David Brooks writes in the New York Times:
Sometimes the behavioral research leads us to completely change how we think about an issue. For example, many of our anti-discrimination policies focus on finding the bad apples who are explicitly prejudiced. In fact, the serious discrimination is implicit, subtle and nearly universal. Both blacks and whites subtly try to get a white partner when asked to team up to do an intellectually difficult task. In computer shooting simulations, both black and white participants were more likely to think black figures were armed. In emergency rooms, whites are pervasively given stronger painkillers than blacks or Hispanics. Clearly, we should spend more effort rigging situations to reduce universal, unconscious racism.
Now that I think about it, this could be a deeply encoded anti-racial quota argument. I suspect Brooks might be thinking vaguely about the recent book by Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor Jr., Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It's Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won't Admit It.
But, that wouldn't make any sense combined with the violence statement. And the implication that Emergency Room Indian doctors and Filipino nurses are conspiring to inflict needless pain on NAMs is just kind of out there. What is this a reference to, anyway? Are a higher percentage of NAMs who go into emergency rooms trying to cadge free drugs while a higher percentage of whites have, like, actual broken arms? But my assumption was that white people were the big prescription pain pill addicts, so I'm just baffled...
We used to have a two-word explanation for things we didn't like: "evil spirits." But now, in a case of Occam's Razor in Action, we have a one-word explanation: "racism."
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80 comments:
I thought this guy was supposed to be reading your blog, Steve-o.
"Clearly, we should spend more effort rigging situations to reduce universal, unconscious racism."
Hmmm. So, if a black thug beats unconscious a conscious white 'racist', the knocked-out whitey may still be 'racist' in his unconscious state. How about we just kill whitey? But what if his afterlife soul still remains 'racist'. We must do something about afterlife 'racism'.
Clearly
"Sometimes the behavioral research leads us to completely change how we think about an issue."
All this 'behavioral research' is rigged to produce what researchers want.
The main problem is the findings are not understood in the larger context of social reality but judged according to moral absolutes inside a bubble.
According to our society, 'racism'--especially 'anti-black racism'--is an absolute evil regardless of why someone may not like black people. All people must like/love black people no matter how blacks act.
We must have faith in the mountain-sized magic negro who wuvs a wittle white mouse.
So, suppose non-blacks show anti-black bias due to the fact that blacks tend to be more thuggish, dangerous, thieving, and murderous. But that fact is suppressed, and the non-blacks are condemned for having negative feelings about blacks regardless as to WHY they came to feel that way.
Now, imagine if a test is done on women, and we learn that women fear men more than other women. This 'prejudice' makes sense in light of the fact that men are stronger/more aggressive than women and there's far more male on female violence than vice versa.
But suppose we ignore that context and just condemn women for being 'sexist'. Ridiculous.
Or, if we were to do a test on Jews, I'll bet many of them harbor hostile feelings toward Germans(Holocaust), Arabs(Middle East tensions, and Wasps(No Jews Allowed in country clubs).
This Jewish hostility can get out of hand, but given the historical/social context, it's at least understandable. But suppose we just condemn Jews for being 'anti-goyite'.
Brooks is saying we must have FAITH in the equality of blacks with non-blacks in everything.
But this is like telling us to have faith that some Mexican will win the gold medal in the 100 m sprint in 2016 olympics.
Next time you visit NY and walk around white areas but avoid black areas, remember you're being 'racist'. If you choose to travel to Europe than Haiti or black Africa, you are being 'racist'. If you choose to travel to Seattle or San Fran than to Detroit, you' are being 'racist'.
I mean how dare you believe that black areas are more dangerous to visit.
This is Brooks patting himself on the back for being better than us. I say he should go whole hog and go live in Detroit.
Should bureaucrats just be called Crats? Beat on the crat, beat on the crat, beat on the crat with a baseball bat.
"In fact, a mountain of research shows that increases in prison terms have done nothing to deter crime. "
Um, bullshit.
The NYT does allow non-PC comments, which shock some readers:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/11/opinion/brooks-beware-stubby-glasses.html?comments#permid=57
Beliavsky
Boston
"Both blacks and whites subtly try to get a white partner when asked to team up to do an intellectually difficult task."
Considering that whites score on average one standard deviation above blacks on IQ tests, this make sense.
Jan. 11, 2013 at 11:01 a.m.RECOMMEND
rjpaquin
Norton Shores Michigan
Please, explain further. Right now the hairs on the back of my neck are up. Help me out!
Using the word "rigging" in this context is inflammatory. Or did I just betray myself as subconsciously prejudiced?
"For example, many of our anti-discrimination policies focus on finding the bad apples who are explicitly prejudiced...Clearly, we should spend more effort rigging situations to reduce universal, unconscious racism."
