March 28, 2009

Maureen Dowd: "Blue Eyed Greed?"

As I've mentioned before, many a female pundit's output consists in large part of demands that society's structures and values be revolutionized so that she, personally, will be considered hotter-looking.

Thus, Maureen Dowd writes in today's NY Times in "Blue Eyed Greed?"
At a press conference Thursday in Brasilia with Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain — who has a talent for getting himself into dicey spots — Lula started off coughing from some cheese bread he’d wolfed down. Then he suddenly turned accusatory.

“This crisis was caused by the irrational behavior of white people with blue eyes, who before the crisis appeared to know everything and now demonstrate that they know nothing,” charged the brown-eyed, bearded socialist president.

As the brown-eyed Brown grew a whiter shade of pale, Lula hammered the obvious point that the poor of the world were suffering in the global crash because of the misdeeds of the rich.

“I do not know any black or indigenous bankers,” said Lula.

That's just because Brazil is backwards in terms of affirmative action, not starting it until a few years ago. Here in America we've enjoyed the services of Franklin Raines of Fannie Mae and HUD, Stanley O'Neal of Merrill Lynch, and Henry Cisneros of HUD and various home-building schemes.

Perhaps Maureen and Lula got their demographic data from watching old Washington Mutual TV ads?

... The “Lula lulu” by the “Brazil nut,” as The New York Post dubbed it, became big news just as President Obama met at the White House with Vikram Pandit and a cadre of white-bread bankers who have taken the bailout — some of whom, like Jamie Dimon, have distinctly blue eyes.

And it is true, of course, that the upper-crust, underwhelming Anglo-Saxon leaders who allowed America’s financial markets to morph into louche casinos, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, were very, very white men with blue eyes. ...

Before President Obama, whose brown eyes are opaque when you look into them, presidents have been more known for blue eyes. The ones with brown eyes, Richard Nixon and L.B.J., came a cropper.

Throughout history, whether it’s images of Jesus that don’t look Middle Eastern or Barbies who don’t look ethnic, blue eyes and white skin have often been painted as the ideal.

The cerulean-eyed Paul Newman once wryly predicted his epitaph: “Here lies Paul Newman, who died a failure because his eyes turned brown.”

Surveys show that people with blue eyes are considered more intelligent, attractive and sociable.

A 2007 University of Louisville study concluded that people with blue eyes were better planners and strategic thinkers — superior at things like golf, cross-country running and preparing for exams — while people with brown eyes had better reflexes, making them good at hockey and football.

Lula’s rant underscored an ancient rivalry.

When I was little, growing up in a house that prominently displayed a blue-eyed Jesus and a blue-eyed J.F.K., I felt my brown eyes were far less attractive than my brothers’ blue ones.

I obsessed on it so much, cutting out a picture of a beautiful brown-eyed model and keeping it in my scrapbook, that my mother finally reassured me:

“You look at blue eyes. You look into brown eyes.”

Later, of course, there would be the thrill of Van Morrison serenading a “Brown-Eyed Girl.”

Before Barack Obama, when I interviewed the brown-eyed sons of immigrants who were thinking of running for president, Mario Cuomo and Colin Powell, they seemed torn about taking the big plunge, given how far they had come in relation to their dads.

I asked Governor Cuomo if he was leaving the field to “the privileged blue-eyed WASPs” like Bush senior and Dan Quayle who felt entitled and never worried about their worthiness.

Barack Obama and his family have already had a profound effect on the culture in terms of what is beautiful and marketable. Black faces are popping up in all kinds of ads now — wearing straw boaters and other prepster outfits in Ralph Lauren ads.

With Michelle urging students to aim for A’s and the president promising to make school “cool,” brown eyes may finally — and rightfully — overtake blue as the windows of winners.

Sorry, Maureen, but your nemesis, Catherine Zeta-Jones, is brown-eyed, so you can't actually blame society's prejudice against brown eyes for you not snagging Michael Douglas.

So, I spent some time looking at photographs of Bernie Madoff, Joseph Cassano of AIG FP, Allen Stanford, Angelo Mozilo of Countrywide, Kerry Killinger of WaMu, Roland Arnall of Ameriquest, Joy Jackson of Stripper Fraud Mortages, and various other people who have distinguished themselves in the financial world in recent years, and I came to the conclusion that it's really hard to tell what color eyes people have from candid photographs. Most people have boring-colored eyes.

Unless you have Paul Newman's eyes, you have to be as vain/insecure as Maureen Dowd and spend enough time and money on having your hair dye and lipstick complement your eye color and then have the best glamour photography to make your eye color as readily apparent as her's in her column photo.

