As I continue to clear out the collected links from the week, here are a few stories where I have a bit more to say on the articles:
- Income and Public Schools. Scott Turner called my attention to this article, which notes that, for the first time in at least 50 years, a majority of U.S. public school students come from low-income families. This is very troubling to me. Back when I went to public school (in the 1960s and 1970s), pretty much everyone sent their children to LA Unified — unless you were very very rich. Hollywood stars sent their kids to LAUSD (especially in the Palisades). Middle-class white folks in the valley sent their kids. Schools were a place where you could meet people from all groups, and learn that we were all — just people. You learned that everyone could be smart, and you made friends across the lines. In the 1980s as busing started, there “white flight” from the schools, and I believe that the findings in this article are a direct descendant of that. One of the best ways of breaking the privilege lines is bringing people together. You want to know where kids learn the notion of privilege — it is when the middle and high income are separated in their private schools (which are much more homogenized, just like milk from the store and white bread from the store). This is where income inequality takes us, and it is a bad thing.
- Blog Comments. Hadass Evitar pointed me to this: An article on why blog comments are being pulled. Now I haven’t pulled comments from my blogs, but I do understand the dearth of comments and the spam. Over on the WordPress side, it seems the only comments I get these days are spam, which are deleted. In fact, I even did a whole post directed at the spammers. But I do want comments, and I miss the old days on LiveJournal where people would comment and we’d have discussions. Comments provided me a way to judge whether people were reading my blog; I really don’t want to resort to Google Analytics. Of course, here’s where I ask you to comment: what do you think? Have you stopped commenting on blogs? Why? Is it because of the trolls, the lack of community, or do new mechanisms make it much much harder. Should blogs get rid of comments, and just share the article on Facebook where the comments do occur?
- Antisemitism in Europe. I forget who led me to the just-posted piece on Mrs. Wolowitz, but I started exploring the source, and found this recent piece by Dr. Deborah Lipstadt (one of my instructors when I was at UCLA, but that’s another story, nevermind, anyway) on Hypocracy after the Paris Attacks. The article essentially points out that the outrage is that journalists were attacked; the fact that they were Jews was secondary, and often other antisemitic attacks in France go on with rarely the outrage. In fact, antisemitic attacks go on regularly across Europe, and there is little outrage. Just think about this quote from her article: «European Jews have been under attack for more than a decade. But there were no marches after Halimi’s death, the Brussels murders, and numerous other incidents. There were some protests after Toulouse, most likely due to the general horror at a killer deliberately targeting children, but nothing on the scale of this past week. Many French Jews felt that those protests were quite muted, given the horror of the event. More troubling, nowhere have I heard an acknowledgement that Europeans have failed to take seriously these attacks on Jews. Instead, people have explained away the attacks by suggesting they’re a response to Israel’s actions in the Middle East. That argument telegraphs the message that, while killing Jews was wrong, it was understandable.» Even in the US, attitudes like this persist. We get up in arms about the privilege issues regarding blacks and other minorities, yet turn a blind eye as the Christian majority slowly attacks those who are non-Christian. We need to speak up — worldwide — that belief is like sexual orientation — a personal thing that people have the right to just be. People observing a religion should not be attacking others because of their religions, and people should be free to follow their faith. We must speak up when the right to do so is attacked, especially in countries that claim to have religious freedom.
