White as a cultural status identifier is not the same thing as white as a skin tone. It’s somewhat comparable to the difference between Deaf and deaf.
Hispanics in the USA are, at present, not White. Regardless of their melanin content.
This may change in the future; thirty years ago in Australia, Greeks and Italians were not White. Now they are.
My mother is a white woman from Chile. Please stuff it.
The idea that white people have the same culture in the US is beyond ridiculous. Southern culture is nothing like Russian-American culture which is nothing like Jewish culture. Wisconsin is as foreign to me as Denmark minus the language.
I will never truly understand American’s fixation on skin color as the only defining attribute of someone’s identity.
About 30 million of them in the US who self-identify as white would disagree.
So when she speaks Spanish, do you think it emphasizes her whiteness? Or does that only apply to Tim Kaine? I’m just curious as to how speaking Spanish really draws out how white he is.
I mean, do you fixate on his skin color when he speaks Spanish? What thoughts go through your head that make you feel that bilingualism is worse in white people. Do you have the same problem with “latino looking people” who speak English? Do you think it emphasizes their skin color?
Again: white is not the same thing as White. One is about skin colour, one is about status in the racial hierarchy (which is different from culture, so it can contain both northern Whites and southern Whites despite their cultural divergence). Same spelling, different words.
Jewish Americans are mostly white. But they are generally not White.
The point which you seem to have deliberately missed in your eagerness deliver information I already possess, is simply that Tim Kaine doesn’t have a Hispanic background of any sort. In the United States, when I fill out a census form the line that says WHITE, also says (NOT HISPANIC). Here, being white is a function of a complex set of relationships decided by history and cultural context. Irish people had to become white. The fact that Tim Kaine speaks Spanish is nice thing in general, and good thing to have on a resume. But it’s emphasized as an appeal to identity politics. An identity he doesn’t fucking have. He’s not from South America. He’s a white Irish mutt of some description (“mutt” being a term I used to describe myself before you go off on that for no apparent reason.) And before you argue that it’s some kind of an aside, let’s be very clear that it was deliberately mentioned to appeal to Hispanic voters.
I’m sorry dude. You have a really deep seated prejudice going on that you seem to be absolutely blind to.
There is nothing wrong with someone speaking a foreign language. It is not odd, it is not bizarre, it does not draw attention to any part of them, it does not matter what color their skin is, it does not mean shit about their identity. It shouldn’t bother you. At all. It shouldn’t bother anyone. It just is.
Maybe spend some time thinking about why it should bother you that he speaks Spanish instead of just reacting blindly trying to defend yourself. You probably won’t, I attacked too hard and it is hard to stifle the self-defense mechanism, but… good lord.
I’m beginning to wonder if you’re just ignoring everything I’m saying.
I would say Jews became White by the 1970s, at least in the New York City area. The defining moment might have been the controversies over CCNY/CUNY, Open Admissions, and the imposition of tuition there, which occurred at the same time as a large number of Black and Latino students started to appear. Or, one might view the political conflict about school governance which erupted in the 1960s and pitted the same racial groups against one another – many of the city’s public school teachers being Jews. Whiteness is defined against not-Whiteness, so the fact that Jews were in opposition to non-White groups raised them from Not Quite White status to full White status. Certainly this transition had completed itself before the end of the 1970s. The timing may have been different elsewhere, but I notice that hardly anybody raised Mr. Sanders’s Jewishness as an issue or even very interesting factor – compare that with the number of people still gaga about Mr. Obama’s ancestry.
You’re clearly just blindly reacting to the first words I wrote as I expected. It is ok. I’m not going to fight with you. I wish you the best of luck on getting over whatever hangup you have.
Posting primarily for pure GIFness.
So she’s already come 180 on her promises about the TPP from just a couple months ago. Nobody could have seen that one coming. Nope. No way.
And, by “nobody could have seen that one coming,” of course, I mean “Anyone who wasn’t completely aware that this was exactly what was going to happen needs to take their head out of their ass.”
Even the good polls wiff sometimes. It could be perfectly accurate in how the data is processed and analysed, but the sample could be skewed in some way. Not match the electorate. Older, younger, whiter, blacker, etc. than the general population. Or should just by chance you could happened to knock into a block of people that happen to be voting differently than the general population. Or the model could be borked. You’re obviously working on a smaller than everyone in the country sample size. So that data has to be analysed by fitting it to a model of the electorate/general population. If you include more of a particular demographic than actually exists, base your model on bad break downs of the country, forget to carry a 2, etc. Your good data, however accurate or predictive it might have been, won’t match reality. All of this can be exacerbated by small sample sizes or collection problems.
IIRC the major polling problems for '08-'12 were down to a few of these factors. Both the general population and the electorate had major demographic shifts faster than expected. Basically old white men are less of a proportion of the country and voters than they used to be, to more of a degree than those polls accounted for. Basing your model of voter turn out and the assumed electorate on the 2004 polls (and then 2008 polls for '12 and '14 midterms) didn’t give an accurate read on who would actually be voting where. That introduced a drift between certain polls and actual voting. And IIRC from around 2004 to at least 2012 a lot of your major polls failed to adapt in certain ways. Specifically they refused to utilize or properly weight calling to cell phones and polling by online tools. That had the effect of excluding disproportionate numbers of young, non-white, urban and poor voters. All of whom are much less likely to have a land line than old wealthy whites. This basically just magnified one of the long standing issues with polling here. Old white people are way more likely to actually respond to polls. Effectively retirees in rural, mostly white districts have nothing better to do than talk to that random dude who just called him. That always skews thing to one extent or another, so it needs to be accounted for in analyzing the data. The last few go rounds it skewed things a lot more than anyone realized.
