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Thinker #fundie mobile.nytimes.com

The economic rationale behind the Asian cap is donor money. It is likely that Harvard receives most of its donations from wealthy White individuals. If the school became seen as "too Asian" these donors would stop giving. Why give money to an institution they see as not benefiting "their" kind?

If there was no cap at the Ivy League schools, America's elite could become predominantly Asian American within a few generations. This sudden demographic change would receive major backlash and resentment from the White majority. The United States, whether you like it or not, is still a White, Western country that primarily serves this group's interests. No group relishes in seeing themselves become a minority in their own country.

Suppose the top universities in China became overwhelmingly White. Do you not think there would be backlash and attempts to limit their numbers as well? Of course there would.

Paolo Martini #sexist mobile.nytimes.com

I don't know the specifics in this case, but as a former Psych professor in the seventies at American colleges, I have to say that I can't recall ever being subjected to such intense and persistent seduction as I was by my female students. I took to keeping my office door open during 'visits' by my most ardent admirers and had to physically peel attractive young women off me. Maybe it was my animal magnetism, but my female colleagues never reported this kind of behavior on the part of their male students. In fact, men and women tend to have different reactions to authority figures and power in general, which is the real issue here: men are generally diffident about sucking up to it, while women attempt to seduce it. Asking a thirty year old to hold out forever in the face of such pulchritude is unreasonable, when we're talking about people who have not taken an oath of celibacy. By the way, no, I never had sex with a student: it seemed obviously unethical. But the flesh is weak, and it is facile to think of these men as predators and their students as victims

Keith Raniere #fundie mobile.nytimes.com

It is not clear how many women were branded or which Nxivm officials were aware of the practice.

A copy of a text message Mr. Raniere sent to a female follower indicates that he knew women were being branded and that the symbol’s design incorporated his initials.

“Not initially intended as my initials but they rearranged it slightly for tribute,” Mr. Raniere wrote, (“if it were abraham lincolns or bill gates initials no one would care.)”

Woodrose #fundie mobile.nytimes.com

If you want to fight Trumpism and the alt-right, work for social cohesion. Trump tapped into Americans' yearning for social cohesion, the functional communities so many older people remember.

Multiculturalism destroys community cohesion. Real people feel the real loss of social support. By all measures, American communities are not supporting their members as they once did.

Maybe we need to spend some time thinking about what we are protesting about, not just the protest methods. As a lifelong feminist, I did not participate in the Women's March. I read the manifesto, and it was a women-led march for multiculturalism. The concerns of older white women were not mentioned -- imagine a manifesto that does not mention preserving Social Security and Medicare for older American women!

Since I'm a feminist, not a multiculturalist, I did not march. I don't respect cultures that don't respect women.

I don't know the answers for how people fight for their rights while not destroying the community they want to be a full part of. All I can say these days is that I feel politically homeless. Pushed away from the left, but certainly not a member of the right.

cb #racist mobile.nytimes.com

One of the most destructive political constructs in history is the ridiculously inane notion that 'integration' is desirable. Thinking people have always known integration is undesirable, unworkable, destructive. Most normal people of any age and ethnic/racial group naturally self segregate. People are naturally, understandably more comfortable with their own people. This is self evident , blindingly obvious. This is the way nature has hard wired humanity, the natural order of things. And yet, misguided, malignant government policies continue to impose destructive, unwanted forced integration policies with the misguided, discredited notion this will (somehow?) benefit a political 'protected class.' People naturally wish to avoid interacting with certain people, certain sub-cultures. Such self preservation is only natural. Most normal people only wish is to be left alone, to live with their own, to enjoy their natural freedom. Is this really asking too much? The insane integration paradigm is so 20th Century. We are done!

Jim schwartz #racist mobile.nytimes.com

In my own opinion on this article, I was telling you that you would lose 2016 and had lost other state elections because of the economy long before. This is all sour grapes long after the fact. Half of this article is spent explaining 'racism' of the election, where really this IS a white country and won't ever be anything else. The heart of the country is white workers, all party platforms come to that side first, always. It is not racist to think so, it is fact. You have gotten so far into a supposed future Latino population shift, but I think the interests of middle class workers cross all sides and races, sexes even.

Frank #fundie mobile.nytimes.com

I couldn't' agree more. Originally the Ivy League was where the old money east coast elites sent their children. The middle class aspired to send their children there for the connections their own children would make if not for the quality of the educations afforded. Now it seems you're less likely to meet a Bush or Kennedy than some recent 2nd generation immigrant automaton ruthlessly driven by 1st generation immigrant tiger parents. Elitism is giving way to meritocracy, which is good, but at a frightening cost.

Chechnya government #fundie mobile.nytimes.com

First, two television reporters vanished. Then a waiter went missing. Over the past week, men ranging in age from 16 to 50 have disappeared from the streets of Chechnya.

On Saturday, a leading Russian opposition newspaper confirmed a story already circulating among human rights activists: The Chechen authorities were arresting and killing gay men.

While abuses by security services in the region, where Russia fought a two-decade war against Islamic insurgents, have long been a stain on President Vladimir V. Putin’s human rights record, gay people had not previously been targeted on a wide scale.

The men were detained “in connection with their nontraditional sexual orientation, or suspicion of such,” the newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, reported, citing Russian federal law enforcement officials, who blamed the local authorities.

By Saturday, the paper reported, and an analyst of the region with her own sources confirmed, that more than 100 gay men had been detained. The newspaper had the names of three murder victims, and suspected many others had died in extrajudicial killings.

A spokesman for Chechnya’s leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, denied the report in a statement to Interfax on Saturday, calling the article “absolute lies and disinformation.”