By the way, can we finally lose the term "white-bread?" I suspect that for a few decades now, blue-eyed people eat less white bread per capita than brown-eyed people.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

69 comments:

  1. It's true- I have blue eyes and life has been a gravy train with me having biscuit wheels....thank you Steve and or maureen

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  2. Ha. Try being the one blue-eyed member of an extended Arab-American family and listen to all the "Crusader" jokes and jabs you get subjected to at family get-togethers.

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  3. "As I've mentioned before, many a female pundit's output consists in large part of demands that society's structures and values be revolutionized so that she, personally, will be considered hotter-looking."

    Please provide links?

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  4. Blue eyes vs. brown eyes ... what about us green-eyed folks?! We're always left out of the discussion. Boo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo!

    :-P

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  5. To me Maureen Dowd is a poster child for the uselessness of high intelligence in women. She's obviously very smart, but being a woman, she's bored by the sort of topics to which intelligence can be usefully applied. She's spent all her professional life around politics, but, like most women, she's much more interested in gossip and famous people's personalities than in politics. WHY was she interviewing Cuomo and Powell? So that she could comment on their wives, eye color, fashion sense, haircuts? You don't need to be smart to do that.

    She has an interesting writing style, but it was probably always going to be wasted on mindless gossip. High intelligence in women is like men's nipples that way - form without purpose.

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  6. Blue eyes vs. brown eyes ... what about us green-eyed folks?!

    Here, here. I'd be interested to know how desirable green eyes are compared to blue ones. People have been commenting on my green eyes all my life, never negatively. I guess it's partly because green ones are rarer than blue or brown ones.

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  7. "2007 University of Louisville study"

    Someone needs to post this.

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  8. ...many a *male* pundit's output consists in large part of demands that society's structures and values be revolutionized so that he, personally, will be given a high status job in the current administration.

    I'm thinking of the JournoList gang - in whom this trait is embarrasingly obvious.

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  9. Can't somebody appoint Brad Delong assistant director of the FTC or whatever?

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  10. Speaking of blue eyes, did you catch the LA Times piece about Jane Elliott?

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  11. Dowd's always seemed to me the perfect example of white liberal self-hatred. Being a woman she can't hide it inside social policy recommendations or political gamesmanship like men can. She just comes across as a spiteful old woman who hates our culture and country the way it is. But as we all know, Miss Dowd will not be passing her beautiful brown eyes on to anyone, so it's hard not to pity her more than hate her.

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  12. I think you people are missing what's important here? Its acceptable to blame white people with blue eyes for the financial crisis but if someone placed blame on the people with hooked noses, the outrage would be earth shattering. Has anyone checked if the ADL condemned this man yet?

    If the ADL and SPLC don't condemn these words then we can conclude that these organizations aren't really concerned with battling "hate." Instead, their purpose seems to be to destroy the lives and reputations of people who refuse to be politically correct.

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  13. Looking at those pictures of Michael Douglas's child bride, I realized that Catherine Zeta-Jones looks rather like what Teri Hatcher would look like if Teri Hatcher were pretty.

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  14. How nice, Ms. Dowd. Maureen the biddy... Funny how true stereotypes turn out to be.

    Is it just me, or are old American ladies really that insufferable?

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  15. Jun said...

    Blue eyes vs. brown eyes ... what about us green-eyed folks?! We're always left out of the discussion. Boo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo!

    :-P


    Well, I made a couple babies with a green-eyed redhead. It wasn't the green eyes or red hair that gave me trouble (or maybe it was?). I've always been partial to that look, because it's kind of exotic compared to my blond/blue or brown/hazel family.

    My son has light green eyes and blond hair and my daughter sparkling blue eyes and light brown hair. I'm not disappointed. But I really, seriously hope my daughter, who's pretty damn sharp for a two-year-old, never turns out like Maureen.

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  16. "To me Maureen Dowd is a poster child for the uselessness of high intelligence in women. She's obviously very smart. . . . She has an interesting writing style . . ."

    Maureen Dowd's intellectual achievements consist of obtaining a B.A. in English from Catholic University.

    Her journalistic achievements speak for themselves. As for her "interesting writing style," you're being overly generous, or chivalrous, or something.

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  17. rightsaidfred3/29/09, 3:04 AM

    I recall this from Dunnigan: over 2/3s of WWII aces had blue eyes.

    I'm green eyed myself.

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  18. Contributed to the moderation queue at the NYT website:

    > President Obama met at the White House with _Vikram Pandit_ and a cadre of white-bread bankers who have taken the bailout

    Self-deprecating subtlety appreciated, even if inadvertant. Pandit isn't the only blue-eyed devil near the heart of the disaster. Think Raines and Gorelick (Fannie), Cassano and Greenberg (AIG), Stanford and Madoff (eponymous), Mozilo (Countrywide), Killinger (WaMu), Arnall (Ameriquest), Jackson (Stripper Mortgages), Frank and Dodd (Congress).

