August 15, 2013

Facial Profiling

I have been negligent in keeping up with my reality TV viewing lately, but a current hit is apparently "Duck Dynasty" about a hirsute clan in Louisiana that has gotten rich in the duck call business.
NYC Hotel Kicks Out ‘Duck Dynasty’ Star After Confusing Him For Homeless Man 
WEST MONROE, La. (CBS Houston) — A New York City hotel kicks out one of the stars of “Duck Dynasty” after an employee thought he was a homeless man. 
Appearing along with his family on “Live with Kelly and Michael” Wednesday morning, Jase Robertson described the incident. 
“The first thing that happened to me at the hotel was I got escorted out,” Robertson said, joking that it was a “facial-profiling deal.” 
Robertson said that the hotel employee simply didn’t know who he was.

“I asked where the bathroom was and he said, ‘Right this way, sir.’ He was very nice,” Robertson explained. “He walked me outside, pointed down the road and said, ‘Good luck.’” 
Robertson continued, “So I circled back around and my wife said, ‘What happened?’ and I just said I just got kicked out.” 
Robertson took it in stride and didn’t blame the employee for the incident. Robertson continued to stay at the hotel despite the incident.

19 comments:

jody said...

apparently the star, phil robertson, played for louisiana tech from 1965 to 1967.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dn6yjaBQeEI

somehow terry bradshaw was his backup.

ken stabler put a beating on him in that video.

Anonymous said...

Sounds as though the guy has a decent sense of humor regarding the situation. An honest mistake was made. Nothing personal and nothing more to it than that.

Now then.

Notice the contrast between what happened when in Switzerland last month Oprah was not instantly recognized within five minutes. Worse, imagine if she had been politely asked to leave the store she was at for fill in the blank reason (e.g. causing a stink for not being instantly recognized and treated will all due respect that her life station demands)

How long would we be hearing about it?

Steve Sailer said...

Oprah has been trying to quiet down the Switzerland thing. She never tried to sell the story all that hard; instead, the world bought hard what she was briefly selling, which I think is the bigger lesson.

Considering how much Oprah has been an omnipresence for the last 30 years, I don't have all that much against her. I can think of a number of things she should apologize for (her campaign to convince everybody they were all equally in danger of getting AIDS back in the 1980s, and her promotion of "The Secret," which was shameful), but that list is surprisingly short for somebody who has been on TV for five or ten thousand hours.

No, the real story is how much white people want to hear their immensely privileged black heroines and heroes reminisce about nearly subliminal racial slights.

Anonymous said...

What's "The Secret"?

Anonymous said...

Dat be facist.

woland said...

I could just see this guy walking around with a $38,000 handbag. He could use it to carry his dead ducks in it.

TontoBubbaGoldstein said...

What's "The Secret"?

Steve could tell you. But then he would have to kill you.

Sam said...

Duck Dynasty is more interesting for its role in the culture war. This show has beaten American Idol at the ratings.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/tv-ratings-duck-dynasty-tops-446567

Anonymous said...

the real story is how much white people want to hear their immensely privileged black heroines and heroes reminisce about nearly subliminal racial slights.


Oprah has always been about...Oprah. She helped sell the story because it cast her as the "victim" and coincidentally her new film (about black victimhood) is out. After all, how can a billionairess be a victim?

Unless it's race related, which she clearly helped shape the story initially as one of race and thus making her the "victim".

Anonymous said...

A show where the men wear camo, the women dresses, the men using firearms, the women raising children & taking care of the homestead.
All within the context of a large loving family devoted to God. And millionaires to boot. Draws a great number of viewers. This is not in keeping with the New America. I feel like a subversive just to watch.

Cail Corishev said...

What's "The Secret"?

A book/movie purporting to be a documentary about the New Age belief that your thoughts can alter reality via some technobabble involving "quantum" stuff. Which means if you think hard enough about winning the lottery (and optimistically enough -- for some reason the Universe only response well to positive thinking), you'll win it. It was even being shown in churches for a while, because it also claimed to tie in some vaguely Christian concepts like "ask and ye shall receive." Oh, and the "secret" part is that all the great inventors and leaders and healers of the past, from Jesus to Da Vinci, were really just people who knew this secret "law of attraction" and used it well.

Oprah was a big promoter of it, and probably the main reason anyone who doesn't know how to align his own chakras has ever heard of it.

Cail Corishev said...

By the way, one thing about having a show like Oprah's that does thousands of episodes over the years is that you can throw a bone to every group sooner or later. It's like the way the ACLU occasionally defends a KKK member or someone on the hard right so they can claim to be impartial, even though their entire focus is pushing leftist causes. What she did on one particular episode that one time is meaningless; it's what she pushes day after day that matters.

For instance, Oprah once interviewed an order of traditionalist, full-habit-wearing Dominican nuns that is bucking the trend of all the dying modernist orders by growing fast and having lots of young members. It was a nice piece because it showed how joyful they are and how even smart, pretty girls can be drawn to a religious vocation when it's done right.

That piece got passed around lots of Catholic churches, and people who don't watch Oprah regularly probably got the impression that she's some sort of fair-minded interviewer who will give anyone the stage. But that's not the case at all; she's committed to pushing a pantheistic, New Age belief system (which, not coincidentally, tells wildly rich and famous people that they got that way because they have such good thoughts -- they deserve it, in other words; none of that "rich man through the eye of the needle" stuff for them!), but she's smart enough to know that she has to throw a bone to the majority once in a while if she wants to preach beyond the choir.

Anonymous said...

What would Oprah's response be to this incident?

Anonymous said...

Just imagine the media storm if this had happened to the fat lady, a.k.a Oprah.

Anonymous said...

He certainly handled the 'slight' with far more maturity and character then Oprah did, (and that's even assuming her version of events was the truth).

Steve Sailer said...

It's also quite possible this incident didn't happen and was just made up by a Duck Dynasty screenwriter who had been looking around for a chance to use "facial profiling" for some time, and post-Trayvon post-Oprah seemed like an ideal point.

Steve Sailer said...

If so, well played, sir, well played.

AnotherDad said...

From Cail Corishev @9:46:

"For instance, Oprah once interviewed an order of traditionalist, full-habit-wearing Dominican nuns that is bucking the trend of all the dying modernist orders by growing fast and having lots of young members. It was a nice piece because it showed how joyful they are and how even smart, pretty girls can be drawn to a religious vocation when it's done right."

I'm on board with traditional Catholicism as a concept--though i'm not a believer myself--but the whole vocation thing only worked in another much more fertile era.

What i want now from smart, pretty and conservative girls is ... *babies*. Lot's of babies.

Anything else is a distraction.

Anonymous said...

http://www.buzzfeed.com/nataliemorin/chinese-signs-that-got-seriously-lost-in-tranlsation