to be both boring and revealing at the same time. In Slate today, Bazelon writes:
Lead plaintiff Frank Ricci, on the other hand, framed his victory in terms that evoke America, the land of opportunity: "If you work hard, you can succeed in America, and all of these guys worked hard," he said on the steps of New Haven's federal courthouse. True. But only part of a larger truth. And in historical terms, a strange sort of rhetoric to hear a white person laying claim to.
Read that twice.
(As a commenter suggested, is it really strange that a guy named Frank Ricci is laying claim to the central message of the Collected Works of Sylvester Stallone?)
"Who? Whom?" That's all the mainstream media thinks about.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
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30 comments:
I'll fix it for this poor brain-addled idiot: "True. But only part of a larger truth. And in historical terms, true in most every nation, most every region, most every generation. In short, historically the way of civilization."
PR
I agree with Bazelon. It's strange that, in a country built by white men, which is still majority white, a white man has to spend years of his life fighting our new apartheid system just to get fair treatment from the government.
Anon it is not strange at all.
Emily Bazelon is a WOMAN. As such, it is in her interest to obtain opportunities by virtue of her gender, against White Men.
Consider her own appointment as a Yale Fellow. Could that have come given her rather undistinguished (compared to other, more experienced litigators and ex Judges and so on) on the basis of merit vs. Gender?
Please.
Bazelon is every White Woman writ large. All benefit greatly from Affirmative Action, immigration (cheap nannies/maids make boring house-husbands irrelevant) and so on.
Look at TV sometime, and tick off how many ads are male or female oriented. Almost all ads save beer commericals are female oriented, and beer commercials must tread the line carefully against appear too "male" ... and often play upon "fears" of offending a Black guy, ala the Coors commercial with the dart that hits the beer can instead of the Black yuppie guy.
Color this "dub." Women have a huge, vested interest in AA, particularly since marriage is now the minority of women. Bazelon is merely expressing the views of most White Women in America.
Yes, strange to hear if you agree with the implicit assumption that white people generally stole and cheated their way into everything they have.
Otherwise this quote is an ordinary horatio alger-type sentiment.
What's disturbing is that after this happened to him he's still singing the praises of America. The least advantaged group in society is the most patriotic. Someone needs to tap blue collar white guys on the shoulder and tell them it ain't their country anymore.
Its not really possible to understand the significance of this utterance without reading Kevin MacDonald's "Culture of Critique".
testing99, it's not about "white women" per se. 54% of white women voted against Obama
Emily Bazelon and Betty Friedan (and Tim Wise, and Stephen Jay Gould, and too many others to name) have something else in common.
I would second the Culture of Critique recommendation.
When I visit my grandfathers' graves - the prison guard and the laborer, I'll pass Emily's words along. I'll do the same at my grandmothers', the seamstress and the maid. Going back further in America is a little difficult - I hit orphanages and the like - but still, my Slavic great grandfather who shipped over here to drudge on a railroad would, if he were alive, be glad to hear what this twat thinks of him.
Like young Hoste says though, if these working class guys are still blabbering platitudes and singing the praises of this low-fi gulag whose owners hate them, then who cares what happens to them?
testing99 always brings a smile to my face, if not an outright chuckle.
testing...don't ever stop being you!
Emily Bazelon is a WOMAN! Thank you t99. What else is she, though? There's something else...I'm just...well, not sure I should mention it....
Its not really possible to understand the significance of this utterance without reading Kevin MacDonald's "Culture of Critique".
Well, yes and no. Of course Breyer and Ginsburg voted against the guy. But what about Souter and Stevens. Stevens maybe gets a pass because he was well into adulthood when blacks...let's face it ... were pretty screwed. But Souter, what's his excuse. The guy lives about as far from blacks as it is possible to be on the Eastern seaboard, is obviously not seeking status, I think we have a case of a latter day Thoreau on our hands. Sotomayor will be an improvement, at least she isn't a self-hating whitey.
That's brilliant! It's only part of a larger truth. So until we express the truth that encompasses the entirety of existence, Ms. Bazelon will constantly shoot us down. Awesome. Very drawing-room-philosopher Hegelian!
Inspired by testing99, I checked out in the GSS what women think of affirmative action and immigration:
http://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2009/05/23/womens-attitudes-towards-immigration/
http://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2009/04/27/most-women-strongly-oppose-preferences-in-hiring-blacks/
In response to stari_momak, I would point out that the white New England people are not now, nor have they ever been, a majority of the American people. In order to get a majority of votes, they need allies. If they hook up with the minorities and import more minorities, they get to 51%.
In the FDR years, white Northeastern liberals ruled in coalition with Southern Democrats. In the 1960's, they turned on the Southern Democrats, drove them out of the coalition, and substituted minorities.
It's been a rough road, at times, getting the new coalition to majority status, but they are there now.
From Wikipedia:
"Bazelon is a Senior Research Scholar in Law and Truman Capote Fellow for Creative Writing and Law at Yale Law School."
Jeff Williams said...
In the FDR years, white Northeastern liberals ruled in coalition with Southern Democrats. In the 1960's, they turned on the Southern Democrats, drove them out of the coalition, and substituted minorities.
I generally agree, but let me add two things. Before the election of FDR America had conservative New Englanders in office all throughout the 1920's. Second, you are looking at New England as a monolithic block, which it wasn't before WW2. The descendants of the original Protestant settlers still had influence up until that time, and projected onto the entire country their generally conservative nature. Beginning in the 1930's and culminating in the election of 1960, the descendants of the Ellis Island immigrants multiplied and eventually took over the Northeast.
"But Souter, what's his excuse." someone asked.
A guess? He's gay. Kindred spirit.
