Tuesday, January 27, 2009

if you're brave

As I told Malcolm privately, I have no intention of jumping into the toxic vortex of the very heated discussion about race and immigration now occurring in a post over at his fine blog. But if you're brave enough, and feel you have something intelligent to add (civilly!!) to the discussion, be my guest and jump on in! Me, I think it's rapidly turning into the Marmot's Hole comments section. I don't blame Malcolm for this, of course; these folks are all adults and therefore responsible for their own actions.


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5 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is for the brave. I find his humor great in a to-hell-with-PC way.

www.nickscipio.com

Take a look at his picture of the day for 1/27. His earlier pictures are pretty interesting too, but those sometimes involve the naked body.

John from Daejeon

JW said...

I'm not sure it's even psychologicaly possible for Americans of color to respond civilly to what is quitely frankly their white supremacist worldview. It caused in me something of a cognitive dissonance leading to what can only be described as a mechanical reaction filled with venom. Directly following the election of what ranks perhaps as one of the great moments of American history, I come across on that blog which seemed to be a gathering of perfectly reasonable Americans this unthinkable crap about letting white people in and showing the door to colored people. Can you really honestly blame someone like myself for turning a bit nasty on them?

JW said...

Oh and this ill founded worry about English somehow losing its grip in America is bogus. What it can only mean is that you can't stand the fact that 1st and 2nd generation immigrants are *multi* lingual. In my workplace, we have 2 who are fluent in korean and english, 1 who's fluent in korean, english, AND spanish, and 1 who speaks spanish and english flawlessly. In this day and age of real time global transactions, are you telling me that you'd rather have mono as opposed to multi lingual citizens?

Kevin Kim said...

JW,

I saw the nastiness in the original thread (on Mangan's site) and didn't want to step into the pile. Does anyone seriously think they're going to convince anyone else of anything in that thread?

As for multilingualism... my own feeling is: the more languages you know, the better off you are. It's often worth the effort to learn a second (or third, or fourth) language, and I'm not just talking about how such learning improves one's job prospects.

Switzerland seems to get along fine with four official languages (though as I mentioned to a friend, it does have its "Ausländer RAUS!" side).


Kevin

JW said...

And let me just say this one last thing, if you won't mind. Those guys coming into the debate *know* it's pretty much impossible for Americans of color to have a civil conversation with them. So their message what it comes down to is, if you are white, join the conversation and hopefully the cause and let us solidify our white alliance and fight the "good" fight. It's absolutely repulsive.

So no, I don't think it's remotely possible to have any sort of real conversation with them. I am just glad they are well within the minority and we as a country are well past the point of struggling against such folks.