Intellectually honest nice-guy conservative Ross Douthat seems concerned:
But the senators are yesterday’s men. The America of Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III is swiftly giving way to the America of Sonia Maria Sotomayor and Barack Hussein Obama.
The nation’s largest states, Texas and California, already have “minority” majorities. By 2023, if current demographic trends continue, nonwhites — black, Hispanic and Asian — will constitute a majority of Americans under 18. By 2042, they’ll constitute a national majority. As Hua Hsu noted earlier this year in The Atlantic, “every child born in the United States from here on out will belong to the first post-white generation.”
[….]You can see this landscape taking shape in academia, where the quest for diversity is already as likely to benefit the children of high-achieving recent immigrants as the descendants of slaves. You can see it in the backroom dealing revealed by Ricci v. DeStefano, where the original decision to deny promotions to white firefighters was heavily influenced by a local African-American “kingmaker” with a direct line to New Haven’s mayor. You can hear it in the resentments gathering on the rightward reaches of the talk-radio dial.
We all know that white people have never engaged in back-room dealings with “kingmakers” to get jobs for their own. Of course, Tammany Hall involved Irish people, who weren’t considered “white” at the time.
And that’s why this whole discussion of whites and nonwhites is so vacuous. Race is a man-made construct and society’s notions of it change over time. The idea of blacks, Hispanics, and Asians forming a majority block that lords it over “white people” (however that is defined) is simply absurd. (By the way, it’s worth noting that San Francisco’s Lowell high-school had, in effect, affirmative action for all non-Chinese-Americans until recently.) And the notion of an “America of Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III” versus an “America of Sonia Maria Sotomayor and Barack Hussein Obama” is offensive. Is it not “your America” until whatever group you have been arbitrarily assigned to becomes a majority?
I tend to agree with Douthat about the idea of class-based affirmative action, if there is some reasonable way to implement it. But to couple that notion with fear-mongering about non-white majorities and to give credence to the crazy shit that is spewed on right-wing talk radio…that’s just pathetic and shameful.
This is why it bothers me when the Atlantic circle-jerkers drool all over Douthat for being a “reasonable conservative”. He serves up the same race-baiting tropes wrapped in a more Times-friendly package.
Update. If you check out the exit polls for November’s election, you see that Asians, Latinos, and “other” all voted for Obama by roughly the same amount (about 65%). I don’t know what the national figures for income are like, but I recall hearing that in California, Asian-Americans have a higher median income than whites. So this is not at all economic. It probably goes to show that if you treat people like they’re part of some kind of scary, “nonwhite” bloc, they won’t vote for you.
burnspbesq
When Douthat first arrived at the Times, we consoled ourselves by thinking that he had to be a step up from Kristol.
Anyone still believe that?
DougJ
When Douthat first arrived at the Times, we consoled ourselves by thinking that he had to be a step up from Kristol.
I didn’t. And I was called a “douche” for insisting that he wasn’t.
kwAwk
It seems to me that what Douhat is clumisly trying to say is that the time is coming to rethink our notions about affirmative action.
If the non-white children of immigrants are just as successful as their native born white counterparts then it lends credence to the notion that what is holding back certain minority groups is no longer the oppression of whites on blacks but something in the culture of the specific minority group itself.
That something may or may not be justified based upon history, but it can not be explained or resolved by simply blaming the white majority and its behavior any longer.
Mr Furious
I didn’t either. Kristol was preferable, because he was more obvious and easily dismissed.
Nobody pretended he was reasonable.
kwAwk
And before you guys get all huffy and call me a racist or something, let me say that this just would more likely affirm something I’ve been saying for a while.
Blacks won the civil rights movement war. Now they must move on to win the peace.
Violet
Never liked him at The Atlantic, although I understood the various other Atlantic bloggers saying nice things and being polite to their colleague. That’s just good practice for keeping your work environment pleasant.
He’s just More Of The Same in terms of conservative thought. He’s not a step up from Kristol; he’s a step sideways. Same thoughts, different packaging. They’re all of a muchness these days.