    Even if their eyes aren't actually blue, they might possibly have worn contacts at one time. Per Lula's and Maureen's blinding [sic] insight, that's good enough for me!

    Steve Sailer seconds Dowd's brilliant analysis at http://tinyurl.com/dcgao3

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  19. One of my schoolteachers announced in class one day that he couldn't bear people with big, brown, stupid cows' eyes.

    It having happened in Scotland, it might have been that few if any in the class had brown eyes. I don't know because it's not what I noticed about girls, sorry people, at that age.

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  20. This reminds me of the recent Los Angeles Times article on Jane Eliot, where the Asian journalist spends the whole article trying to convince me that her Deep Deep Pain growing up jealous and resentful of all the beautiful white people, means that America is racist against minorities.

    Never mind that Asian women aren't considered unattractive, or that Asian-American women live longer and generally have a higher standard of living than every other group in America. Somehow even this Asian girl raised by white parents, just like privileged preppy Barack Obama, can't help but grow up obsessed with her imagined victimization by white America.

    And now this article is just a coded hate piece against blue-eyed WASPs. These kinds of envious ethnic resentment articles are crudely divisive, and a racist kind of hate speech.

    It shouldn't be censored, but it should definitely be condemned. Protocols of the Learned Elders of Whitey/WASP is just as unhelpful as the original version.

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  21. According to Wikip. Maureen Dowd was born on Jan 14, 1952, meaning she only another 33 months to go before she is a grand old lady of 60.

    I suggest a monthly countdown in the run up to this auspicious anniversary.

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  22. Wade Nichols3/29/09, 6:43 AM

    Portfolio Magazine has a brief article on Lula's "commentary", and even provided pictures of the 8 top officials of the Brazilian Central Bank, none of whom have blue eyes:

    http://www.portfolio.com/views/blogs/
    daily-brief/2009/03/27/brazilian-presidents-comment-is-a-lulu

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  23. Oh give me a break. Obviously Lula has a bad case of Melanin Envy now that he's the only white guy among all of the Western Hemisphere's leftist leaders and he needs to maintain his position as a populist in a country where populism means appealing to dark-skinned people. So he picks out his one "melanistic" feature and tries to build an alliance around that. Nice try.

    This Eye Color in Europe map may be interesting, by the way; there's a lot more patterns in there than just north vs south. Who knew that the Welsh were as dark as Greeks, or that apparently about 1/3 Norwegians have brown eyes?

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  24. ...many a *white* *male* *Jewish* pundit's output consists in large part of demands that society's structures and values be revolutionized so that he, personally, will be given a high status job in the current administration.

    I'm thinking of the JournoList gang - in whom this trait is embarrasingly obvious.


    Fixed that for you.

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  25. Anonymous:

    I think you people are missing what's important here? Its acceptable to blame white people with blue eyes for the financial crisis but if someone placed blame on the people with hooked noses, the outrage would be earth shattering.

    Indeed. Dowd would be out of a job within a week, maybe two. There'd be scores of articles in the establishment press condemning her in the meantime, Jews crusading against Auschwitz Part Deux and extended phenotypes falling all over themselves and one another to prove who's the bigger Righteous Gentile (Uncle Tom). Organized Jewry and the Jewish press would go ape.

    I won't be surprised if Dowd doesn't see the first article pointed her way over this. I won't be surprised if there's a tepid response from a columnist or two. I will be surprised if there's anything more than a bit of wrist-slapping.

    Has anyone checked if the ADL condemned this man yet?

    If the ADL and SPLC don't condemn these words then we can conclude that these organizations aren't really concerned with battling "hate." Instead, their purpose seems to be to destroy the lives and reputations of people who refuse to be politically correct.


    Indeed. Not that we need more evidence that ADL and SPLC are Jewish tribal organs, of course.

    Rain And:

    And now this article is just a coded hate piece against blue-eyed WASPs.

    Coded? Uhm, the "code" for blue-eyed Anglo-Saxons in the piece is, er, blue-eyed Anglo-Saxons. Not much of a code, is it?

    These kinds of envious ethnic resentment articles are crudely divisive, and a racist kind of hate speech.

    It shouldn't be censored, but it should definitely be condemned. Protocols of the Learned Elders of Whitey/WASP is just as unhelpful as the original version.


