get rid of the social registers and let women into your secret societies and
  • you still end up with something that is clearly a self-replicating upper class, a powerful elite, filling your schools and running your public institutions.
  • you even end up with an elite that literally uses the same strategy of exclusion that WASPs once used against Jews to preserve its particular definition of diversity from high-achieving Asians — with the only difference being that our elite is more determined to deceive itself about how and why it’s discriminating
  • certain of the old establishment’s vices were inherent to any elite, that meritocracy creates its own forms of exclusion
  • the WASPs had virtues that their successors have failed to inherit or revive
  • Those virtues included a spirit of noblesse oblige and personal austerity and piety that went beyond the thank-you notes and boat shoes and prep school chapel going — a spirit that trained the most privileged children for service, not just success, that sent men like Bush into combat alongside the sons of farmers and mechanics in the same way that it sent missionaries and diplomats abroad in the service of their churches and their country.
  • The goal would have been to keep piety and discipline embedded in the culture of a place like Harvard, rather than the mix of performative self-righteousness and raw ambition that replaced them.
  • for every Brahmin bigot there was an Arabist or China hand or Hispanophile who understood the non-American world better than some of today’s shallow multiculturalists.
  • And somehow the combination of pious obligation joined to cosmopolitanism gave the old establishment a distinctive competence and effectiveness in statesmanship — one that from the late-19th century through the middle of the 1960s was arguably unmatched among the various imperial elites with whom our establishment contended
  • “Those who are mourning the passing of the old Establishment should mourn its many failures, too,” he writes. Which is fair enough: The old ruling class was bigoted and exclusive and often cruel, it had failures aplenty
  • And as an American today, you don’t have to miss everything about the WASPs, or particularly like their remaining heirs, to feel nostalgic for their competence
  • long with the establishment failure in Vietnam, which hastened the collapse of the old elite’s authority, there was also a loss of religious faith and cultural confidence, and a belief among the last generation of true WASPs that the emerging secular meritocracy would be morally and intellectually superior to their own style of elite
  • the WASP ascendancy did not simply fall; it pre-emptively dissolved itself.
  • its virtues were to some extent transferable to a more diverse society: The establishment had always been somewhat permeable to arrivistes,
  • in our era their admirable influence is still felt in figures as different as Barack Obama and Mitt Romney
  • In such a world the establishment would have still admitted more blacks, Jews, Catholics and Hispanics (and more women) to its ranks … but it would have done so as a self-consciously elite-crafting strategy, rather than under the pseudo-democratic auspices of the SAT and the high school resume and the dubious ideal of “merit.”
  • At the same time it would have retained both its historic religious faith (instead of exchanging Protestant rigor for a post-Christian Social Gospel and a soft pantheism) and its more self-denying culture (instead of letting all that wash away in the flood of boomer-era emotivism).
  • So as an American in the old dispensation, you didn’t have to like the establishment — and certainly its members were often eminently hateable — to prefer their leadership to many of the possible alternatives
  • it’s to look forward, and to suggest that our current elite might someday be reformed — or simply replaced — through the imitation of the old establishment's more pious and aristocratic spirit.
  • Right now, almost all the discussion of our meritocracy’s vices assumes the system’s basic post-WASP premises, and hopes that either more inclusion (the pro-diversity left’s fixation) or a greater emphasis on academic merit (the anti-affirmative right’s hobbyhorse) will cure our establishment’s all-too-apparent ills.
  • a more radical theory of the case, one proposed by Helen Andrews in a 2016 Hedgehog Review essay on meritocracy and its discontents:
  • The meritocracy is hardening into an aristocracy — so let it. Every society in history has had an elite, and what is an aristocracy but an elite that has put some care into making itself presentable? Allow the social forces that created this aristocracy to continue their work, and embrace the label
  • By all means this caste should admit as many worthy newcomers as is compatible with their sense of continuity. New brains, like new money, have been necessary to every ruling class, meritocratic or not
  • they must give up any illusion that such tinkering will make them representative of the country over which they preside. They are separate, parochial in their values, unique in their responsibilities. That is what makes them aristocratic.
  • If we would learn from their lost successes in our own era of misrule, reconsidering this idea — that a ruling class should acknowledge itself for what it really is, and act accordingly — might be a fruitful place to start.
Javier E

The Harvard Admissions Process Needs Reform - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...576136