All of which is to say that individual polls = bad. Even the good ones. They can have a bad day, or miss something entirely. IIRC the Gallop polls from 2012 were pretty on the ball. Except for a handful of late in the game releases that missed the mark rather badly, and they were sort of the only major poll that did.
The Gallop poll is generally a good one (as are most of their polls on nearly every subject). But traditionally the Quinipiac polls is where the geeks look. Smaller sample size, and less granular in their questions. Pre-Obama it was far more often to call things right, and its often considered more predictive. Though I don’t necessarily think that’s the case (I don’t like to think of any individual poll as predictive). That doesn’t seem to have held for the last few elections though. Better are polling averages and demographic analysis (especially those based on primaries and past votes, actual voter data rather than questions about what will happen later).
For polls Real Clear Politics seems to be the go to polling average, and they have a fun little tool for digging around and looking at various situations. Though I’ve seen a fair lot of references to Huffington Posts polling averages this year. For analysis of those polling averages, and good break downs on the demos Five Thirty Eight is the usual go too.
For the change in tenor in Trumparitaville? As of Thursday things were largely the same. Yeah Trump! Oh he bankrupted a bunch of small business men? He’ll do the same to Iran! That guy is a shark I tells ya!
The change is starting Friday and moving through the weekend. Curiously after Trumps speech. I’ve seen a lot more of these people scowling at their candidate when he crops up on the TV. And only hear mocking references to his speech. Its been fairly interesting to me that the vast bulk of the people in question have never voted before. Even as they spend huge amounts of time regurgitating Fox news and circle jerking each other over conservative values and who’s a real proper conservative American. The sudden dip in enthusiasm, if its actually an indication of a change and not the heat wave, could point to those people staying non-voters. I am in NY though, albiet in a pretty reliably Republican area. I don’t know quite how to interpret what I’m seeing on the ground. Particularly given recent trends in the polls and news.
Oh and as further color on why I’m looking to derive something from the reaction of my customers. So busy restaurant and pizza place, one of the more working class and republican towns in our area. Heavily conservative and vocal customer base of largely non-voting Fox News and Brietbart acolytes. Exactly the low information, angry, old, white, “independent”, culture war, sorts Trump has gotten his support from. Starting about 2 months ago there was an increasing shift in the disposition of the crowd and my coworkers. This is a group that’s, again, heavily pro-trump. But ill informed and heavily bought into the same FEAR line he’s pushing. Previously all were rabidly interested in watching to continuing murder and fear porn that is the news. Requesting I put news channels on for 24 hour coverage of the latest disaster and minute by minute updates on who died just now and what awful thing happened to a dog 3 towns over.
Almost universally this crowd was aping the interpretations pushed by Trump, taking it as evidence of the “this country is being ruined” line, and relating it back to Trump and his candidacy. Starting 2 months ago there were increasing direct statements of exhaustion with the whole subject. Requests to put something else on the bar TV. Less obsession and statements of the country being ruined, people coming to get us. People seem pretty damn well tired of, and disinterested in, being afraid all the time. That struck me and a pretty odd, and sudden, shift in the tenor things.
So the whole GOP convention was entirely predicated on this self same FUD, play to people’s anxiety approach. Especially Trump’s speech. But people already seemed (here and to me) to be exhausted with that narrative, and expecting something in the way of solutions to the supposed problems they’d been obsessing over. Since Friday there’ve been a continued disinterest in bad news, and an uptick in requests to turn off the news as soon as Trump pops up on the screen. Its a group that was previously demanding I put various Trump events on the TV. Now they’re scowling at the guy, ignoring the fearful murder news, and asking I put on the game when the subject of Trump pops up.
I think that speach, and the convention may (may! its been 3 days) have been a bad mistake. They went whole hog on fear mongering at just the moment the group they’re trying to court began to get straight exhausted with that story-line.
Moore’s no svengali, but he’s close enough to the Rust Belt that he knows how appealing Trump’s message can be when the alternative is More of the Same. There are grains of salt, but he’s more on the right path than the WaPo editorial page.
This longish article from George Lakoff from UC Berkeley also ends with some good recommendations at the end that Hilary should be paying attention to (but hasn’t been) .
“I believe marriage is between a man and a woman. I am not in favor of gay marriage.”
Gotta thank you for these highlights of the thread - very interesting to read some stuff “from the ground”, so to speak. Quality reporting, kinda getting that zeitgeist-reading vibe of Thompson!
Yeah bartending is always a good profession for keeping your ear to the ground. And purely by chance I happen to be in a great place for it this go round. Suburban/rural Long Island (where I’m at), and anywhere in Jersey that isn’t Newark have apparently been the places with the highest and most consistent support for Trump, and the places most stocked with his typical voters. And have been since before he announced his candidacy. If you ever wondered who all those people calling for Trump to run over the past decade were, and where the fuck they could possibly be. Well your answer is that Long Island and Jersey are the fucking worse.
Weird thing is that while local and house elections in these areas can often times be reliable GOP slots. Overall the area and the state is pretty decidedly for the DNC, and these places fucking love Hillary. So while there are more Trumpists here (supposedly, like I said mostly people who do not vote) than anywhere else they’re still handily out numbered by the same people who put Hillary in the Senate.