This is liberal "thought" in a nutshell: Start with a view (in this case, that any relatively negative view of blacks is invalid, even when held by blacks) based on absolutely no evidence. Even better if this "view" is contrary to common sense. Next spend zillions harassing, err, "training" people to not hold such views. Then when learning people still hold such views, under no circumstance consider that your view may be wrong, instead double down on your efforts.
There's nothing that be can done with people like this. There's no point in debating with them. To them 2+2 = 5 and that's all there is to it. I'm starting to think Pinochet really was onto something.
"In fact, a mountain of research shows that increases in prison terms have done nothing to deter crime. "
Okay, how about we reduce terms and relocate the prisoners to Brooks' community.
A quick scan of the comments there suggests that "Fox News viewer" is to the typical New York Times reader what "NAM" is here. I wonder if NYT readers believe the apparent dimness of Fox News viewers is due to nature, nurture, or some combination thereof.
"For example, many of our anti-discrimination policies focus on finding the bad apples who are explicitly prejudiced...Clearly, we should spend more effort rigging situations to reduce universal, unconscious racism."
We are all Joseph K's, and it's the Jewish elite that now accuses all of us. We are all on trial for crimes we didn't even commit. We might be 'guilty' somewhere in our 'unconsciousness'.
Btw, if we are indeed fighting bad apples who are explicitly prejudiced, how do Jews get to make movies like RULES OF ENGAGEMENT, TAKEN, TAKEN 2, MACHETE, RED DAWN REMAKE, etc and get away with it?
How come US continues to show imperialist Israel with aid while being utterly bigoted toward Iran with no nukes?
How come Harvard and Yale gets to discriminate against goy whites in favor of Jewish whites?
I guess it aint a bad apple as long as it's kosher.
And, what about 'affirmative action' and 'disparate impact'? Seems to me our society has been vilifying and punishing entire groups of people--especially the white middle class, working class, and poor class--in the name of 'social justice'.
So, what the F is Brooks talking about?
"Using the word "rigging" in this context is inflammatory."
Shut up you crazy rigger!!
Yep, he's advocating massive authorial affirmative action with the goal of distorting the population's histograms of reality.
Unfortunately for his ilk, even if you distort the perception of reality, it remains reality. I await the return of the gods of the copybook headings!
The same policies that civilized the Irish in America [we weren't] will work.
They're not always pretty BTW.
And involve a liberal application of the shillelagh. *It* seems to hurt less when it's your own.
Then there's old schools, hard work and insisting on old values and intact families.
The Irish value a strong family life. It would be past mythical and false to contend it was maintained thru the various trials.
What we DIDN'T DO was glorify bad behavior.
Oh Churches and mean @ss nuns help as well. I mean, MEAN. But we needed it.
We don't need blacks to appear intelligent/nonthreatening; we need them to appear intelligent/nonthreatening vs whites. So, one solution is to rig situations to make blacks appear smarter and less thuggish. The other is to rig situations to make whites appear dumber and more thuggish. But I suppose an increase in white violence would be poorly received.
Was he being ironic maybe?
I thought Brooks was smarter than that.
And longer prison sentences don't reduce crime? I would think that they do, if only for the fact that the criminal is for a LONGER time behind bars and can't commit crime during that period.
'"In fact, a mountain of research shows that increases in prison terms have done nothing to deter crime. "
Um, bullshit.'
I think it's that criminals are, in general, stupid people with limited capacity to prepare for the future (or, lacking "future time orientation," I suppose). So a 1 year sentence and a 10 year sentence may not make a huge difference in their planning. On the other hand, locking criminals up for 10 years obviously keeps them out of the path of the public longer than locking them up for just 1 year, so crime levels overall will drop even if no one is deterred.
This is nothing new. Think Plato's Noble Lie. 1984. Brave New World. The King's Touch. Constantly, elites believe that the world is malleable to their own wishes, beiefs, desires, hence Canute's marching his court down to the sea and commanding his soldiers to hold back the tide. Reputedly, Xerxes had the sea whipped when storms delayed his crossing into Greece.
This is why elites grow corrupt unless they are confronted with brutal reality in some way, the human tendency to think status confers powers to change reality is too strong. History is littered with this stuff.
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The plural of anecdote is not data, but my Irish mother and her siblings did not come from an intact family, and family disintegration was not unknown then; her memory of nuns is basically of abuse and hypocrisy, nothing else. That gibes with Frank McCourt (the novelist, Angela's Ashes) who had little use for the Irish. A relative was a WWII Marine, the family story was that he (raised by Irish mother and father) he was told that the Irish make great Marines, because abuse by their mothers was so common it rolled off their backs like water off a duck.