harvard admissions college affirmative action

shared by Javier E on 19 Nov 18 - No Cached
  • Almost every student on campus is the subject of harsh appraisals based on how others assume they got in. The New York Times recently published an article about five freshmen friends at Harvard; one of them, the daughter of two Harvard alumni, was unsettled when a classmate “contrasted people who were ‘super qualified to be here’ with legacies.” Assumptions about affirmative action have led other observers to perceive Harvard’s many black and Hispanic students as beneficiaries of lowered admissions standards, rather than students who are themselves “super qualified to be here.”
  • In fact, the only students who aren’t vulnerable to assumptions of underqualification are Asian. The heartless assumption about Asian Americans at highly selective colleges is that they are, if anything, overqualified—academic beasts of burden, whose strange willingness to work endlessly makes them a vast group of curve-busters, who disappear into the hard sciences and are never heard from again until you need a knee replacement or a shunt in your brain.
  • he lawsuit has thrust many facts into the public view that Harvard would have liked to keep secret. An internal investigation conducted in 2013 concluded that the admissions process was biased against Asians, yet the admissions office never did anything to remedy the fact. Previously confidential notes made by admissions officers reveal that many Asian students were torpedoed because of low scores in the squishy category of personal qualities; these notes suggested that many Asians just aren’t the right kind of people for Harvard—not enough self-expression, norm-breaking, insouciance. “Would she relax and have any fun?” was written on the application of one high-achieving female student, which seems both racist and sexist
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • et the larger lesson be this: The entire, time-honored way of doing admissions at Harvard and its peer institutions is unsustainable. What could be more elitist—more paternalistic—than a black-box process from which life-changing, final decisions are rendered based on a system that more or less comes down to: Just trust us? How can a process meant to democratize an institution still valorize the children of wealth and privilege? If the system is broadly understood to make right its manifold past failings regarding race and privilege, how can it justify admitting Asian Americans at a lower rate than any other cohort?
Javier E

Andrew Sullivan: Portrait of the President As a Con Man - 0 views

nymag.com/...he-president-as-a-con-man.html

immigration Catholic sexual abuse trump con game history

shared by Javier E on 29 Jul 18 - No Cached
  • One of the talking points for some who support continued mass immigration is the notion that the places where immigration is least popular are the places with the fewest number of immigrants. That’s how irrational xenophobia is, they suggest
  • the Migration Policy Institute complicates the picture a bit. While it finds that the number of immigrants increased by 9 percent between 2010 and 2016, it also notes that it had risen by 15 percent or more in 15 states. And among those states, most are red ones: North Dakota, West Virginia, South Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming, Alaska, Indiana, and Iowa among them.
  • , the total numbers are nowhere near where they are in, say, California, but the pace of change really has increased in those states where opposition — especially to immigrants who entered the country illegally — is high. I don’t find this surprising.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • One other small thing to note: More than a fifth of Americans, according to this survey, now speak a language other than English at home. In Nevada and Florida, nearly a third of residents don’t speak English at home.
  • very few previous waves of immigrants have been so homogeneous for as long as the Spanish-speaking immigrants from Mexico and Central America currently are; their numbers are higher than any other previous wave; and few have been so thoroughly dispersed.
  • the sheer scale of the cultural transformation of the last couple of decades — the CDC predicts that close to a quarter of Americans will be Hispanic by 2035 — is undeniable.
  • If you ignore that, or insist that worrying about too fast a pace of cultural change is inherently racist, it’s relatively easy to insist that there is no immigration crisis
  • if you believe that nations require some continuity and cultural unity to cohere and endure, then the picture is somewhat different. There is a reason this issue has become so prominent in this country. And it isn’t entirely bigotry.
Javier E

Opinion | Conservatism After Christianity - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...vatism-after-christianity.html

conservatism christianity trump white identity

shared by Javier E on 16 Sep 18 - No Cached
  • The trend was consistent: The more often a Trump voter attended church, the less white-identitarian they appeared, the more they expressed favorable views of racial minorities, and the less they agreed with populist arguments on trade and immigration.
  • The differences were particularly striking on race. For instance, a quarter of Trump voters who never attend church describe being white as “very important” to their identity; for the most frequent churchgoers voters, it was 9 percent. Among non-churchgoing Trump voters, only 48 percent had warm feelings toward black people, compared to 71 percent of weekly churchgoers; the same sort of pattern held for views of Hispanics, Asians and Jews.
  • their views of Muslims, interestingly, seemed to have been influenced by Trump’s own rhetoric, becoming more hostile between 2016 and 2017.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • in general, churchgoing Republicans look more like the party many elite conservatives wanted to believe existed before Trump came along — more racially-tolerant, more accepting of multiculturalism and globalization, and also more consistently libertarian on economics.
  • Secularized Trump voters look more like the party as Trump has tried to remake it, blending an inchoate economic populism with strong racial resentments.
  • The irreligious are less likely to have college degrees, less likely to be married and more likely to be divorced; they’re also less civically engaged, less satisfied with their neighborhoods and communities, and less trusting and optimistic in general.
  • Such a bet might be understandable as an act of desperation. But it’s hard to see how it can reverse de-Christianization, and easy to see how it might accelerate it
  • only about a third of Trump’s 2016 voters are in church on a typical Sunday, and almost half attend seldom or not at all.
  • Despite their resistance to that toxicity, the churchgoers in this survey did vote for him, making a pragmatic bet that his policies on abortion and religious liberty were worth living with his Caligulan personal life and racial demagoguery. To defend that bet, some historically-inclined believers have cited past cases where Christians accepted bargains with a not-particularly moral leaders — including the way the early church accepted the patronage of Roman emperors, from Constantine onward, whose personal piety was limited at best.
  • But the Constantinian bet involved a rising religion allying with a worldly power to accelerate its growth and gains. The bet under Trump involves the reverse sort of situation: A Christian community trying to make the best of its decline, and allying with a leader whose core appeal depends upon and possibly furthers the de-Christianization of conservatism.
  • This seems to support the argument, advanced by Tim Carney of the Washington Examiner among others, that support for populism correlates with a kind of communal breakdown, in which secularization is one variable among many leaving people feeling isolated and angry, and drawing them to the ersatz solidarity of white identity politics.
  • e his ascent was intimately connected to the secularization of conservatism, and his style gives us a taste of what to expect from a post-religious right.
Javier E

