Huh. From an informal poll of my street:
Six households are raising some kind of livestock – goats, cows, donkeys, guinea hens, chickens, horses.
None of them are immigrants.
Generally I have to press 1 for English or, para hablar en Espanol, oprima el numero dos. I find it slightly annoying if I am trying to drive with one hand and punch buttons on the phone with the other in the dark. Otherwise, not such a problem.
Where the hell are you? Just in New York, I’ve seen major newspapers in Mandarin, Korean, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Greek, Italian and whole lot more that I can’t identify. I’m sure that they’re happy to mail subscriptions to other places in America. Admittedly, you might get your news a few days late, but if there’s something breaking currently, you can always log in to the news website from a country that speaks your language - they’ll probably be covering it.
See, I can only speak English, and very scattered phrases of various other languages. I imagine were I to move to a country with a different primary language, I don’t think endeavouring to learn it would be a poor idea by any means.
But when i’m off to vote - to perform one of my more important choices of civil duty - I suspect i’d want to make sure I did so correctly, and that pretty much means i’d want to do so if possible in English. I mean, even being fluent in day-to-day English doesn’t imply fluency in the English of voting forms. And generally I tend to think rather unkindly on people who decide that others should be willing to learn a whole new language because of the preposterous idea that they themselves might have to be careful while voting. “Gosh, I had to add five extra minutes onto my voting time! Clearly, it would be better for other people to forego the ability to vote in a language they’re most familiar with, so that I can get the hell out of here sooner!”.
Edit: Oh, and last time I checked, honour killings tended to be against the law over here. I’m sure that in America they are accepted happily as forms of multiculturalism, and LP is not at all employing hyperbole of murder to give his message board post more emphasis.
My ballot was in 2 languages: English and Spanish. The English was “on top”, that is printed first, with the Spanish being underneath.
Same with the buttons on the phone: it’s always press one for English, 2 for Spanish. This is a big deal for people? I like the ones that say (in Spanish) press some button to hear Spanish, then they continue on in English. I don’t even have to press a button at all! They are saving me countless hours of button pressing. I do have to listen to a 4 second sentence in a foreign language, though. How terrible for me. How will I cope?
I don’t know from goats, but if this economy doesn’t improve soon, I’d like to start raising chickens…
The fact that newspapers in other languages exist in New York is hardly compelling evidence that they’re a useful source for political information. Furthermore I will posit that the volume of information translated from the mainstream media and politicians themselves (who, you know, use English) is a slim minority - feel free to prove me wrong. You might find a transcript of Obama’s latest speech in Korean, but how about the subsequent analysis of it? Probably not so much. And wouldn’t you say needing to mail subscriptions across the country would imply that there are inadequate resources for other languages?
I’m sure you don’t want to see Mandarin, Korean, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Greek, Italian and a whole lot more languages that you can’t identify on the ballots. Like I said - the overwhelming majority of information is communicated in English and to be a part of this country’s political process you should be expected to speak the language of the people.
LP and IntelSoldier can both fuck themselves. Morons like you are precisely why rational conversations on subjects like this are impossible.
IntelSoldier was being sarcastic. LonesomePolecat is a full-fledged white supremacist, though.
And as coincidence would have it, if you look up ‘goatse’…
I wonder how they decide what languages to include? If there’s one family that speaks only Cherokee or something, do they print up instructions for them?
I’m going to go way out on a limb here and say the OP is completely full of shit.
Why not? I assume that they cover whatever their readership is interested in. You know - one page local politics, one page national politics, and six pages of celebrity sex gossip. Just like the English language papers.
Are you saying that there are no Korean analyists? Really? Who do you think puts out the U.S. based Korean news channels? Even if there aren’t, I imagine that they translate and dub whatever talking heads they find interesting, just like the English language media does when interviewing Iraqi analyists, or German sports stars, or Palestinian motar victims, or whatever.
Can’t say that it’s ever bothered me. I’m pretty good at identifying the parts I can read.