    Whoa there. This may come as a shock to you, but this strikes me as enabling. You make it sound as if the NYT is cranking this stuff out against Jews and non-Caucasoids on a regular basis. Did the NYT ever crank stuff like this out vs. Jews and non-Caucasoids? And you seem to imply that PotLEoZ was acceptable establishment opinion at some point? When? AFAIK, insofar as the Protocols and such were presented to the public, it was at the fringes, and on some rich fellow's personal dime (Henry Ford).

    It's been fifty years, at least, since this sort of thing has been leveled at Jews in the establishment press. That whole time, it's been fine to point out "WASP" "dominance." Jewish Hollywood and the northeastern Jewish media establishment have been using "WASPs" as their punching bag for generations.

    Let's not lose sight of the fact that criticizing Jews is geiger-needle-burying radioactive, and obvious animus against "WASPs" barely budges the needle, if it registers at all.

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  26. "...many a female pundit's output consists in large part of demands that society's structures and values be revolutionized so that she, personally, will be considered hotter-looking."

    Just as many a dweeb poster's output on intellectual blogs consists in large part of bitterly bemoaning the fact that desirable women stupidly insist on finding guys other than him attractive. Just saying.

    Maureen Dowd is an idiot. If not for a few strokes of incredible luck, she'd be a meddling PTA president in upstate New York.

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  27. Blue-eyed whites is a code word for non-Jewish whites. (A smaller percentage of Jews have light-colored eyes than non-Jews do.)

    Who pumped these black racists full of this weird little meme? I noticed that Toni Morrison's _The Bluest Eye_ is an earlier expression of it.

    In any case, was it really non-Jewish whites who screwed up the financial system? This ugly talk spreads in many unpleasant directions.

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  28. Dowd must not have had any ideas for a column. She had to reach into her sack of hack writer themes.

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  29. I have green eyes too. They were 'prized' higher than blue eyes in Elizabethian England..but i think they are genetically 'not quiet' blue eyes.

    off topic, has anyone ever seen the curious amber-golden color of some east european eyes? very attractive on a woman.

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  30. Anyone else remember when the arguments presented in 'The Israel Lobby' were considered suspect because the authors were blonde and blue-eyed? 'Blue-eyed' is a dog whistle slur for smearing some whites groups while excluding another influential white group, which stereotypically doesn't have blue eyes. Much like blonde jokes told by people from populations that don't have blonde hair.

    There was something during the filming of Lawrence of Arabia where an Arab lady thought Peter O'Toole was terrifying because of "...the horrible blue eyes which looked, she said, like the sky shining through the eye-sockets of an empty skull." So the preference for blue eyes is certainly not universal. It could be cultural, biological, or a bit of both. Even so, I'd be willing to chip in a dollar to buy Ms. Dowd some tinted contacts if it'd help.

    My eyes are green, by the way, which is obviously the best color.

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  31. I recall this from Dunnigan: over 2/3s of WWII aces had blue eyes.

    Well, the top twenty aces of WWII were all German. So I'm not sure that 2/3 blue eyes is overrepresentation. FWIW this also explains why there aren't a lot of WWII movies that really focus on the air war; 'preternaturally skilled fighter aces versus bombers' is just a very hard story to tell in a way that doesn't make the fighter pilots look sympathetic if not outright heroic.

    I do remember reading a long time ago that blue eyes were vastly overrepresented among corporate CEOs, but I've never been able to dig up the reference online. It would be interesting to know whether this was due to some intrinsic difference, or due to people's perceptions of the blue-eyed.

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  32. Matriarchy Is Hell3/29/09, 10:42 AM

    I watch CNBC finance network these days to keep an eye on the markets. That channel features a continuous stream of very attractive female hosts throughout the day. Recently the channel did self promotion spots featuring the various hosts' bios and I was stunned to learn that the ladies all come from top colleges, Ivy League or otherwise exclusive.

    This was a stunning revelation because it appears from the CNBC female hosts' daily input and commentary that they were all hired for their looks and not their brains. But it turns out they do have the brainpower apparently.

    This evidence corroborates the previous commenter that even highly intelligent women are largely uninterested in strategic thinking, problem solving analysis and complex system theory etc.

    Last week host Dylan Radigan left CNBC essentially for friction caused by his thought crimes against the bankers. Actually what he had done was 1) analyze the problems in the system 2) develop a problem solving macro theory and 3) argue his position daily by pointing to the technical issues that must be addressed to heal the system. That is male behavior.

    This goes to the fundamental flaws of matriarchy. There really is no there there. Only a tiny percentage of the most intelligent women in the human population are interested in doing the sort of thinking that is required to maintain the technical framework of an advanced society. Females are consistently bored by these thinking processes. The genders tend to group separately at social gatherings mostly based on thinking processes. The males are obsessed with Theory > Argument > Technical Application > Solution. In general even the high IQ females are simply not interested, mostly because they have other fish to fry.