My take is that Irish assimilation was due to: 1. No Welfare state, you worked or starved, and the Irish built most of this country (Empire State and Chrysler Building, railroads, Golden Gate Bridge, Hoover Dam); 2. No race card being available, the Irish being White; 3. No Irish media/radio/TV being available; 4. Ireland being far away; 5. A large gap in migrations, ending almost entirely in 1920; and 6. A massively expanding nation with labor in short supply and an empty continent being filled up.
LOL; You made an HBD post out of %2.6 of that article.
I think it's that criminals are, in general, stupid people with limited capacity to prepare for the future (or, lacking "future time orientation," I suppose).
And non-criminals tend to use a lower discount rate (they discount the future less), which suggests that some of these non-criminals would be criminals if not for harsh sentences.
It's ridiculous to claim that there's no deterrent effect simply because the people who are hard to deter continue to commit crime! To measure deterrence, you have to look at those who aren't committing crimes.
Having recently checked out Paradise Drive from the library, it was striking how satirical the tone was. The comic sociologist is taking himself much more seriously now that he's a NYT columnist. It's easy to imagine what a younger David Brooks would have said about the Social Animal.
"Clearly, we should spend more effort rigging situations to reduce universal, unconscious racism."
How about we paint white people black? Or vice versa?
Both blacks and whites subtly try to get a white partner when asked to team up to do an intellectually difficult task. In computer shooting simulations, both black and white participants were more likely to think black figures were armed.
There's the essence of liberalism. He merely states reality, but imagines that he has thereby refuted it.
Illustrates what happens when you have to write a column but have no idea what to write about. Call in the interns!
It appears political Commissar Brooks is designing a campaign to spend more effort rigging situations to reduce universal, unconscious realism , ahem, racism with his personal WishThink (WT). It's also interesting to watch him misdirect his readers with the desire to restrain government debt commitments today while before the election he vilified conservatives when they brought up the topic.
Thank God for the Internet, local newspapers, and YouTube; organizations and technologies that provide us a realistic glimpse here and here and here and here we and our children must endure which Brooks and the New York Times are oblivious.
Now that I think about it, this could be a deeply encoded anti-racial quota argument.
Or Swiftian satire. "rigging"? Good one, Brooks, you cunning bastard!
"Clearly, we should spend more effort rigging situations to reduce universal, unconscious racism."
Liberals do this all the time in movies, TV, etc. They invert reality which is why we have so many black doctors, scientists, etc and so few black thugs or otherwise realistic depictions of blacks in the media while whites are demonized and depicted as monsters. In spite of all the magic negroes, people still know implicitly that this is all bullsh1t. There's a limit to what rigging mass media 'reality' will do vis a vis actual reality. Rigging elections is a more practical option if you're into actual results in the real world. Who cares if you don't change people's minds as long as you get what you want.
Longer prison sentences do keep criminals off the street longer, which reduces the number of criminals on the street, hence the number of crimes. Almost too obvious to state.
There is evidence that the death penalty deters murder in certain situations however. Death seems like a short-term thing I guess.
The research is also leading to new policy approaches. The most famous involve default settings. Roughly 98 percent of people take part in organ donor programs in European countries where you have to check a box to opt out. Only 10 percent or 20 percent take part in neighboring countries where you have to check a box to opt in.
The name given to this by the people who favor it is "paternalistic liberalism". I'm skeptical about the merits of the name, but the gist of the concept is to pressure (but not outright command) people to behave in the fashion the liberal state thinks is "correct".
Of course the liberal state has been employing subtle (and often distinctly non-subtle) coercion for several decades now. The novelty lies in the new areas where they wish to employ it.
"Both blacks and whites subtly try to get a white partner when asked to team up to do an intellectually difficult task."
"So both are racist? Is that even conceivable?"
Brooks doesn't see the real problem.
If blacks and whites and whoever are 'subtly' doing stuff like that, it's because our society doesn't allow open truth and honesty. In a world that is true and honest, we would admit that certain races are better at certain tasks than other races. Of course, there are lots of dumb whites and lots of smart blacks, but there are many more smart whites.
So, if our society were honest and true, people would openly look for the best worker for the job and let the chips fall wherever they may.
But our society is dishonest and untrue, and indeed it punishes truth and honesty. That forces people to be 'subtly' honest and true instead of openly honest and true.
What Brooks calls 'subtle' evil is really just 'subtle' truth.
In a communist nation that didn't allow free speech and free enterprise, one could only be 'subtly' free through whispered conversations and black markets.
'Subtle racism' is not 'overt racism' that has gone underground. It is simply truth and honesty working quietly and gingerly around the tyranny of politically correct lies.
If you wanna hire good talent, but there isn't enough worthy candidates among blacks, you can't say it like it is. If you dare speak such truth, your career is destroyed faster than that of communists during the McCarthy Era. So, you have no choice but to go about it the 'wink wink' way.
