It’s All In The Perspective
By Mitch Berg
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Even Black people agree that Blacks are more racist than Whites or Hispanics.
Plainly, the poll itself, is racissssssss.
Joe doakes
Well, clearly. Because if you say you’re not racist, it means you are.
And if you say, do or thing something racist, you’re a racist – unless, apparently, you’re a liberal blogger.
GREETINGS, MN “PROGRESSIVE” PROJECT READERS: Great to have you here. Quick point of order, though; I don’t say racism is “a liberal problem”. Merely that “Dog Gone’s” rationalization of her use of the term “Uncle Tom” is itself self-indulgent, illogical and corrosively specious.
As she says it, racism is when “You do or say something racist when you make an unfounded claim about someone on the basis of a race or an attribute to race”. That’s just wrong. It’s when you attribute any trait, positive or negative, to someone based on their race. And Dog Gone’s judgment of whether something is or is not “unfounded” is the same precise logic redneck peckerwoods use when they say “N***er ain’t racist, cuz there’s black n***ers and there’s white n***ers”; in other words, the idea that using a a racist term to describe someone is ever “founded”.
And is someone going to seriously claim that the term “Uncle Tom” isn’t racist, whether you believe it’s “founded” or not? Say what you will about Justice Thomas’ legal and personal history (liberals seem drawn to the fiction that he’s unqualified to be a SCOTUS justice, but Sonya Sotomayor is), but who out there can build a case that calling him “a slave who brown-noses his masters to curry favor” isn’t racist? Unless your name is Tom and your siblings have kids, “Uncle Tom” has no other meaning.
As to her constant claim that conservatism is racist? Leaving aside the fact that the claim is bigoted in and of itself, it’s also ideologically nonsense. While there are no doubt conservatives who, individually, are racist (just as there are racist liberals as well – indeed, the most gleefully racist person I’ve ever personally met was a mutual acquaintance of Dog Gone’s and mine who happened to be an east-side Saint Paul DFL ward heeler), one of the bedrock tenets real conservatives observe is judging people as individuals, not by their class, gender or, yep, race.
Martin Luther King was no conservative Republican, but he dreamed that his children would be judged by the contents of their hearts, not their color – and that (hold the stereotypes most of you no doubt romp and frolic in) is a conservative ideal.
I’ve known Dog Gone for 20-odd years, more or less, and sincerely hope she’ll pull her mind out of the fever swamp sooner or later. She could be better than that.
Your comments are welcome; I moderate everyone’s first comment (to cut down on spam), but unless something is slander or pointlessly inflammatory, I approve everything, because unlike certain blogs I enjoy a vigorous discussion.
July 20th, 2013 at 8:37 am
Mr. D. when Clarence Thomas makes statements that are not supported by fact, that deserves mention. Neither Thomas or I are entitled to make stuff up, and that appears to be what he did.
Are you trying to deny that racist statements are NOT made on SiTD? Sorry, but that is not factually accurate either.
July 20th, 2013 at 8:39 am
My claim that conservativism, in the U.S. is widely racist is supported by fact, by peer reviewed academic research, not subjective opinion.
July 20th, 2013 at 9:38 am
And yet DG when you call someone an “Uncle Tom” you are unequivocally making a racist statement. One of many bigoted statements you post here on SITD on a regular basis.
July 20th, 2013 at 10:16 am
“Martin had a history of being an honor student, with a good family, active in his church and school, who behaved like a lot of kids, not a particularly bad kid.”
Irrelevant. Evidence of character is not admissible in a criminal trial to show that a person acted in concert with that character, which is the Defense couldn’t talk about Martin being suspended from school for being in possession of suspected stolen property, smoking week twice a week, having THC in his autopsy and on the night he died, returning from the store with the ingredients to make the drug “lean”.
Based on the relevant facts admitted at trial, the jury found Martin put Zimmerman in such fear of his life, that Zimmerman was justified to use deadly force in self-defense. That’s the law in Minnesota, too, and race has nothing to do with it.