    For all of the gender equalization that has gone on in this society, any viewer can still watch a channel like CNBC, or Fox Business or Bloomberg and see the females consistently go silent or otherwise add very little incisive commentary, once the conversation gets into theoretical or technical issues. There are only a handful of females in the entire country who are capable of holding their own on these issues and the fundamental reason is: they are not interested in doing so.

    There is a female Wall Street analyst, Meredith Whitney, who correctly diagnosed the banking problems and cogently argued her macro theory during this entire crisis. Bravo. This woman is rightfully a heroine to many women across the country. The ladies hold her up as an example and say "See! We CAN do this!" And it's true. A small number of women can be bothered to do these jobs well.

    But it is interesting to see Whitney on finance TV shows with female hosts. The female hosts do exactly as they do with any male "technician": they mostly go quiet and offer no incisive commentary of their own on the issue being discussed. So it's not that the female hosts seek to avoid engaging in a "technical" discussion with males for whatever reason. The high IQ female hosts display the same behavior no matter the gender of the technician. The high IQ male hosts, on the other hand, are constantly engaging on the nuts and bolts and the theory. They just can't help themselves.

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  33. She may have brown eyes, but she has great taste in music.

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  34. Being a blue-eyed (and fair-haired) white mal myself, I can't help but derive a certain perverse pleasure at being the boogeyman of the differently-hued.

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  35. Boring eyes! That's what I'll call my hazel brown-green eyes now because it's true without being a mouthful.

    BTW, I'm currently reading Envy: A Theory of Social Behaviour by Helmut Schoeck and I highly recommend it.

    I have a somewhat related problem to the Dowd family eye drama. I have red hair while three of my daughters are brunettes. This wouldn't be too bad were it not for stranger after stranger making pitying comments to us that it was too bad they didn't get my hair. Something like that can really affect a girl.

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  36. George Bush the younger has brown eyes so she got her facts wrong. Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan is Greek, Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs is Jewish, and John Mack of Morgan Stanley is Lebanese so her WASP banker crack is not correct either.

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  37. Blue-gray-green eyes are most striking and seem to change color depending on the person's particular surroundings, clothing, lighting, and even mood. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Green-grey-eyes.JPG

    How wonderful is the physical diversity amongst White people! Without the colorfulness of White features in terms of eyes and hair humans would be a boring and extremely uniform black/brown haired + brown-eyed mass.

    I for one would like for these diverse White features to live on forever; however, we live in an increasingly darkening world, and reversion to the standard dark-haired/dark-eyed norm would mean the loss of many unique human traits, probably forever.

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  38. I have brown eyes, though my father was a blue-eyed banker.

    Considering the way PC reasons about original sin, I wonder, am I too to blame for the suffering of the Brown-Eyed classes?

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  39. I'm always struck by the simpleminded view that some men hold in regard to any woman's criticism of appearances. I've always found men to be hyper-sensitive about their short, slender statures, as they find reasons to criticize tall, hunky men. I've often chuckled at some particular guy at a given event, as I wondered what would be left of him once he removed his suit jacket (along with those shoulder pads). And then the poor dears begin to lose their hair even before they're out of their 20s. Would having blue eyes help these guys?

    All by way of asking if it's really necessary to generalize about women based on the asinine outpourings of that Dowd woman.

    By the way, can we finally lose the term "white-bread?"

    Yes, I find this a disgusting expression, and even moreso since it has found its way into "respectable" writings and conversation.

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  40. Let's be honest about what this is about.

    Steve is sort of right. Female pundits and particularly female liberal commentators, are often at the heart of Yuppie status games, and female culture does drive most of Liberal status games, but it's not what Steve says (women wanting society to be structured so they are more attractive).

    No, it goes back to the old, old struggle betwee the first colonists at Jamestown: the people who have the land and are aristocrats and wealthy, and powerful, and "lean and hungry" types wanting opportunities elsewhere, to move up as well.

    Now, in Yuppie circles women like Dowd (and younger counterparts) drive social mores in the yuppie circles, because no one is more status-obsessed than women.

    NO ONE.

    Women (in yuppie circles) hate hate hate "prole" type folks like the Palins, and the old-line "WASPS" (folks like Ayers, son of a Chicago millionaire, or Dorhn, are fine) but the REAL enemy is the White Middle Class. Incipient Andrew Jacksons who the female Yuppie circle HATES HATES HATES.

    Men, in Yuppie circles, have to mouth the platitudes for sex and companionship. It's that simple. It's why Yuppie politics boils down to one giant episode that never ends of Sex and the City.