Americans Remain Deeply Ambivalent About Diversity - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...583123

diversity identity us politics culture

shared by Javier E on 21 Feb 19 - No Cached
  • These survey results suggest that Americans are deeply ambivalent about the role of diversity in their families, friendships, and civic communities. Some people, it seems, prefer to stay in their bubble.
  • just under a quarter of Americans say they seldom or never interact with people who don’t share their partisan affiliation. Black and Hispanic people were more likely than whites to describe their lives this way, although education made a big difference among whites: 27 percent of non-college-educated whites said they seldom or never encounter people from a different political party, compared with just 6 percent of college-educated whites.
  • Less than half of respondents said they encounter political differences among their friends. Only 39 percent said they see political diversity within their families, and vanishingly few people said they encounter ideological diversity at religious services or community meetings.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • The PRRI/Atlantic findings add to growing evidence that these institutions are becoming weaker—or, at the very least, more segregated by identity
  • Almost one in five of the survey respondents said their interactions with people of a different political party are negative
  • “As these other social identities have moved into alignment with partisanship, we’re seeing more animosity across partisan lines—not necessarily because we’re disagreeing about things, but because we believe the [person from the] other party is an outsider, socially and culturally, from us,”
  • “It also becomes really easy to dehumanize people who we don’t have identities in common with.” In recent decades, social scientists have seen increased use of the language of dehumanization, Mason said: people calling their political opponents monsters, animals, or demons, for example.
  • When asked how they would feel about their child marrying someone from the opposite political party, 45 percent of Democrats said they would be unhappy, compared with 35 percent of Republicans.
  • Perhaps more than any other, this was the fracture line that animated the 2016 election. Even the iconography, from the Trump campaign’s “Make America Great Again” trucker hats to the Clinton campaign’s forward-pointing “H” and “Stronger Together” slogan reflected this divide
  • a far greater number of Americans may have only cursory interactions with people unlike themselves.
  • Certain subgroups were more cloistered than others: 21 percent of Republicans said they seldom or never interact with people who don’t share their race, versus 13 percent of Democrats
  • Similarly, more than a quarter of white evangelicals said they rarely encounter people of a different race, slightly more than any other major religious group included in the survey.
  • among white people, education level made a huge difference: Those without a college degree were more than twice as likely as their college-educated peers to say they rarely encounter people of a different race, and more than four times as likely to say they seldom or never encounter people from a different religion or political party.
  • Many respondents pointed to political parties and the media as two major causes of all this discord, with stark differences along partisan lines: 85 percent of Republicans said the media is pulling the country apart, versus 54 percent of Democrats.
  • Americans today are sharply divided over the value of multiculturalism: In the survey, 54 percent of Democrats said they prefer the United States to be made up of people from a wide variety of religions, compared with 12 percent of Republicans. By contrast, 40 percent of Republicans said they’d prefer a nation mostly made up of Christians, compared with 14 percent of Democrats.
  • Roughly one out of five survey respondents reported that they seldom or never encounter people who don’t share their religion, and a similar proportion said the same for race.
  • “As certain groups reach a critical mass, I think it throws Americans as a whole back into a conversation about affirming these principles [of pluralism] or not,” he said. “If you think culture war today, it’s less about gay marriage and abortion than it is about American identity.”
  • When people largely surround themselves with sameness, they may find themselves left shouting across perceived divides, unable to see their reflection in anyone who stands on the other side.
Javier E

The unhappy states of America: Despite an improving economy, Americans are glum - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ing-economy-americans-are-glum

shared by Javier E on 31 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • Americans are more glum now than they were during the Great Recession
  • 2017 turned out to be the worst year for well-being on record. The overall index score was even lower than during the financial crisis, and, for the first time in the decade that Gallup has done this poll, no state in the country showed a statistically significant increase in well-being.
  • In 2009, a year when 15 states showed declines in well-being, money and financial worries were at the top of the list. Today, emotional and psychological factors dominate. People are not content in their jobs and relationships, and depression diagnoses are at an all-time high in the United States.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Some blame politics and polarization for causing people to feel more anxiety and bitterness toward work colleagues and family. There's a constant narrative of division in the country between Republicans and Democrats, gun-rights supporters and gun-control advocates, the religious and the nonreligious, and so on. And there are near daily headlines about chaos in the White House.
  • “We don’t know what is going to happen next. There’s no clear path toward stabilizing either the country or the world.”
  • Almost every demographic group dropped in well-being in 2017 — except for wealthy white men. Women, African Americans, Hispanics and lower-income households (those earning less than $48,000 a year) all saw substantial drops in their perception of their well-being.
  • Democrats also showed far bigger declines than Republicans or independents. “Switching out the person in the Oval Office can and does have an effect on well-being,”
  • While consumer confidence is at the highest level since 2004, polls that look at broader issues than income and spending power don't appear as rosy.
  • Forty percent of American adults now say they are lonely, double the share of people who said that in the 1980s, according to AARP. Some people are even struggling to feel connected to their work colleagues
  • In 2017, the No. 1 fear was corrupt government officials followed by the overall state of health care and worries about pollution. There was also a significant jump last year in fears about the United States getting into another world war.
  • In 2017, half of Americans said one of their top fears was “not having enough money for the future,” a reminder that even if people have jobs now, they remain anxious because they aren't sure how long that will last.
  • “People are feeling more economically insecure, even if they have a job and a salary,” said Rachel Schneider, co-author of “The Financial Diaries: How American Families Cope in a World of Uncertainty.” “I think it's a combination of knowing you're responsible for your own retirement, knowing you're responsible for your own health care and knowing that you don't have any significant job security.”
  • There's a growing push from academics and even Wall Street bankers, such as hedge fund billionaire Ray Dalio, to get politicians to look beyond the national statistics on jobs and economic. Those numbers aren't painting the full picture of how Americans are doing, let alone feeling, experts say.
  • Despite the improving economy, the fear of running out of money down the road jumped nearly 10 points from the year before, and it was followed closely by fears of “high medical bills.”
Javier E