I thought you were a big self-defense scholar and combat pistol marksman. How come you didn’t learn basic self-defense law in those classes?
.
July 20th, 2013 at 11:14 am
Oh, hey, look: that racist Dog Gone is still here making more racist statements. She’s such a shameless racist.
July 20th, 2013 at 1:17 pm
supported by fact, by peer reviewed academic research, not subjective opinion.
‘peer-reviewed academic research’ is not a synonym for ‘fact’. My God, you are a stupid woman, Dog Gone.
July 20th, 2013 at 4:48 pm
Are you trying to deny that racist statements are NOT made on SiTD? Sorry, but that is not factually accurate either.
Excellent point, Dog Gone! Once you broke out the “Uncle Tom” slur here, there is no question that racist statements now exist on SiTD! You are the arsonist calling the fire department.
July 20th, 2013 at 5:01 pm
How can you have an honest debate with a person who thinks that ask.com and wikipedia are reliable sources?
The last time I interacted with DG at Penigma’s blog, she had claimed that sexual orientation must be congenital because over 90% of lesbians were left-handed.
The statement is absurd on its face. If you walked into a room full of any group of people not selected for handed and saw that 90% were left-handed it would be a twilight zone moment. In fact what she had done was engage in her usual layering of poor analysis on top of misreading on top of gullibility, all on a foundation of question-begging.
She had misread the study she based her ‘90% of lesbians are left handed’ statement on. In fact the study said that lesbians were 90% more likely to be left handed than the general population, so the number was more like 4%, not 90%.
It took me several attempts to get her to acknowledge her mistake. She wasn’t really recalcitrant, she just didn’t know how to read the data.
Furthermore, the study in question was a metastudy. It used data from several studies spaced years apart, with different sample sizes and populations, and even with different criteria for determining left-handedness. The study was published in a second or third rate Canadian public health journal. The best journals won’t touch metastudies because their methodology allows the authors to cherry pick their data to fit a pre-determined conclusion.
This is all too common a practice in the social ‘sciences’.
This seems like a good place to repost Feynman (a real scientist) on the social sciences:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaO69CF5mbY
July 20th, 2013 at 6:18 pm
Terry,
DG was a journalism/communications major at St Olaf – did you expect more?
July 20th, 2013 at 6:49 pm
I thought it was Winona State, Kel.
I am sure DG does well in her area of primary competence, but she is horrible at analyzing data and arguments.
She once used as supporting evidence for a claim research published by Loyola’s education college (about black schools being short changed, I believe).
The link didn’t go to peer reviewed research, it went to a term paper written by an undergrad.
July 20th, 2013 at 7:15 pm
Ter…er, PM:
I know. Whenever DG points to what she calls “peer-reviewed research”, it’s always a crap-shoot; is it really:
I’m tempted to read the link she provided above to see what it is. Given the state of the humanities academy today, I’d be inclined to trust “peer reviewed” “research” less than, say, stuff I hear from dissociative schizos on the bus.
Ward Churchill, David Bellesisles and Carol Gilligan were all “peer-reviewed”.
July 20th, 2013 at 7:22 pm
Neither Thomas or I are entitled to make stuff up, and that appears to be what he did.
You make stuff up all the time. Or you get your material from those who do.
For example, your little screed about Zimmerman’s endemic bigotry. Not only did the FBI show no evidence of significant racial bigotry anywhere in Zimmerman’s background, but in fact it turned up rafts of black neighbors who noted he was the friendliest, most outgoing person of any race, black or white, in the community.
The FBI (via the Miami Herald) made no bones about it:
Now, I admit that it’s only the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and not some bobblehead academic who happens to agree with your half-informed prejudices, but I think that’s fairly significant, no?
July 20th, 2013 at 7:24 pm
Are you trying to deny that racist statements are NOT made on SiTD? Sorry, but that is not factually accurate either.
