I put this in an older thread, but it fits here:
I'm guessing that the end result of Trump's election and the subsequent cascade of shit running down America's legs will be something where a subset of white people (marked by location and education) becomes a "minority" group with set-aside quotas and the like. I honestly don't know if me-type white people will be the numerical minority or the Trumpists, but they'll get the quotas and set-aside dollars. It will probably take a couple of generations, but social mobility across regular white people and huge-asshole white people seems to really be dropping. There's always been pockets of greatly disadvantaged white people, of course, but they were usually isolated from each other and they also stopped thinking of themselves as disadvantaged once they stopped being disadvantaged.
Jesus. If this is true (like, if there are any substantial number of people with this misconception), that's about the worst thing ever.
"Let me make the songs racist memes of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws."
I don't know why I said 'worst thing ever'. I can come up with ten candidates just as good from last month's headlines. But awfully bad.
Honestly, a group of people who believe that probably wouldn't do so well at college anyway.
While the full blown version of the myth wasn't common around my high school, the idea that there were lots of scholarships exclusive to minorities filled a similar mythological role.
My reaction was that this was super easy to believe. It's a variation on the AA hire. It's especially pernicious because it's an exaggeration, but it's true that scholarships can take race into account, so it's a rorsarch test of your preexisting beliefs on race. But it would be nearly impossible to dispel.
I.e. "But I'm paying for college!" would be met with assumptions about partial scholarships being more generous than the college student realizes, or an assumption that she went to a reach school instead of a safety school where she would have gotten her free ride. I.e. If she's not on scholarship, then her admission was the AA part.
Also: there's a belief that there's good black people (attend college, nonthreatening, etc) and scary bad black people. Since the person in question is attending college, they're in the good group. But since the good group is supposed to be super tiny, colleges compete by dumping excessive rewards on them. Again, there's a kernel of truth - many colleges do nothing more to make minority students feel welcome other than offer scholarships. So the solution to an underrepresented group is often presented as "throw more money at them?" (Probably most schools now realize this is insufficient? But it has certainly been true for decades.)
Sometimes they photoshop other minority group students into brochures.
I learned in grad school that there are scholarships for people with ancestry from my corner of Europe. There are definitely also eg Lutheran scholarships.
All of that said, US affirmative action in my experience seriously pisses off Chinese people in the US.
Yes, but suing on behalf of white people will make that much, much worse for Chinese people.
6 describes my high school as well. I recall a middling-performing white girl being angry that she perceived a probably-slightly-worse performing (Southeast, if it matters) Asian boy getting a better offer to a specific school (Temple, IIRC), presumably based on race somehow. There was a lot of hearsay and poor information going around and it was easy to go from "underprivileged minorities get a slight boost" to "whites are seriously screwed." This was most acutely felt by the mediocre white people right at the cutoff.
Anyway, I figure that taken as a class, Chinese people (People's Republic) in the U.S. owe me a favor, but not ROC Chinese people.
My calculus might be too heavily weighted on dumplings, but it is what it is.
I have a spreadsheet. There's rows for the U.K., the U.K. minus England, Australia, Germany, France, Korea, China-China, Taiwan-China, Russia, Ireland, India, Spain, Italy, Mexico, Japan, and Sri Lanka.
Chinese people (People's Republic) in the U.S. owe me a favor
One really big favor from all of them, or a bunch of smaller individual favors?
Under communism, those are equivalent.
100 hundred duck sized favours.
On second thought, that's too many.
I should get duck for lunch. I know an cheap place run by guys from ROC.
13: Will this favor be in the form of dumplings? Is it that you have received insufficient mainland dumplings? That's very sad, but I'm not sure it's China's fault. If they do pony up, though, I would honestly recommend many small dumplings over one giant one, especially if they're soup dumplings.
On a privilege and perception note: I had a conversation once with a conservative feminist in which I mentioned that a co-worker had been fired when she transitioned, and it was revealed to me that this woman believed that trans people had all these special rights and were never discriminated against, while cis women of course faced huge discrimination all the time and no one cared. To her credit, she did seem to believe me that my co-worker had been fired because of transphobia and had no real recourse, but since I rarely socialize with people who aren't pretty aware of the whole "there is a lot of discrimination against queer, trans and gender non-conforming people" thing, it surprised me.
