A couple quick thoughts on immigration, for no particular reason

On January 5, 2024 By Luther M. SilerIn Politics

I’ve only talked about immigration a few times here, but at least one of those times is the site’s biggest post ever, so I don’t know if that means it counts more? Maybe it does. One way or another, my opinion about immigration, nutshelled, has not changed: Let ’em in. I don’t care why they’re here, I don’t care why they want to be here, I don’t care if they’re in my community or my school because they already are, and I don’t care if it costs me personally some minuscule amount of tax money. Anybody who wants to come be an American should be able to come be an American. That might include some number of bad people. I don’t care; we have plenty of those already so a few more won’t matter. I trust any number of immigrants more than any similar number of Republicans anyway. Let’ em all in.

But that’s not the point of this post, which is really only a minor thing but it popped into my head the other day and I don’t have Twitter any longer so when something like this happens I have no real choice but to put it here: it is really easy to be incredibly disingenuous about immigration if that’s what you decide you want to do, and one specific way people are being disingenuous about immigration keeps getting stuck in my craw.

If we’re using “arrests at the border” as our metric for whether someone is doing a Good Job on immigration or not, the good guys automatically lose. And I’m deliberately phrasing that statement in a nonpartisan manner because it can go either way.

Arrests are up? We’re catching more criminals vs look how many more people are pouring over the border.

Arrests are down? They’re not bothering to enforce our laws vs people aren’t trying to come in illegally any longer because our laws work.

The actual numbers and the actual reality of the situation does not matter one bit when you’re using “arrests” as a metric because you can make any change in arrests good news for your side.

Let them in, house and educate them, let them have safe, legal jobs, and provide them with a path to citizenship. I don’t care if it costs me money. Put an aircraft carrier on eBay or some shit. Have a bake sale. I don’t give a fuck.

The end.

Progress, finally

On April 28, 2022 By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

I think that if you had asked me, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you that Fatima has been in my class since January. She has since been joined by two more Afghan students, one girl and one boy, and today, finally, we had a part-time interpreter in the room with us, and I have never been more excited to meet someone in my entire life as I was this poor guy. We did some quick diagnostics stuff (a lot easier to have the kids see what math they understand when you can explain to them what you want them to do) and then I just asked him to ask them to tell him about themselves.

Fatima likes grapes. Like, that doesn’t seem like much, but it’s communication. There’s still a few days of Ramadan left but I am absolutely bringing this kid some grapes sometime soon. Two of them are from Kunar province and the third is from Khost province, which means all three of them were right on the border with Pakistan. I asked the translator to reassure them that if they wanted to talk to each other during class, that was absolutely okay– the three of them are as quiet as mice pretty much all the time— and I actually heard the other girl (who needs a code name) laugh for the first time. It was great.

I think it is actually Thursday, which is good, because I’ve thought the week was nearly over all week, and that kept being wrong, and if it’s actually Thursday than that ought to make tomorrow Friday, the actual end of the week. Nineteen days of school left.

Speaking of the end of the week, Wednesday (I think) was my nephew’s first birthday, so we’re going to be out of town all weekend to go to his birthday party in the north Chicago suburbs, so if you follow the YouTube channel, updates are probably going to be light. I didn’t post any new videos today for the first time since I started the channel because yesterday was that busy, and I think my plan right now is to do one video a day for tomorrow, Saturday and Sunday, and then try and resume the normal schedule on Monday. We’ll see if I pull that off or not, but it’s the plan at the moment. At any rate, if I go radio silent over there, don’t panic. I haven’t quit anything, we’ve just hit a scheduling snag.

And now we’re getting somewhere

On January 19, 2022 By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching4 Comments

I am tired and annoyed for reasons that are not especially interesting, but today was a much better day at work than yesterday was, pretty much across the board. Fatima and I worked on numbers; she was already able to tell me one through about four or five, and so we worked on writing and identifying zero through nine, both as number symbols and the individual words. I have a similar process in mind tomorrow for letters, and I’ve bullied administration into letting a bunch of us out of a pre-scheduled meeting tomorrow morning so that we can all sit in my room and put our heads together to see what we can do. Apparently there are some funds available both through the program that brought her family into the country and through our own bilingual department, so we will see what we are able to get ahold of.