Well, yes it is.
You were instructed to come back with actual racist statements here on SITD.
Now, I expect the more I ask you, the more likely a litter of puppies will interrupt your writing, at least on this blog.
But do humor me, would you? What “actual racist statements” took place on this blog.
Please be very, very specific. Because you’re not on MPP; you can’t just slop any bullshit you want out here without consequences.
July 20th, 2013 at 7:27 pm
supported by fact, by peer reviewed academic research, not subjective opinion
DG, I’m not sure if you slept through the part of class where they explained what peer-review of academic papers, especially in the humanities, was.
It is very frequently subjective stuff. “Peer review” merely means public critique.
I’m going to take a look at this “peer reviewed” bit of bilge you linked. Then I’m going to dig a little. I’m pretty confident that you are, yet again, overpromising and under-to-non-delivering.
July 20th, 2013 at 7:42 pm
Ah.
Hey, DG – you don’t happen to have an online copy of this “peer-reviewed research”, do you?
Because the link you sent gives a graf from the abstract. It’s $30 to get a copy. I’m certainly not paying for it…
…and I’m going to guess with great confidence that you didn’t either.
I’m going to speculate – not just with confidence, but with authority – that you didn’t read the “peer reviewed study”, but rather the claims made about it in the Daily Kos or some such fever-swamp daisychain (and mirabile dictu, Kos’ article about the Tesler article turns up in Page 1 of the Google search!), and that you have no idea about the study, its raw, data, or the peers that reviewed it and their perspective on the “study”.
But the abstract gives me a clue or two about its data, and also about the sheer dishonesty with which you present it:
Could return. Not “is the dominant leitmotif in white conservative thought”.
There’s no way to know what he’s talking about, since I have no access to the study, much less the actual data. How many people did he question? How? What was the methodology? Was there a control group? Did he test independents and Democrats for analogous biases? Was the percentage change in “OFR” (which might be a clinical term in some circles, but smacks more of trying to legitimize junk demography) outside the range of statistical noise?
I don’t know – and it’s for damn sure you don’t.
At the very most – and I’m being charitable – if the “study” methodologies were remotely sound (not holding my breath) they might be data points in showing that race affected some conservatives’ choices in the 2010 elections.
We don’t know – because the “study” is behind a paywall.
One thing’s for sure, though; even the abstract printed at the link doesn’t make the claim for the study that you did.
DG, it pains me to ask – but are you incapable of being honest? Or do you just not know what you’re talking about? Ethnographic research is a significant part of my job, DG – what I do for a living. You can not bullshit me.
This is ludicrous.
July 20th, 2013 at 8:04 pm
What’s the link, Mitch? I have access to jstor & few other archives through the outfit I work for.
I can’t post the whole thing online, but fair use allows me to reprint portions of it for purposes of commentary and criticism.
July 20th, 2013 at 8:23 pm
Got it (I think)!
It’s a metastudy: http://mst.michaeltesler.com/uploads/jop_rr_full.pdf
It’s junk, ‘peer reviewed’ or not. It’s thesis can’t be disproven, it is opinion journalism.
July 20th, 2013 at 8:43 pm
PM:
Wow. Who’da thunk it. I wondered.
DG: Did you miss class the day they explained the bit about theories needing to be falseable?
July 20th, 2013 at 8:45 pm
Reading it now. This is painful.
July 20th, 2013 at 9:01 pm
DG, I do try to be patient with you. It’s hard – you lead with a whoooole lot of unearned arrogance which is harder and harder to stomach the more you exhibit.
But I try.
But it’s getting harder and harder.
You presented the Tesler “study” as peer reviewed proof that white conservatives are racist.
As I noted earlier, this is erroneous (that’s a nicer word than “dishonest”). And the statistical conclusions are stretchy to boot. The standard deviations on the “OFR as predictor of opposition to Obama” are very, very high, meaning that even if you accept the data and methodology as valid (too early to tell), the stats themselves indicate that the results are crawling with outliers, and the stats are all over the place.