“You cannot arrest or repress people who just don’t exist in the republic,” the spokesman, Alvi Karimov, told the news agency.

“If such people existed in Chechnya, law enforcement would not have to worry about them, as their own relatives would have sent them to where they could never return,” Mr. Karimov said.

The sweep, like so much else in Russian politics today, was entangled in the country’s troubled politics of street activism.

It began, Novaya Gazeta reported, after a Moscow-based gay rights group, GayRussia.ru, applied for permits to stage gay pride parades in four cities in Russia’s predominantly Muslim North Caucasus region, of which Chechnya is a part.

The group had not focused on the Muslim areas. It had been applying for permits for gay parades in provincial cities around Russia, and collecting the inevitable denials, in order to build a case about gay rights and freedom of assembly with the European Court of Human Rights, in Strasbourg, France. It had applied to more than 90 municipal governments. Nikolai Alekseev, a gay rights activist coordinating this effort, told Novaya Gazeta he had chosen this tactic rather than staging risky, unsanctioned gay parades.

The group had not applied for a permit in Chechnya, but in another Muslim region in southern Russia, Kabardino-Balkaria. The mere application there — denied, as usual — had prompted an anti-gay counterdemonstration.

In the restive Muslim regions, Mr. Putin has empowered local leaders to press agendas of traditional Muslim values, to co-opt an Islamist underground. The gay pride parade applications became a galvanizing issue.

“In Chechnya, the command was given for a ‘prophylactic sweep’ and it went as far as real murders,” Novaya Gazeta reported.

According to the report, the authorities set to finding and arresting closeted gay men, partly by posing as men looking for dates on social networking sites.

“Of course, none of these people in any way demonstrated their sexual orientation publicly — in the Caucasus, this is equal to a death sentence,” the newspaper wrote of those detained in the sweep.

“I got numerous, numerous signals,” about the sweep of gay men, said Ekaterina L. Sokiryanskaya,, Russia project coordinator for the International Crisis Group, and an authority on the North Caucasus. “It came from too many sources not to be true.”

Gay men have begun deleting online accounts, or fleeing the region. One user of Vkontakte, a Russian social networking site, wrote that a 16-year-old boy had been detained in a village in Chechnya. He returned days later, according to the post, “all beaten, just a sack with bones.”

The newspaper published contact information to aid men wanting to leave Chechnya for relatively more tolerant parts of Russia. But reaching communities of closeted gay men in the remote mountain region poses challenges.

“Even delivering the information is very difficult,” Ms. Sokiryanskaya, who is familiar with the aid effort, said. “They are just small islands, isolated.”

Donald Trump #racist mobile.nytimes.com

The witnesses described the story this way: Mr. [pro-golfer Bernard] Langer, a 59-year-old native of Bavaria, Germany — a winner of the Masters twice and of more than 100 events on major professional golf tours around the world — was standing in line at a polling place near his home in Florida on Election Day, the president explained, when an official informed Mr. Langer he would not be able to vote.

Ahead of and behind Mr. Langer were voters who did not look as if they should be allowed to vote, Mr. Trump said, according to the staff members — but they were nonetheless permitted to cast provisional ballots. The president threw out the names of Latin American countries that the voters might have come from.

Mr. Langer, whom he described as a supporter, left feeling frustrated, according to a version of events later contradicted by a White House official.

The anecdote, the aides said, was greeted with silence, and Mr. Trump was prodded to change the subject by Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff, and Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas.

Just one problem: Mr. Langer, who lives in Boca Raton, Fla., is a German citizen with permanent residence status in the United States who is, by law, barred from voting, according to Mr. Langer’s daughter Christina.

“He is a citizen of Germany,” she said, when reached on her father’s cellphone. “He is not a friend of President Trump’s, and I don’t know why he would talk about him.”

She said her father was “very busy” and would not be able to answer any questions.

But a senior White House staff member, who was not at the Monday reception but has heard Mr. Trump tell the story, said Mr. Langer saw Mr. Trump in Florida during the Thanksgiving break and told him the story of a friend of Mr. Langer’s who had been blocked from voting.

Daniel #fundie mobile.nytimes.com

Asian parenting styles, success of and stress upon Asian children in educational systems whether in Asia or the U.S.?

Probably in our overpopulated, environmentally degraded, increasingly technocratic and controlling societies Asian children have a profound advantage. There is some evidence Asian children have not only considerable natural intelligence, those of perhaps especially the Far East are descendants of societies which for centuries stressed social order over individuality, which is to say for centuries the individualist in those societies was at a disadvantage and gradually the Asian type was arrived at to point of stereotype: The intelligent but rather conforming person.

In our societies today whether of East or West, whether authoritarian or democratic--choose your system, your politics--we seem to be moving regardless of label to a world which was something of the historical situation which gave birth to China and other Asian countries, which is to say stress is being placed, when organizing diverse and large populations, on intelligence and conformity more than anything else...You must be intelligent to go far goes without saying, but not intelligent and too individual--you must fit in as easily as possible with other people.

Asians excel at this as anyone has observed having walked on the streets of an Asian city such as Hong Kong or Tokyo. You see thousands of intelligent faces going politely about their business. The U.S. seems to favor this evolution.

Patrick #fundie mobile.nytimes.com

Hitler fought the same fight, caught between the corrupt Weimar capitalism that led to hyperinflation on one side, and the atheistic Bolshevist Communists on the other. That's the reason he's the perpetual archetype for evil whenever the entertainment media needs a villain, he dared to stand up to the globalists of his day in an effort to preserve white, Western culture. So those same forces are once again terrified of seeing the rise of a man against time.