Coca-Cola makes cute ad, racist far-right idiots lose their [inks]

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

I voted 7 for historical hilarity, but Sunny Flowers' soda bonfire might be pretty interesting.

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I'm wondering what advantage people like to see in a country that would have multiple languages spoken and accepted in it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_multilingual_countries_and_regions

Excluding the nations with... um, 'ethnic tensions', there's a hell of a lot of success stories in there.  Or at least places where it's hardly even been an issue in the first place.

Can we exclude the nations with ethnic tension when asking this question?  Part of the concern is that multiple languages can reinforce segregation and distrust among ethnic groups.  It doesn't do that necessarily, but it would be good to understand what the difference is in places where it's a problem versus where it isn't.

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I'm wondering what advantage people like to see in a country that would have multiple languages spoken and accepted in it.

oh idk maybe because language is the central vehicle of cultural expression that allows communities to maintain historical tradition and some people would like to see these communities maintained rather than destroyed by xenophobic and oppressive language laws. this is a very American opinion of mine.

This is of course true to a degree, and is one of the reasons why the ethnic enclaves of the United States are so culturally valued. But there is a difference between ethnic enclaves and showcasing America as a bilingual nation. Our national motto has a meaning that should be taken a bit more literally.

..which would be a lot easier if it were in English

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You're right, but I think the white majority had an easier time accepting those enclaves because their inhabitants conformed in most other respects to ideas about American culture. I can't speak to the situation in the United States, but in Ontario a lot of non-English communities were made up of farmers (I'm thinking of my anscestors in Renfrew County). If the situation was similar across the American Corn Belt, these immigrant farmers would have been reproducing American cultural mores.

Today, American culture is a bit stuck in the past. When I think of America, I still often think of family farms, small businesses, and bountiful food at the dinner table. I don't think of the cleaning ladies or the Wal-Mart greeters. Even though many whites hold these types of jobs, they are more closely associated with the immigrant class. The big, visible enterprisers are still white men, so the myth of American white culture continues, even though, in reality, there's a real mixing of the races. Whites still want to feel part of an imagined superior class though, so they latch onto the fading imagery of "American culture." Thus, I would maybe argue that immigrants today are more easily racialized than their Eastern European counterparts from the 19th century—it's the only way to differntiate between "Americans" and "other." White Wal-Mart greeters get to identify with the class that owns businesses and produces goods, where nonwhite Wal-Mart greeters are just poor immigrant Wal-Mart greeters. It's pretty terrible, but, you know what...? I think it's a subliminal and natural phenomenon. To put it another way, whites build a bit of a castle for themselves. When a new Coca-Cola ad comes around and challenges popular conceptions of what it means to be an American, it's more than a little threatening. I get it and I don't hate anyone for it.

The idea that there was a melting pot for American immigrants is often overstated. It was an ideal among some people like Henry Ford and TR, and among some portion of the immigrant population.  There was integration of immigrants in many ways, just as there is today. But when people are comparing immigrants today to immigrants of the past in the US in terms of integrating and adopting the broader American culture and identity,  they are really comparing the effects of having two generations, from the 1920s to the 1960s, where immigration was highly restricted.  And so it seems like the immigrants were more acculturated than today because there was not a constant stream of new immigrants who had not been acculturated and who prior to the restrictions had provided ethnic communities with a stronger link to the Old World. 

The immigrant farming communities in the US in the 19th/early 20th century were more often from Northern and Western Europe, while urban immigrants were more often from Eastern and Southern Europe - or from Ireland, which was considered just as bad. (Then you had Welsh, Slovaks, Hungarians, etc coming over to work in the coal mines, Chinese on the railroads, etc.)
The combination of urbanism and non-Protestants, often considered less white in the racial views of the day, was seen as a threat to American ideals, and increasingly as a eugenic threat at the turn of the 20th century. 

For all the xenophobia that exists toward immigrants today, I'd say it is a great deal less racial than it was back then, at least in terms of any explicitly developed ideology.  And I don't think poor whites identify with rich whites or vice-versa so much as they identify with a certain sentimental vision of America that they may see threatened by the introduction of the unfamiliar who they worry may not share that vision or simply don't easily fit into their conception of it.

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Ok, I admit that I was wrong in saying what I said. It was very ill-phrased. But, I do not see what the Republican Party can do to reach out to blacks and hispanics, as that will, at the very least, mean the abandonment of much of the party's ideology (and such attempts will probably be futile anyway, since, to put it very crudely, the Republican's can always be 'outbid' by the Democrats when it comes to implementing policies that these groups generally want to see), and thus the abandonment of the core of the GOP's support.

How does reaching out to blacks and Hispanics hinge on abandoning anything in the party's ideology?

Well, I say that because, as has been pointed out in other threads, blacks and Hispanics have very serious objections to large proportions of the GOP's ideology, particularly when it comes to economic matters.

Higher income Blacks, and to a lesser degree Hispanics, but to a greater degree Jews and other non-Christians, vote disproportionately Democratic. There's more than just economics at work with my party's inability to garner votes among these groups.

I believe those groups are still more likely to have views on economic issues more in line with the Democrats compared to others of the same economic status.