    Juat as the female DC social circle sought to punish Jackson's proteges (and Jackson himself) during his time, and in Bush's time HATED the "boring" middle class nature of his family life, so too does much of Yuppie politics center around the biggest threat:

    ORDINARY WHITE PEOPLE.

    America has always been in this struggle, from Andrew Jackson's days and probably back to Jamestown. [It's notable that the old-line families sought to keep new arrivals from settling out West, and made all sorts of idiotic agreements with hostile Indians just to keep a check on westward movements and thus their land more expensive and valuable, a policy that nearly wiped out the colony on several occasions.]

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  41. I think her obsession with eye color is in itself racist. She should be re-educated.

    It'd be interesting to see her cough up any of her other bias-es, but I'd bet she'd rather die than admit to anything un-pc ever.

    In any case, I doubt if anyone notices her eye color, her age and weight might be issues though.

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  42. From brown-eyed Camille Paglia:

    "I have been at war with WASPiness since I grew up in upstate New York in the 1950s and early '60s. There is no way to describe the brute social power of the WASP establishment of that period -- the smooth, bland, coded good manners; the hidden past interconnections of families and business associations; the mysterious alliance between chic sororities (overpopulated by blondes) and the most prestigious Presbyterian church in town.

    "College at the State University of New York at Binghamton in the revolutionary mid-1960s was a delicious relief for me. The counterculture was booming amid a fantasia of new influences from psychedelia, African-American blues, London Mod, and Andy Warhol's glittery Factory. And at my college there were so many dynamic, super-articulate, politically activist, and screamingly funny Jewish students from downstate New York that I felt the world had changed forever.

    -------------

    "Long story short: The old WASP elite may be gone, but its style lingers and still typifies our central institutions in business and politics."

    http://www.salon.com/opinion/paglia/2008/07/09/russert/index3.html


    Coded good manners... overpopulated by blondes... they linger still... snuff them out... replace with politically activist and SCREAMINGLY FUNNY Jews from downstate New York.

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  43. Well now, excluding the Dimons and Paulsons, ain't there a plethora of identifiably Jewish Americans at the heart of the whole business of derivatives and financial meltdown and bailouts?

    Wouldn't that be more more accurately like black eyed white people? What is the eye color distribution among Jewish Americans?

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  44. rob: actually, it was the real lawrence of arabia, TE Lawrence, who encountered this, and wrote about it in his book 7 pilliars of wisdom. The bedoin women thought his eyes looked like an empty skull held up to the sky.
    bbartlog: madison grant (another evil wasp) pointed out in his book, conquest of continent, that the best sharpshooters in the army were almost all light eyed.

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  45. Perhaps Mr. Lula believes that Americans, are too ignorant to know that some Brazilians, the majority of which are Portuguese, have blue eyes. While it was the brown eyed Spanish who invented the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the Portuguese didn't wait long before not only participating but controlling aspects of it. As to his feigning ignorance of Portuguese, Hispanic, and black bankers/investors, he and his party have taken huge bribes from his fellow Latin American fascists, and from criminal (including money laundering), drug and weapon's organizations from Nigeria and Mozambique, Lula is as corrupt as the day is long, as is his party. Nor would I lend any credence to his claims to caring about the poor in his country, he profits from the sex tourism industry, and that includes the aspect of it which exploits children, he takes foreign aid intended to help the millions of homeless children in his country, and uses it for himself. He does NOTHING to help those children. He, his administration and party take bribes, and ignore the oppressive poverty that exists in his country, he allowed his army, when in Haiti as UN troops rape and kill Haitians.
    Lula's party, the PT, controls 6 of the biggest 10 pension funds of the so-called estatais, the state-run companies, and Lula fattens himself off of these monies.

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  46. testing99, you make many EXCELLENT points in your stellar post.

    I fully agree, after experiencing it for many years first hand in college, work, and beyond, that MANY leftist/yuppie White, Jewish, and Black American women are by far the most status-obsessed, hypercompetitive, and materialistic people in American society today. They have such an irrationally large chip on their collective shoulder that it's ridiculous, even laughable.

    In fact, these women are rapidly becoming THE most socially, politically, and economically corrosive groups in American society as they take out their seemingly limitless personal vendettas (whether long-term singleness, childlessness, failure to thrive economically, etc) on the mythical 'evil WASP patriarchy.'

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  47. If it's hard to tell what color people's eyes are from those pics, maybe we could force them to wear something that would really stand out, so that we know whom to hate.

    Yellow is a pretty good color for that.

    I'll run it by Ms. Dowd.

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  48. testing99, you are projecting your own tiny universe of experience onto the rest of the globe again. You sound like the Jewish lady from Manhattan with that famous quote "I don't know anyone who voted for Nixon".