As opposed to “a consistent uniform trend”.
DG, with all due respect, you would seem to have gone with yet another Google search result.
July 20th, 2013 at 9:55 pm
From the paper’s conclusion. Read it, and then view the Feynman video I linked to above.
There are three kinds of studies you can do in the sciences & the humanities.
A controlled study shows a cause and effect relationship between the dependent variable and the independent variable. “The nicotine in cigarette smoke is the cause of fifty percent of lung cancer deaths” might be the result of a controlled study.
An epidemiological study finds, not a cause and effect relationship between the dependent and independent variable, but a corelation. The classic example is a study showing people living near a river contract dysentery more frequently than people who live further from a river. A later, controlled study finds living near the river doesn’t cause dysentery, but drinking river water does.
Metastudies are even further removed from cause and effect than epidemiological studies are. In a metastudy you use research done for another study or studies in a new way in an attempt to show a corelation that was not shown in the original data. You might, for example, corelate racial information from the 2000 census with home foreclosure data from 2008.
Each of these kinds of studies can be useful. Sociologists and political scientists tend to use epidemiological studies because it is extremely difficult or even impossible to isolate the dependent variable in a population study. Metastudies are usually done to save money. It’s cheaper to go to the archive and get existing data than it is to create your own dataset. Isolating the independent variable is even more difficult in a metastudy than it is in an epidemiological study.
Where the humanities fail . . . er, humanity . . . is when they present the results of an epidemiological study as a controlled study. You find, for example, that people who listen to talk radio are significantly more conservative than people who listen to NPR, and you claim that listening to talk radio ‘makes’ people more conservative, when it may mean that conservatives live in areas with better AM than FM reception.
In Tesler’s paper, he tries to corelate white voter opposition to interracial marriage with white voter opposition to Obama the candidate or Obama’s policies, and build from that to a controlled study conclusion: racism (or Old Fashioned Racism, OFR) is behind both.
The reasoning works like this: Ask people a bunch of policy questions (including approval or disapproval of interracial marriage). Associate Obama’s name with the question. Do the same, but this time associate the name ‘McCain’ or ‘Hillary Clinton’. Put the results in a spreadsheet, and voila! It’s science! Daily Kos (and DG) claim that it is proof positive that opposition to Obama’s policies is racially motivated!
In fact Tesler does not control for myriad factors. Hillary’s policies are not the same as Obama’s. Bill Clinton’s policies are not the same as Obama’s, and the electorate of 1996 is not the electorate of 2008. Obama’s name is associated with a failed economy and race relations that are at or near historic lows (as I write this, wannabe lynch mobs are rioting Controlling white voter survey results against black voter survey results would be interesting, but Tesler doesn’t do it. A multiracial voter survey would be even more interesting, but Tesler does not do that, either. Instead, as controls, he uses old data and old studies of voting patterns to ‘prove’ his point.
Garbage in, garbage out. You don’t improve fidelity by amplifying noise. Check out the graph on pg. 32. It basically nullifies everything else in the paper — GOP identification does not corelate well with
opposition to interracial dating, especially when you have not corrected for things like age, race, and locality.
July 20th, 2013 at 11:01 pm
It’s disturbing to know that there is a chance I might have inhaled an oxygen molecule that DG once used.
Stupidity that deep has to be virulently contagious.
July 21st, 2013 at 1:30 am
This is frustrating.
Here’s science.
Since the early 90’s there has been a concentrated effort, paid for mostly by the United States, to survey all Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs) greater than 1 km in diameter that might one day impact the Earth. Do a google search for ‘Spaceguard’ to get some details.
1 km might not sound that big compared to the diameter of the Earth, but at typical velocity vs. the Earth (~18 km/s) it would likely mean the end of civilization. Dust would block out the sun for many months, rivers and oceans would be polluted.