Paying the price for breakdown of the country's bourgeois culture - Philly - 0 views

www.philly.com/...ourgeois-culture-20170809.html

culture values tradition

shared by Javier E on 03 Apr 18 - No Cached
  • implicated in these and other maladies is the breakdown of the country’s bourgeois culture.
  • That culture laid out the script we all were supposed to follow: Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. Go the extra mile for your employer or client. Be a patriot, ready to serve the country. Be neighborly, civic-minded, and charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime.
  • They could be followed by people of all backgrounds and abilities, especially when backed up by almost universal endorsement.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • Adherence was a major contributor to the productivity, educational gains, and social coherence of that period.
  • Was everything perfect during the period of bourgeois cultural hegemony? Of course not. There was racial discrimination, limited sex roles, and pockets of anti-Semitism.
  • However, steady improvements for women and minorities were underway even when bourgeois norms reigned.
  • Banishing discrimination and expanding opportunity does not require the demise of bourgeois culture. Quite the opposite: The loss of bourgeois habits seriously impeded the progress of disadvantaged groups
  • This cultural script began to break down in the late 1960s.
  • A combination of factors — prosperity, the Pill, the expansion of higher education, and the doubts surrounding the Vietnam War — encouraged an antiauthoritarian, adolescent, wish-fulfillment ideal — sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll — that was unworthy of, and unworkable for, a mature, prosperous adult society
  • This era saw the beginnings of an identity politics that inverted the color-blind aspirations of civil rights leaders like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. into an obsession with race, ethnicity, gender, and now sexual preference.
  • And those adults with influence over the culture, for a variety of reasons, abandoned their role as advocates for respectability, civility, and adult values.
  • All cultures are not equal. Or at least they are not equal in preparing people to be productive in an advanced economy.
  • The culture of the Plains Indians was designed for nomadic hunters, but is not suited to a First World, 21st-century environment. Nor are the single-parent, antisocial habits, prevalent among some working-class whites; the anti-“acting white” rap culture of inner-city blacks; the anti-assimilation ideas gaining ground among some Hispanic immigrants
  • These cultural orientations are not only incompatible with what an advanced free-market economy and a viable democracy require, they are also destructive of a sense of solidarity and reciprocity among Americans
  • If the bourgeois cultural script — which the upper-middle class still largely observes but now hesitates to preach — cannot be widely reinstated, things are likely to get worse for us all.
  • Among those who currently follow the old precepts, regardless of their level of education or affluence, the homicide rate is tiny, opioid addiction is rare, and poverty rates are low.
  • Those who live by the simple rules that most people used to accept may not end up rich or hold elite jobs, but their lives will go far better than they do now. All schools and neighborhoods would be much safer and more pleasant. More students from all walks of life would be educated for constructive employment and democratic participation.
  • But restoring the hegemony of the bourgeois culture will require the arbiters of culture — the academics, media, and Hollywood — to relinquish multicultural grievance polemics and the preening pretense of defending the downtrodden. Instead of bashing the bourgeois culture, they should return to the 1950s posture of celebrating it.
Javier E

The ugly face of ethno-nationalists - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...gly-face-of-ethno-nationalists

gop conservatism nativism populism racism white supremacy trump politics

shared by Javier E on 22 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • it’s time to acknowledge that many Republicans view his appeals to white grievance as a positive feature. It’s behind their obsession with “Telling it like it is” — code for expressing base prejudices. The rejection of Hispanics as real Americans has become a given among state-TV hosts like Tucker Carlson.
  • When Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) takes to the floor to claim Democrats care more about illegal immigrants than sick kids or the military, you see how vital the race/immigrant card has become to the GOP’s unity.
  • In many ways, antagonism toward immigrants is the glue that binds Trump to his followers and Republicans to one another.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Trump proved in the 2016 election that immigration unified the GOP much more effectively than did its traditional focus on reducing entitlement spending, free trade and low deficits. Among the GOP base, the populist issues of trade and immigration are now far more animating than even abortion or taxes.
  • I never understood why a movement would take pride in rejecting modernism (rather than shaping it, conserving what is good and discarding what is not), but on top of that, stopping a huge demographic shift — the largest, most diverse generation in history (millennials) supplanting aging baby boomers — seems futile and irrational.
  • The retreat into ethno-nationalism is no small matter but rather goes to the very definition of America and the core questions the Civil War, the civil rights movement and every wave of anti-immigration sentiment have presented: Who is an American? Does America need immigrants to prosper and to renew its creed in each generation?
  • Trump and this iteration of the Republican party have made aversion to diversity such a vital principle, it cannot be considered trivial. This is how Republicans have chosen to define themselves these days — and why many of us can no longer call themselves Republicans.
runlai_jiang

