State of the Discussion

So, first, an observation.

The US has consistently swung back and forth between more or less open door immigration policies, to highly restrictive ones. And we tend to swing back to restrictive policies when the number of immigrants in the US reaches about 15% of the overall population.

See here: https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/immigrant-population-over-time

So, for example, in the later 19th C. we wanted folks to come because we wanted their labor. That's how my Italian great-grandparents come - great-grandpa was recruited to come dig holes for the NYC subway system.

Beginning at the turn of the 20th Century, folks began freaking out about it all, and by the 20's that resulted in the Immigration Act of 1924, which basically said no more immigrants from Asia at all, and far fewer from Eastern and Southern Europe. No more slant-eyes or swarthy garlic-eating weirdos. Right? Sound familiar?

So now we're back at around 15% and everybody is freaking out, like we always do. And Trump et al are riding that train.

Next, a question.

What "American culture" do we expect people to "assimilate" into? There are probably a couple dozen "American cultures" in play. I won't try to enumerate them, because we don't have all day here, but suffice it to say that there are *very many* places in this country where people speak different languages, practice different religions or no religion at all, listen to different kinds of music, eat different food, have different family structures.

It would appear from Vance's speech that what he would like is for everyone to speak primarily or exclusively English, be Christian (and preferably Catholic or evangelical Christian), and belong to a two-parent nuclear family with a male and female parent. I guess this is based on the idea that "English language", "Christian", and the "Leave it to Beaver" nuclear family are somehow "more American".

About 1 in 5 people in this country speak a language other than English at home. Are they "unassimilated"?

About 62% of people here identify as "Christian", but only about 3 in 10 people here attend church once a week or most weeks. About 28% of us identify as "religiously unaffiliated". The remaining 10% or so encompass all of the other faiths.

Are just that 3 in 10 "assimilated"?

Almost a quarter of American children live in single-parent households. Which is very high when compared to the rest of the world, but is not function of our rate of immigration. Are all of those families "assimilated"?

What is this "American culture" Vance et al are on about? What does it mean to be "assimilated" into that culture, whatever it is? Which of the variety of cultures that exist here get to be officially sanctions "American" ones?

What is "American culture"? Who gets to decide?

novakant,
I don't know if this will cheer you up or not but I've got almost 40 years of teaching experience, and post COVID, I downgraded my expectations to be happy if I could get the class to learn one thing during a class session. I'm getting to the point where I'm happy if I can get a few students to learn one thing in class.

I have to admit I was very curious to know what Usha thinks of this when I saw the video, particularly because when he first rose to prominence as possible VP pick all the stuff about her seemed to show that she was a) bright and b) fairly liberal. It's a mystery.

But yes, his response to that amazingly brave student shows how sneaky and tricksy he is in evading questions, and turning them round to say exactly whatever populist claptrap will play best with his audience, and how well that plays with such audiences. Horrifying is exactly the right word. And, as nous upthread remarks, very reminiscent of Charlie Kirk.

wj - a surprising number of evangelical fundamentalists have embraced their catholic co-religionists in the name of Christian Nationalism and being pro-forced-birth. They are also very positive where the various Orthodox denominations are concerned. They can all get along so long as there are no gays, women belong to their men, and none of the Catholics support these last couple Marxist Anti-Popes.

And they will be polite and keep their mouths shut on the whole Mormon thing for the sake of politics so long as no one presses them to affirm that Mormons are Christians.

But the JWs are still on the outs.

Gotta make concessions if you want to have your Christian Red Caesar.

I have a lot of stress factors in my life at the moment, not least a late career pivot to become a teacher. At least I feel on most days that I'm doing something useful, though I don't really know what I'm doing yet. The kids can be a real pain but also funny and sweet, and while the pay is middling, it's stable.

My daughter makes me happy everytime I see her, she is extremely bright, funny and kindhearted. I worry about the future our generation will have left her with: rampant capitalism, global warming and a continous deterioration of democracy, the rule of law and basic human decency.

Reading (books, TLS and NYRB) watching French films and TV series and running helps me relax a bit.

