Fausta's Blog

American and Latin American Politics, Society, and Culture

January 1, 2016 By Fausta

Found: a Puerto Rican who hates the Beatles

When I was growing up, the entire world was in the grip of Beatlemania. I attended an all-girl’s school in Santurce, Puerto Rico, and hours were spent listening to and discussing John, Ringo (my favorite), George and Paul. Among the greatest fans was one of my classmates, a very talented jazz and classical pianist who grew up to become a very successful professional musician.

It is with some amusement that I read this,

Professor: Trying to Make Me Like the Beatles Is a Microaggression

A professor at Notre Dame de Namur University in California wrote a piece published by the Huffington Post claiming that his white friend trying to convince him to like the Beatles was basically a microaggression against him.

Psychology professor Adam J. Rodriguez, who is Puerto Rican, explained that his friend was part of “the dominant culture” that makes people Beatles fans — and the fact that he dared to criticize Rodriguez for not being one was insensitive and meant he just didn’t recognize the “power and privileges” he had as a white dude that Rodriguez did not have.

Say, wha?

For starters, Mr. Rodriguez (no relation) confuses race with ethnicity, but, let’s take a look at the HuffPo article by the San Francisco psychologist,

Here’s what my friend did not consider: He grew up a white middle-class male in the 70s and 80s, to parents who grew up on the Beatles and were immensely influenced by them and other rock and roll bands. I grew up a Puerto Rican lower-class male in the 80s whose parents played guajira, salsa, and Motown/classic R&B/soul growing up. My ears had grown up hearing syncopation, multi-chordal harmonies, diverse percussion, horns, and groove-oriented rhythm sections. The Beatles CDs I listened to were classic rock, non-syncopated, guitar- and drum-dominated, and rhythmically and harmonically simpler. The type of music that he grew up listening to and loving was quite simply different from mine. It was neither better nor worse. Only different. My friend, caught in his ethnocentric blindness, could not grasp that somebody would have a different experience and values from him.

Notice how the Beatles were “neither better nor worse,” yet “rhythmically and harmonically simpler.” Hmm.

He piles on his (probably former) friend because his friend, a true Beatles and Led Zeppelin fan, couldn’t talk him into liking both years ago, 

(yes, this is when music was not yet streaming)

because

There is an implication of a paradigm of normality, and when someone does not fit into that paradigm, it can be uncomfortable for that person, especially if they are dismissed because of their difference like I was.

Seems to me, that, if you have to go back to the olden days “when music was not yet streaming” to come up with an instance when one was made “uncomfortable”, one has been living a privileged existence indeed.

Especially when the HuffPo promises two more articles on social justice by Mr. Rodriguez.

As a person born and raised in Puerto Rico, I fail to sympathize with the outrage. I enjoy a large range of music, from Early Music and Gregorian Chant, to Matisyahu, but a little salsa goes a long way with me. It’s wonderful that so many of this blog’s readers enjoy the opera selections in the Sunday palate cleansers, but jumping from there into conclusions about “ethnocentric blindness” strikes me as, oh yes, ethnocentrically blind (or ethnocentrically deaf, since we’re talking about music).

No wonder Milo has declared war on so-called social justice (emphasis added),

Let me explain. In 2015, I saw the seeds of a movement begin to sprout. Across the internet, and even in fear-gripped halls on campuses, young people began to stand up and challenge the humourless, divisive, identity-obsessed elites that have taken over our cultural discourse. People of seemingly disparate interests and politics — gamers, pundits, metalheads, comic book and science fiction fans, atheists, Catholics, conservatives, libertarians and even many disaffected liberals — came together to agree on only one thing: art and culture should be left alone.

