Democratic (Party) Direction

i don’t speak Spanish but i can’t imagine doing genre neutre in french

i do hear people say latinx aloud in, say, undocumented spaces--it seems like it's primarily a chicano-style deliberately political identity

my 2 rules for avoiding unnecessary stress:
- let people call themselves what they want to
- don't give ppl a hard time when they say things in good faith

― k3vin k., Monday, July 2, 2018 6:28 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm. latinx annoyed me for a while especially since it seemed like it was mostly used by gringos but whatever. if i use any variation of the term when self-describing i tend to use "latino", sometimes i use "hispanic," both are kind of lousy

I just say "mi gente."

i'm totally down with getting away from gendered pronouns but man it's hard when you're talking about a language in which literally every noun has a gender, from book to table to moon to awkwardness. i realize those things don't self-identify so it's fine but still, it feels so much more uphill in romance languages

― illegal economic migration (Tracer Hand), Monday, July 2, 2018 7:46 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yea. there is also a conflation of gender as concept in language/grammar and gender as a social phenomenon dictating roles/norms that is sloppy imo. that a chair in spanish "la silla" is "gendered feminine" has fuck all to do with gender and people

It's even odder when you use the third person plural to avoid gender entirely, which to English ears sounds even more plural ("ellos")

actually, even that pronoun is gendered (ellos, ellas).

the french word for "dick" is feminine, which i've always thought was kind of cute

(well ONE of the french words for dick, i should say)

I'm glad to see that so many democrats are finally waking up to the idea of "playing dirty." Hopefully the next steps are (1) to realize that you have to actually hold power to wield it in a "dirty" way, and (2) Republicans don't go around openly saying that they are playing dirty. If you really want to play dirty you pretend you are playing clean.

dunno what any of that means tbh

Can we get back on topic here folks

Maybe this thread needs Fred back

i didn't mean to distract so badly (but i never want to say "latinks" and now i know i neednt).

"playing dirty" is great so long as it isn't the new code word for the same old failing "say bad things about Trump" strategy but rather being unafraid to embrace popular leftist policies

like it's one thing to "play dirty" by posting twice as many anti-Trump stories on Twitter, it's another to actually go for Medicare For All or a minimum wage.

I say "LaTEEN-ecks" and I am a gringo btw. As I understand it, "Hispanic" is out of favor because it prioritizes the Spanish colonizer part of the identity, and people of the Spanish-speaking Americas want & deserve an identity that doesn't depend on that. So Latino got to be the default except yeah, patriarchal, and "Latin@" is okay in print I guess but not really speech-able? If any actual Latinx ppl want to roll their eyes @ me that's okay sure.

why doesn't "latin_" equally emphasize the colonizer?

I mean less specific I guess, but it's still european-oriented

brb gonna listne to Cardi B + Balvin's "I Like It"

I'll call people whatever they want to be called, what do I care.

I will also call people whatever they want, but has "Latinx" become mainstreamed among Latinx people? Is that what most want to be called?

Again, in Miami, where I speak Spanish 60 percent of the time, I've never heard it, but I don't care if we're (or my group) is an outlier. I'll call you whatever you want so long as you don't call me Al.

The Latin American countries from which Latinos descend
Latino (/læˈtiːnoʊ, lə-/)[1] is a term often used in the United States to refer to people with cultural ties to Latin America, in contrast to Hispanic which is a demonym that includes Spaniards and other speakers of the Spanish language.[2][3][4][5]

"Latino" as a category used in the United States may be understood as a shorthand for the Spanish word latinoamericano (Latin American in English) or the Portuguese phrase latino americano, thus excluding speakers of Spanish or Portuguese from Europe.[6] Both Hispanic and Latino are generally used to denote people living in the United States,[7][8] so much so that "Outside the United States, we don't speak of Latinos; we speak of Mexicans, Colombians, Peruvians, and so forth."[9][10] In Latin America, the term latino is not a common endonym and its usage in Spanish as a demonym is restricted to the Latin American-descended population of the United States.

I've never come across it in conversation in my daily life in my heavily Spanish-speaking community, but what do I know maybe it's cuz I'm mostly talking to either little kids or parents

xp

fwiw this excellent book that I just read goes into this a little bit (granted its from a cultural/artist perspective) about how artists in America who were descended from immigrants from Mexico, Colombia, etc. wanted their own term that reflected their status, apart from being "Mexican" or "American". Latino encompassed the range of possibilities, from people whose families had lived in America for generations to recent immigrants from other various Latin American countries. Makes sense to me.

and when the Mission Cultural Center was founded there was tension between those who wanted to emphasize European stuff (ie from Spain/Portugal) vs. those who wanted to focus on Latin American-rooted stuff. Which was a local backdrop for the Hispanic vs. Latino designation noted above.

And here's an interesting Code Switch podcast ep about how "Latino" got on the US census as a category.
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2017/08/03/541142339/heres-why-the-census-started-counting-latinos-and-how-that-could-change-in-2020

I figure the percentage of ppl who know about/care about/prefer Latinx is probably about the same as that of ppl who care about not mis-gendering others or not making statements that assume an "either/or" gender binary--like people who refer to "both genders" instead of "all genders." Which on the whole probably isn't a lot of people. I'm still gonna do it tho because I think we're generally in transition to a less gender-burdened way of being human and I want to keep moving that forward.

yeah that last point is right on

are we human
or are we gender

like it's one thing to "play dirty" by posting twice as many anti-Trump stories on Twitter, it's another to actually go for Medicare For All or a minimum wage.

