Slashdot Mirror

When you move to another country, they aren't required to adapt to you at all, but if you want to have *ANY* hope of fitting in & making a life for yourself, you *MUST* learn at least their language & a lot of their customs (as long as said customs don't compromise your values).

There's no need to generalize your experience to the rest of the world. There are plenty of people who live in Belgium or any number of European and other nations who don't have a shared language. And guess what, this hasn't caused a complete breakdown in society!

You musn't have been to any major city in California (where whites are now officially a minority) recently. Large numbers of people live their lives quite adequately without speaking English. Some of these people are even US Citizens. Goddammit - what happened to Mom and Apple Pie, eh? Better make sure we shut down bilingual education in those schools. Otherwise next thing there'll be ballot papers in Espanol as well!

It's always amazing to me that "Americans" so happy to promulgate diversity in the OSS realm can sprout such unquestioned nationalism in cultural matters. Why are you so emphatic about others needing to learn English? Does it really frighten you that much that others speak in a language you don't understand and can't be bothered learning?

It's all very well to be principled, but the reality is that Spanish is the second language in the US. If you're smart, you'll expand your ability to communicate with people by learning it and opening up some new horizons for yourself. You might even find it useful in daily conversation.

FWIW, I don't support Betanzos' comments, but I think it's important to take his comments as an opinion from a particular place in the academy, and not of Spanish-speaking individuals as a whole.

Danny

An article that talks a little more about this is http://www.intel lec tualcapital.com/issues/issue320/item7250.asp

I don't know about you, but I usually pick up one or two newspapers in the morning so that I can figure out what I want to look in to later in the day. Paper serves the point of letting me browse through the news without having to stare at the damn monitor. In this case a link might help, but it is not highly likely that it would help me as I usually don't visit the site of whatever newspaper I have been reading. I usually visit more specialized news / discussion sites, like IntellectualCapital.com.

Then again, being a Political Science / Economics major gives me a lot more reason to be doing this then the average Joe.

The point of a parody is that it resembles its target in some key fashion. There was nothing parodic in your summary of my position -- it was a heavy-handed lie. Learn the difference between parody and mere sarcasm, and do it quickly.

If you want to posit a systematic conspiracy against women everywhere but in our schools, that's your privilege. It is up to the intelligent reader to decide which environment is likelier to be bias-prone -- the world of the standardized test, the great wide world of events, or the cloistered, female-dominated world of school. While you're at it, you can hypothesize about black helicopters and New World Orders. Thinking adults are unlikely to join you in your fantasies.

I find it amusing that you seek to compare the status of blacks with the status of women. As Warren Farrell points out in The Myth of Male Power, it is men who die early, get less education, and work in dangerous jobs, not women. If we are to make a racial analogy based on the facts, you are very likely to lose.

You claim that your workplace conspiracy against women is "amply documented", but tellingly you fail to include such documentation. Perhaps you hope to rely on popular misapprehensions -- what "everyone knows". I think you should make an effort to educate yourself about the myth of the glass ceiling, the myth of the wage gap, and other lies you've been told -- and been telling.

--

I always wondered how software companies hide their source. This picture really cleared it up for me. How software companies hide their source.