    The only men who feel the need to "mouth platitudes for sex and companionship" are the usual suspects (insecure, needy, passive-agressive losers) who play the dating game exactly wrong.

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  49. Testing99,

    Im glad you are seeing the light of what Ive been preaching about the elite and their hatred of Joe Sixpack.

    Joe Sixpack is the only one the elite can revel in their superiority over without being racist. So they love to see Joe Sixpack's kids having to go to "diverse" schools, while the elite magnificently shield their kids from the same experiences.

    The elite enjoy outsourcing tech jobs and insourcing tech help because many Joe Sixpacks got programming certificates because he thought he'd be useful in the economy that way. Some of this tension is to reduce competition on the sexual market. You see, some of those redneck kids grow up tall, well-built, and very good looking............and are real sexual competition for the children of the elite in a way little Mexicans and large blacks will never be.

    Tom Wolfe wrote in one of his novels that the ugly things that truly motivate people hardly EVER get mentioned aloud, or even in print. Who is YOUR competition in life, really? Its your sexual competition,..........the kind of men or women to whom the members of the opposite sex that YOU desire might find attractive. Its like Victor Hugo's blonde French girls who passionately hated the beautiful Esmerelda in "The Hunchback of Notre Dame". My younger cousins are a perfect example of this. We are one generation removed from a dirt floor Testing (grandfather), but my younger cousins are all 6'3 to
    6'5, well-built and nice to look at. One in particular is Ralph Lauren material (he just married a petite baby-doll blonde). One of my cousins is a megababe, prettier than any girl on Roissy's last little list. She is almost 6' feet tall and stacked and a successful professional. We are one generation from being log-cabin-poor-whites. They all went to college and 2 are professors. You think the "elite" are threatened by people like them? You bet your life they are.


    Side note...............Maureen Dowd was no doubt one of the prettiest women in her day, and still is easily one of the prettier women of her age bracket. Dowd didn't marry or have kids despite having so much going for her, hence my contention that careerism amongst women is best advanced AFTER they have their families, not before. Start late, let HIM put you through grad-school. Those obviously superior genes didn't get passed on. Meanwhile Octomom has burdened us with 8 genetically lesser people. I dont agree with Dowd's political convictions in most instances, but I'll give her this.............she has turned her wit on Dems (the Clintons especially) a good deal, and thus is much more fair to the right than most journalists are.



    P.S...........Im intrigued by grey eyes. My eyes are extremely blue, so much so that some people still stare, but I find that large brown eyes and green eyes are quiet beautiful. LARGE EYES are what catches people's attention, and if the color of those eyes is an intense shade of green-blue-grey-brown-or even amber............they will be regarded as attractive.

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  50. "blue eyes"

    A blue-eyed native-of-Mexico friend of mine collects Amerindian masks, and in them blue eyes supposedly represent the devil, or evil; goes back to Conquistador days.

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  51. Well, I'M not to blame since I've green eyes. Actually, all we green eyed folk have to contend with is the moniker "Green-eyed Monster". That and being overlooked continually in the Brown eyed vs Blue eyed Wars. That said, HEY, we are here and we are proud of our tiny minority status! Where are OUR special programs and reparations, President Obama?
    ;)

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  52. All this talk about eyes got me thinking about Meg Foster.

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  53. And on the topic of Brazil, that vibrant country of the future, comes this story just out on Drudge:

    http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSN28291897

    The government of Rio de Janeiro is building concrete walls around the favelas on the outskirts of town. They claim it is to prevent their encroachment into the surrounding jungle (no doubt a fragile ecosystem). Poverty is something that progressives hate to see - now they won't have to see it.

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  54. Eye colour is just something a lot of males don't notice, including myself.

    I remember reading the book "The Outsiders" in school, which is a story about a bunch of street punks. At the beginning, the male protagonist described at length the colour of all his brothers' eyes. That was a dead giveaway that the book was written by a female.

    Come to think of it, I don't even know what colour my own mother's eyes are. I'll have to check next time I see her.

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  55. Bet ya didn't know the four men who wrote the Gospels, Matthew and Mark, and Luke and John, had blond hair and blue eyes-- according to a church ceiling built by Austrians in Minnesota.

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  56. There is a female Wall Street analyst, Meredith Whitney, who correctly diagnosed the banking problems and cogently argued her macro theory during this entire crisis. --MisH

    Yes, she is a female. More to the point, she is a Whitney. That's one of the most accomplished families in American history.