What we really need is to be able to secure the assistance of an interpreter. Even if it was only for an hour a day or something, some way these kids can actually talk to us would be tremendously helpful, and I’ve still had no luck in finding anything digital that can speak Pashto. We need a live person. I just don’t know yet how to find one. That’s the next big mission.

Oh, and I found something else out today that is gonna be super fun: I don’t know if this is official or not, but the word is there may be thirty more families landing in the district soon. Fatima has seven brothers and sisters, so if these thirty families are similar in size that’s quite a lot of new students to figure out. Speaking as an American, this is wonderful; speaking as someone who needs to teach these kids math, I’m shitting myself in terror.

(Mental note: try to figure out a way to ask her about her family. Brothers, sisters, that sort of thing. Second mental note: I know Islam really doesn’t like representational art; make sure asking her to draw her family or something doesn’t violate a cultural taboo. Third mental note: learn everything about everything.)

As if this year wasn’t challenging enough

On January 14, 2022January 16, 2022 By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching4 Comments

I discovered today that I have a new student coming into my class on Tuesday. And by “my class” I mean “third and fourth hour,” the class I have repeatedly begged that no further students be added to, the class that is both my biggest and my by an exceptional margin most poorly-behaved class.

The student is an Afghan refugee. I have no idea if she speaks any English; I sure as fuck don’t speak either Pashto or Dari. I have no idea what her educational background is. Hell, I have no idea what her personal background is; if she’s coming out of Afghanistan there’s almost certainly some fucking trauma in there somewhere. She has a brother, and her brother’s teacher told me today that he thinks that her father worked with the Americans in some capacity or another, which could mean fucking anything. It might mean she speaks some English, it might not. For all I know, he’s making assumptions– which, okay, as they go, that’s not a bad one, but it’s still an assumption. And if I hadn’t seen her name and started asking questions today this would have happened with no Goddamned warning of any kind at all.

To be absolutely clear: I’m glad she’s here, if that’s what her family wanted, and yes I’d be perfectly fucking happy to have an Afghan family move into the house next door and replace the family of the dude who took one look at my white skin and told me he was happy “the right kind of people” were moving into our house when we bought it. I’m glad she’s in my school. But this is not a regular fucking transfer student! I’m just as responsible for her education as every other kid in the room; I don’t get to just shove her in a corner and ignore her, and if it turns out that she’s a hijabi I’ve got to prepare the students for her to be there as well. Now, granted, one can probably assume that any Afghans looking to flee the country and enroll their kids in public school in bloody Indiana are probably on the less religiously conservative end of the scale, but even a simple head wrap combined with the language barrier is going to set her up for bullying if we aren’t careful, especially in the class they’ve got her in. If she’s wearing anything more conspicuous than that the kids are going to treat her like a Goddamned alien. Can we at least get a parent meeting before this kid comes into school? Shit, Google Translate isn’t even going to help, because you can’t type in Pashto on a Chromebook. I can get it to translate– probably poorly– from English to Pashto (not that I have any way to figure out if she speaks it, since fucked if I know the difference between it and Dari, or Arabic for that matter) but not the other way around. So if she’s got no English at all we’re limited to gestures and sign language.

It’s entirely possible that she’ll turn out to be Westernized enough already that none of this will be an issue; again, I know nothing about her. But if she isn’t?

Fuck.

1/16 EDIT: It has only just now occurred to me that even if this girl is literate in her home language, which is not guaranteed, her home language is not going to be written in Latin script, and therefore she may not even know the alphabet. And I’m supposed to teach her 8th grade math.

On Afghanistan

On August 15, 2021August 15, 2021 By Luther M. SilerIn Politics2 Comments

I don’t know a Goddamn thing about Afghanistan.

Well, okay, that’s not quite true. I probably know more about Afghanistan than most Americans. But that is a perilously low bar, and does not really imply anything worth bragging about, and if the bar is not compared to other Americans but is my knowledge of this country useful or sufficient, well … it ain’t, on either count.