That movement is called cultural libertarianism. It stands against any authoritarian, from the Right or the Left, who sucks fun and freedom from the world like some kind of vampire without the cool factor, and who uses faux grievances and exaggerated victimhood to get what they want. Cultural libertarianism rejects the fainting-couch feminism and race-baiting of the Left in favour of deliberately provocative joyfulness and exuberance. It also predicates facts over hurt feelings, versus the social justice crowd who want to turn harrowing anecdotes into “lived experience” — which we are then expected to treat like scientific data.

And, failing those, there are the not-harrowing Beatles anecdotes.

2016 is going to be an interesting year.

Now, if you will excuse me, I’m off to listen to the White Album.

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Filed Under: Fausta's blog, multiculturalism, music, politics, Puerto Rico Tagged With: Fausta's blog, The Beatles

July 10, 2010 By Fausta

Just don’t say Jesus

Five Letter Word Unwelcome in the NC House of Representatives, and it’s not only there:

– A California school district is adding The Bible as a literature elective for high school seniors. Perhaps to assuage the main-lining of Islam via “diversity” pushed onto all students, everywhere.
– The debate stirred about whether those he has bashed relentlessly should pray for an avowed atheist who has publicly revealed his battle with cancer.
– Pulpits used to spew hate instead of healing.
– UI professor of Catholic studies loses his job over explaining some tenets of the Catholic faith to students in his class on (wait for it)… Catholicism.

And the beat goes on…

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Filed Under: multiculturalism, religion Tagged With: Fausta's blog

May 5, 2007 By Fausta

The integration debate, and what we can learn from it

The NY Times has an article on the immigration debate in France titled, In French Bid, Immigrant’s Son Battles Reputation as Anti-Immigrant. In it, at least they give Sarko credit:

The possible next president of France is the son of an immigrant with a very un-French name who has done as much, if not more, than any other French official to improve the status of minorities.

He knows the pain of being an outsider and even advocates American-style affirmative action, heresy for many people in officially colorblind, egalitarian France.

The problem is that no matter how much France wants to officially paint itself colorblind and egalitarian, it is not. Everything in France is determined by who you know, what school you attend, and what colleges you graduate from. Nobody knows that better than Sarko:

Mr. Sarkozy himself has struggled as an outsider, describing himself as a “little Frenchman of mixed blood” who rose to the top of French politics without going through the normal channels of the elite Ecole Nationale d’Administration as Ms. Royal did.

At the same time, France has a large minority of unintegrated aliens who have lived there for generations. Whether the French assumed that the immigrants would “naturally” become French out of their own initiative, or didn’t care, the fact is that these unintegrated long-term residents, many of which are illegal aliens, have become a huge problem. While the NYT first referred to these individuals as “youths”, the customary euphemism, later on in the article (13th paragraph) it does mention that the “youths” are mostly Muslim.

Sarko has favored aggressive action to integrate them into French society,

He encouraged the creation of the French Council of the Muslim Faith, which gave Islam a voice in France. He appointed the first prefect in France who is both foreign-born and Muslim. He has even argued for relaxing rules that restrict government support for building mosques.

And he supports affirmative action, which the Socialists steadfastly oppose.

In addition, Sarko has suggested that the illegal aliens be granted the right to vote in local elections. But there’s one thing: he wants integration, not accommodation:

While Mr. Sarkozy has moderated his language and struck a more conciliatory tone in the presidential campaign, he did not help matters by proposing last year that France have a ministry of immigration and national identity to ensure that new citizens adhered to France’s secular values.

To many people in the suburbs, the idea seemed to be a way to suppress cultural differences in favor of a traditional French way of life.

Those cultural differences have become a huge rift in the social fabric. That is always the cast when a section of the residents of a country are not integrated. Many other European countries are in the same quandary.

And that brings us to the crux of any discussion regarding immigration: integration.

In France, as elsewhere, opportunists will use the rifts for their own perfidious purposes: witness Segolene Royal’s statement that

if he [Sarkozy] is elected, “democracy will be threatened,” The Associated Press reported. She said she felt a “responsibility to raise the alert about the risks of this candidacy and the violence and brutality that will be set off in the country.”

