Comments Posted By Foobarista
Displaying 31 To 40 Of 63 Comments
An aside to Sivakumar: I wish more Indian Americans would get involved with politics. I live in a part of the country with numerous Indian immigrants, and the vast majority I've met are quite sensible and clearly have conservative instincts, but seem uninterested in American politics beyond griping about taxes - but follow Indian politics closely. I keep trying to get them to get off their butts and get involved, but few seem interested.
90% of American politics is about showing up. If you aren't in people's face, you don't exist. And the Asian habit (more among East than South Asians) of working hard and hoping for notice doesn't work in in-your-face American politics.
Chinese immigrants seem the same way; the few Chinese that get into politics are standard latte liberals or local ward-boss types, all of whom tend to be Dems. There have been a few Chinese conservative politicians, but far fewer than their population would suggest.
Sorry for the OT grump, but as long as "conservative" equals "middle-aged white guys", it simply won't matter numerically.
Comment Posted By Foobarista On 2.08.2009 @ 16:01
NOW THEY'RE COMING FOR THE FAT PEOPLE
This is a textbook example of why I don't want the government "doing more". The more it does, the more it has to control. If the government isn't running healthcare, it won't have a reason to "care" about non-criminal personal behavior beyond reasons of public health (where "public health" is limited to handling epidemics and such things, which is a legitimate government function).
Comment Posted By Foobarista On 30.07.2009 @ 11:59
HELP! IS THERE A WHITE DOCTOR IN THE HOUSE?
I know it'll be a shock to him, but I'll defend Reynolds here; Asian immigrants in the US are a self-selected population. I wouldn't necessarily call them an "elite" (although many Chinese definitely are), but there is a rather fierce Darwinism imposed by US immigration bureaucracy - not to mention the whole refugee experience that Vietnamese went through in the late 70s and 80s - that means the survivors are people with a high level of persistence and determination, and a willingness to "learn the game" and play it well. It's little surprise that they out-compete native-born Americans of all races, particularly those who come from backgrounds of multi-generational poverty.
I grew up in an immigrant Asian neighborhood in the SF Bay Area, and saw first-hand how Vietnamese moved quickly from the section-8 hellholes into the middle and often upper classes within a decade, sometimes less. They did it so fast that Mexicans and Blacks in those neighborhoods figured they must have had some sort of massive government aid. But they didn't - they just kicked ass. But they also knew that they _could_ kick ass, since they'd made it this far.
Those who couldn't kick ass didn't make it.
Note that there was also a correlation between what they did in their homeland and how well they did in the US. My best friend in HS was a Vietnamese guy who came from a family of doctors, and now he's a dentist - and all of his sisters are in medicine of one form or another. His wife is an optometrist. Another friend's family ran a restaurant in Saigon, and her family opened a Vietnamese nightclub as soon as they'd saved a few grand, and ultimately became successful. But a neighbor came from the Vietnamese countryside, and while they did OK, they didn't do "great", and didn't "play the game" of education, saving, and 25-hour-a-day butt-busting quite as well as the others.
The "take away" for me was that "classes" have more than access to money; in the case of the Vietnamese I knew growing up, they all started with zero dollars and almost no English. Those who grow up in "higher classes" know that every society has a "game to be played" and are willing to sacrifice in order to play it.
I'm not sure how this applies to Blacks, but it's made me more sympathetic to arguments that if we are to have AA, it should be based more on net worth than physical properties like race.
Comment Posted By Foobarista On 29.07.2009 @ 15:57
Some other fun effects of AA:
1. One can argue that historic racism has hurt American blacks. But the benefactors have been disproportionally African or Caribbean immigrants and their kids.
This makes AA less effective for American blacks, because these immigrants "take up the slots".
2. The AA-mongers have created an odd situation where some groups are more AA-worthy than others. If you're a Chinese kid with triple-800 SAT scores and an arm-long list of extra-curriculurs, good luck getting into a place like Harvard or Yale; your chances are even worse than similar white kids. Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans aren't "historically disadvantaged", while Hmong usually are. Filipinos sometimes are, and sometimes aren't, and occasionally benefit from being "Hispanic". Thais and Vietnamese usually aren't in the AA list, while Cambodians and Laotians usually are.
If you're white but somehow ended up with a Spanish surname, you've won the AA jackpot.
Comment Posted By Foobarista On 27.07.2009 @ 18:10
IT'S PAST TIME TO INOCULATE CONSERVATISM AGAINST THE BIRTHERS
Earl, Obama will simply let the birther charge twist in the wind. He *doesn't* want it to go away; the longer it's there, the more marginalized conservatives get. Obama isn't showing a whole lot of skill when it comes to actual governing, but he knows politics, and he knows a lunatic fringe charge when he sees one.
He knows that the weird-right will hang itself and take a lot of the non-weird right with it.
Comment Posted By Foobarista On 22.07.2009 @ 16:16
And the other issue is the "birther" charge will paint conservatives as closet racists and nativists. If conservatives ever want to gain credibility with anyone other than middle-aged white guys, we'd do well to go after Obama on the issues, not on something that questions "who he is".
Comment Posted By Foobarista On 22.07.2009 @ 11:45
The problem is that conspiracies are fun. They allow people to worry about trivia.
As for the "birther" charge, suppose it's actually true. Still, it's hard to argue that Obama didn't spend much of his youth in the US, and all his adult life. And in any case, the "native birth" part of the Constitution is one of its more silly parts nowadays, goes against the idea that you can make yourself a complete American even without native roots, and has prevented many excellent politicians from running for President.
Whatever you may think of Obama's politics and policies, there's clearly numerous native-born Americans who agree with them - enough for him to win an election fair and square.
And do we want Joe Biden as President, and have Nancy Pelosi one heartbeat away?
Comment Posted By Foobarista On 22.07.2009 @ 11:41
bsjones: since pedantry is my profession, I'll mention that a "360" would be to return to your initial position.
Comment Posted By Foobarista On 13.05.2009 @ 18:49
At the end of the day, it's statism versus anti-statism. Bush and Obama are/were both statists. The Republican Party loses when it veers toward statism - after all, given a choice, many people like "statism with a smiley face" of the Obama variety over "statism with an angry frown" of the "Compassionate Conservatism" variety.
Whenever you say "Society must do X", you're making a statement favoring state action to force X on the population. It doesn't matter what X is.
So-cons have many goals that can't be achieved without a big state, which is why they and small-government conservatives are eternally - and probably rightfully - suspicious of each other.
Big states are simply too dangerous to leave lying around.
Comment Posted By Foobarista On 12.05.2009 @ 13:16
THE ENDURING POPULARITY OF STAR TREK
For my part, I really liked DS9. I wouldn't have the full collection on DVD if I didn't :) And it had by far some of the coolest battles and complex balance (or un-balance) of power politics of any TV show.
Comment Posted By Foobarista On 8.05.2009 @ 14:18