Brooks, instead of trying to discover why truth and honesty have been forced to be 'subtle', chooses to stamp out the last vestiges of truth and honesty even in its 'subtle' form. He's a not-so-subtle neo-Stalinist.
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Imagine there's a guy named Bob. Bob is dumb, lazy, and smelly. So, I don't wanna work with him. But the prevailing law says Bob's ancestors had it bad, so I must respect, love, and admire Bob. But Bob really is dumb, lazy, and smelly.
Since I'm not allowed to speak the truth about Bob, I have no choice but to be 'subtle' in hinting that Bob... er... has... er...maybe.. some problems.
Brooks, instead of trying to have a honest discussion about Bob, is the sort that would go after even the 'subtle' discussion of Bob's problems.
Brooks is saying LET'S NOT ONLY BAN THE SPEAKING OF TRUTH BUT EVEN THE WHISPERS OF TRUTH.
Jews pull the same shit with 'antisemitism'. Jewish power is REAL, but we can't talk about. So, all we can do is 'subtly' hint about it, but Jews will say that is 'subtle' antisemitism and must be stamped out too.
Oh, to hell with Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, Mr. Brooks. Instead let's cede to the Leviathan Nanny State and all massive corporatist entities the absolute power to rule by rigging everything.
Ban truths about 'youths'.
Freud nephew, Edward Bernays who started "public relations".
Whuh? The entire news/entertainment industry does nothing but portray an inverse, Bizarro world representation of racial realities. Watch any car insurance commercial or network TV crime drama (Law and Order SVU is the epitome of this.)
Or you could have some affirmative action based very strictly on measured IQ combined with workfare and an extremely (but sensibly) strict criminal justice policy so the smartest ones have all the spending cash.
That way the smarter ones would have the most kids and the most violent ones would have fewer kids and eventually - it might take a while - the problem would be fixed for real.
It would also require not importing replacement low-skill workers while the process was underway.
If you look at Pinker's graph of the decline of the English homicide rate i wonder where the modern black American population is? Half-way done? Maybe less? So they're maybe half as violent as the English used to be?
And if you knew the reason why that decline happened you could probably do it a lot faster than 600 years.
All this could be fixed but only if people told the truth - so it won't be.
I was just thinking about how it's different in the UK. Here the (now) left-liberal, foreign-owned, London Evening Standard recently ediatorialised that one shouldn't stop and search young black men for knives/drugs purely on the colour of their skin - but included a clause that _of course it would sometimes be necessary in high crime areas to stop young black men disproportionately_ - ie the very thing they were complaining of, was also 'necessary' (implictly, due to black crime). And stop & search without probable cause is a genuine infringement of civil liberties - but the routine stop & search of young black men in Brixton means that white liberals can live more safely in Stockwell.
It's rather difficult to imagine the use of the word "rigging" in a non-satrical context here.
"The research is also leading to new policy approaches. The most famous involve default settings. Roughly 98 percent of people take part in organ donor programs in European countries where you have to check a box to opt out. Only 10 percent or 20 percent take part in neighboring countries where you have to check a box to opt in. "
I don't have a problem with that since most people would do it of they thought about, but if you even have to check a box to do it you might not.
Companies are starting to enroll people in 401k's automatically and allow them to opt out since so many people didn't opt in because it's not something people see an immediate benefit of.
Most people would check the box if you told them you would add 2000.00 to their next paycheck by doing so because that is immediate.
>Are a higher percentage of NAMs who go into
>emergency rooms trying to cadge free drugs while a
>higher percentage of whites have, like, actual
>broken arms?
Yes. (Source: I am a hospital worker.) But puzzlingly, even when black people have terminal cancer, doctors don't prescribe opiate analgesics at the same rates or dosages as for white patients. This is especially strange because all physicians know that at the end stages of cancer, everyone needs lots of dope, and a dope fiend needs even more than most. It's not necessarily racism, although it may be in part. Low prescription rates and dosages of painkillers for black patients is a real thing, and it is an enigma.
I suspect that hospital workers suspect that Hispanics and Blacks have already ingested er, problematic potions, so that they may be damaged more with more painkillers.
Or they suspect that Whites have more access to more medical information and would demand more painkillers.
"It's rather difficult to imagine the use of the word "rigging" in a non-satrical context here."
yeah, but Obama is a walking satire of the 'magic negro', but it seems like no one got the joke and made him president.
Day by day, the Onion becomes irrelevant as real news becomes more and more ludicrous.
Pretty sure the lower prescribing for blacks is a belief that they have higher pain tolerance.
Canute was making the opposite point. He was calling out his sycophantic courtiers. It was a kind of all is vanity thing actually quite touching from a Christian perspective.
I am always amazed at what the term "on average" implies to most people.
Even uttering the word can get you denounced as a racist, sexist, or a hater depending on the context.
So yes Steve, statistics are too sophisticated for most people to either understand or handle.