This is just one of the many, many, many, many reasons that we need to have English declared our national language.
Why wouldn’t I? It doesn’t matter what language somebody speaks - if he or she is a US citizen, they’re every bit the equal of you and me, and their vote deserves to be counted alongside ours. I’m all for it.
I can guaranfuckingtee that the OP is absofuckinglutely full of shit.
Understanding English is not something that magically happens the second you step foot in the US. It’s damn hard to learn a second language, especially as an adult. And the fact that I, a native speaker of English working on her goddamn PhD in motherfucking linguistics, has a hard time understanding some of those ballot measures… well, imagine how hard it is for someone who moved to the US as an adult from an non-English speaking country, worked their ass off to get citizenship … go on, imagine it! You can know English pretty damn well and still have problems with reading a fucking ballot. Anything that can help more people better understand what they’re voting for is a damn good thing in my book. Oh, and, surprisesurprise, you can know another language and know English. It’s called bilingualism people. It’s the natural state for most of the people in the world. I don’t know why so many Americans have such a fucking problem with that concept.
But does it really matter to people like the OP that today’s immigrants are learning English faster than the (white) immigrants of yesteryear? Of course not. The OP, and people like the OP, are only interested in disenfranchising people of color. Like the people who work tirelessly at my polling place, immigrants from Latin America who have way more patriotism that the fucking OP because they spent all fucking day helping people fucking vote.
Seriously, go fuck yourself, English Only Movement. American has always been and will always be a multilingual country. Move to New Zealand if you don’t like it. Though you may have to kill off a few thousand Maori’s to make it a true English Only paradise.
I can also guaranfuckingtee that if we amend the Constitution to make US the official language, we will only have more problems. People don’t like it when you declare their language illegal. See: Basque, Belgium, Sri Lanka. Just fucking leave it alone. Things are fine how they are.
Are you insulting me? 
Out of interest, what would those be? I’ve heard of two; this one, in the form of the general opposition to paying for forms and the like for whichever language, and the other being that it is necessary to try and protect its place in American culture. Which arguments do you mean aside from those?
What never ceases to amaze me is that “english only” supporters always fail to realize is that english was the language of IMMIGRANTS who came to this country. They didn’t seem too fucking concerned about replacing the contemporaneous languages that were being spoken when they arrived. I don’t even think they asked or were very nice about it, were they?
It also never ceases to amaze me that when a news report comes in from any other part of the world, they can always find some local person who can comment on it in english. However, I highly doubt that they could do the same in America and find someone to comment in one of those languages. Seriously, those of you who think that it should be english only should expand your horizons a little more and try to learn a different language. Educating yourself would only help your situation. But go ahead and complain all you want, you’re not going to win in the end…
If you actually have to hunt for the only string of words on a page that you have yet been naturalized to read, rather than being able to find it quickly and easily, you have no business voting.
If you don’t like feeling excluded when something new pops up, take the time to learn it. Don’t expect the world to stay small.
Wait, you think in the world’s third most populous country with the world’s best universities which also happens to be very ethnically diverse you couldn’t find someone who speaks any given language? That’s absurd. With the exception of some ridiculously obscure dying languages, I’m pretty sure a foreign news show could find a speaker of damn near anything with a little research and a phone call or two.
I guarantee that there are people who speak any language that TV has ever been broadcast in in the US right now.
Even if I had to find someone who speaks a dead or dying language, I’d probably look to the United States first, outside of the native region.
The literacy test to become a citizen is very basic. If you can answer some simple questions in English, you pass. In contrast, a ballot, especially one full of propositions, is very complicated. It is easily possible to become a citizen and yet not understand English well enough to understand ballot measures.
I think officials believe that in areas with large numbers of minority-language speakers, it is better that they can read these complicated propositions in their own languages rather than try to read, and possibly misunderstand them, in English. They would attempt to vote on them anyway.
Ed
I really would like to see this ballot.