Segregation Now! Segregation Forever!

Warning! Lengthy quotes regarding race and diversity! Sensitive readers may not wish to continue! Nonracist members of superior races and cultures are especially warned not to continue!

Once again, I am amazed at the foolishness of my fellow human beings. Listening to C-SPAN today my attention was caught by a rather remarkable statement  made by an individual. In about 2 1/2 minutes I had checked his statement and found it to be totally invalid. Let's start with his own words:

HOST:  We are getting your take on crime and policing in your community. What is it like and do you think there's any changes that are needed.  Jay is in a suburb of Pennsylvania, Souderton, go ahead, Jay...

JAY:  The first gentleman, he mentioned the word homogeneity, And of course the most homogenous areas or countries are always the most peaceful. And always have the most trust.

Even though we continue to say this  incredibly Orwellian mantra, diversity is our strength. Which is insane...(he refers to his tiny homogeneous community when he was a child and emphasizes that his superior Pennsylvania German culture kept everyone well behaved.)

The culture and the race of a neighborhood matters. And I do want to say also that that is actually the words and the studies of people not just like me but you look at Robert Putnam, The Harvard professor. I wish you would have him on.  He did that in-depth study 2005 The effects of ethnic diversity on populations. And he's a liberal!  He's the author of a book called Bowling Alone and he didn't like what he found and he was forced to reveal it. And he found, of course he studied tens of thousands of people and communities. And he found that racial diversity… One of the major reason diversity casualties of it is a loss of trust...(He specifies various types of trust which are lost to the detriment of the community)… and at least we should recognize that and stop promoting this insane idea of diversity as strength when it's torn apart civilizations throughout human history. 

Why that's shocking! A liberal Harvard professor discovers that racial diversity is evil destroyer of society and tries to conceal the facts but is forced to reveal them!  Racial prejudice isn't prejudice! A liberal has proven it!  Only gullible fools believe diversity has any value whatsoever!  All it does is destroy civilizations!

That doesn't sound very believable, does it? So of course, I checked it out.

What did the professor actually say? Well here we have, in his own words from an NPR radio interview, the real meaning of his report:

Prof. PUTNAM: I do need to step back a minute and say I think that the - it's not merely a fact that America's becoming more diverse. It's a benefit. America will - all of us will, over the long run, benefit from being a more diverse, more heterogeneous place. Places that are more diverse have higher rates of growth on average and they have better cuisine. And it's just a more interesting place to live. 

So in the long run, waves of immigration like we're going through now and that we've gone through in the past and increasing diversity is good for a society. But what we discovered in this research, somewhat to our surprise, was that in the short run the more ethnically diverse the neighborhood you live in, the more you - every - all of us tend to hunker down, to pull in. The more diverse - and when I say all of us, I mean all of us. I mean blacks and whites and Asians and Latinos, all of us. The more diverse the group around us, ethnically, in our neighborhood, the less we trust anybody, including people who look like us. Whites trust whites less. Blacks trust blacks less, in more diverse settings.

So what he actually said was diversity, in the very short term does tend to create mistrust. But he also stated, unequivocally stated, that diversity is of great benefit in the long run. The bad effects are temporary while the good effects are permanent. I did not see any evidence that he tried to suppress his findings. Or that he even wanted to suppress his findings. Or that anyone forced him to publish them. In fact, except for the short-term effects,  his study solidly confirmed his liberal beliefs. He didn't find evidence that diversity was harmful, causes civilizations  to be destroyed, that some cultures and races were superior and others inferior, or any of the rest of the mental manure  Jay somehow managed to project into the study. I repeat, a study which actually shows how totally wrong Jay is about the entire subject. 

In fact, the professor went on later in the interview to state:

Prof. PUTNAM: Well, I don't know that I'm disappointed in the findings. I'm disappointed that it turns out it takes some time for us to get adjusted to people who look differently from us. And I'm a little disappointed that, as our findings become public, some people - some conservatives, some people who are racist, frankly, have taken comfort from my research. And they've made the inference that if we hunker down in the presence of diversity, it would be just great if we had a little ethnic cleansing and we all just live around people who look like us. That's absolutely not my view.

Pardon me, Jay, but your racist bigotry is showing. Please zip it up. I can't stop you from having such an ugly thing, but you really shouldn't wave it around in public.

Oh no! I have played the race card! When a man says, falsely, that races and cultures are different with some being superior and others inferior and that mixing them is a wicked thing which destroys civilizations, I unfairly suggest he might be a racist! After all he only talked about race while I, with malice aforethought, talked about race.