I use to think that most people were just afraid that the term "on average" might be misunderstood by the less intelligent....
Now I am convinced that most people just can't grasp it because they either do not understand or have never been exposed to a bell curve.
"Pretty sure the lower prescribing for blacks is a belief that they have higher pain tolerance."
I remember Nietzsche saying in passing in his Genealogy of Morals that blacks don't feel pain as much as whites. I also remember P.J. O'Rourke joking about this in a magazine piece called Foreigners Around the World. It seems that there used to be a stereotype that blacks don't feel as much pain as whites. Is this actually true? I tend to trust stereotypes, but the honest answer is I don't know.
Now I am convinced that most people just can't grasp it because they either do not understand or have never been exposed to a bell curve.
Bell curve... wasn't that one of Hitler's policies?
*
Pretty sure the lower prescribing for blacks is a belief that they have higher pain tolerance.
*
Where the hell is TRUTH in this discussion?
Nevermind, I'll carry your water, man.
Maybe we whites just bitch and whine more when faced with life's little ouwies?
". This is especially strange because all physicians know that at the end stages of cancer, everyone needs lots of dope, and a dope fiend needs even more than most. It's not necessarily racism, although it may be in part. Low prescription rates and dosages of painkillers for black patients is a real thing, and it is an enigma."
Well, if that's true, I guess that's genuine racism; however, so many doctors, nurses, and medical personnel are "minorities" that I wonder how much is "racism."
I have heard that pale, blue eyed people have a lower pain threshold -- on average -- than dark eyed people, even among just whites. Darker coloring (again, on average, does seem to come with a higher pain threshold. In England it was recognized that red-headed children would usually get any disease, especially fevers, more severely than non-red headed kids, and they used to have special cots for them. I remeber seeing a photo of one in a hospital ward. Is that "racism?"
David Brooks is still wringing his hands over this crap? Doesn't he know that non-whites from all over the world--including Africans from Africa--are beating a path to our awful, prejudiced doors?
Columns like this really are the last shout before the denouement. Latinos are already the majority-minority and close on their heels are Asians, and increasing numbers from the Levant and everywhere else on the planet.
The guilt account is used up and the country is filling with people with no pangs of conscience one way or the other over antebellum America. By the time this runs its course, blacks will be back where they were in 1880.
Brooks is saying we must have FAITH in the equality of blacks with non-blacks in everything.
As Gary Oldman's character in The Professional would say: "Bingo!"
The great irony of progressivism is that for all its adherents' conviction of their rational superiority to Christians, the progressive and the Christian alike assume the equality of man a priori.
The Christian, of course, can be forgiven his assuming the universal equality of man, because his concern is not this world and its natural constraints but the next. Christianity posits spiritual equality; it makes no claim to earthly equality. As that retrograde dead white male Kierkegaard argued, to presume otherwise is to ascribe to God the most superficial of purposes. Christianity, Kierkegaard observed, endeavors not to do away with worldly distinctions but rather to overcome the temptations thereof. To believe otherwise is blasphemy. Thus one must not confuse spiritual equality, which is the equality of eternity, with worldly likeness, which is transient and is therefore the last thing on the mind of a sincere Christian (a rare species these days, I will grant you that).
But the progressive, alas, falls prey to temptation. Because progressivism is, at bottom, a Christian heresy, the progressive confuses spiritual equality with worldly equality. If this were not so, and the progressive claim to the disinterested application of science from which the elect derive no personal benefit whatsoever (cui bono?) were true, then the progressive would actually live by the discoveries of his secular Lord and Savior, Darwin. But as any one who actually deigns to read their sacred text discovers... good Lord, Darwin's a Nazi! He advocates eugenics! And he's a racist! And a sexist! And he--gasp!--espouses preference for one's own kind over others! (And this even--horror of horrors--includes Europeans!)
How does the progressive reconcile his equalist religion with that most hateful and bigoted of entities--namely, reality? Well, simply put, like any good religious lemming, he doesn't. There are two absolutely foolproof ways to end a conversation: you can either say that the phenomena under discussion are so because God willed them so; or you can call your interlocutor a racist. The victory, in either case, is twofold: you not only win the argument, but, most importantly, your cognitive dissonance lives to fight another day.
Biblical literalists irk me for many of the same reasons that progressives do--the hysterical mode of argumentation, the imperviousness to reason, the ideological insularity. But if there's one thing you have to give the Christian fundamentalist credit for, it's this: at least he knows he's religious.
One consequence of A.A. is that if you get a black doctor you may wonder if he is really competent or just got there because of his race. This is not an issue if you have a white doctor. Thus A.A. can be seen as a kind of stigma for THOSE blacks who could have done well without it.
It seems that there used to be a stereotype that blacks don't feel as much pain as whites. Is this actually true?