New Barriers to Replace Aging Border Wall in California - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...-wall-in-california-1520164800

boarder fence

shared by runlai_jiang on 04 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • The structure was one of the first new pieces of a border wall put in place since the start of a lengthy construction project in February just west of the border crossing in downtown Calexico, a small, mostly Hispanic farming town.
  • Mr. Kim said the roughly $18 million project was funded by Congress last year. He said the project happens to be getting under way in the midst of Mr. Trump’s continuing effort to build a wall along the Mexican border. “We want to make sure everyone knows what it is and what it isn’t,” Mr. Kim said.
  • California has become a flashpoint in the debate over the president’s immigration policies, including his proposal to build a wall. The state has sued the administration multiple times challenging its immigration policies.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Mr. Kim said the new barriers in Calexico are replacing solid metal panels that sat as high as 18 feet in some areas. But smugglers and border crossers have cut holes in them thousands of times in recent years, requiring near-constant repairs.
  • The new bollard-style barriers are likely to be harder to breach and will offer agents more security, because they will be able to see what and who is on the other side. The Border Patrol has established a “First Amendment zone” for potential protesters, Mr. Kim said, but so far the area at the western edge of the project hasn’t been used.
millerco

Blue-Collar Whites Are Leaving Trump - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...550247

US history politics trump approval 2020 election

shared by millerco on 11 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • According to previously unpublished findings, the blue-collar whites at the core of his coalition have lost faith over his first year in office.
  • A massive new source of public-opinion research offers fresh insights into the fault lines emerging in Donald Trump’s foundation of support.
  • Previously unpublished results from the nonpartisan online-polling firm SurveyMonkey show Trump losing ground over his tumultuous first year not only with the younger voters and white-collar whites who have always been skeptical of him, but also with the blue-collar whites central to his coalition.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Given that he started in such a strong position with those blue-collar whites, even after that decline he still holds a formidable level of loyalty among them—particularly men and those over 50 years old.
  • What’s more, he has established a modest but durable beachhead among African American and Hispanic men, even while confronting overwhelming opposition from women in those demographic groups.
  • Together, the results crystallize the bet Trump is making for his own reelection in 2020, and for his party’s chances in November’s election: that he can mobilize enough support among older and blue-collar (as well as rural and evangelical) whites to offset the intense resistance he’s provoked from groups that are all growing in the electorate: Millennials, minorities, and college-educated whites—particularly the women among them.
  • Mark Blumenthal, SurveyMonkey’s head of election polling, calculated Trump’s average approval rating over the last year among groups of voters segmented simultaneously by their race, gender, education level, and age.
  • That extra level of detail, not available in conventional polls because their samples are too small, offers a more precise picture of Trump’s coalition.
  • The SurveyMonkey results put Trump’s total approval rating for 2017 at 42 percent, with 56 percent disapproving. That’s slightly higher than, but within range of, other major public surveys.
  • In the 2016 election, exit polls found that Trump’s best group was whites without a four-year college degree; he carried 66 percent of them. But his approval among them in the 2017 SurveyMonkey average slipped to 56 percent. In 2016, whites with at least a four-year college degree gave Trump 48 percent of their votes. But in the 2017 average, just 40 percent approved of Trump’s performance, while a resounding 60 percent disapproved.
Javier E

Can a 'No Excuses' Charter Teach Students to Think for Themselves? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...s-to-think-for-themselves.html

shared by Javier E on 12 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • Several years ago, Achievement First, a charter school network serving primarily low-income black and Hispanic students, got an unpleasant wake-up call: Its students had done well on tests, but fewer than a third of its high school graduates were earning college degrees on time. That was better than the 14 percent national college completion rate for students from low-income backgrounds, but it was far below the network’s hopes.
  • Was the schools’ highly structured, disciplined approach to behavior and learning giving students the tools they needed to succeed at the next level?
  • “There is a real dilemma confronting ‘no excuses’ charter networks as they shift their instructional model to encourage deeper learning,” Shael Polakow-Suransky, the president of the Bank Street College of Education, said in an email. Their focus on discipline, he said, “can undermine the autonomy and student voice so critical to developing independent thinkers.”
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • “One said, ‘In college you have to teach yourself more than half the content on your own,’” Ms. Toll said. That is very different from what is required in high school, she said, “and that sort of led to the whole concept of self-directed learning.”
  • For much of the day, each classroom is split in two, with one teacher working more traditionally with half of the students while a second teacher supervises students wearing noise-cancelling headphones and working on their own on laptops.
  • Mr. Cuban said he was particularly impressed with the way that Summit schools asked students to set goals for themselves.
  • But he added that he thought the impact of online teaching tools depended on how they were implemented and that the ultimate test, for both Summit and for Achievement First, would be what happens to college graduation rates.
  • Achievement First’s Greenfield model also emphasizes setting goals. Twice a week students meet with a teacher, referred to as a “goal coach,” to go over their progress in different areas and set goals for the week.
  • the team came to believe that Achievement First students were not sufficiently engaged in school. The expeditions, also borrowed from Summit, are intended to spark passions and inspire long-term ambitions.
  • Twice a week, students participate in what the network calls “circles” — a structure borrowed from the social-emotional curriculum of another charter network, Valor Collegiate Academies, in Nashville.
  • Mr. Samouha said that one of the surprising discoveries in his team’s interviews with alumni who had dropped out of college was that, in some cases, their parents had actually encouraged them to drop out, because they didn’t like seeing them struggle and didn’t know that such difficulties were normal and surmountable. He said the Greenfield team traced that back to the network having not made the parents full partners in their children’s schooling.
  • So in the Greenfield model, parent-teacher conferences are student-led, and attended by the members of a student’s “dream team,” which includes parents or other caregivers, as well as other mentors, like older siblings, pastors, coaches or family friends.
  • “We’re not going to solve this through a weekly parent seminar on challenges your child will face in college,” Mr. Samouha said. “We’re going to solve it by literally building an experience where parents are at the table with teachers and students.”
  • The network’s ultimate goal is to raise its college completion rate to 75 percent, and it says among its more recent classes about half of graduates are on track to finish college.
Javier E