It might not be China's fault, but it is the fault of Chinese people in America. And soup dumplings are from ROC.
22: From ROC? Let me lay some Wikipedia on you: Xiaolongbao is a type of steamed bun (baozi) from the Jiangnan region of China, especially associated with Shanghai and Wuxi. Likewise with tangbao generally.
That's not to say that the ROC doesn't have its own soup dumping worthy of standing beside, say, the xiaolongbao - I've really only had mainland ones and would not know. But you can get tangbao throughout the people's republic.
Indeed, I have eaten many a soup dumpling in Shanghai; yea verily, I have spilled soup dumpling interior all over my shirt mere moments before I needed to go teach a class.
Who are you going to believe, Wikipedia or this guy from ROC who sells soup dumplings for living?
24: To be totally honest, I'd probably believe anyone who gave me sufficient soup dumplings.
25: There's no bowl, except the dumpling.
It's not soup with dumplings, like some other ethnic groups do it.
Heathen soup dumplings!
True soup dumplings are prepared according to the recipe in the Book of Leviticus and are called kreplach.
I think only if the pigs were wearing wool-cotton blends but I could be mistaken.
30: Geez, Moby, when was the last time you read it? They cut that part out years ago.
Like how vegans now are fine with eating meat so long as the animal looked like it was going to for soon anyway?
Like how vegans now are fine with eating meat so long as the animal looked like it was going to for soon anyway?
Sadly, our local, vegan, ROC-people-run basement restaurant has recently closed down. I would be sadder, but there was some ingredient they used that sent me into anaphylactic shock every time I ate there, so I had to stop going a long time ago anyway.
Is Leviticus still against pork?
I think that code is deprecated.
I posted this on twitter as part of that original conversation, but I'll note here as well - for every scholarship that is available to someone from an "underprivileged" background, there's another one that is out there that can simply serve to entrench privilege.
I "won" a scholarship that was available exclusively to the children of employees at my father's fortune 500 company. It wasn't a huge sum of money, but given the extremely low SUNY tuition back in 1992, it covered about 1/3 of it per year.
Several years later, my brother "won" the same scholarship.
Also, anyone who thinks of athletic preferences and scholarships as advantaging minority or underprivileged students should look at the list of NCAA sports and notice how many of them are golf, field hockey, skiing, and lacrosse.
I would bet four of them are golf, field hockey, skiing, and lacrosse.
It's three, isn't it? I knew that field hockey was the same thing as lacrosse.
Why be lachrymose when there's lacrosse?
Why be a goof when there's golf?
Why be in hock when there's hockey?
If you're a police officer in a hypothetical place like Wales.and somebody with a grudge is trying to hurt you, can't you get a gun to the home until they find the guy?
British police officers are assumed to supply their own knives.
And soup dumplings are from ROC.
Maybe this impression is why my friend from Shanghai hates Din Tai Fung so much.
I have not yet had the opportunity to eat xiaolongbao in Shanghai, which I am assured is to Din Tai Fung as Din Tai Fung is to my local delivery place that accidentally delivers deflated, punctured soup dumplings half the time.
I've never ordered soup dumplings for delivery. I don't see how they could travel well.
I really read 50 trying to figure out what sport it was leading up to.
There's a whole dark under current to murdering people in Wales.
If somebody asks you to go to a place called the Devil's Bridge at midnight and alone, I think maybe they aren't your friend.
You know what? Fuck it. Let's go anyway.
Never mind. Shouting at the wrong person.
10: the combination of skill-based immigration requirements and AA could produce some weird results. Hypothetically, if the US only allowed geniuses to immigrate from Elbonia and also had AA so as to push the proportion of Elbonian-heritage students closer to their proportion of the general population, the bar could be incredibly high for Elbonian-heritage applicants.
50: yes. A lot of Northern Ireland police were issued a side arm for personal protection (as opposed to whatever weapon they checked out of the armoury going on duty), although it was still a special concession they had to apply for.
I saw the linked tweet free-floating in the wild, and what struck me is that this reveals that the idea that there's "good" government bennies available only to blacks/minorities goes much deeper than I'd realized. Like, we've all seen that Craig T Nelson quote about how he was on welfare and food stamps, but nobody ever gave him a handout, but Atrios, at least (who's quoted it often), always framed it as imagining that somebody else is getting better benefits. But this reveals a mythology that goes way beyond some secret, better version of food stamps. Maybe I was dense not to grok this, but clearly there's a huge mass of incredibly delusional whites who think that every black American gets tens of thousands of dollars' worth of gov't checks every year.