An asteroid diameter = ~10km would be an extinction event. The sky, world wide, would glow as bright as the sun for a few seconds. Wildfires would be ignited across the globe. The last impact of a 10km diameter asteroid, 65 million years ago, killed off 80% of sea life and every land animal that weighed more than 25 kg.
Since the early 90s, using Earth and space based systems we’ve mapped the orbits of over 90% of PHAs 1km in diameter or larger. NASA is now trying to survey all the PHAs down to diameter = 140 meters. A collision with an asteroid between 140 m and 1 km wouldn’t be the end of the world, but could cause catastrophic loss of life and property. It would be like World War III.
So scientists are trying very hard to characterize the threat. You might think that asteroid diameter distribution is like the diameters of earth sand and rocks — that there are ten grains of sand 1mm in diameter for every one grain of sand 10 mm in diameter (in reality it’s logarithmic not linear but you know what I mean).
Scientists do not know how asteroid size scales with the number of asteroids. If you know for certain that there are ten asteroids 10 km in diameter that cross the orbit of the Earth, that doesn’t tell you how many asteroids diameter = 0.1 km that cross the orbit of the earth. It might might be a thousand or it might be ten (for the record, models show that there should be a gap between ~50 meters and ~500 meters where there aren’t many asteroids).
Figuring out something like the ratio of 10 m or 100 m asteroids to 1 km asteroids is seriously hard work. You have to design experiments, do theoretical work, and convince someone to pay you for your time or invest in some experimental equipment — like a space telescope.
So when some weenie poli-sci graduate publishes a paper saying that old survey data proves that racial animus explains the opposition to Obama’s policies, and the key to his thesis is data like:
Correlation between Republican party ID and opposition to interracial dating.
1986 0.07
1990 -0.02
1994 0
1998 -0.025
2002 0.05
2006 0.01
2010 0.12
You wonder what kind of a freakin’ world you live on where people consider information like this demonstrates a ‘fact’ worthy of them putting on their hate for people they’ve never met.
July 21st, 2013 at 9:42 am
DG,
Don’t forget – still waiting on all those alleged racist statements on SITD.
And you might wanna try again on your previous one, “why was the Cornish stand-your-ground bill”crap””, since your last attempt relied on data that’d been pretty roundly debunked, and never addressed a single specific of the Cornish bill.
See to this. Thanx.
July 21st, 2013 at 9:03 pm
“My claim that conservativism, in the U.S. is widely racist is supported by fact, by peer reviewed academic research, not subjective opinion.”
The paper says nothing like this.
July 21st, 2013 at 10:51 pm
eat shit DG,
http://dailycaller.com/2011/03/15/ron-schiller-is-wrong-people-who-want-small-government-are-not-racist/
July 22nd, 2013 at 9:44 am
This NYT article illustrates what is wrong with the social sciences: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/21/opinion/sunday/lets-shake-up-the-social-sciences.html
The author is a ‘physician and sociologist’, Nicholas Kristakis. He does not really want to shake up the social sciences.
What he wants to do is declare victory and move on. He literally says this:
“One reason citizens, politicians and university donors sometimes lack confidence in the social sciences is that social scientists too often miss the chance to declare victory and move on to new frontiers.”
There is none of the questioning of basic assumptions that the sciences are based on. There is no introspection at all, and this is exactly what the social sciences need — though I think that introspection would result in folding up the tent and moving on.
The problem with many of the social sciences is that they do not produce knowledge that can be built upon. In physics, if you spend a billion dollars on some project — or even hand out the money as small grants to hire grad students, or provide scholarships in the hard sciences — you get an increase in the knowledge of the physical world. This is simply not true with, say, economics or psychology.
Monopoly power is not always bad for markets; we allow monopoly power in the field of intellectual property because in the long run we believe it helps the markets. Private property itself is a form of monopoly, and markets couldn’t exist w/o it. Astronomy has been studied for thousands of years, ‘racial profiling’ wasn’t even a word until a few decades ago. And ‘illness is unequally distributed by social class’? Everything is unequally distributed by social class. The humanities cannot tell us why this is, why this a feature of society worth studying, why it is bad, or what (if anything) we should do about it.