Couchie would very much love to be the heir to the Charlie Kirk throne, and judging by the way that he sidesteps the questions, reframes them, gaslights, and performs entirely for the audience while refusing to engage with any of the actual questions being asked of him, I'd say that he's learned the patter needed to try to be the paterfamilias of TPUSA.

I don't think his performance is all that convincing for the people outside the room, but it's probably reassuring for those in attendance who were hoping to be a part of the moment when we all watched the triumph of Couchie's will.

So however many years ago some dude told him immigration would weaken organized labor, which means liberals are stupid. Well, sh*t ... I guess that settles it.

Colleges and universities have an issue with silos. The mindset is that everything ought to fit into one of them.

They will (depending on the particular college) accept a double major. But the mindset is that, whatever the two majors, they must have some kind of synergy. Thus someone may have an undergraduate double major in chemistry and biology, and the faculty will nod sagely and say "aiming for biochemistry in grad school" (there being no undergraduate program in biochemistry). They can wrap their heads around that.

But I had a double major in Mechanical Engineering (fluid mechanics) and in Cultural Anthropology. Drove the professors in both majors nuts. In their minds, there must be some synergy there somewhere. They were seriously frustrated that, apparently, I could see it but they could not. The idea that I just found two disparate subjects which both interested me? Simply inconceivable, apparently.

I was in the high school band, and we did everything from marching to concerts of all sorts to pep band to classical ensembles to the music when the drama people did a musical. The band director was a retired master sergeant from one of the US Army bands. In addition to teaching us a lot about music, he also instilled things like "excellence is a habit", "if we all succeed, I've succeeded", and an understated "we're just that damned good". When he retired hundreds of former band members from all over the country went to the picnic.

The only insurrection I know about is when I was a senior, and he was out of town so a couple of us were running the pep band for the Friday night basketball game, and the cheerleaders got to do the only performance of their dance/cheer routine for the "Jeremiah Was a Bullfrog Polka". The backstory to that might be worth a post :^)

The statement from Buckingham Palace in full:
His Majesty has today initiated a formal process to remove the style, titles and honours of Prince Andrew.

Prince Andrew will now be known as Andrew Mountbatten Windsor.
His lease on Royal Lodge has, to date, provided him with legal protection to continue in residence.

Formal notice has now been served to surrender the lease and he will move to alternative private accommodation.

These censures are deemed necessary, notwithstanding the fact that he continues to deny the allegations against him
.
Their Majesties wish to make clear that their thoughts and utmost sympathies have been, and will remain with, the victims and survivors of any and all forms of abuse.

FYI The last person to be de-princed was the Duke of Cumberland, who fought for the Kaiser in WW1, so treason, and the last person to have his KG removed (Knight of the Garter) was Emperor Hirohito in WW2.

Well, Andrew is now Mr Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, and is being moved from his huge house on the Windsor estate to a (presumably) smaller house much further from London, on the Sandringham estate. There appears to be no precedent for this, and the interview with Virginia Giuffre's brother and sister-in-law (who are both in tears) is very moving. It's my impression that most people in the UK are perfectly satisfied with this.

Wu, as spoken in Shanghai, has five tones. Standard Mandarin has four. Cantonese has six. In each case there are dialects which differ.

I remember reading once that Vietnamese was a seven-tone language, and the reason French had been quickly adopted and hung on so long was that little kids could use that while they were figuring out Vietnamese. I have no idea if any of that's true.

I just found out one of my college roommates passed away late last night/early this morning. It wasn't a surprise. He had metastatic cancer and it was clear that he was nearing the end.

I hadn't seen or heard from him for roughly 30 years until about a month ago when his brother called me out of the blue to let me know the situation and to invite me to a birthday party he was throwing for him early this month. In the last month, I spoke with my former roommate on the phone a few times and went to see him three times - once at the party and twice at his house.

My wife finally got to meet him at his birthday party after hearing stories about him for years from me and other mutual friends who I did stay in touch with. He was the only one out of our tighter circle of friends that she hadn't met. She would joke that he was like Norm Peterson's wife, Vera, on "Cheers" (or Niles's wife, Mariss, on "Frasier") who never made an appearance on screen, leaving you to wonder if she really existed.