Sorry, Conservatives. Holding up a mirror that reflects your racism back in your face is not playing the race card. Your whole deck is racist.

Ben Secures The Borders

Edwin O'Donnell, a College of the Holy Cross history professor, presented this quote to his students during a C-SPAN presentation:

Why should the Mexicans be suffered to swarm into our settlements, and by herding together establish their language and culture to the exclusion of ours? Why should California, founded by Americans, become a colony of aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Hispanicize us instead of our Americanizing them, and will never adopt our language or customs, anymore than they can acquire our complexion.

Only six words have been changed from the original quote which was by Benjamin Franklin in 1753, referring to the German colonists moving into Pennsylvania.

I also decapitalized words which would not utilize the capital letter in today's grammar. Otherwise, the quote is as Benjamin Franklin stated it over 300 years ago.

Sounded like FOXNews didn't it? Oh, sorry! I should have used the proper name, FOXLies.

So: 

In the 1700s we were terrified the Germans would take over our country, speak German instead of English, and make us Not British.

In the 1800s we were terrified that the Catholics would take over our schools, teach our children the Catholic Bible instead of the Protestant Bible, and make us love and obey the Pope

In the 1900s we were afraid the communists would take over and make us love Lenin.

Today we are afraid the Mexicans will take over, refuse to learn English, make us all obey Sharia law (?!), and take back everything they gave up in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

Now that's progress.

I am posting a conversation from Facebook.  I found it stimulating and interesting.  I hope you agree.  I have removed the names and addresses of the other two participants as I do not have their permission to post their personal data.  


L:  Stand Against GOP Voter Suppression Tactics --L posted this link.



C :   How are they preventing American Citizen Registered Voters from voting???


Jim Naranjo: Demanding identification which many thousands of voters lack , refusing student id's since young people tend to vote democratic, making new severe penalties for violating ridiculous restrictions on registering new voters, who are mostly minority and or young...etc. etc.

See: http://el-naranjal-del-desierto.blogspot.com/search?q=Voter+suppression+

This is a powerful attempt to end free elections in America and replace them with show elections in which everyone knows the winner as soon as the ruling party names its candidate. Vladimer Putin must be a Republican!

El Naranjal: Search results for Voter suppression
el-naranjal-del-desierto.blogspot.com



C :    So if you want to vote....Get a LEGAL I.D. It's really not that hard. I'm a minority and I vote legally. I don't believe I have ever met a student that didn't have a LEGAL I.D. Face it , the left is counting on the illegal immigrant vote. These are voters that should not and (according to the law) cannot vote. I guess desperate times call for desperate (and illegal) measures? Suffering from voter remorse doesn't justify a feeble attempt at defending the mistake voters made four years ago. Sniff Sniff......I smell a "Blame Bush" comment coming soon.



Jim Naranjo: It is VERY hard for the elderly, for students far from home, for the disabled and the poor, where laws require birth certificates which are expensive and hard to acquire in many states. Voter fraud is almost nonexistent, It just doesn't happen. Your arguments are the same ones ones used to defend Jim Crow when I was young. You have been deluded by agitprop and disinformation. I want all legal voters to vote, even if I dislike their choice. You want to prevent many thousands from utilizing their unalienable rights because you are afraid of illegal immigrants.

Nativism is as old as the US. In Revolutionary days it was the unAmerican Germans, In The Civil War it was the alien Irish, now it's the awful Mexicans. The GOP fears it will lose if an honest election is held. Therefore, they will recreate Jim Crow in a new form and rig the election. The Bush administration spent years and millions of dollars to root out your "voter fraud". They only found that, over ten years, there might have been three one hundred thousandths of one per cent cases, at most.

Gee, big problem. A whole three one hundred thousandths of one per cent.

Stop panicking and check the facts. This is about rights. It is about honesty. Individuals who have voted for decades are suddenly being denied that right. Individuals who come from families which have been citizens for generations!


Jim Naranjo: You're right, I'm sorry. Bush must not be held accountable for the things he did. You Republicans just abhor personal responsibility. Blame a Democrat for Mr. Bush's actions. That's fair and balanced.