“So social scientists should devote a small palace guard to settled subjects”.
No scientist would ever say this. Imagine if Einstein had faced a ‘small palace guard’ of physicists who believed that their job was to defend the Newtonian view of physics?
“Behavioral economics, for example, has used psychology to radically reshape classical economics.”
To what effect? This is simply false.
The reason donors don’t like the social sciences is because it delivers nothing but unread PhD theses and tenured positions for the radicals who write them.
July 22nd, 2013 at 10:07 am
Galileo was peer reviewed, and his thinking was rejected by his peers. Didn’t make them right. Didn’t make him wrong. Peer review simply substitutes another person’s thinking for your own.
Dog Gone, if you’re going to leave your thinking to someone else (which, based on your past attempts at thinking, I strongly encourage), then you should leave your thinking to Rush Limbaugh. He’ll not only tell you what you need to know, he’ll tell you what to think about it, guaranted accurate over 90% of the time.
.
July 22nd, 2013 at 10:50 am
Mitch, I’ve seen more than a few birthers comment here, which should suffice as an identification of a racist statement.
Asserting that Barack Obama was not born in the United States (and is therefore not legally entitled to be president) in view of all the factual evidence to the contrary, for what appears to be a racial animus, given the politics on the right that not only tolerate but celebrate people who are active birthers.
Then we have the expression of clearly racist rants on the right, of individuals who have been applauded here, like Ann “Perhaps, someday, blacks will win the right to be treated like volitional human beings. But not yet.” Coulter, or Ted “[Black people] could fix the black problem if they just admit they can do anything that I can do, anything that Alex Jones can do, anything that any American can do, if you put your heart and soul into being honest, law-abiding, [and] delivering excellence at every move in your life,” Nugent.
Or tea partiers like Rand Paul who hire white wing racists to their staffs, and who, along with his father court and cultivate and take donations from white supremacists?
Really, you don’t think that the right is racist? The Tesler paper was one example, it is not the only or the definitive example of academic research into racism and it’s correlation to right wing politics; there is a LOT more, and it is well documented and stands up well to critical evaluation.
Don’t just read the Tesler paper; check out the sources in his bibliography, for starters.
I’m not asserting all conservatives are racist, but that many of them are, and that the right caters to racists, has racist polices, and that those who are not themselves strongly racist are tolerant and accepting of those who are.
July 22nd, 2013 at 11:05 am
The Tesler paper was one example, it is not the only or the definitive example of academic research into racism and it’s correlation to right wing politics; there is a LOT more, and it is well documented and stands up well to critical evaluation.
But you never read the Tesler paper, Dog Gone.
If you did you would know that it does not conclude, as you reported it did, ‘ that conservativism, in the U.S. is widely racist’.
You have proven, time and time again, Dog Gone, that you have no ability to determine what is and what is not a ‘fact’.
July 22nd, 2013 at 11:51 am
Joe Doakes’ comment of 10:07 (re Galileo) reminded me that during the Reformation and Counter-reformation, Protestants spent an awful lot of intellectual energy using the name of the Pope and numerology to ‘prove’ that the Pope was really the Beast of Revelations, while Catholics did the same with the name ‘Martin Luther’.
Tesler’s paper is like that.
Assuming that any increase in liberal policies between Bill Clinton’s presidencies (1992-2001) and Barack Obama’s presidency (2008-) can be assigned to conservative racism is ludicrous. Peer review in the social sciences merely means that the paper uses standards within the discipline, it doesn’t mean ‘true’. That’s why you can have published, peer reviewed poli-sci, sociology, and economic papers papers that come to opposite conclusions.
In real science, research that couldn’t be duplicated, or that can both prove and disprove the thesis would be a scandal. In the humanities it’s just another day in the academic biz.