Political opportunism can be found anywhere in the world. Political opportunism will not get anyone integrated into anything other than discord and strife.

I have discussed immigration on Blog Talk Radio with my guests Pieter Dorsman and Siggy, and with Captain Ed; and also privately with my neighbor TigerHawk. We all have independently arrived at the same conclusion: integration is the issue.

Integration can be even more problematic when there’s a religious aspect: As Pieter said in his blog after our conversation,

It is important to understand that failed Muslim integration to a large extent has resulted from the long held belief that allowing different religious pillars to exist in The Netherlands would contribute to a solution like it had in the past for the Catholic-Protestant divide on which the nation was built. The problem is that a template for neutralizing religious tensions between a culturally and economically largely homogenous group has limited use to integrate a group that both ethnically and economically occupies a different and separate world. Add to that the fact that Catholic and Protestant structures have largely become defunct in one of Europe’s most secular nations and you can picture the divergent tracks in Dutch society.

Even among Catholics and Protestants, one of the things I discussed with Captain Ed is that many churches are not facilitating integration because they hold foreign-language services. The newcomers are made to remain aliens.

Important as it is, the religious aspect is only one part of the problem. Both in Europe and in the USA we now have a new kind of immigrant – those who, to use Siggy’s words,

“they don’t say I want to participate, they don’t say I want to contribute, they say, I want”.

The task of any society is to teach its citizenry what it means to be a citizen of that society. A large part of being a citizen of any society is knowing that participating and contributing is at least as important as demanding.

We are doomed to relive France’s current problems in America if we don’t make a concerted effort to integrate and assimilate immigrants.

In America’s case, the first place to start is with language.

As I have mentioned before, children of immigrants need to learn English in order to fully master American life. For them not to master English means a handicapped life.

But acculturation is not simply being bilingual:

Prior generations of immigrants, once they arrived in the USA were taught, by the public schools and by other civic organizations, traditional American values; more specifically, middle-class, Protestant values, within a Judeo-Christian tradition. People learned to read English by reading the King James Bible. The Protestant work ethic was promoted through Horatio Alger stories, and the value of delayed gratification was spoken of. School curricula stressed discipline and the “three R’s”, and included famous sermons, such as Governor John Winthrop’s A Model of Christian Charity. People were taught and encouraged to serve their communities through volunteering, a most American trait. In short, immigrants were directed towards what it meant to live in an American culture; no one assumed that simply knowing the language meant one was acculturated.

In today’s PC environment, that has nearly disappeared from the curricula.

Today is Cinco de Mayo, a minor holiday in Mexico that is given a lot of publicity in the USA.

Here in Princeton the Princeton Shopping Center had a live salsa band (I didn’t ask the musicians where they were from, but Mexican salsa is something you eat, Caribbean salsa is something you dance to), pony rides for the kids and hot dogs for all. In all, a pretty well integrated atmosphere for a festive day in truly glorious Spring weather. Cinco de Mayo’s as good a name as May Madness, as far as I’m concerned, while May 5th would be even better.

By all means, have a Cinco de Mayo party, celebrate St Patricks, Columbus Day and every other holiday. I’m certainly in favor of celebrating and getting as much joy out of life as we can.

But let’s not have a lesson unlearned: what the French are dealing with now can happen here.

Integration is the key.

More on the French elections tomorrow.

Update, Sunday 6 May Pieter Dorsman has an excellent article about Holland. I’ll post more on it later this week.
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Filed Under: bilingual ed, Blog Talk Radio, education, elections, EU, France, multiculturalism, Nicolas Sakozy, politics, Segolene Royal

April 4, 2007 By Fausta

It’s time to ditch bilingual ed

Today at RCP Tony Blankley writes about Newt, Bilingual Ed and the PC Police (emphasis added):

Likewise today, Spanish is a magnificent language proudly spoken by people around the world. But in the United States, while the language remains beautiful and noble, those Hispanic-American children who are discouraged from learning English (by a bilingual policy that retards rather than advances the learning of English) are and will continue to be culturally and economically ghettoized by their inability to read, write and speak English.