C :  Voter fraud??? Does A.C.O.R.N., S.E.I.U., and thug Black Panther members standing in front of voting polls ring a bell with you? You seem to be an intelligent man, denial is not becoming of you. People can spew out all the bull$#*! they want from centuries past. I live in the present and am worried about now. Honestly, are you better off today than you were 5 years ago? Is your house worth as much today as it was 5 years ago? Did you have any furlow days 5 years ago? Your community organizer has had nearly 4 years to improve "Bushes actions"....to no avail. Maybe someday people will wise up and vote in a person because he/she is experienced and highly qualified, and not because of the color of his skin. (Look everyone, I voted for Obama....I'm obviously not a racist). But alas....most educators are of the liberal mindset and it's very difficut to convince an educator that he may have made the wrong choice. We libertarians just want less Gov and more jobs...obviously too much to ask from this administration. BTW....it's spelled "percent"....Teach


Jim Naranjo: Every time I post my comments they read correctly until actually posted. Then they are garbled. Later tonight I shall post them on my blog. My apologies for the delay and inconvenience!


My latest post:


  I have a life long philosophic commitment to the following belief system:  Reality is real.  Facts must be faced and dealt with appropriately.  You may love a fact.  You may hate a fact.  In either case it remains a fact.

  Fact: ACORN was the victim of fraudent actions, not the perpetrator.  it was ACORN which first reported the abuse.

  Fact:  SEIU was accused of inappropriate influence. Maybe guilty, maybe not.  Both political parties are definitely guilty of influence peddling.  That's both.

  Fact:  the "thug Black Panther members", were laughed at by voters and the Bush Justice Department could not find adequate cause to file charges against them.

  Fact:  GOP congressional leaders said repeatedly they would deliberately block Obama's efforts to improve the economy so as to prevent his reelection.  In spite of this, Obama has created jobs, too few, but he has actually created jobs.

  Fact:  More than half of the national debt was accumulated while Bush was still President.

  Fact:  I can spell per cent. 

  Fact: The Oxford Dictionary of the English Language reports that the term  began as per cent, moved to be percent in the 1700s, and in BE, split again to per cent, AE retaining the percent version.  As usual with such generalisations, there are lots and lots of exceptions.  In other words, I used the correct British usage.

 Furthermore,  I have a hard time typing accurately and my proofreading is terrible. I suffer from vertigo and disorientation so severe I am totally and permanently disabled.  Your sneering personal attack based on what seems to be a typographic error weakens your arguments. Argumentum ad hominem attacks are a logical fallacy and have been recognized as such for millennia. For the sake of your own credibility, I suggest you refrain from this error in the future.

  You argue not from facts, but from fear.  I am sorry you are so frightened.  I also feel threatened.  I agree that there is much to fear, but I believe that America is fundamentally strong and that we will weather these terrible times and continue to do well.
 
  I add,  Obama has done only a good job as President, not a great one.  

  I hope this calms you.  Plato was wrong about so much, but I must agree with his allegory of the charioteer.  We are a chariot pulled by the horses of our passions and emotions.  The charioteer is our rationality, whose job it is to guide and control those horses so that they do good, not evil.

  Yes, I have restated Plato's idea to correct some errors he made, but his point is largely intact.

  I apologize for any offensive typos and/or use of the Queen's English.  (This is a joke, as much at my expense as at yours.  It is good to be able to laugh at yourself.  It keeps one from taking oneself too seriously.  If you and I laugh at the both of us, there is less anger. If there is less anger, the charioteer has more control.)

  Be at peace.

  Jim

Got to run, The Celestial Dragon, aka Fenris Wolf (son of Loki) is nibbling at the sun.  I need to observe and drive him away with noise and clamor!

Immigration solution

Alright, I'm forced to admit it. The Republicans are right. All these awful immigrants are the source of every problem America has had or ever will have . And this anchor baby business must be stopped. So what we'll do is pick a date – we have to pick a date because the American Indians are immigrants too and if we don't set some cut off point, every single human being in United States will have to leave it --but  anyone arriving after that date, and all of their descendents, will be expelled from this great nation.

This is the only way to save America! I propose we set the date at 1575. That will get rid of all those grave robbing and land stealing Pilgrims and other illegal immigrants who came after them. Not only were the Pilgrims illegals, they never even bothered to learn the language, Wôpanâak, spoken by the Wampanoag citizens!  Hey, Pilgrim descendants, this is America!  Learn Wôpanâak, or go home to England and talk all the English you want!

By the way, I should mention that this program would exempt my family since the Naranjo patriarch arrived here in 1574, but that's just a coincidence.

