The Spanky Group.
 

Interesting that it's industrialization that gets the ethnics going.

I wouldn't say that Indonesia is industrialized, and I was under the impression that there wasn't much of a middle class in those three areas.

That's not a new development, is it?

I brought them up, and my point was that when a central government is weak, it's more likely to lose control over outlying areas. Macao and Hong Kong were largely uninhabited when Portugal and England took them over.

One of my college roommates wrote his thesis on Tibet. Chinese power in Tibet was not seriously challenged, but it wasn't so comprehensive, if that makes any sense. No one was about to throw them out, but they were an occupying force.

That's what Jose Padilla was saying not long ago.

You can't just move in a middle class. You need to plant the right seeds, and water them carefully, but not too much.

I think what you're saying is tautological. Take Yugoslavia. If it had stayed intact, you could say Yugoslav nationalism prevailed. Instead, you can say that Croatian nationalism prevailed, etc.

I think you're saying that national boundaries often follow ethnic lines. There is some truth to this (e.g., Yugoslavia), but arguably it is a modern phenomena. In Yugoslavia and (e.g.) Rwanda, ethnic groups that had co-existed for years started slaughtering each other. Maybe it wasn't inevitable so much as the result of a constellation of things (e.g., modern media).

OK. But they might not agree in Hawai'i.

I've heard these things, but India still seems to work fairly well.

We seem to differ about the degree to which things are predetermined.

Didn't the division in Europe along ethnic lines often come before industrialization?

And how was WWI caused by nationalism? Or WWII, for that matter? The assassination of Franz Ferdinand was the spark, but the fuel was a lot more stuff. Hitler's rise and Germany's aggression can't simply be attributed to nationalism. Austria (e.g.) had been a separate nation for a long time. No one thought Czechoslovakia was part of Germany, nor Poland.

Western Europe, maybe, but Central and Eastern Europe are a mess that way.

I would make a bet on this one if I thought it were practical. Pakistan doesn't seem to me to cohere, and India does.

The Spanky Group: - irridentism it is the wave of the future
 

You were the one focused on industrialization. I just think economic growth and prosperity leads to ethnic awareness and desire for independence. Indonesia was one of the Asian tigers, and as it got more prosperous the cries for independence grew.


The strong push and the violence are. There have always been irridentism tendencies but now it is full blown and out in the open. Thailand being one of the Asian tigers caused that.

OK but according to my sister the entire middle and upper class in Tibet is Han Chinese.


No it is not tautological. I don't believe there is any such thing as Yugoslavian nationalism or soviet nationalism (at least the way I am defining it). When I refer to nationalism I am talking about pride and identification with your ethnic group. Those countries were always doomed because eventually ethnic nationalism (or irridentism) would tear them apart.

When I am referring to nationalism I am talking about ethnicism or irridentism. And as I have been saying all along, the more developed an area gets the more it conforms to ethnic boundaries. Europe, the most developed continent on the planet, at least in the "old world", is the most clearly defined ethnically -meaning the national boundaries comply very closely to ethnic boundaries. The more the rest of the world becomes developed (and more democratic) the more it will become like Europe.


In underdeveloped countries you often have one ethnic group ruling over another. As the country develops the oppressed ethnic groups gain more power and fight against the oppressive system. What happened in Rwanda was years of oppression boiling over. The Tutsis had always ruled that part of Africa and a perfect storm allowed the Hutus to act on their hatred.


Maybe the native Hawaiians see the US as an empire, but the Howlis, who form the overwhelming majority, probably don't see it that way.


Worked fairly well? Have you ever been to India?

You were the one who brought up industrialization. My thesis is that prosperity and democracy help bring out ethnic nationalistic desires: pre-industrialization or post industrialization. When a country is industrializing it is becoming more prosperous and so it tends to split up along ethnic lines.

The Duke was shot by a Serbian nationalist. It was nationalist aspirations and movements that were causing trouble in the Balkans, and it was that Balkan trouble that led to the war (the invasion of Serbia). Yes the interlocking alliances turned it into one hell of war, but it all started because of ethnic national aspirations in the Balkans.


