• 23 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: June 14th, 2023
  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldtoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•How come in American classrooms they make another language an elective. Why not teach our kids as many languages possible that way if we go somewhere we will kind of have uper hand?English
    4·
    12 hours ago

    Outside the cities, the rural areas can be real shit-holes.

    One of the more notable achievements of the last two decades of Chinese economic improvement has been the degree of urbanization, particularly in the western end of the country. This used to be a point of criticism among western economists (Chinese Ghost Cities being a popular meme during the '00s/'10s). Now we just don’t talk about Chengdu or Lhasa or Lanzhuo at all.

    It’s not the level of rank poverty you see in many developing countries, far from it, but it’s a lot worse than even the poorest parts of Appalachia in the US

    In my experience, having done a little traveling through Appalachia and the northern end of the Gulf Coast, urban migration has solved a lot of the back country issues by hollowing out the country’s interior. If we didn’t build a highway through a chunk of the state, people just stopped living there.

    Chinese rural communities have experienced a similar hollowing out, particularly in the 80s and 90s when the prosperity on the coasts fully eclipsed the poverty of the western interior. But because agricultural labor was seen as critical to social stability, the state simply refused to let people leave. The end result was an enormous black market population that became a nightmare to manage. And so the late Deng and Hu governments (and early Xi government - although by then much of the work was done) spent a significant amount of resources and labor back filling rural development. Hu, in particular, was a champion of the rural west thanks to his policy of low taxes and high investment.

    This didn’t eliminate the developmental black holes on the Chinese map. But the expansion westward was its own kind of economic revolution. One that culminated in a virtual elimination of the poverty the country had become known for during the Reagan Era.

    The difference in approach - demanding people move to the cities rather than demanding public spending move to the country - is a critical point of divergence between American Neoliberal and Chinese Socialist domestic policies.

  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldtoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•How come in American classrooms they make another language an elective. Why not teach our kids as many languages possible that way if we go somewhere we will kind of have uper hand?English
    4·
    12 hours ago

    I really am failing to make the connection between how learning a second language as an optional class leads to “freezing migrant families out of public sector jobs and services”.

    American public school kids don’t normally get access to electives until at 6th grade (sometimes not until 8th or 9th grade depending on the state and district). So “optional” in theory is a deliberate effort to delay bilingual learning in practice.

    Mono-lingual populations are more easily primed towards hostility against minority speakers. So your senior staff is biased towards English as a primary language when hiring the next generation of public workers. And these workers are increasingly both unable and unwilling to provide services in secondary languages. This creates a natural barrier for any minority speaker from even interacting with public bureaucracies.

    In my city, nearly all public services are available in English and Spanish at the minimum, and frequently Chinese, Vietnamese, and Russian as well.

    Bigger and more egalitarian cities, with large minority-language populations can staff their departments with fluent minority-language speakers. And under more liberal and egalitarian governments, they do. But as the population grows more reactionary, these kinds of skills get drummed out of the bureaucracy.

    This isn’t even a new problem in government.

    Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told 2,500 troops Tuesday about the foreign-language skills he championed as a congressman, an active-duty Army officer was complaining about the paucity of military personnel who can speak anything other than English.

    But it has become an increasingly domestic issue, as fascists take command of the bureaucratic core.

    On March 1, 2025, President Trump issued Executive Order 13166, which designated English as the United States’ official language. This Executive Order is no longer theoretically in effect, and existing federal civil rights laws and regulations require language access for individuals with limited English proficiency in programs and activities receiving federal financial assistance.

    Nonetheless, numerous federal entities are pursuing policies prioritizing English as the only language, effectively reducing or eliminating Spanish.

  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldtomemes@lemmy.world•that's weirdEnglish
    2·
    1 day ago

    We’re already seeing them pop up wherever real estate prices go vertical.

    But dense housing builders are constantly at war with suburban city planners. Getting permits is an increasingly Kafka-esque endeavor, unless you can buy yourself an exemption through municipal corruption.

  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldtomemes@lemmy.world•that's weirdEnglish
    1·
    2 days ago

    I think I would have felt resentful if I were forced into a particular living situation rather than being able to choose it.

    I mean, we’re all forced into a living situation that our budgets and our work-life demands. The illusion of choice is going to a real estate agent and seeing twenty different near-identical overpriced units, then making a dubiously informed decision that’ll lock you into 30 years of debt.

    I’d love to live in a crystal palace on a tropical island next to a rail station that’s thirty minutes east of midtown Manhattan and an hour west of the Vail chairlifts which runs me $99.50/mo for the note. No amount of resentfulness will give it to me.

  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldtomemes@lemmy.world•that's weirdEnglish
    14·
    2 days ago

    the -ism on display in the second photo is racism.

    You can definitely go into the deep history of Levittowns, Master Planned Country Club communities, and Red Lining in the big metro areas. But I think the advent of the modern suburb speaks more heavily to the mix of “Free Real Estate” and enormous state subsidies for rural development following the S&L crash of the 1980s.

    Like, there’s no reason these can’t be high rise condos with racist building managers, rather than cookie cutter ranch homes with racist HOAs. The suburb isn’t merely about racial segregation, it is about individualist alienation. Breaking up the extended family unit into the nuclear family cluster, subdividing the working class into thinner and thinner economic tranches, and fencing people into gilded cages complete with 30 year golden handcuff mortgage notes.

    You can debate over the exact degree to which civic planners intended to separate and capture individual specimens of human labor. Or how deliberately the 1950s architectural model of personalized kitchens, TVs, and car ports manufactured an increasingly pliable working class subject. But the subdivision doesn’t end at the color line. We are a fully balkanized society.