As many Americans know, Oklahoma banned Sharia law from being considered by state courts. Why was this important? It wasn’t, not as a real issue. There is no likelihood of Sharia being a part of the state court system. The action was taken by demagogues in the state legislature who wanted to distract tier constituency from their failures and to benefit form the fears and confusion of the electorate.
Doing good work and passing good laws is hard. Playing on fears and baseless panics is easy. I’m surprised the legislators didn’t also attempt to ban Kilingon law. It’s so much harsher that Sharia and as likely to ever be a part of the state court system.
The founding fathers attempted to create a balance between the outrages of Athenian democracy [see Alcibiades and the Syracuse expedition] and the suppression of the people under the Roman Republic. That’s why junior high school civics students learn that the US is a democratic republic. Its supposed to be a careful construction of the benefits of both systems without the inherent failures of each. Actually, it works pretty well, considering that its a wholly human effort. We do surprising well when compared to the rest of history.
Right now everyone is confused and frightened. Therefore we tend strongly to seek someone to blame. Someone who is not us. That’s important. Obviously we can’t be responsible for our own troubles. It must be a plot.
American voters hate politics and largely ignore it. Then they are surprised when politicians use their power to do bad things. It shouldn’t be a surprise, but somehow, it always is.
　

On immigration and ethnic studies. Arizona, determined to drive out all that nasty Hispanic and liberal money, has added strict new regulations on ethnic studies in public schools. While they seem obvious at first glance, at second glance they sound paranoid...as in clinical paranoia. I have always had hesitations regarding ethnic/women’s studies. Well, I have since their inception, which I am old enough to recall clearly. I seems to me a better route would be to be more inclusive in American and world history classes.

I note that the apparent source of the bizarre “Cleopatra was black.” movement is a Black studies program at one university where the theory is aggressively professed by the instructor. Anecdotal evidence such as this is often quoted by those who fear such courses, but I have yet to hear any verifiable data regarding how accurate and or how divisive such programs are.

I recall as a student at San Deigo State the resentment I felt that female students had a special lounge from which the rest of us were excluded. Why wasn't there a male only lounge? I have no doubt that that was wrong, but do ethnic studies really promote the overthrow of the United States? Do they actually “track” students racially? The law refers to these and other abuses and at least one Arizona official defended the law saying these excesses do occur. If so, this is one retired school administrator who thinks that a new law is less necessary than appropriate supervision by school authorities. If passing a law is the only way to make Arizonan principals and superintendents do their job, something is very rotten in the educational system of Arizona.

In any event, it seems clear to me that Arizona is wildly overreacting to show the world that they are tough on tolerance. The fact that the majority of Americans polled support Arizona’s hard boiled approach to the immigration problem encourages them, but they should remember that at one time, something like 90% of Americans supported the Iraq war. At that time I said, “The day will come when America will look at Iraq and ask, ‘How did we get into the mess?’” I was right then and I am convinced that Arizona will one day say the same thing about its new attitude.

I also can't resist pointing out that Arizona and many Americans are bitterly angry that the federal government failed to deal with immigration. I recall that one of the few things Georgie Porgy tried to do right was comprehensive immigration reform. He was prevented from doing so by the same people who are now so bitter that the government failed to serve their needs by listening to them. If only Bush had ignored their demands to do nothing, they would now be happy that he had done something against their will. Ummm... so they are now mad at the government for daring to do as they demanded in the past and also angry at it for not doing what they are demanding now. OK. Makes sense to me!

I must add a point that angers me to the maximum. Hispanics are regularly attacked for being racist due to the name of one political advocacy group. I refer, of course, to La Raza. I am not a member and do not know much about the group's activities, but neither do those who use the name to bitterly attack Hispanics, including the Arizonan official I listened to earlier tonight. If he does know something about the group, he didn’t mention it. all he did was point out the “obvious” racism inherent in the name.

The problem is that the definition of the word “raza” is more complex than the automatically assume bigotry crowd think. The definition is as follows: Race, generation, lineage, family, clan: branch of a family.

In other words, while it is possible the members of La Raza are implying that they are racists by choosing this name, it is also possible that they are simply affirming their membership in an ethnic group [ie: clan]; their feeling that they constitute an extended family [The family of man? Well, the Hispanic sub Family of Man anyway]; or simply acknowledging that they share a lineage and a culture.

Of course, a certain type of person automatically assumes the worst of those who are darker skinned than themselves. I think this is unwise and says a lot more about the person making the assumption than it does about La Raza.

I don’t want to make assumptions either. It is possible that La Raza is making a racist claim. Does anyone know? If you do, I'd like to see the evidence.