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Idiotic Football Players
(cont) If you want to get anecdotal about it, my cousin and her husband adopted a year-old Mexican child from a home in which her drug-addicted mother beat, neglected, and starved her, and left her alone in a high chair for hours while she went out to a bar. This was a private adoption through the concerned but uninvolved biological father, so it was a mercifully swift process. Due to her early traumas, including a drug-infested nine months in the womb, this lovely girl still has some learning disabilities and a fugue-state epileptic condition, in which her brain undergoes seizures while she is sitting or standing. As soon as she could walk, she hoarded food and bit anyone who tried to take away her stash. On top of her biologically inherited, drug-induced handicaps, she has a large frame and has struggled with being physically heavy, which is a no no in this culture. She does not fit in with the poor Mexican kids of immigrant families, and she doesn’t quite fit in with the rich white kids. The Mexican kids are suspicious and don’t think she is Mexican, and the white kids peg her as they’ve been taught—as low class and Mexican—and all the attendent cultural assumptions that come along with this identification. And believe you me, kids are as cruel as Nazis in the schoolyard. She is lucky to have any friends at all, and I and others still fear for her. On top of all of this, she has learned to idolize dominant cultural ideals, doesn’t want to learn Spanish, and has defensive Hannah Montana dreams of just magically “becoming” famous and rich without doing any work. Her middle-class white family doesn’t know what to do about any of it, save hiring private tutors and giving her more love and more food. This is the kind of complexity of any given situation I mentioned in my other post that you fail to take into consideration when you make pronouncements about what should happen with people’s very lives.— June 10, 2009 1:10 p.m.
Idiotic Football Players
(cont) My early years were spent in Orange County, in schools that were either over 70% mixed Asian populations or Latino, and am familiar with the drag-racing culture you mention, as well as some gang culture. I do not see your point at all. Firstly, you conflate all Asians--not wise. Represented are a variety of Asian groups, including pan-Pacific groups and Pacific Islanders with some strong Asian identity. There are strict Catholic and Christian Latino and Asian families whose kids are not allowed to hang out anywhere but math and chess club, and there are kids who also or exclusively drag race, and some who end up in gangs. To be sure, upbringing has a great deal to do with it, and how well one is able to relate to and communicate to one’s parents how it feels to deal with social pressures influenced by attempting to navigate intersections of racial and cultural identities. Because your first example—our original kid—who had a big brother and was "making progress" ended up in a gang, you either assume that his biology won out, and just like our 19th century thinkers, “blood will tell”—or you assume that he had a “choice” of direction, which is just as disgustingly simple-minded, because you entirely ignore the social and cultural implications of his experience—you seem to think that culture is transparent and self-evident, and easily navigated, and this is most likely because for you—it probably was. The logical conclusions of your arguments (again, if you can stomach them), about biology winning out is that racial “minority” kids are disproportionately represented in gangs and jails because they are biologically unfit—yours and rickeysays’s arguments about biological “stupidity”lead to the same 19th century and earlier misegynistic arguments about breeding and fit vs. ‘unfit’ biological stock.— June 10, 2009 1:10 p.m.
Idiotic Football Players
Josh, again. I'll take your second point first. It is the "either/or" problem. Again, something you know next to nothing about. You also picked on one detail and blew it up into "proof" of rickeysays's claim (the major one about nature vs. nurture). In response to the statement that bad teaching at fault is a misconception, I said that sure, there are bad teachers. The training for these folk does focus more on pedagogy and child development more than it does abstract thinking at the university graduate level. It is a bit like apples and oranges, and I should make my point clearer--I think primary and middle school teachers should get the pedagogical training and the training in child development, but that they should also have a Masters and possibly a Phd in the subjects they teach. This will not guarantee that they are talented teachers, but it makes it more likely. Your second "example": I haven't read "Freakanomics," but since you quote it like the bible to hold onto your “most-everything-is-genetics” theory, I think I'll have to pick it up, along with some Vonnegut to revisit before meeting with refried. Yes, that is how I roll. I read and research things, and think deeply before I speak. You need to pick up some sociology and cultural studies texts before you spout off about any of these issues again, because those of us capable of discussing at more than an elementary level are going to grow too tired to try and educate you with real examples and real experiences with social issues and problems.— June 10, 2009 1:09 p.m.