If it were true, who would you know? We don't have any way of measuring how much pain a person is experiencing.
Women like to claim that women can tolerate pain better than men. Again, there is no scientific answer one way or the other. But it seems unlikely that Nature would see any advantage in making certain people relatively impervious to pain.
"The guilt account is used up and the country is filling with people with no pangs of conscience one way or the other over antebellum America. By the time this runs its course, blacks will be back where they were in 1880."
That, my friend, is the truth. Do these progressives see blacks somehow "closing the gap" between Asians and themselves any more than they've closed that between themselves and whites.
Progs are idiots.
Companies are starting to enroll people in 401k's automatically and allow them to opt out since so many people didn't opt in because it's not something people see an immediate benefit of.
Most people would check the box if you told them you would add 2000.00 to their next paycheck by doing so because that is immediate.
But having a 401(k) doesn't produce a financial benefit like that. In fact, it may not produce any financial benefit. You could be taxed at a higher rate in the future instead of a lower rate now.
You know, let’s just have at it: our friend David Brooks unleashes my inner Tarantino.
Behold the elocutionist’s execution in “Singin’ in the Rain”-- one of the most savage acts in cinema, a sado-surreal montage of evisceration, the man buried alive, transformed into an inanimate, perverse slagheap PoMo objet d’art. In a film so harmless, it’s a staggering excess of affect, an absolute horror that springs from nowhere. What perversity seized Gene Kelly with such unrelenting, such hammering hatred? It’s a Sacre du Primtemps, a veritable chestburster sequence-- do I alone have eyes to apprehend this nightmare?
Behold David Brooks-- *our* Elocutionist, the man who inspires a thousand thousand Gene Kellys with a thrill to hate. See there, the sweaty sticky Hitler-shock of hair on the shining dim pate, the s**t-eating whiney and whine as the eunuch opines, the anxiety-attack breathless bray of a barnyard ass broken in to farm boy congressional thrills, ping-ponging platitudes with “ah, uhuhuhuh what David just said” Mark Shields “do you agree?” Well, don’t you, punk? And here hear, on NPR with the onion head, Eeyore Dionne, “I think David is absolutely correct”-- is that a blush, David, or did another GOP Senator just make a pass at you under the table? “Punks” are prostitutes, in the days of Burke, and this “conservative” has propositions. Never mind how they cancel out: they’re just chits for chat, strokes for poll-cats, and David don’t you know you’re a chit yourself?
Why do we hate our Elocutionist? Well, how many “sinful Caesars’ sinful snifters hath he sneezed”? A metaphor, please? Ah, but the ass blushes, brays. If the dumb cluck’s DC technocrat tramp stamp peeks out from the back of his bobo chinos, should we point and laugh at the court catamite so rudely exposed? Oh, Moses knows! Mock the braying ass who shills for the Cathedral on the Hill and calls his wisdom “Burke” with a snide smirk. Snort at his “smarter” elite, his ethnocrat effetes, the atheist Jews who plow snow and blow the dough-- they did it with math, don’t you know!
Does old Jephthah vend his words to keep his babes in oysters and pearls? Someday they’ll make him an earl, if he keeps his brow, ass-dull, to the grindstone, milling his blandishments like wit-thin chaff. Spot the soft-on sprung as his soily digit creases the page, the spunk-speckled Portable Burke he shares, with baited breath, and a frappacino, and a furtive stare, with Captain Success (Xanax?) in the Oval Office. Spot on! Another billion or a trillion conned or coined, and only GOP extremists say “not to be”. Dumb riggers! Prudent Dave plays his part, soils his smarts, and always Mayor Bloomberg’s the next Burke we need. --This is house conservatism, taking your coat and your hat and your shoes and your wallet before you enter the Cathedral; and later you‘ll find him below, where “The Atlantic”s put up a dias and a dining table in the S&M dungeon, where you can watch him opine and dine like a one-man “Salo”.
David Brooks, I am--in the words of the late immortal Lisa Lopes-- “on your ass, n**ga.” Pace the streets, sleep the peace of saints, by all means. But rhetorically, logically, morally, historically, I’d like to flay you like a fiat dollar, down by Law. Every day, this uppity goyische takes his fantasy Lincoln Center induction speech just to tear you an elite new hymen. All Georgetown wants to hear-- all Georgetown wants to shout-- all Georgetown‘s gonna know!: David Brooks, “have a Coke, and a smile, and SHUT DA F**K UP.”
Lucius:
I find your ideas intriguing, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Like, how many times would anyone overpour into the stubby glass? These behavioral finance studies generally have limited usefulness and maximum author condescension. Will Brooks and these academics define where I have gone wrong? Then maybe the PR industry can walk across the street to the government and help them manipulate me into correct behavior.