Mr Furious
Slightly off-topic…fuck Rachel Maddow as long as she keeps trotting Pat Buchanan out and treating him like some crazy old uncle instead of tearing him and his crap apart in such humiliating fashion that he never darkens her studio floor again.
DougJ
It seems to me that what Douhat is clumisly trying to say is that the time is coming to rethink our notions about affirmative action.
The trouble is that he melds that reasonable point with right-wing race-baiting.
All the stuff about lower-income students whose parents didn’t go to college not getting a shake in educational system is on the money, even though it’s David Brooks’ hobby horse. But pitting low-income whites against nonwhites is Lee Atwater redux. And that’s what Douthat is doing
flukebucket
Douthat is just channeling Pat Buchanan. Pat was dating himself. I have no idea what Douthat is doing. Except being a Douchehat.
DougJ
And before you guys get all huffy and call me a racist or something
You’re missing the whole point. This isn’t about “black and white”. It’s about “nonnwhite and white” (Douthat’s formulation). It’s the “nonwhite” population that is increasing, not the black population specifically.
Malron
What gets me here is this: DoucheHat and other conservative white men are freaking out about being outnumbered by the combined total of blacks/Hispanics/Asians in this country. They reject the idea of white as an ethnicity on equal terms with any other and that’s beyond arrogant and paranoid. They need a word to describe this idiocy. Parogant? Arranoid? Also.
JenJen
What’s more amazing to me is that apparently, to a lot of people like Ross Douthat, this changing demographic is “news.”
Seriously. Do they ever get out?
John Cole
You better get used to it- race-baiting is honestly all they have left. The tax cuts for Jesus and bomb it if it moves routes failed, and race-baiting is the only arrow left in the quiver.
aimai
There’s a lot of confusion, deliberate, in Douthat’s claim that “foreign born” non white children do just fine without affirmative action and thus give the lie to the necessity for any kind of affirmative action for native born minority children. First of all–its not clear that its true. In fact Sotomayor’s case proves that you need some kind of affirmative action all the way up from kindergarten to supreme court appointments just to level the playing field enough to let a non white woman get far enough to have her *&^%% excellent credentials examined or ignored.
Affirmative action doesn’t have mean, and never did, accepting substandard non whites in place of whites. It always meant forcing schools and boards and businesses to beat the weeds until they found a sufficient number of fully capable and accredited outsiders rather than lazily relying on race or gender or religion to fill slots they pretended went on merit. People like Douthat simply refuse to remember when Jews could only get into Harvard under a quota system that *prevented too many of them from getting in.* Ditto for asian americans. And double ditto for african americans. Affirmative action, in some cases, puts a floor underneath acceptances that prevents organizations from insisting they can’t fill slots in a race equitable way.
Its not reparations, at this point, its simply trying to prevent the country from lapsing into a racial caste system. Break the race/class/education barriers for a few hundred years and then we can talk about affirmative action for Douthat and other birthright assholes……………..
aimai
Brick Oven Bill
Re: Race is a man-made construct and society’s notions of it change over time.
This is an arrogant humanocentric statement and incorrect. Race is not a man-made construct. Race is a construct of environmental evolutionary forces. Mayans are shorter than Bantu because they evolved in dense forests. This is also why they suck at basketball.
Zach
There were no backroom dealings revealed in Ricci. There was, however, a concurrence filled with paranoid, conspiratorial conjecture of scary black men running our cities behind the scenes and forcing whites to do their bidding lest they be branded racist and subject to race riots that can be summoned on command.
It’s really silly to think that the urban racial power struggles of the late 20th century are going to characterize the post-white generation. In fact, the future will almost certainly be one where Scalia and Douthat’s backwards looking racial paranoia is seen for the obvious anachronism that it is in light of whatever, you know, actual problems we face at the time.
IndieTarheel-mobile
It’s the Southern Strategy, not refurbished but rather whitewashed for the 21st century. Douchehat takes no notice of the fact that his target demo had laegely abandoned the venue before he even took the stage; his is but a wistful solo sung to empty air and empty heads.
RedKitten
This seems to be a theme today — there’s a Salon article about much the same thing, where a right-winger talks about why the GOP is losing elections, and basically blames everybody BUT the GOP.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2009/07/20/gop_math/index.html
(I don’t know how to embed links without the buttons, John…sorry.)