Let’s Toast to Banning Booze
I meant Lou Dobbs clips. Those will really distract. Well, beermonkey, you sound like a fun chap. And a good point about drinking on the beach surreptitiously. We don't look rowdy, so we get away with it, though you have to take certain precautions. No glass unless you absolutely must bring that champagne, and mastery of the low pour, inside the cooler, into your very innocent-looking flower-printed tumbler.— June 10, 2009 12:49 a.m.
Pop Corn, Red Vines, Bon Bons or Beer?
If you remember the Point Loma place, let us know. The promise of good pizza doesn't always 'deliver' but it's always worth a try. What Dreams...granted, it was pretty sap-enstein, with a few interesting scenarios and good digital cinematography. I did like all the scenes of wading around in goopy Impressionist and Van Gogh-esque paint--makes one feel better about being dead. Those little tinny boxes you placed inside the car were funny, like listening to a cheap Chinese radio under the covers. But it's all nostalgia now...— June 10, 2009 12:39 a.m.
Banker’s Hill/Mercy ER Patient
Au contraire. At first glance--and I wouldn't even need it to say, as there are plenty of examples to be had--you have a lively wit and mobile range of expression that makes for an excellent writer. I will examine the blog further, and hope that you blog further here, too. Neighborhood, schmeiberhood, appears to be the editorial attitude, and you were at once, if not now, a San Diegan.— June 9, 2009 4:55 p.m.
Idiotic Football Players
Do you see how easy your argument is, falling right back upon biology? You say 15% nurture, and 85% nature, but then completely leave out any consideration of how this kid's physical, ethnic appearance might have made it difficult for him to relate to the social group he was directed towards, and led him to groups where his identity felt easier to secure. We don't have a manual of his entire life, so how can we blithely say that he had his chance, and biology won out?— June 9, 2009 4:50 p.m.
Hooray for Hollywood
"Yet, you throw something at them that shakes their world-view, and logic goes out the window." I still don't understand what you mean by this. You haven't shaken anyone's world view? Anyone out there? Has Josh shaken your world view with his argumentation? Is your Rosie O'Donnell example, or your examples of how you are pissed off by administrative costs for political consulting or upscale charity events, supposed to convince others of something? What you call an open mind seems to have a different definition. In order to have intellectual give and take, there needs to be solid argumentation on both sides, and both need to have a common purpose in mind, to build toward new knowledge. This is what people do in universities, and this is why a college education is so important. By the way, is that what you think they do in university, sit back and bitch about big bad Republicans? All I have seen from you is a willingness to fall back once in a while when someone else does all of the work, and is finally able to get through to you. You rarely bring anything serious to the table and you expect to be fed. I am sorry to have to say these things, Josh, but they are true. I don't understand what it is that you are doing with these blogs. What is your purpose? You mix random, careless statements about politics and events that affect people's lives and even right to live with random commentary on pop culture, and call it a day. You work mainly with innuendo, gossip, sudden, unexamined thoughts, and fourth-party hearsay. You cite your ACLU "lawyer-friend" and your "liberal professor-friend," with the sole purpose of saying that they employ no logic. I have the feeling that you think you are 'winning' arguments with them by throwing inconclusive particulars into the mix, and they just give up because there is nothing to be done, nothing to be possibly constructed upon your platforms of "logic." Maybe you should just start a daily blog titled "All that being said, I'm a Democrat..." and focus exclusively on your mission to create a stronger police state, and a "merit-based" educational and social environment from which considerations of race and culture are banished. You'll build a stronger readership of those who can agree with you, and finish your arguments for you, provided you can stomach their conclusions.— June 9, 2009 4:40 p.m.
Hooray for Hollywood
I don't understand why you keep saying that your friend "throws logic out the window." How does he do this in argument? I also don't understand what Jackson's administrative charity costs (yes, I've heard that kind of story a million times about charity events and benefits, it is the way they work) have to do with anything at all.— June 9, 2009 4 p.m.
Banker’s Hill/Mercy ER Patient
Merci, anti-g! Ton chat parle le francais si gentilement, miouuu minou! Mica and I can expect to read a few rants from you soon?— June 9, 2009 3:06 p.m.