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  57. d.c. watcher3/30/09, 5:42 AM

    People in north eastern Europe considered dark eyes to be the "devils" eye, a theme in the The Painted Bird, a pseudo-autobio (as we learned years after its publication) by Jerzy Kosinski who claimed he survived the holocaust in Poland. Turns out he may have been fairly safe in Russia, but that's another story.
    The mistrust of dark eyes among some Europeans may be a result of Cossacks, Avars, Huns and Turks and Arabs invading over the centuries.

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  58. I recall this from Dunnigan: over 2/3s of WWII aces had blue eyes.

    How about the number of Super Bolws won by blue-eyed quarterbacks? Last time I checked, it was in the 80-90% range.

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  59. anonymous said...

    High intelligence in women is like men's nipples that way - form without purpose.

    Actually high intelligence women can have very intelligent kids. Other than that their smarts can be a waste.

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  60. High intelligence in women is like men's nipples that way - form without purpose.

    My parents were physicians, and I noticed that their physician colleagues who married dingbat nurses had stupid kids. But if you're OK with stupid kids, intelligence in women is superfluous...

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  61. My parents were physicians, and I noticed that their physician colleagues who married dingbat nurses had stupid kids. But if you're OK with stupid kids, intelligence in women is superfluous...

    Well said...it is very likely most of our intellegence comes from our mothers. Marry a stupid woman and the stupidity rubs off onto the children...

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  62. Yes, she is a female. More to the point, she is a Whitney

    a Whitney also wrote the Sanskrit Oxford dictionary.

    I am a woman and I find Maureen Dowd very irritating to say the least--

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  63. NYT is the voice of upper class new yorkers. Dowd is doing her job of creating a distraction by inciting racial resentment. NYT and WSJ will do everything possible to divert attention from the policies of the last thirty five years which have shifted wealth from the middle classes by lowering the top income tax rate and increasing the payroll tax. An

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  64. Victoria, I agree with you about men being more sensitive about looks than they let on. Men with Brad Pitt level looks rarely succeed as leaders because other men resent their beauty. This is a major reason, in my opinion, why Mitt Romney lost to McCain. While women resent beautiful women they also admire them whereas straight men don't.

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  65. "In fact, these women are rapidly becoming THE most socially, politically, and economically corrosive groups in American society as they take out their seemingly limitless personal vendettas (whether long-term singleness, childlessness, failure to thrive economically, etc) on the mythical 'evil WASP patriarchy.'"

    Status obsessed northeastern feminists cause more social problems than welfare recipients and illegal aliens?

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  66. Steve:

    Of course, blue-eyed people eat less white bread than brown-eyed people. It's quite a few years since they ate any brown-eyed people at all.

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  67. "In fact, these women are rapidly becoming THE most socially, politically, and economically corrosive groups in American society as they take out their seemingly limitless personal vendettas (whether long-term singleness, childlessness, failure to thrive economically, etc) on the mythical 'evil WASP patriarchy.'"

    Yes. Women's lib has been immensely destructive to Western society. Not just the political movement, also the mechanical replacement of "women's work" by washing machines, pre-fab microwave meals, television, etc.

    Men and women are competing in the workplace and public/work sphere (men's sphere) instead of complementing one another in the private sphere (women's sphere). Women have also abandoned some of their old "helper" institutions like the churches.

    In the background to all this is the higher cost of living. One man's wage isn't usually enough to support a family anymore. Add on no fault divorce and all the "free love" criticism of the marriage institution among smarterpeople: reduces male incentives to achieve (why bother when it just means higher child support payments?). Which probably reduces a certain facet of the economy that "women's jobs" cannot replace.

    What drives all this even harder is that instead of resisting this, women are pushing for these changes.

    The only thing that *will* reverse this is the economic collapse. Matriarchy only works when there is a lot of low hanging fruit around, enough to feed the kids and put a roof over your head. Resource scarcity means tougher competition and even fighting (wars), which is a male specialty.

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  68. Status obsessed northeastern feminists cause more social problems than welfare recipients and illegal aliens?

    Too close to call. Seriously.

    --Senor Doug

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  69. none of the above4/2/09, 8:29 PM

    I deal with very intelligent women all the time, and they sure seem to be using that intelligence for practical, useful stuff, like solving hard technical problems, planning out academic conferences, running large projects, treating sick children, and treating sick pets. I think some of the above commenters might need to get out a bit more.

    It seems to me that our problem with very smart women isn't that their intelligence is useless, it's that a lot of the way we've got for smart people to be successful in life grew up around men who had wives at home and no biological clock ticking in the background. We've set things up so that smart women pretty-much can't have kids until they're in their 30s, without damaging their careers. That has all kinds of bad consequences, from dysgenic effects to lots of very smart, very capable professionals leaving the workplace at 38, to simply grinding a lot of women up in the gears of what's expected of them and the limited set of choices biology offers them.

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