July 22nd, 2013 at 1:07 pm
Mitch, I’ve seen more than a few birthers comment here, which should suffice as an identification of a racist statement.
Sorry, but no.
While the birther stuff is stupid, it’s also not an attribute of Obama’s race or ethnicity.
If you can call the birth certificate controversy “racist”, then so are alleged unpaid traffic tickets.
BTW, are the Democrats “racist” for questioning John McCain’s naturalization status in 2008? Or does some other brand of bigotry obtain?
July 22nd, 2013 at 1:36 pm
Mitch, I’ve seen more than a few birthers comment here, which should suffice as an identification of a racist statement.
To paraphrase Yoda: “That. . . is why you flail.”
You’re flailing, DG. You’re grasping at straws that don’t even exist. You’re so determined to believe the fantastical crap that you believe, you’ll maintain unicorns exist. Racist unicorns. Racist unicorns that eat leprechauns.
July 22nd, 2013 at 1:37 pm
Oh, crap. Mitch, please close that ital tag.
(MITCH: Done!)
July 22nd, 2013 at 1:37 pm
Blech
July 22nd, 2013 at 1:56 pm
BTW, DG – are all the Democrats who claimed Sarah Palin wasn’t really Trig’s mother sexists?
To borrow one of your more annoying rhetorical crutches, “you are silent” on that issue.
July 22nd, 2013 at 2:00 pm
DG; I’ll add a bit of emphasis below:
Asserting that Barack Obama was not born in the United States (and is therefore not legally entitled to be president) in view of all the factual evidence to the contrary, for what appears to be a racial animus, given the politics on the right that not only tolerate but celebrate people who are active birthers.
And now you’re making stuff up. Again.
There is no “celebration” of “active birthers”; that’s a story lefties tell themselves to make themselves feel smarter.
If there were active “celebration”, or even espousal, of the birth certificate issue, wouldn’t it have been part of, say, the GOP convention last year?
Not a word.
And your “appears to be racial animus” bit is you inserting your opinion. Not fact. Please stop.
July 22nd, 2013 at 2:00 pm
Clearly, I’m shooting for 100 comments.
July 22nd, 2013 at 2:02 pm
Then we have the expression of clearly racist rants on the right, of individuals who have been applauded here, like Ann “Perhaps, someday, blacks will win the right to be treated like volitional human beings. But not yet.” Coulter, or Ted “[Black people] could fix the black problem if they just admit they can do anything that I can do, anything that Alex Jones can do, anything that any American can do, if you put your heart and soul into being honest, law-abiding, [and] delivering excellence at every move in your life,” Nugent.
OK. So a couple of conservatives said stupid things.
So?
If I gotta take on Ted Nugent – for whom I’ve never voted, even as a guitarist – then you gotta own our old buddy Ray, the DFL organizer who made Eric Cartman look like Jackson Browne.
Deal?
July 22nd, 2013 at 2:03 pm
Or tea partiers like Rand Paul who hire white wing racists to their staffs, and who, along with his father court and cultivate and take donations from white supremacists?
You say this, but provide no evidence.
And if/when you do provide “evidence” – I’m speculating here, but speculating on the basis of very consistent experience – it’ll be a “Daily Kos” article that you googled that made the claim. This, you will consider fact, bidding one to wonder – is Kos “peer-reviewed” in your opinion?
July 22nd, 2013 at 2:15 pm
Really, you don’t think that the right is racist?
Asked and answered, over and over and over. Nope.
As I’ve written many times, I believe “We-ism” is part of the human condition. People are always more comfortable around, more forgiving of, more affirmative about people who are more like them than about people who are less like them; their confirmation bias upholds those like them and undercuts those not like them.