Even minus 100 pounds and in a wheelchair, he was still the same charming, funny, and engaging guy. He and my wife might as well have been lifelong friends after five minutes.

There was never any reason that we lost touch for so long other than that we simply got caught up in our lives in ways that had him in a different place than the rest of us. He was kind of an enigmatic guy who would go in whatever direction without looking back, though he did express regret about losing touch for so long once we all got back together. And, once we did, it was like no time had passed. We might as well have been back in college hanging out in the crappy apartment we all lived in together.

I'm not fishing for condolences with this comment. I just wanted to share something that I think illustrates the weird poignancy that life occasionally throws at you unexpectedly. It's like there was this significant part of my existence that had long been dormant but suddenly woke up to take hold of me and become, at least for a time, the most important focus of my personal life.

I can't find the word for it, but it's something like "heady," only without the thrill, maybe with a bit of "mind-f**k" thrown in.

It seems like the assumption of a shared language base actually rests on two factors: race, and a largely shared script. Neither of which really impact language.

For race, only consider Swedish, Hungarian, Spanish, and Ukranian. The Europeans who are native speakers of those languages are all the same race. But the languages are not related.

As for a shared script, note that the Latin script is used not only for all of the languages of Western and Northern Europe, but for the hundreds of languages of pretty much all of Sub-Saharan Africa, not to mention Vietnamese. The linguistic overlap is basically nonexistant (barring loan words, of course).

Sure, it would be convenient if learning Japanese was relevant to learning Korean or Chinese (either Mandarin or Cantonese, or one of the other "dialects" -- actually distinct languages rather than real dialects). But while all use related scripts, the spoken languages, as you discovered, are quite different. Just to state the obvious, Chinese is a tonal** language, which Japanese is definitely not. (I'm not familiar enough with Korean to know which, if either, it resembles.)

** In case anyone here is unfamiliar with the term, the only example in English is the use a rising tone in the last syllable of a sentence to indicate a question. The meaning of the word isn't changed. In contrast, Chinese uses 5 (IIRC) different tones to differentiate unrelated words. See the chart here for examples.

russell, the critical phrase there was "by comparison.". I don't think that, in any absolute sense, it will be quick or easy. I just think that the foreign relations impact will be harder and slower to repair. In part because they can decline to join us in anything, whereas we are basically stuck with each other. (The dreams of Steven Miller, et al. notwithstanding.)

Job security is one of the attractive things about working for the government at a lower salary than you likely would in the private sector. So much for that.

wj, you provoke me to trot out one of my favorite dictums once again:

The optimist thinks we live in the best of all possible worlds.

The pessimist fears this may be true.

I know, I know: you're not saying we live in the best of all possible worlds, since your optimism amounts to saying that a better world might arise from the ashes of the current debacle. Do you think we will live long enough to see it?

I give the possibility less than even odds, myself, because I don't see how we get there without a lot of fuss and bother. Maybe civil-war-level fuss and bother, because deMAGAfication will be fiercely resisted by the anti-anti-fascists. And it's not clear that deMAGAfication would even be on the agenda if the Democrats ever regain power.

"Look forward, not back" they will say again. "The MAGAts stole the SCOTUS fair and square" they will mumble. "Fire the army of yahoos who signed up to be ICE 'agents'? Tut, tut, there are civil service rules, you know" will be their position. They will not uproot and incinerate the poison ivy planted among the hydrangeas by the MAGAts, is what I'm saying.

Maybe, with "a lot of work", you can take back the GOP and I can put some backbone into the Democratic Party, but I have my doubts on both fronts. And I'm not even sure what the actual "work" would have to be.

Well, at least I managed yesterday to install a motion-activated porch light for the benefit of my mailman, who will soon be trying to find the mail slot in my front door after dark.

--TP

Latest birthday doodle using some of the "little monster" characters from the fairy tale. These have a family business as "The World's Greatest Spies." They all wear an eye patch over their left eye whether they need it or not.

I'm surprised that the formalized concept of Euclidean rhythms didn't come about until 2004. It's like someone just last week being the first to recognize that people sit on chairs.