It's the Guns - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...560771

guns debate guns

shared by Javier E on 19 May 18 - No Cached
  • here is a simpler and more powerful explanation of why there has been no similar school shooting in Germany since 2009; or in Canada since 2007; none in the United Kingdom since 1996—while conversely, more young Americans have died in school shootings in 2018 than in all the nation’s combat operations all over the world.
  • The answer is almost insultingly simple and has the virtue only of being true: It’s the guns.
  • Back in 2012, Nate Silver observed: "Whether someone owns a gun is a more powerful predictor of a person’s political party than her gender, whether she identifies as gay or lesbian, whether she is Hispanic, whether she lives in the South, or a number of other demographic characteristics.”
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • More than 70 percent of Trump voters in 2016 described guns as “very important” to their vote, versus only 40 percent who described abortion as “very important” to their vote and only 25 percent who felt that way about gay rights
  • With the slow fading of battles over same-sex marriage and abortion, and the rapid collapse of other aspects of conservative ideology, guns may now rank as the single most important political dividing line in 21st century America.
  • Only 30 percent of Americans own guns. Thus far, that minority has sufficed to block substantial federal action on guns. But a one-third minority—and especially a non-urban one-third minority—may no longer suffice to shape American culture.
  • The outrage after Parkland looked less like a political movement, more like the great waves of moral reform that have at intervals since the 1840s challenged the existing political order in the name of higher ethical ideals.
  • The most important success of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, for example, was not to change laws (although they changed some), but to change hearts: to persuade Americans that drunk driving was not funny, not charming, and not acceptable.
  • American gun culture in the 2010s is as blithely irresponsible as American alcohol culture in the 1960s.
  • According to a Pew survey, only about one-quarter of gun owners think it essential to alert visitors with children that guns may be present in the home.
  • Only 66 percent of gun owners think it essential to keep guns locked up when not in use. (Ninety percent of non-gun-owners think so.) Only 45 percent of them actually do it.
manhefnawi

A History of Ink in Six Objects | History Today - 0 views

www.historytoday.com/...history-ink-six-objects

History of Pess

shared by manhefnawi on 31 May 18 - No Cached
  • From Paleolithic cave paintings to parchment scrolls to printed books, ink has recorded human history for over 100 millennia.
  • All inks are a means and method of communication – the first and longest-running form of information technology.
  • ink is anything but simple. Ever since the Pleistocene, inks of all types have been invented and reinvented, with every ink a product of its own unique context.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Neolithic Chinese ink had different cultural requirements from medieval manuscript ink; printing ink is most certainly different from that found in modern fountain pens
  • Recently, Maya Blue has been a key piece of evidence in evaluating the authenticity of one of only four Maya codices to survive into the 21st century, the Grolier Codex.
  • In 2007, however, a detailed chemical analysis of the pigments found in the Grolier matched elements to the Maya Blue found in other codices and artifacts. Although the Grolier contains very little visible blue, these findings, along with other pre-Hispanic materials found in its inks, authenticated the codex.
  • In traditional Chinese calligraphy and painting, the inkstick – along with the inkstone for grinding, a brush and paper – were the classic tools of the trade.
  • From the Middle Ages to the 19th century, iron gall ink was one of the most frequently made and used inks in Europe – so much so that it was often referred to as ‘common ink’.
  • The neat biblical verses were penned in iron gall ink, with the distinctive rusty hue as a clear indication of the ink used
  • While historically pervasive, iron gall ink is also inherently corrosive. Once put to paper, parchment or vellum it bites into and eats away at the surfaces
  • When Johannes Gutenberg introduced mass printing to Europe in the 1440s, the technological breakthrough was more than just a metal, moveable type press. A new kind of ink had to be developed
  • In the centuries prior to Gutenberg’s press, books and codices written out in longhand used water-based inks.
  • In 1968, the Japanese company Epson built the first electronic printer; 16 years later, Hewlett Packard released the first laser jet. By the late 1990s, inkjet printing was inexpensive enough to be ubiquitous in personal computing.
  • Indelible voting ink was invented in 1962 by scientists at the National Physical Laboratory in Delhi, just before the third election in a newly independent India to help combat voter fraud.
  • voters’ ink-stained fingers have become a cultural shorthand and symbol of fraud-free, democratic elections.
Javier E