CNN keeps rerunning a bit showing a black woman at a grocery check-out stepping up with some cash for what appears to be a university-educated left-winger playing the role of a white woman whose food stamp card has run out of funds. What appears to be a second university-educated left-winger plays the role of an emotionless white male who advocates letting the woman own her problems. He is put in his place by the black do-gooder, who appears genuinely not to know this is all set up. The CNN camera crew then rushes in out of hiding to celebrate the responsible black woman with enough spare cash to bail out the left wing actress out of stamps. Enjoy a vicarious psychological reward at home by identifying with her and being approved of by some elite media representatives. You'll get two gold stars by your name!!
Is the media reaching extremes of stage-managed propaganda as its architects reach their mid 50s or so and the zenith of their careers, having been 70s radicals in school? Or has the left just gained a hammerlock on the MSM through persistence. Why does a firm like Time Warner sponsor this stuff? Why do shareholders rights campaigns never gain much traction in the law?
But if there's one thing you have to give the Christian fundamentalist credit for, it's this: at least he knows he's religious."
Best comment so far!
He is most likely talking about matching 401k contributions by the company. This is pretty standard practice.
Whiskey said ....
Constantly, elites believe that the world is malleable to their own wishes, beiefs, desires, hence Canute's marching his court down to the sea and commanding his soldiers to hold back the tide.
...
That's not how I was taught it. He went down to the sea with his courtiers to put an end to all their flattery and claims that he ruled the sea. Wikipedia agrees with me:
.... [the tide] dashed over his feet and legs without respect to his royal person. Then the king leapt backwards, saying: 'Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings, for there is none worthy of the name, but He whom heaven, earth, and sea obey by eternal laws.' He then hung his gold crown on a crucifix, and never wore it again "to the honour of God the almighty King".[95] This incident is usually misrepresented by popular commentators and politicians as an example of Cnut's arrogance.
The emergency room thing is probably a liberal spin on reality to make it fit the Narrative. If its not from someone making a silk purse from sow's ear data, its generally the case that there's a rational reason that's been buried-
maybe NAMs statistically are more likely to be treated for different injuries than whites, which was ignored. Maybe more NAMs come in with detectable levels of drugs and can't be administered painkillers. Lots of possibilities.
I am an ER doctor. I agree that white people, especially of the upper middle class sort, are more likely to get their complaints taken seriously, including but not limited to pain meds. I don't think it stems from pre-existing bias, it comes from years of health care providers observing actual reality. Ghetto blacks often come for basically nothing, often repeatedly (diaper rash, by ambulance, on Xmas eve--yes, I've had it), while "citizens" as we call them 1) usually pay a co-pay, which serves as a deterrent to coming, and 2) are socialized to believe that ER's are for, you know, actual emergencies. Sometimes, it means a NAM with atypical sx. gets played off, but who deserves the blame for that? On the other hand, illegal immigrant males' complaints are generally taken pretty seriously, not because of some racial goodwill, but because we know from past experience that they don't come unless they are literally on the verge of death. The real question is should people be allowed to base future expectations on previous experiences in any of a number life situations.
Women like to claim that women can tolerate pain better than men. Again, there is no scientific answer one way or the other. But it seems unlikely that Nature would see any advantage in making certain people relatively impervious to pain.
Unless some group (women, say) tended to experience episodes of fairly intense pain several times during lives as part of some vital biological process.
That's a pure thought experiment, of course, with no real-life examples.
Cennbeorc
The emergency room thing is probably a liberal spin on reality to make it fit the Narrative. If its not from someone making a silk purse from sow's ear data, its generally the case that there's a rational reason that's been buried-
maybe NAMs statistically are more likely to be treated for different injuries than whites, which was ignored. Maybe more NAMs come in with detectable levels of drugs and can't be administered painkillers. Lots of possibilities.
The simplest explanation may be that NAMs are more stolid, which fits with non-malicious stereotypes. I suppose that means they may actually feel less pain, or that they just bear it better.
Cennbeorc
It wouldn't surprise me a bit if one race responded better some drug than some other race. It would be interesting to see if black people with the self-administer morphine squeeze bulb thing use less than whites.
Another possibility is how much a hassle the doctor thinks you'll be. Figure black patients don't go in with the 'I diagnosed myself with this condition after a few mins on the net, so I want this drug.' Doctors don't like prescribing narcotics. They do it when it's too much a hassle to avoid it.
Re Anonymous,"...if we were to do a test on jews I bet we'd find many of them harbor hostile feelings..." Ya think? Feelings of extreme hostility,contempt for the other,master-race complex,hypocrisy...gee are these the guys who should be runnung stuff? I mean,things in America might go downhill if we're not careful. B)Both blacks and whites see blacks as more threatening. Really? Wow. Just wow. The power of racism.Blacks have been racistized to see blacks as dangerous and violent,just like whites have. Damn this racism. Yes,lets "spend more time rigging" stuff so its better and stuff! Like Brooks says. He is the NYT conservative so all us unwashed gotta agree with him.B)Irish,a la whiskey make good Mrines because they had mean mothers? Was this in Spock? I thought Irish made good Marines because they had more balls?? I bet the British really are mad at Irish motherhood!!
