"*their, sorry about that."

Down with bilingual education!

@ Obi, I agree with your points about illegal immigration. It's not illegal to leave Mexico, and many of our collective ancestors were economic refugees from the Irish famines, Norway, etc. It's also very obvious that our immigration policies need updating, and so does the federal government's enforcement of those policies, which at this time is selective to the point of seeming capricious.

Umbrella, I lived in Tucson for over a year, and I saw less prejudice and more cooperation there than even here in California, at least between Hispanics and Anglos. The city council's summer uniform was not suits but rather the guayabera, or Mexican wedding shirt--those loose-fitting cotton button-up shirts with a decorated front--and the city was very proud of its Spanish and Mexican heritage, with Mexican culture and food everywhere. It's such a beautiful state as well, with everything from the stark deserts to mountains and Oak Creek Canyon, the red rock country, plateaus, the Grand Canyon, the Chiricahuas (spelling?), and so much more.

Tucson is the Austin of Arizona. Basing your views of Arizona on Tucson is like basing one's opinion of North Carolina on the fact that you lived in Asheville.

But good pandering. Nobody ever accused you of being bad at pandering.

Also, Mutejus, you forgot to mention that the 'trees are the right height'.

@Putin33 you're arguing from the very weak position of outsider against an insider. You can't tell a hispanic how very descriminated-against he is by giving him news articles telling him what his experience really was. Believe it or not, I hold the bizare view that he might know something about the conditions in which he lives.

Putin, He is a hispanic, living in the state in quesion, and yet you are going to call him a liar (implied at least)?

FWIW, Asheville is 4% of NC's population, Austin is 6% of Texas' population, and Tucson is 15% of Arizona's population.

He is constructed an impenetrable anecdotal shield from which to defend the state's racially tinged policies and hypocritical banning of Chicano studies. All you have to do is suddenly announce you're 'hispanic' and from Arizona and you can launch anecdotal missiles at anybody who questions you.

Anyway, I didn't call him a liar. I just said he didn't have the slightest clue about what was going on with the books, but simply took the School Board's point of view uncritically, and we're supposed to believe everything he says about Arizona.

Anyway, I hear Ahmed Chalabi knows everything about Iraq.

"you're arguing from the very weak position of outsider against an insider."

...Far be it for me to defend Putin...

But...

Insider= Subjective and perhaps biased,
Outsider= Objective and unbiased?

Outsider =/= Uninformed.

Outsiders can definitely be uninformed though, Obi, as I'm sure you'd agree, and probably more so than insiders as to daily life--as opposed to what outsiders learn from media sensation-seekers.

@Obiwan
I agree, but I would also say that an insider is more likely to be well-informed than an outsider, and an outsider most certainly does not have the automatic mral high ground so to speak.

Also an outsider is not necessarily biased.

Also, which way is an insider biased? If he's being oppressed, he may well be biased AGAINST, or at least, not be biased for. I think you'd find there were plenty of African Americans in the south in the Jim Crow era who would not have gone to bat defending how they were treated, in conversations with northerners.

This insider/outsider stuff is irrelevant. What matters is can you provide objectively verifiable data to back up your claim. Anecdotes by themselves are useless.

That's not really true, putin. I mean, the part about anecdotes being useless is. But not the first part. Not everything about life is tallied up in statistics yet. There are actually still things to be learned about life in Italy, for example, that can be learned by talking to an Italian but not by looking up statistics in published papers.

But it cannot be verified so it cannot be trusted as fact. Sorry, but taking somebody's word for it is not good enough.

And what do you think you're doing when you read something in a paper, pray tell?

And somebody expecting everybody to kneel down before you because you claim to be from Arizona is a cheap way to silence discussion.

"And what do you think you're doing when you read something in a paper, pray tell?"

Reading propaganda, usually.

@Putin
Not such a great approach you've got there... rejecting the practical reality of those undergoing the experience and relying only on what the (not always unpartisan) world of academia deems to be verified.

I wouldn't say it's that cheap, though. I mean, this is a long-term community. People telling wild inconsistencies about where they were from would probably be noticed, especially when the claim to a Hispanic from Arizona came in the context of p0wning a prominent member of the site.

After all, to tell someone that their experiences are all lies and that what they really *must* have experienced (as proven by journal articles from experts) is completely different, is to leave the path of logic.

There is a plethora of individuals undergoing experiences, yet experiencing wildly different things, or at least interpreting them in wildly different ways. So why should we accept this particular Arizonan's experiences uncritically, as if he speaks for them all?

Well, you did say something about Arizona being an apartheid state, where Chicano people were only good for cleaning toilets and picking tomatoes.

I would imagine most Hispanics in the state might be expected to notice such a thing.

"People telling wild inconsistencies about where they were from would probably be noticed, especially when the claim to a Hispanic from Arizona came in the context of p0wning a prominent member of the site."

On a controversial issue like banning books/ethnic studies? No, not really. As we've seen over the course of the past 4 years, people can live in ideological bubbles, thinking shit like Obama is a secret Muslim with a fake birth certificate. So it won't be surprising that people living in conservative Arizona la-la land would think that books were never confiscated or seized.

@Putin because to do so would be to call someone a liar to their face. The actual physical reality of someone's experience can not be altered.

So because they're right wing they must be insane, is that right?

"I would imagine most Hispanics in the state might be expected to notice such a thing."

You're putting words in my mouth by constructing a mish-mash of what I said, but that is your modus operandi. Completely dishonest.

I did say Arizona was an apartheid state, complete with a passbook system for Chicanos and others who look "Hispanophone".

The cleaning toilets/picking tomatoes comment was in reference to the school district's view of the proper place for Chicanos, where they don't learn about their heritage but instead learn about janitorial duties.