― Hazy Maze Cave (Adam Bruneau)

my opinion is the exact opposite. as long as we have this hyper-polarized political climate, meaningful policy change is nearly impossible. what i don't want to see is a repeat of the aca in which the whole thing was sabotaged from the get-go by republicans, who then said it was because it was a bad idea in the first place. too many leftists, i think, buy into this narrative, have the idea that it didn't work because it wasn't _radical_ enough, and minimize the role years of consistent republican opposition played in its failures. my legislative priorities for the democrats when they get in power are to reform our failed institutions so that they can function effectively again. that does, of course, include healthcare, as it has for decades, but it also includes a lot of other things now.

i'm gender wayang

"latinx" strikes me as a formulation well-suited to internet discourse, in that it's a lot easier to type than it is to say. a lot of the proposed gender-neutral pronouns were the same way - i remember in the '90s bdsm scene "hir" was popular.

'xir' possibly the winner there - but these are all well-meaning fumblings towards a better world

I love that the native americans and other indigenous people of different countries had 5 genders.

I would like for there to be universal healthcare in the US. Those that don't want their healthcare to be involved with the government can be all means pay for private insurance. You would think that with more competition and fewer "sick" people weighing down insurance companies, private healthcare would become better/less costly. But we know the healthcare companies still gotta hit their quarterly projections.

a private option would be perfectly fine

Yeah, I kind of think you would need it to make it more palatable to those that are anti-government. But yikes, that health insurance isn't transportable is one of the stupidest things ever.

latinx0r obv

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/07/04/teacher-candidates-democrats-midterms-664358

unfair advantage for teachers and bartenders running for office: they are already accustomed to spending 14 hour days on their feet while talking to people the entire time

Also

UPDATED w/ latest results: so far in '18, female candidates are overperforming by an average of 12.2% in Dem primaries vs. 4.8% in GOP primaries (graphic credit: @CookPolitical intern Jacob Link). pic.twitter.com/Iqjc8kP0Gt

— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) July 3, 2018

Schumer had a town-hall-by-phone the other day and was read the riot act

that Nation article (complete w/ cardboard cutout) was extremely funny imho

my opinion is the exact opposite. as long as we have this hyper-polarized political climate, meaningful policy change is nearly impossible. what i don't want to see is a repeat of the aca in which the whole thing was sabotaged from the get-go by republicans, who then said it was because it was a bad idea in the first place. too many leftists, i think, buy into this narrative, have the idea that it didn't work because it wasn't _radical_ enough, and minimize the role years of consistent republican opposition played in its failures. my legislative priorities for the democrats when they get in power are to reform our failed institutions so that they can function effectively again. that does, of course, include healthcare, as it has for decades, but it also includes a lot of other things now.

― Arch Bacon (rushomancy), Wednesday, 4 July 2018 12:10 (yesterday) Permalink

On your first statement, you're just wrong. Polarization only prevents meaningful policy change when you're deadlocked. Right now politics is extremely polarized and Republicans are achieving "meaningful policy change" at an alarming rate. They achieve change through power, not through compromise.

As for Obamacare, my thoughts on it are complicated but I think it's a bit of a strawman that the left criticism is that it wasn't "radical" enough. Maybe not bold or comprehensive enough to garner widespread enthusiasm, or too wonky and byzantine to do so.

I'm fully aware of how Republicans were able to hobble Obamacare and diminish its success, but their ability to do that was partly a function of its design -- too many moving parts that had to work in tandem. I still think it was an impressive feat of policy, perhaps almost too clever for its own good. And there are some aspects of it that are just hands down improvements, like the end of preexisting condition denials. Had the entire thing passed with a public option, I think it might have even functioned as a trojan horse that could have gotten us one step closer to some kind of universal healthcare program. Obviously rising premium costs and high deductibles would be less of an issue if many states hadn't deliberately refused free medicaid expansion money just to fuck with Obama.

I hope one day it will be remembered like one of those clunky and inelegant failed flying machines that preceded the Wright Bros more intuitive design.

They achieve change through power, not through compromise.

otmfm. they understand their power and use it fearlessly and ruthlessly, without hesitation. moreover, they have no scruples about stomping on and blotting out every carefully considered and scrupulously measured action Obama took, as he hoped to achieve the sort of consensus that usually is produced by compromise. except the republicans did not compromise with him and their only consensus was to repeal his policies.

I read something vaguely relevant to all of this *gestures at whole thread* recently but I think it was in the New Yorker and so it would be extremely obvious of me to link it here probably

The thing that still really supports rushomancys point is that the GOP failed to repeal Obamacare.

Certainly one of the smarter things about Obamacare is the recognition that once you give people a benefit it's hard to take it away. But the republican strategy against Obamacare is multi-pronged. They are not only trying to repeal it but also trying to weaken it to the point of collapse, which they may still achieve. Plan costs have become untenable for many, deductibles are too high, etc. If not for the preexisting condition aspect I think you'd have seen it repealed already but there are enough people saying "if it wasn't for this I couldn't get healthcare at all" that it's hard to repeal directly.

Rush's point is correct that this is partly by design on the part of Republicans -- they want to make it untenable. But the complexity and wonkishness of Obamacare is precisely what renders it so vulnerable to GOP attack.

which they may still achieve

Largely unnoticed in the massive tax-cut bill that was passed under reconciliation and therefore only required 51 votes in the Senate, was a repeal of the tax penalties for not having medical insurance, which was a critical component of the ACA. Unless this is reinstated, or else a new mechanism is passed for funding the subsidies and bringing people into the system, the ACA will collapse.

It will be interesting to see how well the USA medical system withstands the collapse of the ACA and how much chaos this will cause.