A little OT but Lance Armstrong will appear on Oprah next week to discuss his beating at the hands of Chris Brown.
Another example.
One hears about the school loan default crisis. Fox News has pundits, congress critters and anchor persons all decry how kids don't pay back their loans. Why should that be?
Sometimes they say it's rising college costs. I wonder. I got my Masters at George Washington - maybe the most expensive large school in the country. It has higher tuition than Harvard, Yale, Stanford, MIT, etc. Yet I never took out a loan.
Why? I never paid tuition. They paid me through scholarships, fellowships and internships. I made more money in grad school than I had made before, out of school.
Academic ability correlates with school default rate (negatively). The students who belong in college don't take out loans, The students who don't belong there, do.
Fox News much less MSNBC never mentions that the student loan default is 5.5 times as high for blacks as for whites. Asian have an even lower rate. Like so many so-called public problems they are really black problems hidden by the code of silence that surrounds race.
Albertosaurus
"But if there's one thing you have to give the Christian fundamentalist credit for, it's this: at least he knows he's religious."
Yeah, but mostly about Zionism.
Govt school loans and stipends amounting to thousands and thousands of dollars of handouts is a welfare racket. "students" will sleep through community college classes to receive the benefit.
"It seems that there used to be a stereotype that blacks don't feel as much pain as whites. Is this actually true?"
It has been proven that redheads need more novocaine at the dentist's office, so why could this not, conceivably, be true?
Rigging must work. David Brooks had been rigged as a 'conservative' and so many people fell for it.
No one fell for it all unless you count the liberals who read him thinking they are getting their daily dose of the other side. But I don't think they even think he's a conservative.
""Women like to claim that women can tolerate pain better than men. Again, there is no scientific answer one way or the other. But it seems unlikely that Nature would see any advantage in making certain people relatively impervious to pain."
Unless some group (women, say) tended to experience episodes of fairly intense pain several times during lives as part of some vital biological process.
That's a pure thought experiment, of course, with no real-life examples.
Cennbeorc"
-As opposed to say, men, who were more likely to have to grit and bear it on a daily basis doing the hard manual labor, hunting, fighting, etc... tolerance to things is generally built up by repeated exposures with relatively short intervals between, rather than say, having a kid 5x during your life.
""The emergency room thing is probably a liberal spin on reality to make it fit the Narrative. If its not from someone making a silk purse from sow's ear data, its generally the case that there's a rational reason that's been buried-
maybe NAMs statistically are more likely to be treated for different injuries than whites, which was ignored. Maybe more NAMs come in with detectable levels of drugs and can't be administered painkillers. Lots of possibilities."
The simplest explanation may be that NAMs are more stolid, which fits with non-malicious stereotypes. I suppose that means they may actually feel less pain, or that they just bear it better.
Cennbeorc"
-Doubt it- if anything, they come to hospitals over pratically nothing because its all free to them anyway. Not to mention that when it comes to real world bravery, white men tend to stand on top.
I think Chuck H.'s answer that there is a rational explanation for it that is being conveniently ignored is the best answer- it could be, perhaps that it is that more blacks are coming in with a medical record of abusing drugs, so they are more hesitant to give them painkillers. The fact remains, which liberals always ignore, that you have to compare apples to apples- you have to control for things like these, take them into account to really understand the reality of the situation. You can't say, "oh 5/10 whites that came to the ER got painkillers but only 4/10 blacks did, so that means there is racism, and/or that a black coming in for the same reason as a white is any less likely to get painkillers". You have to thoroughly examine whether there is a legitimate reason why more whites got them.
According to my girlfriend, a nurse case manager at an urban hospital with a patient population that's 75% Medicaid, the average black patient is in the ER for ridiculously minor ailments, and because the reimbursement is about 30 cents on the dollar, the hospital keeps treatment and meds to a bare minimum. People with insurance usually have a usurious copay for ER visits.
The girlfriend would ask if the brothas and sistas are so physically tough, why are they in the ER with a sore throat?
There's a constant battle at her hospital between the doctors, who are usually Scots-Irish (in the Sailerian definition) and the nurses, predominantly middle-age Irish women from Southie. The docs are prone to want to give "the million-dollar workup" to many of these patients with ill-defined ailments, while the nurses want their asses out the door.
The simplest explanation may be that NAMs are more stolid, which fits with non-malicious stereotypes. I suppose that means they may actually feel less pain, or that they just bear it better.
Isn't that a side benefit of low intelligence?
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