Some people and cultures express this differently than others; the Lakota word for “human” moves from “complimentary” to derogatory the further one ges from the speaker’s own tribe. “We-ism” – tribalism, in this case – is baked into the language itself. Black professionals, like white college professors, are uncomfortable and sometimes pretty demeaning around blue-collar “rednecks”. Be honest; you’d crap if you had to spend an afternoon around a bunch of custom combiners.
Conservatives are no more “we-ist” than anyone else. It’s just that their “we-ism” get spotlighted by a major political movement and the media that serves it. And you.
Side note, DG: the stuff spout about conservatives and their purported beliefs,
were it about a racial minority rather than a mainstream political movement, would be squarely in the “racist” camp. Like “we-ism” is for most people, it’s part of your cultural background noise. But it’s there.
July 22nd, 2013 at 2:17 pm
The Tesler paper was one example, it is not the only or the definitive example of academic research into racism and it’s correlation to right wing politics;
It’s the only one you provided. I’m not bound to take your word for it that there’s “better” research on the subject.
July 22nd, 2013 at 2:21 pm
there is a LOT more, and it is well documented and stands up well to critical evaluation.
WRONG, DG.
You’re the one making the affirmative case that “conservatives are racist”, and have made it countless times on my blog and (I’m told) yours – usually in terms that themselves ooze sexism, classism and, as re Justice Thomas, racism.
Asked to substantiate the claim, you provided a single, solitary link. Terry and I read the paper, and demolished not only its conclusions and methodology (it’s a meta-study, and it reached statistical conclusions with HUGE relative deviations, indicating that its “averages” are really widely-scattered results with huge outliers) but the very notion that it reached the conclusion you said it did.
And in response – “trust me, the real evidence is out there!”?
It is not our job to do your homework for you.
July 22nd, 2013 at 2:22 pm
Don’t just read the Tesler paper; check out the sources in his bibliography, for starters.
I did.
Would you care to direct the reader to one that substantiates your claim, and explain why?
July 22nd, 2013 at 2:28 pm
I’m not asserting all conservatives are racist, but that many of them are, and that the right caters to racists, has racist polices, and that those who are not themselves strongly racist are tolerant and accepting of those who are.
And at last, accuracy. You’re making an assertion.
You have no empirical evidence. The “study” to which you linked us state no conclusion (and in any case reach no meaningful conclusion of any kind).
And your protestations – “read the bibliography!”? It’s not our job to make your case for you.
Simple fact, DG: there is no such correlation. The idea that conservatives are more “racist” than society at large is a bit of lefty groupthink – something the tribe chants to itself to try to frame and dehumanize its opponents.
It’s not science – it’s Saul Alinsky.
And I would hope that you’d be self-aware enough to figure this out at some point.
July 22nd, 2013 at 2:37 pm
Oh, yeah:
it is well documented and stands up well to critical evaluation.
So when I asked for something subtantiating your claim that conservatives are racist, did you think “I’ll send some BS and save the “good” material for myself?”
I mean, why didn’t you send something that actually tried to reach a proximate conclusion?
I suspect I know the answer; you don’t know the material. You started with a conclusion, and googled to find something that looked authoritative. I can’t prove it; but I do know that a Kos post about Tesler pops up in the first page on Google.
July 22nd, 2013 at 2:37 pm
Don’t just read the Tesler paper; check out the sources in his bibliography, for starters.
Well, that settles it! The article has a bibliography! Gospel truth it is! We have all been p0wned!
July 22nd, 2013 at 2:39 pm
BTW , DG – I don’t expect you to admit that you started with a defamatory and ugly conclusion about conservatives, and googled to find something that looked academic and authoritative to “prove” it without really knowing the details.
But if that’s what you were doing, how would the results be any different?
July 22nd, 2013 at 2:44 pm
statistical conclusions with HUGE relative deviations
Oh oh. I think you stumbled onto something a quack “Social Studies” perfessor could spend the rest of his/her life begging for grants to investigate – that it is a libturd trait to be incapable of grasping a concept of “+/-“.
July 22nd, 2013 at 2:45 pm
Ha! 100!