I saw someone suggest on Twitter earlier today that the one thing we could have done to avoid what’s going on right now in Afghanistan would have been to elect Al Gore in 2000, and I have some sympathy for that argument. I saw another that suggested that Biden has simply decided to be the President who takes the hit for a result that was going to be inevitable whenever we decided to leave, and that the main thing the policies of the Presidents between him and Dubya have done has been kicking the can down the road so that the disaster after the withdrawal was someone else’s problem.

We have been in Afghanistan nearly half my life. The Taliban has simply … waited. They are more patient than us. They always have been. No matter which President chose to leave, the Taliban were still going to be there, waiting. And I don’t think that the regular Afghans were especially happy to have us there either. One way or another, they were still going to be there when we left.

I do, however, feel like it’s not unreasonable to suggest that maybe, just maybe, we should have done something more to help those who helped us. America should have been welcoming of Afghan refugees for decades, and we haven’t, and I have to believe that the number of people we’re looking to evacuate– I’m seeing the number 3500– is sorely insufficient. There are apparently just short of 100,000 Afghans in the United States right now. I feel like after 20 years of occupying their country that seems like a very small number.

We spent two trillion dollars and lost over six thousand soldiers there in twenty years, and in the end it was for nothing. We probably shouldn’t have been there in the first place, or maybe we should have just kept paying attention after we got there— Afghanistan has always been our forgotten war even just after it started, when our attention immediately turned to Iraq. I don’t know. I don’t know how things could have gone better. I’m not sure how they could have gone much worse, either.

I suppose we’re about to find out what the results of 20 years of shitty policy looks like one way or another.

Syria and the limits of my knowledge

On April 8, 2017 By Luther M. SilerIn Politics2 Comments

I’ve kinda had my head in the ground for the last couple of days; I’m sort of still there, as it’s taken me a good five or six minutes just to write this sentence. It’s been a shitty few days to be an American, or at least to be a sane one.

(It’s been a worse few days to be a Syrian; I hope that I didn’t need to clarify that, but I’m going to anyway.)

I’ve been very clear here on multiple occasions about how I feel about how this country should treat Syrian refugees. What I’ve been less clear on– in fact, I don’t know that I’ve really addressed it at all– is how we should treat Syria. There’s a good reason for that; I know when I’m in over my fucking head, and this is absolutely one of those times. Even before we get into “Should America take a side in the Syrian civil war?” there is the very important “Can America do anything about the Syrian civil war?” There is also the minor fact that the Russians are involved and anything we do with Syria runs the risk of provoking Russia, which is something I suspect all of us would like to avoid.

I don’t know what to do about this, except for the part that is both relatively uncomplicated and morally clear: we should accept every refugee from this conflict that we possibly can. Period. I don’t have the tiniest idea what the hell to do about the rest of it. I don’t feel bad about that. I’m a fucking furniture salesman from Indiana. There are people for whom figuring this shit out is their jobs.

Which, speaking of that: another thing I am absolutely certain of is that none of the gang of scam artists, poltroons and quarterwits currently occupying the White House have the vaguest fucking clue what to do, and I don’t trust them even the tiniest little bit to get any aspect of this shit right. Barack Obama went to Congress to authorize military action and they turned him down; the shitgibbon fires fifty Tomahawk missiles at an airport, warning the Syrians and the Russians first but not bothering to notify Congress, and somehow fails to even disable the airport.

That is a failure of such epic proportions that it simply had to be intentional. The point was to make a bunch of noise and waste a bunch of money but not to actually do anything worthwhile. I suspect when Obama asked for Congress to authorize military action this was not what he had in mind. Was what he wanted the right thing to do? I have no idea. I know that I trust Obama’s judgment infinitely more than I do the shitgibbon’s. But that doesn’t mean he was right either. For all I know there may very well be no way to cut this particular Gordian knot.

Fuck ’em for the stolen Supreme Court seat, too. Which doesn’t really fit in this post but I’m including it anyway because it’s my blog.

On refugees and Christianity, again

On January 28, 2017January 28, 2017 By Luther M. SilerIn Politics9 Comments

On the right, Rouwaida Hanoun, a Syrian five-year-old who is, as far as I know, still alive. On the left, Anne Frank, who is not.