How Trump Is Reshaping American Opinion - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...596335

american opinion nativism free trade' immigration discrimination culture politics trump

shared by Javier E on 20 Aug 19 - No Cached
  • The Reuters analysis also found that Americans were less likely to express feelings of racial anxiety this year, and they were more likely to empathize with African Americans. This was also true for white Americans and whites without a college degree, who largely backed Trump in 2016.”
  • the number of whites who say “America must protect and preserve its White European heritage” has sunk nine points since last August
  • The percentages of whites, and white Republicans, who strongly agree that “white people are currently under attack in this country” have each dropped by roughly 25 points from the same time two years ago
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • A record-high number of Americans—75 percent—said in 2018 that immigration is good for the United States. Although the Trump administration took steps last week to limit even legal immigration, the Trump presidency has seen an increase in the number of Americans who support more legal immigration—not just among Democrats, but even slightly among Republicans.
  • white Americans are 19 percent more supportive of a path to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants than they were four years ago, and slightly less supportive of increased deportations
  • more Democrats say blacks are treated unfairly at work and by the police than in 2016—remarkable given how coverage of police violence toward African Americans has dropped in the past few years—while Republican attitudes have remained unchanged.
  • voters have now gotten a chance to see him implement ideas that seemed novel or at least worth a shot during the campaign, and they don’t like what they’re seeing in practice
  • 64 percent of Americans think free trade is good, up from 57 in 2017, 55 in 2016, and 51 in 2015. Meanwhile, the percentage who say free trade is bad has dropped 10 points since 2017.
  • The poll found that “people who rejected racial stereotypes were more interested in voting in the 2020 general election than those who expressed stronger levels of anti-black or anti-Hispanic biases.” That wasn’t the case in 2016, when Americans who held strong antiblack views were more politically engaged.
Javier E

Most American teens are frightened by climate change, poll finds, and about 1 in 4 are taking action - The Washington Post - 0 views

beta.washingtonpost.com/...9-9610-fb56c5522e1c_story.html

climate change teens youth survey 2019

shared by Javier E on 16 Sep 19 - No Cached
  • In a coastal town in Washington, climate change has a high school junior worried about the floods that keep deluging his school. A 17-year-old from Texas says global warming scares him so much he can’t even think about it.
  • But across the country, teens are channeling their anxieties into activism. “Fear,” says Maryland 16-year-old Madeline Graham, an organizer of a student protest planned for this week, “is a commodity we don’t have time for if we’re going to win the fight.”
  • Roughly 1 in 4 have participated in a walkout, attended a rally or written to a public official to express their views on global warming — remarkable levels of activism for a group that has not yet reached voting age.
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • The poll by The Post and Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) is the first major survey of teenagers’ views since the explosion of the youth climate movement last year.
  • This week, in the run-up to a major United Nations summit, hundreds of thousands of school kids plan to abandon their classrooms to demand more aggressive measures to protect the planet.
  • “People feel very guilty when a child says, ‘You are stealing my future.’ That has impact,” Thunberg told The Post. “We have definitely made people open their eyes.”
  • More than 7 in 10 teenagers and young adults say climate change will cause a moderate or great deal of harm to people in their generation,
  • Both Lopez and Graham said thinking about climate change makes them afraid, an emotion they share with 57 percent of teens nationwide. Fewer than a third of teens say they are optimistic.
  • most say they rarely or never discuss the issue with family and friends.
  • Adults “think: ‘Oh you’re so young, you don’t know what you’re talking about,’” he said. “But I know the facts, and I know what the most drastic consequences will be. I know that people aren’t doing what needs to be done.”
  • Roughly a third of both teenagers and adults say the issue is “extremely important” to them personally
  • Just under half believe the United States must drastically reduce its fossil fuel use in the next few years to avoid the worst effects of climate change.
  • Adults, he said, don’t seem to take the issue as seriously, or as personally, as people his age
  • Teenagers also share adults’ questions and misconceptions about the ways the world is warming. In both age groups, no more than 2 in 10 say they know “a lot” about the causes of climate change and ways to reduce it
  • fewer than half say they’ve taken action to reduce their own carbon footprints
  • nd roughly 4 in 10 say mitigating the effects of warming will require major sacrifices from ordinary Americans.
  • the number of teenagers who say they’re being taught in school how to mitigate climate change appears to be on the decline
  • Fourteen percent say they have learned “a lot” about the subject, down from 25 percent in 2010
  • “It’s terrible,” said Sam Riley, 17, of Boston. “It’s hardly ever brought up at my school.”
  • The high school junior said he learned nearly everything he knows about climate change from reading the news and searching the Internet
  • Riley, who is black, believes that minorities and people in low income communities will be most severely impacted by warming, because they are more likely to live in vulnerable areas and less likely to be able to insulate themselves.“The wealthier you are, the more protection you have,”
  • black and Hispanic teens express a greater sense of urgency around climate change; 37 percent and 41 percent, respectively, say people need to act in the next year or two, compared with 24 percent of white teens.
  • About 4 in 10 of those under 18 call climate change a “crisis.” But unlike adults, most teenagers say they don’t feel helpless. More than half — 54 percent — say they feel motivated.
  • But,” she said, “this generation — we’re fighters. And we’re going to win.”
johnsonel7

