dlaw: watch me

Whites now account for 49.6% of births in the United States:

Such a turn has been long expected, but no one was certain when the moment would arrive — signaling a milestone for a nation whose government was founded by white Europeans and has wrestled mightily with issues of race, from the days of slavery, through a civil war, bitter civil rights battles and, most recently, highly charged debates over efforts to restrict immigration.

If that’s what you want to call it. 

The article goes on to highlight the gap between whites and people of color in regards to the level of education attained, largely to make the point that the fastest growing portion of the population also has been unable to receive the best education available. They don’t come out and say why—I mean, come on, it’s the New York Times.

Would a change in the demographics of America alter the dispersion of power within the country though? Does having more people of color present within a country mean that more political power, more economic power, more cultural capital will also be in the hands of people of color? 

I am wary to make such a claim.  The population of people of color in this nation has been rising steadily for centuries, our presence has been increasing yet economic and political power hasn’t quite been extended to us. Granted, the population of white people was also rising at a similar rate for much of the nation’s history.

But I think such an entrenched power structure—one where whites have a 400 year head start—will take more than babies of multiple hues to dismantle 

is an article written by Matthew Rosenberg explaining that 2012 has seen an increase of “green on blue” attacks, or Afghan army members attacking members of the US army.

You should read the article.  It’s well-written (by that I mean, hey, nice prose), but it doesn’t really answer much—at all. The article simply states a fact—US army members are being attacked more frequently by Afghan army personnel—but when get to the end of the article you arrive at a one paragraph explanation of motives saying essentially “hey, those haven’t been released yet.”

The detainee has since presumably been asked those questions. But in a reflection of the official reticence to discuss green-on-blue attacks, his answers remain shrouded in secrecy. It is not even clear whose custody he is in.

The detainee in question is the third member of the Afghan army to partake in the March 1st attack. The fact no one even knows whose custody he’s in should sound alarms to anyone reading this piece.

There is something about these attacks the public is not supposed to know which is an indication that these attacks can probably be explained by something more than, “they just went crazy” or “the Taliban got to them.”

The Elusive Big Idea: 

If our ideas seem smaller nowadays, it’s not because we are dumber than our forebears but because we just don’t care as much about ideas as they did. In effect, we are living in an increasingly post-idea world — a world in which big, thought-provoking ideas that can’t instantly be monetized are of so little intrinsic value that fewer people are generating them and fewer outlets are disseminating them, the Internet notwithstanding. Bold ideas are almost passé.

It is no secret, especially here in America, that we live in a post-Enlightenment age in which rationality, science, evidence, logical argument and debate have lost the battle in many sectors, and perhaps even in society generally, to superstition, faith, opinion and orthodoxy. While we continue to make giant technological advances, we may be the first generation to have turned back the epochal clock — to have gone backward intellectually from advanced modes of thinking into old modes of belief. But post-Enlightenment and post-idea, while related, are not exactly the same.

(Source: The New York Times)