Not that Blankley or Grinwrich are saying anything new. Thousands of Hispanics have been saying the same thing.

(BTW, there are no “Hispanics” outside the USA; once we all leave the continental USA we are Puerto Ricans, Nicaraguans, Uruguayans, or whatever. “Hispanic” is a construct, and I’m using right now because it’s expedient.)

Among the thousands of Hispanics who decry bilingual education is Herman Badillo, who actually introduced and was instrumental passing in Congress the bilingual voting and bilingual education programs. In his book, One Nation, One Standard, Badillo again and again realizes that

(page 65) Reexamining bilingual education, the Board of Education released a study concluding that efforts to educate tens of thousands of students in their native languages were flawed. The study found that students – even recent immigrants – who took most of their classes in English generally fared better academically than did students in bilingual programs, where little English was spoken.

(page 67) Bilingual education requires an average of four to seven years before students master english, but immersion programs accelerate that to as little as one year. Immersion’s benefits are most dramatic for immigrant children in the early grades.

Last year I pointed out

Take a look at the professions where English prevails, not only in the USA, but across the world:

engineering
computers
other technology
natural sciences
medicine
financial institutions such as banks, stock markets, commodities markets, and trade in government-issued securities
accounting
economics
international law

A small amount of research will show you that those are the highest paid occupations in the world.
… While Harry Reid bellyaches about job outsourcing to China, he should take a look at the high-skilled jobs being outsourced: I guarantee you that the best Chinese engineers with world-class skills, like engineers all around the world, learned English.

Harry should also try getting hold of his friendly tech support hotline person. The odds are the person is in India. India’s become a preferred place for outsourcing jobs because India’s an English-speaking country. Again, English pays:

India’s IT and outsourcing sector is currently worth about $22bn and expected to grow by 25% until the end of the decade, it said.

India is actively courting more investors, and its economy will continue to grow in those areas.

Tony Blankley continues, and finds the real reason for the PC outrage:

It is not hateful of Newt to point that out. It is hateful of ideological “civil rights” activists to try to intimidate any politician who would dare to liberate kids from the linguistic ghetto that serves the political power of these “civil rights” activists. Once these kids have mastered English and fully entered American life, they will no longer be vote fodder for the “civil rights” activists’ political ambitions.

The special interest ethnic activists prefer to have a new generation of clients, rather than a new generation of fully integrated American citizens. And what they fear is an honest and open debate on the bilingual teaching method.

Teaching in the native language (bilingual ed) combined with ballot measures and government and consumer information in the native language is establishing a dubious result today — as millions of immigrants are given just enough such linguistic help to let them function minimally in America (without learning English), but not enough to participate fully in our great country, economy and culture

Poor people move to this country to benefit from our riches. Denying them the instruction they need in English is, as Roger said, condemning those same immigrants to a life of poverty and bad jobs.

Every child, every adult, in our country needs to be fully literate in English. I can’t say it enough.

Prior posts
Badillo speaks out on education
Krauthammer on assimilation
Acculturation is not simply being bilingual
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technorati tags bilingual education, education

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Filed Under: bilingual ed, education, multiculturalism, politics, Republicans, technology

February 16, 2007 By Fausta

The great news about the economy, and today’s items

Larry Kudlow on the great economy,

Averages across-the-board are now moving toward all-time highs: Dow, transports, utilities, the small cap Russell 2000, the NYSE index and D-J Wilshire 5000. Inside the indexes, the story is the same: commodities, cyclicals, defense, machinery and construction all hitting all-time highs. The depth, breadth and resiliency of this rally is remarkable.

America’s bull market economy stands at the epicenter of the newly capitalist world market economy. Therefore, it is no surprise that America’s stock rise is being emulated around the world. This is called economic leadership.