Much of his argument is that the only reason Obama won is because non-Hispanic whites no longer make up 90% of the voters (conveniently ignoring all of those goofy whites who voted for Obama, despite the fact that they’re white and he’s not.)
Basically, until the GOP stops using terms like “real Americans” (implying that anybody who isn’t white, Christian and right-wing ISN’T a “real” American”,) and until they show a real interest in what non-whites want (as opposed to just showing a cynical interest in how to get their vote) then they’ll continue to come across as racist asshats.
gnomedad
Ya think? Standing athwart history hollering “Mine!”
Joe
According to several stories I’ve seen in the past couple of years, many colleges are utilizing affirmative action to increase the number of men, because only accepting the most qualified candidates would lead to a 70% female enrollment. Where is the outrage?
DougJ
What gets me here is this: DoucheHat and other conservative white men are freaking out about being outnumbered by the combined total of blacks/Hispanics/Asians in this country.
Exactly.
srv
“By the way, it’s worth noting that San Francisco’s Lowell high-school had, in effect, affirmative action for all non-Chinese-Americans until recently”
I visited a friend in Silicon Valley this weekend. He and the wife are Indian, naturalized citizens, in their 40’s. They’re looking to move out of Cupertino and into the hills. When asked why, he said “I want the kids to have a more diverse environment – it’s 40% Chinese and 50% Indian here”
So I said “you mean there’s not enough white people?” He looked at me and started laughing – “I never thought of it that way, but any diversity would be a good thing.”
Max Peck
If not for affirmative action only white men would get most jobs. This can not be argued. People look to their own first. It’s that simple. No one is hiring outside of their own color unless forced or the candidate is a phenom. Keep in mind the group that benefitted most from affirmative action is white women. They’d be typists or check out clerks otherwise.
But spinning it as a war against christmas type thing stirs agner, gets ratings and puts republicans in office. And putting republicans in office is all that matters to the republican party.
Ash Can
@kwAwk: “And before you guys get all huffy and call me a racist or something”
Why should we bother? You’re doing a fine job of it yourself.
Scott
You better get used to it- race-baiting is honestly all they have left. The tax cuts for Jesus and bomb it if it moves routes failed, and race-baiting is the only arrow left in the quiver.
But race-baiting failed, too. And to my mind, it’s more likely to fail harder than tax cuts and neocon bombing.
Tax cuts and warmongering are at least something you can bullshit on, and most run-of-the-mill voters don’t have enough experience with either to call you out. But just bellowing “OMG BROWN PEEPLEZ” is gonna make people say, “My neighbor is Hispanic, my accountant is black, what’s the big deal?”
bago
@RedKitten: You make an anchor tag for a link.
A stands for anchor, and then the href element of the anchor tag contains the url you intend for the marked up text to link to.
Zifnab
But I’ve been informed, repeatedly, that the Asians were the “good” minority, what with their conservative hard-working independent values systems and tendency to vote Republican.
Seriously, the Asian American community is about the only major minority group the GOP hasn’t completely shat all over in the last 20 years. After blowing their chance with blacks in the 80s and 90s, then proceeding to xenophobe themselves out of the Hispanic vote in the ’00s, it’ll be funny to see if the Republican Party can nail the trifecta by driving off the hundreds of thousands of Chinese immigrants by lumping them in with “all other minorities”. I’ll tell you straight off from personal experience that callously equating asians and blacks is, perhaps, the high speed rail track to pissing off the Asian American community.
flukebucket
And putting republicans in office is all that matters to the republican party.
But it is a losing strategy now. And as a strategy it is only going to get worse and worse and worse.
I cannot see how Republicans are going to climb out of this grave that they dug for themselves.
Third Eye Open
Yo, Billy-BOB…
What gene or cluster of genes appear in one race and not another?