There are– it is horrifying to think, but it is true– people who believe that the orange fascist currently occupying the White House is a Christian. Many of these people are the same people who believed Barack Obama to not be a Christian, so it’s immediately and apparently clear that when they say “Christianity,” what they mean is “White supremacy,” and they have little to no idea of what Jesus actually preached, what he might have believed, or– rather importantly– what he looked like.

I noticed this morning that the post I wrote about refugees last year is spiking in page views again, which is not surprising. The monster in the White House has chosen to ban desperately frightened and endangered people– the “least among us” who Jesus spoke of– from our country, has deliberately decided to let children die rather than incur even the slightest risk to people who look like him. He has, of course, excluded his business partners from these calculations; if you are wealthy enough for him to have business dealings with, you are a Person, of course; Rouwaida Hanoun is not. When I wrote the post last year we had a President who, while he made bad decisions in any number of ways, I believed fundamentally cared about people.

Unfortunately, that is no longer remotely true, and the man who was trying to keep Syrian refugees out of my state at the time is now Vice President. Most of the time, I have trouble believing our current President is actually human. It takes every bit of moral strength I have to recognize that the demented narcissist in the White House deserves as much compassion and dignity as anyone else by simple virtue of having been born a person. Somebody or something fucked this man up; I don’t believe he was born this awful.

But that’s beside the point. When I wrote that post last year, I was trying to be nice and trying to be the voice of reason. You may recognize the tone; I use it around here from time to time when I’m writing something I want to be taken more seriously than usual. At this point, I’m going to take a different tack: if you don’t think these people should be allowed into the country, if you think refugees (and people with green cards! People who have been here, and are now separated from their families simply by virtue of having been somewhere else when the ban went into effect!) should be banned from the United States simply because of their religion, you’re a fucking monster. You’re not a Christian. Christ himself would rebuke you– he already has, in fact, in clear terms in the Bible you claim to believe is divinely inspired and true in its every word.

You are a bad person if you agree with this ban. You are a racist and a monster and a coward and every bit as much of a piece of shit as the people trying to keep the Jews out of the country in the 1940s were. You are the exact same people saying the exact same things for the exact same reasons, only with “Jew” crossed out and “Muslim” written in. And while I don’t want this to be true and I try to be a better person, I really wish there was a Hell so I could see the look on your face when you end up there. Because Jesus has been clear on your responsibilities in this matter. If you’re not a Christian, you don’t have to follow Jesus. I certainly don’t. But he was perfectly clear on this, and you are the bad guys.

As I was writing this, word came through Twitter that the ACLU has won a stay against this executive order, which is good, as it was wildly illegal from the start. I set up recurring monthly donations to the ACLU and Planned Parenthood today. You should too.

It continues (morning blogwanking)

On November 20, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking, Uncategorized8 Comments

Yesterday was the highest-traffic day in the history of the blog, including the time where I was Freshly Pressed:

Screen Shot 2015-11-20 at 8.11.55 AM.png

You’ll note that I had more individual visitors than I had pageviews the day before, and I’m pretty sure the day before was the 2nd or 3rd best day I’ve ever had. That’s pretty impressive. As of now, 8:17, I’ve already got 160 views, so thus far the pace hasn’t slowed down any. And check this out:

That’s all time ranked posts, using the old stats editor. Leaving out the home page and the “About” page, which aren’t posts, that means that a post I wrote less than 48 hours ago is now the 7th highest-traffic post I’ve ever written.

Dag.

I don’t think it’s going to catch the Snowpiercer post, which has five times as many hits as its closest competitor, but it’ll be really interesting to see how far it gets before interest fizzles out. Another interesting detail: right now, traffic appears to be driven almost exclusively by Facebook referrals. As of this second the page has been shared on FB 759 times and 31 on Twitter, but I got 671 referrals from FB yesterday and only 13 from Twitter. Not one click through StumbleUpon, Reddit, Tumblr, or any of the other usual suspects. My autoshare on FB has reached 907 people and the Tumblr share doesn’t have a single note on it. Less than ten from Google +, which I think is funny, since those might be my first G+ referrals ever.

I’m actually kind of scared to see what will happen if Reddit gets ahold of the post. Which I suppose you can take as an invitation if you’re a Redditor.

Still no trolls, either. Amazing.

Now (again) if I can just get these people to buy books. 🙂