The reality is that non-inflationary growth and rising living standards are occurring all around the globe. For this, thank the spread of American-style, free-market capitalism. Some call it cowboy capitalism, but I prefer to think of it as prosperity capitalism.

Record wealth is now being created among a hundred million-plus investors in the United States, including union and public employee pension fund holders who are 60 percent invested in the Bernanke bull market. This, even though they rail against stock market wealth and business in general, and still don’t get it that their retirement wealth bread is being buttered by the fabulous expansion of the portfolio value of the ownership society.

Stocks are the best barometer of future business and economic health. They are signaling that the wealth of the nation currently and prospectively looks excellent.

Democrats rule the roost on Capitol Hill, but Bernanke stuck to his free market principles. He is targeting inflation and employment, and so far doing a good job with both.

Does anybody remember that President George W. Bush appointed Bernanke? And that Bush’s record-low tax rates on capital have promoted strong economic growth? And that this tax-driven growth and investment surge brings inflation down by absorbing the excess money created by Alan Greenspan between 2003 and 2005? The availability of more goods and services makes the existing money supply less inflationary.

In his brief tenure, Bernanke has mopped up this excess liquidity and reduced inflation expectations. Meanwhile, low tax rates are counter-inflationary. So, a combination of strong economic growth and newfound monetary control are working together for the betterment of investors, workers, businesses and federal finances. The supply-side model is very much in place right now.

Contrast that with France

————————————————–

The “Surge” appears in the streets of Baghdad. Muqtada al-Sadr goes AWOL. The terrorists are hurting.
Where are the Democrats?
Democrats Will Follow Iraq Vote With Push to Block More Troops

And they support the troops, yeah, right.
It’s called De-legitimizing the Troops, folks.

————————————————–

El Cafe Cubano continues the Friday fast for all political prisoners.
————————————————–

Cultural Marxism

Critical Theory is an ongoing and brutal assault via vicious criticism relentlessly leveled against Christians, Christmas, the Boy Scouts, Ten Commandments, our military, and all other aspects of traditional American culture and society.

Both political correctness and Critical Theory are in essence, psychological bullying. They are the psycho-political battering rams by which Frankfurt School disciples such as the ACLU are forcing Americans to submit to and to obey the will and the way of the Left. These devious devices are but psychological versions of Georg Lukacs and Laventi Beria’s ‘cultural terrorism‘ tactics.

Read it all. (h/t Larwyn)

————————————————–

Dr. Krauthammer writes on how Russia steps back on the world stage
————————————————–

Amanda Marcotte manages to put together half a dozen sentences without profanity. She keeps that up, I’ll start believing in global warming.

It’s 13F in The Principality. Amanda’s got her work cut out for her.

Who’s to blame for Marcotte’s fall? According to her, Dan’s one of the culprits.

————————————————–

Over at the church of global warming, Antarctic temperatures disagree with climate model predictions

A new report on climate over the world’s southernmost continent shows that temperatures during the late 20th century did not climb as had been predicted by many global climate models.

This comes soon after the latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that strongly supports the conclusion that the Earth’s climate as a whole is warming, largely due to human activity.

It also follows a similar finding from last summer by the same research group that showed no increase in precipitation over Antarctica in the last 50 years. Most models predict that both precipitation and temperature will increase over Antarctica with a warming of the planet.

Oh, I forgot, it’s not global warming; it’s climate change.

————————————————–

Stop the ACLU celebrates its first million visitors.
————————————————–

Al Franken announces a run for the Senate: a Transcript (h/t Larwyn)
————————————————–

Don’t trust those Reuters photos. And yes, the bombs are retarded.
————————————————–

If you’re a woman who can’t find a guy who wants to commit, and you can’t figure out why, read this.
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Filed Under: Communism, economy, Global Warming, Iraq, men and women, multiculturalism, political prisoners, Princeton, relationships, terrorism

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