I am Cuban, Italian, Cherokee and Welsh…what race am I?
c’mon dude, you’re not even trying anymore. John, bring back BIRDZILLA
BDeevDad
Depends where you live and what you’re using it for. Out here in CA, it’s being used with a lot of the right wing talk radio folks to successfully dehumanize Mexicans.
kth
Just because Samuel Alito makes an unsubstantiated allegation in a Supreme Court opinion, doesn’t mean it’s true. And fuck Douthat for repeating this allegation as if its truth had been established.
ironranger
For some odd reason, I don’t think guys like Russ are in favor of affirmative action for poor white people who can barely feed or clothe themselves. Not the right kind of white folk.
BDeevDad
Not enough Asians living in the south and midwest. They’re still concentrated on the coasts
tgs
That would make you a tango-yew-greaser of course.
Gus
I love how for “conservatives” identity politics is verboten, unless it is practiced on behalf of white men.
Steeplejack
I, for one, welcome our young, nonwhite overlords.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
@Joe:
No outrage would come from the men admitted into schools with 70% female enrollment, that’s for sure.
Betsy
@Malron:
Excellent, excellent point. And one that’s made far too seldom. It makes sense, though. Conservatives have long divided things into “white” and “not white,” so it makes sense that it wouldn’t occur to them to compare whites to any specific group, but *all* the other groups. I think it’s part of their very, very deep-seated us v. them mentality.
gwangung
Only half-shat.
And I think they already lost them.
I’ve pointed out before that about half the Asian American generation in the 1990s were Republican. There were ripe opportunities to lock them in for generations to come then. But they neglected them and now I hear far too many Republicans whining “it’s just TOO HARD to reach out to Asian Americans, they’re already locked in by the state Democratic party.”
Idiots.
Persia
@Zifnab: I suspect John McCain’s defense of the word ‘g**ks’ to describe Vietnamese people hurt him in the general. Maybe they can expand their racism forward.
Steeplejack
@RedKitten:
{a href=”HYPERLINK YOU WANT” rel=”nofollow”}TEXT YOU WANT TO APPEAR{/a}
Replace curly braces with angle brackets. Be sure to include the “http://” in the URL. For some reason it will screw up if you start with the “www”.
Betsy
@Joe:
I’ll tell you where: it’s being directed at all the man-hating feminazis (woot! represent!) who feminized education and discriminate against all the boys in grade school and high school. Because if it’s boys falling behind, it’s not possibly because they’re not as qualified, or biologically less well equipped (as the argument goes when it’s girls or blacks or whatever else); it’s because they’re treated unfairly. Also.
JGabriel
kwAwk:
The fact that so many people still think of the successes of the civil rights movement as a win for blacks rather than as a win for the entire country is evidence that there’s still a problem.
.
Brick Oven Bill
Gang behavior is also evolutionary based. Gang behavior is a logical survival strategy in Neolithic evolutionary environments. However, in societies that were forced to undergo the pressures of metals, gangs gave way to organizations and discipline. This is why British parliamentary behavior is different than Zimbabwean parliamentary behavior. Metals developed at latitudes above the Sahara.
This is why transplanting Neolithic-formed populations into 3-Age-formed populations creates pockets of emergent gang behavior. In a larger experiment, you get Washington DC and Detroit. People like to pretend that education can trump biology, but this is false.
Take for instance the MAOA gene Third Eye Open. The establishment will surely not assign this gene to demographic groups in America because of the current political climate. But my guess is that if this was studied and groups assigned, those Neolithic groups would be far more likely to contain the MAOA gene.
Senyordave
Warning: this is a Rasmussen poll. But it is dismaying that you could 42% of any group that actually is made up of sentient beings to admit they would vote for Palin for POTUS.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/rasmussen/20090720/pl_rasmussen/election201220090720;_ylt=AmnZi71WwOBvsda0CNILccCs0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTJzbDFrdjV2BGFzc2V0A3Jhc211c3Nlbi8yMDA5MDcyMC9lbGVjdGlvbjIwMTIyMDA5MDcyMARjcG9zAzIEcG9zAzcEc2VjA3luX3RvcF9zdG9yeQRzbGsDMjAxMm1hdGNoLXVw
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
@Zifnab:
Interesting. Am I incorrect, then, in thinking that Asian-Americans tend to vote Democratic? From what I’ve heard on the subject, Asian-Americans tend to be pretty reliable Democratic voters, with the possible exceptions of Vietnamese-Americans and Korean-Americans. Is that not true?