Hitler’s entire political movement was based on German ethnic nationalism and irridentism. Have you read Mein Kampf? Hitler's main mantra was the unification of the German people. He was from Austria and had always dreamed of uniting Austria with Germany. From day one he wanted to unite all the German people. His first few steps in foreign policy were about irridentism and uniting all ethnic Germans in one country. He grabbed Austria to unite the German people. His next step, the issue of the Czechoslovakia was all about the Germans in the Sudetenland. He wanted to unite them with the German nation. Chamberlain gave Hitler the Sudetenland, mainly because the Sudetenland was like 96% German. His next step, the invasion of Poland was all about uniting the Germans in the Polish corridor (which was mostly German), in Danzig (95% German), and in East Prussia (already part of the German nation but separated from Germany by the corridor) with Germany. The conquering of the rest of Eastern Europe was to get "breathing room" for the ethnic Germans. He wanted to invade Slavic countries and occupy them so he could exterminate the Slavic natives to make room for more ethnic Germans (who he was encouraging to breed). The plan was to make the lands from Germany to the Urals all German with German ethnics occupying the land. He was going to exterminate all the Slavs and replace them with Germans to create one huge Germania. The Hungarians, Romanians, and Finns were not lined up to be exterminated because they were not Slavs. Hence they all became allies. Hitler only invaded the west because the west declared war on him. He only invaded them to secure is flank so he could invade the east and create his "breathing room". Hitler did not think the west was going to declare war after he invaded Poland. If they hadn't he would have moved on to Russia. But since they did he had to deal with them.

His goal was always two fold.

1) Unite the German peoples in Germany, Austria, the Sudetenland, and the polish corridor

2) Invade the rest of the Slavic countries, exterminate (or enslave and work to death) the entire native populations and replace them with Germans.

The whole point of the war was German ethnic nationalism and irridentism.


I think you missed the point. I think India is even more cleanly ethnically divided than even Western Europe. Eastern Europe is the messiest, then Western Europe is more cleanly divided, and then India is the most cleanly divided ethnically of all.

There's something going on in Iran
 

There have been several stories of late that suggest to me that Ahmadinejad is losing control of the country. The first was that the parliment voted or was planning to vote to move up elections for the presidency. The second, is this story today, where the hardliners are pissed because he watched some song and dance show: http://www.guardian.co.uk/iran/story...c=rss&feed=12.

We'll see where this goes.

Ho ho ho.
 

Bravo. I don't want government employees proseltyzing, but I also don't want them to waste their time worry/arguing about this. Good for the governor.

It's time to end the Christmas wars -- give me the Lemon Test, and I'll give you "Merry Christmas!" by the clerk at the auto tag office.

Reason no. 85,426 Demcrats should never be put in charge of anything...
 

Clueless In Seattle

SEATTLE — This city's school district decided in 2000 that because the son of Jill Kurfirst and the daughter of Winnie Bachwitz are white, they should be assigned to an inferior and distant high school. If they had not left the Seattle school system, this would have required them to rise at 5 a.m. in order to leave home by 5:30 a.m., alone and in the dark, to take the first of three buses, returning home between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m., with almost no time left for homework, family activities and adequate sleep.


The parents argue that the racial school assignments — actually, assignments by pigmentation — that so injured their children violate the Constitution's guarantee of equal protection of the laws. The reliably unreliable U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit — often reversed but never in doubt — predictably ruled, with interesting indifference to pertinent Supreme Court precedents, against the parents. Soon — oral arguments are tomorrow — the Supreme Court can remind the 9th Circuit of the Constitution's limits on what schools can do in the name of "diversity."


Students can seek admission to any of Seattle's high schools. But the Seattle School District decided to engineer a precise racial balance in its most popular — because much better — high schools, which are chosen by more students than they can accommodate. The district wanted each oversubscribed school to reflect the entire system's ratio of 40 percent whites and 60 percent nonwhites. So it adopted a race-based admission plan to shape the schools' "diversity."