The Iberian Peninsula and the influences Islam had on its culture - 0 views

en.yabiladi.com/...-influences-islam-culture.html

history islam culture

shared by johnsonel7 on 19 Sep 19 - No Cached
  • European Union to trace the history of Islam in Europe. Convinced that the «way in which a society treats its minorities says a lot about it», the researcher took the lead of this groundbreaking project in Spain to document the spread of the Quran in Christian territories.
  • «Strong Muslim presence in the Iberian Peninsula has for sure left a footprint in Christian kingdoms. It is worth mentioning that Muslims were, during the Middle Ages, the vectors of a culture that was deemed superior to the one of the Christian West in general and to that of the Hispanic kingdoms in general»
  • But it is during the first half of the twentieth century that essayists, philosophers and historians got interested in answering questions related to the remains of Islamic culture in the Iberian Peninsula. Some of them realized that the Spanish culture was the outcome of the interaction between Muslims, Christians and Jews
Javier E

Half of Us Face Obesity, Dire Projections Show - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...ity-dire-projections-show.html

obesity food diet fat sugar culture

shared by Javier E on 11 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • A prestigious team of medical scientists has projected that by 2030, nearly one in two adults will be obese, and nearly one in four will be severely obese.
  • In as many as 29 states, the prevalence of obesity will exceed 50 percent, with no state having less than 35 percent of residents who are obese,
  • in 25 states the prevalence of severe obesity will be higher than one adult in four, and severe obesity will become the most common weight category among women, non-Hispanic black adults and low-income adults nationally.
  • ...26 more annotations...
  • as with climate change, the powers that be in this country are doing very little to head off the potentially disastrous results of expanding obesity, obesity specialists say.
  • Well-intentioned efforts like limiting access to huge portions of sugar-sweetened soda, the scientists note, are effectively thwarted by well-heeled industrie
  • With rare exceptions, the sugar and beverage industries have blocked nearly every attempt to add an excise tax to sugar-sweetened beverages.
  • Claims that such a tax is regressive and unfairly targets low-income people is shortsighted
  • “What people would save in health care costs would dwarf the extra money paid as taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages,” he said in an interview.
  • in a city like Philadelphia, where a soda tax of 1.5 cents an ounce took effect three years ago, total purchases declined by 38 percent even after accounting for beverages people bought outside the city
  • piecemeal changes like this are not enough to make a significant difference in the obesity forecast for the country
  • nationwide changes are needed in the ubiquitous food environment that has fostered a steady climb toward a weight-and-health disaster.
  • Americans weren’t always this fat; since 1990, the prevalence of obesity in this country has doubled.
  • Our genetics haven’t changed in the last 30 years. Rather, what has changed is the environment in which our genes now function.
  • “Food is very cheap in the United States, and super easy to access,”
  • We eat out more, consuming more foods that are high in fat, sugar and salt, and our portion sizes are bigger.
  • “You don’t even have to leave home to eat restaurant-prepared food — just call and it will be delivered.
  • As a society, we also snack more, a habit that starts as soon as toddlers can feed themselves.
  • “People are snacking throughout the day,” Mr. Ward said. “Snacking is the normal thing to do in the United States. In France, you never see anyone eating on a bus.”
  • We also eat more highly processed foods, which have been shown to foster weight gain, thanks to their usually high levels of calories, sugar and fat.
  • even when controlling for weight, consuming lots of processed foods raises the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes.
  • “Through marketing, we’re constantly being sold on foods we didn’t even know we wanted. We’re all about immediate rewards. We’re not thinking about the future, which is why we’re going to see more than half the population obese in 10 years.”
  • Unless something is done to reverse this trend, Mr. Ward said, “Obesity will be the new normal in this country. We’re living in an obesogenic environment.”
  • “if I could wave a magic wand, I’d make a tax on beverages a federal mandate because they’re the largest source of added sugar in the diet and are strongly linked to weight gain and health problems.
  • the link between beverage consumption and greater intake of calories may also apply to drinks flavored with no-calorie or low-calorie sweeteners.
  • prompting restaurants to gradually, surreptitiously reduce the amount of fat, sugar and calories in the meals they serve could help put the brakes on societal weight gain. “Menus could make healthier, lower-calorie meals the default option,
  • Controlling portion sizes is another critically important step. “Big portions are especially motivating for low-income people who reasonably want to get more calories for their dollar,”
  • Another policy-based approach that could reverse rising obesity projections might be to partner with climate control advocates, Dr. Bleich suggested. “If we pull more meat out of the American diet, it would help both the environment and weight loss,
  • “prevention is the way to go. Children aren’t born obese, but we can already see excessive weight gain as early as age 2. Changes in the food environment are needed at every level — local, state and federal. It’s hard for individuals to voluntarily change their behavior.”
  • health-promoting changes in the food packages provided to low-income women, infants and children since 2009 have helped to reverse or stabilize obesity in the preschool children who receive them.
« First ‹ Previous 121 - 140 of 220 Next › Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page