DougJ
I’ll tell you where: it’s being directed at all the man-hating feminazis (woot! represent!) who feminized education and discriminate against all the boys in grade school and high school. Because if it’s boys falling behind, it’s not possibly because they’re not as qualified, or biologically less well equipped (as the argument goes when it’s girls or blacks or whatever else); it’s because they’re treated unfairly. Also.
In all honesty, I think that gender inequity in educational achievement is a real issue. But you’re completely right that when it was men doing better than women, it was framed biologically, whereas now that it’s women doing better than men, it’s framed as an unfair system. It’s funny how that works.
kay
Does race-baiting serve a dual purpose here? The Democratic President is African-American. Does that make this particular tactic more attractive?
I know this is obvious, but is it also true?
Is that what makes the risk of alienating Hispanic voters worthwhile? That they can tie race-baiting to a specific President, in a way they couldn’t with, say, Bill Clinton, who was a big Southern white guy?
There’s a reason they’re doing this. Assuming the reason is because they are tone-deaf and clueless or can’t parse an electoral map might be a little arrogant, on the part of Democrats.
The Sotomayor hearings were about Obama. Is the resurgence of the southern strategy about Obama too?
MBunge
Oh, for pete’s sake. Douthat is clearly getting at a pretty obvious point. All the racial/identity politics and backroom dealmaking that have been conducted up to this point in the U.S. have been in the context of an overwhelming white majority and/or a disenfranchised white minority. As that context changes, it’s going to have an effect.
Mike
Hammy
I love BeBe and CeCe Winans.
Hey, you don’t have to go as far back as Tammany Hall to hear about back-room dealings by whites to give jobs to whites. Just read last year’s report on the politicized hiring at the DOJ and the practice of screening resumes for “good Americans”.
JGabriel
gnomedad:
Nicely done. I’m stealing that one.
.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
@Brick Oven Bill:
“Gang behavior is also evolutionary based. Gang behavior is a logical survival strategy in Neolithic evolutionary environments. However, in societies that were forced to undergo the pressures of metals, gangs gave way to organizations and discipline. This is why British parliamentary behavior is different than Zimbabwean parliamentary behavior. Metals developed at latitudes above the Sahara.”
Yes, because iron wasn’t used in sub-Saharan Africa until Europeans brought it there. Oh, wait, eastern Niger was one of the first iron-smelting regions in the world, in 1500 B.C. Turns out, Africans used iron before Europeans did. Fancy that! (Also, the Incans and Aztecs and Mayans? Those were gangs. Not empires, gangs.)
There’s so much wrong with this theory, I don’t know where to begin. It’s some top-notch spoofing, though. It’s flagrantly racist, without being explicitly racist. That’s just the right tone for a spoof to take.
Betsy
@DougJ:
Oh yeah – I wasn’t meaning to comment on the actual issue, just conservatives’ varying responses to it. To be honest, it’s not something I’ve studied in depth. The coverage of it always gets my hackles up, though, because it always seems so deeply rooted in stereotypes and the assumption that success is a zero-sum game: if girls are doing better, boys must be doing worse, and boys doing worse is worse than girls doing worse. (How’s that for a horror of a sentence?)
That doesn’t mean that there’s *not* a problem; I just don’t know much about the issue, because I haven’t gone out of my way to look for sufficiently trustworthy investigations of the subject.
Keith G
@Brick Oven Bill: Wow Brick:
“Washington DC and Detroit” = “Neolithic-formed populations”
So, given the populations of Washington DC and Detroit what you are saying is……?
DougJ
Oh yeah – I wasn’t meaning to comment on the actual issue, just conservatives’ varying responses to it.
I didn’t think you were. I thought you made a good point.
anonevent
@Malron: A hundred years ago, they changed the definition of white to include Irish and other groups so that white would continue to be the majority. But those damned Mexicans won’t play along and learn just English and stop eating tortillas so that they can join the glorious majority.
JGabriel
DougJ @ Top:
Well, there’s a nice bit of racial harmony – no matter what the race, approximately 1/3 will always vote for fear-mongering assholes and lower taxes.