The district gave preference to certain applicants, using considerations it called "tiebreakers." One, which benefited about 10 percent of applicants, was whether the student had a sibling at the desired school. Another was whether the student's race would produce or maintain a 40-60 balance.


When registering children for high school, parents were asked to specify each child's race. If parents did not specify, the district did so based on visual inspection of the parents' or child's pigmentation. The school board president has said that "skin tone matters."

The two children wanted to attend Ballard High School because of its biotech academy. In the 2000-01 school year, when 82 percent of the city's students sought admission to the five best schools, the children were among the 300 students denied admission to the school of their choice because their race interfered with racial balancing.


Although Seattle never had segregated schools, the district discusses its racial preferences with reference to "segregation" and "integration." But a statement by the district reveals that racial preferences are supposed to serve social engineering: "Diversity in the classroom increases the likelihood that children will discuss racial or ethnic issues and be more likely to socialize with people of different races." Or different skin tones.


Is that a "compelling government interest," sufficient to justify race-based school assignments? The 9th Circuit, siding with the district, argued two propositions, both of which conflict with Supreme Court precedents.


One was that racial preferences are benign if they do not " unduly harm any students" or " uniformly benefit any race or group of individuals to the detriment of another" (emphases added). But the Supreme Court has rejected this idea that the equal protection clause protects group rights rather than individual rights.


Second, the 9th Circuit said broad deference is owed to the judgments of local school districts. But no line of cases has established that high schools enjoy even the limited latitude that universities have in treating race as a factor when deciding who may be admitted. Rather, the Supreme Court has held that public secondary education "must be available to all on equal terms." And here are samples of the Seattle district's judgments which the 9th Circuit thinks deserve deference:


Until June, the school district's Web site declared that "cultural racism" includes "emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology," "having a future time orientation" (planning ahead) and "defining one form of English as standard." The site also asserted that only whites can be racists, and disparaged assimilation as the "giving up" of one's culture. After this propaganda provoked outrage, the district, saying it needed to "provide more context to readers" about "institutional racism," put up a page saying that the district's intention is to avoid "unsuccessful concepts such as a melting pot or colorblind mentality."


The Supreme Court has said that all racial classifications by government are "presumptively invalid" unless narrowly tailored to serve a compelling government interest. The district's repellent Web site revealed the interest that the district considers so compelling that it justifies racial preferences. Supreme Court deference to such race-mongering would make a mockery of the equal protection guarantee

Reason no. 85,426 Never to Listen to Spanky and the Republics
 

NPR has put the arguments in both the Louisville and Seattle cases on their web site - the selections played on the radio were fascinating, full of difficult line-drawings and light shades of gray, and with the Justices sounding more like advocates of their positions than the attorneys for either the Justice Department or the Cities.

But to look at the question differently: assuming you are not going to admit based on scholastic qualification (because each district involved was not dealing with magnet schools but instead with schools intended to serve the general population), and you are going to have a school choice system within a school district, what are good criteria for student assignment? Do any of those criteria have a secondary impact on race (e.g., if you use location, there is a clear secondary impact if your housing is segregate; if you prioritize keeping families together, there is only a secondary impact if one race or ethnic group has larger families)?

Reason no. 85,426 Demcrats should never be put in charge of anything...
 

Last I checked, Brown was an unanimous decision. Sure, the entire Court was nominated by Democrats, but damnit, Roosevelt had 20 years of nominations. 6 out of the nine were his. And Burton was a Republican, despite the fact that Truman nominated him.

Reason no. 85,426 Never to Listen to Spanky and the Republics
 

You take race out completely. Desegregating schools was obviously the correct call. But trying to fight desegreation caused not by laws, but because of segregated cities, by busing kids far form their homes was a bad call. I think busing sent race relations back twenty years.

Why not just take race out of the equation completely? The schools are there to educated children. Full Stop. They are not there to be used as tools of social enginreering or there to provide compensation for some past wrong. Instead of trying to make sure our schools are diversified, we should be trying to make sure they educate the children.

Racial quotas and preferences are always a bad idea.

Reason no. 85,426 Never to Listen to Spanky and the Republics
 

Nice speech, but it ignores my question. Care to try again and identify the criteria you would use in selection?