Amazing.
I had Din Tai Fung in Beijing a couple of days ago and was pretty meh on it. I've had better soup dumplings, even in Beijing.
Also this seems to be the most political thread, so: transcripts of Trump's calls with Peña Nieto and Turnbull. Whoah.
The most terrifying thing for me is that - as a quirk of the ineffective way that people are hired in the environments where I've worked for the last few years - I've had the opportunity to work with several irascible 70 year old white dudes who nobody has ever said "no" to, and I recognise the dynamic very clearly. These could have been transcripts of meetings that I've attended. It's horrible that Trump is in such a position of power, when he doesn't have the hard or soft skills for it, and any aptitude he did have is slipping, along with his patience, ability to concentrate, and level of basic courtesy.
Oh, and since it's not getting much attention compared to the other crazy things he said, check out the part where he all but invites Peña Nieto down the Maduro route, who seems just as non-plussed as I would have been...
TRUMP
Good. I want you to be so popular that your people will call for a constitutional amendment in Mexico so that you can run again for another six years.
PEÑA NIETO
You are very kind, Mr. President. And really, the only thing I am interested in for both of our nations to do well - for your government, for you, and for us to truly have a relationship with friendship and a very constructive relationship, Mr. Trump.
Speaking of Atrios, can I vent? He's clearly decided to align with the dirtbag left (albeit in kind of a passive aggressive way), and just like every other person in my feeds who has done so, it's led to somebody whose political opinions/instincts I've respected and agreed with for a decade or more to come off as a gibbering moron.
The example of the moment is that some idiot misread this Kevin Drum post as laying the groundwork for supporting war with NK. It's an incredibly stupid misreading, for a bunch of reasons, but there's Atrios retweeting it. I know RTs≠endorsements, but how else to read that? It's not a funny tweet, nor an insightful one, nor one that raises interesting questions. It's just some dumbass with reading incomprehension, and Atrios amplifying it because it's framed as a dig at warmongering liberals, or something.
And he's doing shit like this constantly, on the blog and on Twitter. It's the lefty version of the old "now I'm outraged about Chappaquidick" line. "I used to vote Dem, but now that HRC lost, I'm in favor of Russian interference in elections." And like I say, he's not the only example, but it's particularly clear with him because A. I've read him for 14 years or whatever, and B. it's on his blog, so you can't just dismiss it with "Twitter is trash."
(Sorry for deopping that comment between the two of yours, JRoth)
North Korea clearly wants nuclear capability. They want it very badly because they think--not irrationally--that it's the only thing that can reliably protect them from an American invasion.
Of course, the major (maybe even only) reason there is a risk of American invasion of NK is because they are developing a nuclear capability.
68:Well, that and an incredibly stupid Frum-penned speech.
I mean, look, NK has never not been run by insular, paranoid Kims, but that speech, followed by invasion of Iraq for no good reason, was all the justification they would ever need for building a nuke. They'd been working on it for awhile prior to that, of course, but the pace has been AFAICT accelerating for years.
Anyway, justification is irrelevant to Drum's point. Even if there were some way to use carrots to make NK friendly and relatively normal in international relations, they would still want that protection/bargaining chip. You can get more with a kind word and a nuke than with a kind word alone.
68: True. But OTOH, America has in the past 30 years invaded/bombed Grenada, Panama, Iraq (twice), Serbia (twice), Afghanistan, and Libya. The world is dangerous for rogues with enemies. Iran, Israel, Pakistan, South Africa, all operated on the same logic.
I had Din Tai Fung in Beijing a couple of days ago and was pretty meh on it. I've had better soup dumplings, even in Beijing.
Do you remember where? The others I've had there were similar quality but I think a little worse. When I tried asking the most food-oriented people I know there they scoffed and told me to go to Shanghai.
It's supposed to be "food-Asian", racist.
Anyway, I've enjoyed sitting half of world from Asia and pontificating on soup dumplings on the basis of having eaten them at two different places and talked to a guy who was born, but not raised, in the ROC.