Yes, what strange rhetoric coming from a person of Italian ancestry, brought up with middle class values, living in a working class part of town, employed in an old-fashioned job. I sure Bazelon has never heard any Jewish, Irish, Italian, Korean, or other immigrant utter these or similar words.
I'm sure Ricci would never identify with Rocky Balboa, nor would Rocky, a white person, lay claim to the rhetoric of success through hard work. Nope, that's totally not at all the message of EVERY SINGLE ROCKY MOVIE.
I would also recommend the Culture of Critique for anyone who wants to know why a white woman -- who obviously believes she deserves her place at Yale! -- would write something like that.
@testing99;
TV ads are directed primarily at women because they make something like 80% of the buying decisions. Women also watch more tv than men, except for sports. Carl's Jr. shows no compunction at appearing too "male" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8nJKa13sBo
White women may get a slight AA boost in the workplace but nothing compared to the preference blacks and hispanics receive.
In Steve's VDARE article on this topic, he noted that to get to the four-fifths rule on IQ, you have to have a cutoff of 74 IQ.
70 is the cutoff for qualifying for services as developmentally disabled.
Now that's some scary firefighters, then.
"Bazelon is every White Woman writ large."
Oh, hell, testing99, could you allow for the exceptions, however few you think them?
Here I am, a married, white, stay-at-home mother, about to re-enter the workforce if the economy ever recovers, in a traditional women's profession still so heavily female that the only affirmative action in effect is racial/ethnic/linguistic? In other words, it will work against me.
I've seen my husband lose out on academic jobs because of AA, his salary stagnate because of H1-Bs, and I have sons I care about. I am invested in my men, and so are most women I associate with. I want my daughters to MARRY successful fulfilled white men, and be able to have sizeable families.
And then there's a sense of fair play and honor, which is not quite dead yet.
Emily Bazelon is not pro-affirmative action because she's a white woman. She is pro-affirmative action because she is a stupid, elitist thoughtless hack, who somehow got into the best law school in the land.
Bazelon is married, most likely to a white man. Wonder what she would think if he had been discriminated against?
--White women may get a slight AA boost in the workplace but nothing compared to the preference blacks and hispanics receive.--
This is so true. A relative has a JD from Georgetown and specializes in EEO law (unfortunately). After being layed off following a merger, she went unemployed for about 14 months. She reported that unless you are black, they don't want you to run the EEO department. She reported attending interviews and watching as comparatively poor candidates walked away with lucrative jobs. She become very embittered. Then she landed a job deploying an entire EEO department; now she is happy and once again pissed at white people (men in particular). An unbelievable story that illustrates how liberalism must be some kind of religion. I remember when the Bell Curve was published and I asked of her opinion. She said it was a bad book because it purported that black people were stupid.
Its not really possible to understand the significance of this utterance without reading Kevin MacDonald's "Culture of Critique".
I don't think it's possible to understand Evil Neocon/T99/Whiskey without CoC or an equivalent, either. Competing explanation, you see. And without any actual evidence, one must make up the gap with repetition devoid of any "Scots-Irish" "the other fellow has a point of view" silliness.
A relative has a JD from Georgetown and specializes in EEO law (unfortunately) ... Then she landed a job deploying an entire EEO department; now she is happy and once again pissed at white people (men in particular).
To take this in a slightly different direction, the above is why the parasite economy will eventually gut the real, productive economy in the US. The government comes along and passes a bunch of laws that mandate employment positions that would not exist in a free market. Your relative's salary is basically another tax her employer pays, the costs for which are passed on to customers, shareholders, etc. Similarly, in a free society nobody would pay Emily Bazelon to write about extruded and rococco laws that would be called totalitarian in another era.
Such jobs for unhappy women with a sense of entitlement are possible, of course, because in the real economy, people are so productive that society can pay the freight for pseudo-lawyers from Georgetown and Yale without everybody taking too big a hit in their living standards.
But when cap-and-trade finally gets going, along with all the other totalitarian schemes Barack Hussein and his social engineer buddies have in mind, this dynamic will change.
Strange coming from a white guy? What, Ricci got his $2 million "pink skin trust fund" and then squandered it so he had to get work as a fireman? I'm not sure what's more inexplicable, the bizarre assumption, whatever it is, that underlies Brazelon's statement, or the fact that she thinks its so widely shared that she doesn't even have to spell it out.
-Adam Greenwood
If you try hard for decades, and sue, and have a union behind you, and get a favorable 5-4 decision in your Supreme Court case - you can succeed! Yay America!
After thinking about it for a second, I think Ms. Bazelon and many others are laboring under a basic logical error, that of a mistaken reversal. They have erroneously inferred that because most elites are white that most whites are elite. People like Frank Ricci simply don't exist for them. Though they pay lip service to "nuance" their world-view is black and white, literally. ALL minorities (including women) are victims and ALL white males are victimizers. Justice is siding with the victims. Therefore justice is to punish Ricci and his coworkers.
Emily Bazelon's last name struck me as curious until I finally remembered where I had run across it before. Turns out her grandfather was Chief Judge of the D.C. U.S. Court of Appeals back in the 60's and 70's. Here is the relevant excerpt from Alan Dershowitz's Chutzpah:
Judge Bazelon rarely went to synagague, but he was a Jewish judge in every sense. He saw the world through his Jewish background. His humor was frequently in Yiddish. His speeches referred to the rabbinic literature. He described himself as a secular American with a "Jewish soul." If a defendant deserved compassion but no writ of habeas corpus--or other formal legal remedy--was technically available to him, Bazelon would wink at me and order that I find some ground for issuing a "writ of rachmones." Rachmones is the Hebrew-Yiddish word for "compassion."
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