I'm very much in favor of removing race as a criteria affecting the public education available to children, but I think that is a very tall order and something Louisville, in particular, seems to be struggling with in good faith and in a very productive way.

The Spanky Group: - irridentism it is the wave of the future
 

Since Indonesia is not industrialized, the separatist models there fit what I was talking about.

I don't get why economic growth and prosperity lead to ethnic awareness. Can you explain this? Also, since most places are usually experiencing economic growth over time, it seems like you could explain separatism anywhere as a function of economic growth.

I've heard that too, but that doesn't mean that it's growing significantly.

It's easy to say that after the fact. If Yugoslavia had stayed together, you could attribute it to Yugoslav nationalism. It didn't, so that sounds nuts now. What you're saying sounds like, it was inevitable that things would turn out the way they are.

Nationality and ethnicity are two different things. Referring to nationalism when you have ethnicity in mind is just confusing.

There are plenty of places in the world where national boundaries do not follow ethnic "boundaries." For example, Quebec is still a part of Canada. Northern Ireland is not part of Ireland. Etc. Los Angeles is still part of the United States.

What are you looking at to determine that Europe's national boundaries conform more closely to the distribution of ethnic groups than, say, Asia's? It strikes me as such a broad proposition as not to be useful.

If this is an argument, what is it based on, and how can one test it? It seems like you can explain away as counter-evidence by saying that things will change in the future.

The phenomenom of ethnic groups being under- or over-represented is hardly unique to underdeveloped countries. In the United States, both Mormons and Jews (the former not an ethnic group, I concede) are over-represented (proportionately to their share of the population) in the Senate, and blacks and Hispanics are under-represented.

Why do oppressed ethnic groups gain more power with development? Maybe they just get more oppressed, no?

You're echoing my point about Rwanda, which was that the "perfect storm" was not inevitable, but rather the result of a constellation of factors.

So ethnicity only matters when people think it matters? That's not much of a test.

Anyhoo, you're wrong about the demographics of Hawaii, if you by "haole" you mean "white." Whites are about 40% of the population. Asians are about 60%, of which 25% are native Hawaiian.

Compared to what, I guess is the question.

When is a country not become more prosperous?

If the war had been confined to the Balkans, then I would agree, but the fighting on the Western Front (e.g.) didn't have much to do with Balkan nationalism.

I am familiar with all of the facts you mention here, and think the problem is that you are using nationalism and ethnicity synonymously. I agree that Hitler's views and actions were strongly informed by his racial views, and that he saw Germany through an ethnic lens. I don't think it adds much analytically to call that "nationalism." And certainly one can debate whether Hitler was able to do what he did because Germans supported those particular views. Which is to say, the argument you're making about causation seems strained to me.

India has an incredible array of ethnic groups. I'm not sure how you can say they are cleanly divided.

Reason no. 85,426 Never to Listen to Spanky and the Republics
 

I don't understand what they accomplishing with this school choice. People should be sent to the school nearest to them. If they are setting up special schools (science school, art shool etc) then the entrance should be on merit. If it is just to give people a choice of schools, the kids that live nearest should get in, and then if there is room, and too many applications for those spots, then do it by lottery or merit.

However, my question did answer yours, because the answer is whatever they do, no matter how they handle it, race or skin color should never enter into the equation. Never.

caption, please
 

Reason no. 85,426 Never to Listen to Spanky and the Republics
 

Suppose you learned that it was clear that the framers of the Thirteen, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments disagreed with you on this, and thought that race should sometimes enter into the equation. Would you change your views?

The Spanky Group: - irridentism it is the wave of the future
 

I have been confused by this in this discussion. In my understanding of nationalism, people start thinking of themselves less in terms of ethnicity or tribe and more in terms of the political and geographic entity to which they belong, such as the situation in France (okay, maybe the situation in France 50 or more years ago). I tend to think that when nations break up along ethnic lines, something is happening other than nationalism. Tribalism?

caption, please
 

And you thought "My Pet Goat" was a piece of shit....