See, under the skin we’re all the same!
.
DougJ
All the racial/identity politics and backroom dealmaking that have been conducted up to this point in the U.S. have been in the context of an overwhelming white majority and/or a disenfranchised white minority.
I don’t think that’s true. Tammany Hall and other systems like it (there was a really interesting piece about something like this, but less corrupt, in New Jersey) operated because they were able to win elections, which involved getting majorities.
Hammy
This should win over the Asians:
On Tuesday, State Rep. Betty Brown (R) caused a firestorm during House testimony on voter identification legislation when she said that Asian-Americans should change their names because they’re too hard to pronounce:
“Rather than everyone here having to learn Chinese — I understand it’s a rather difficult language — do you think that it would behoove you and your citizens to adopt a name that we could deal with more readily here?” Brown said.
DebTX
I would venture to say that there are very few “pure” whites. These people have no idea what they’re talking about. The younger generation couldn’t care less. My “white” (via Indian, French, Irish) 15 year old has a circle of friends who are all mixed race, and they’re all good kids who are fun to be around. It’s a shame in this day and time that I had to sit him down and tell him to always be aware of his surroundings because some rude, hateful people don’t take too kindly to see mixed races hanging around together.
And this is a “christian” country? Phhhht.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
@Keith G:
“So, given the populations of Washington DC and Detroit what you are saying is……?”
He’s saying that even though Africans started using iron 500 years before Europeans did, they have less experience with metal than Europeans do. And since metal is the thing that abolishes gang mentalities ( because SHUT THE FUCK UP, that’s how!), regions that have less experience with metal (even though they actually have more) are still prone to Neolithic gang mentalities.
Also, there was never any civilization more advanced than gangs in sub-Saharan Africa, until Europeans came along. Also.
It’s pretty good spoofing, like I said.
Bootlegger
They have gangs because they don’t have any metal. Amiright?
JGabriel
bago:
Yeah, I’m sure that cleared things right up.
Krista, start a link with this (replace squigglies with “<“and “>” ):
{a href=”http://www.yoursitehere.com/”}
and end it with
{/a}
.
DougJ
I love BeBe and CeCe Winans.
I have actually never heard that version. I have a live Mavis Staples version on iTunes that I like a lot.
JenJen
@John Cole:
Trust me when I say I am not being a concern troll by being very, very concerned about this. Really, John? I mean, even among younger Republicans? Don’t you think there’s a split of some sort coming?
bago
@Steeplejack: Because www is not a protocol descriptor. The rel attribute is superfluous. The nofollow value for the rel attribute is not even a part of the w3 spec.
Brick Oven Bill
The genetic codes in those Washington DC/Detroit evolved in places where the large aggressive males would have the greatest reproductive success. This is the Neolithic evolutionary environment. Bill Gates, a technological and organizational genius, would probably be eaten for dinner in this environment. In contrast, modern farming favors discipline and planning over aggressive behavior.
If Africans were pioneers in metallurgy, it got snuffed out along the way. All modern advances in metallurgy have been made in 3-Age societies. When leadership from 3-Age societies leaves Neolithic populations (Zimbabwe/Haiti), farm production drops dramatically. Currently Zimbabwe and Haiti are food importers. Zimbabwe used to be the breadbasket of Africa.
Haiti under the French used to be one of the richest societies in the Western Hemisphere. They grew sugar. Now Haiti is poor. 3-Age populations are banned from owning land in Haiti.
Or perhaps Almighty God created us all with identical plastic brains.
bago
@Brick Oven Bill: Metal pressure gangs is the name of my next band.
ruemara
As a non-whitey, can Mr. Douchhat please point me to the appropriate backroom dealmaking emporium? I seem to have missed that flyer at my “How to Disenfranchise a Honky” seminar and tea party.
Why do conservative pundits make it so hard for me to not be blindingly angry at them?
Mr Furious
I think BOB’s analysis is slightly off. It’s clearly because cold winters forced more clothing than at more southern latitudes…
Right?
—
On a related note, the KKK must’ve relied on rope because they had no metal either…right? But the wearing of robes and hoods blows a hole in my attire-based theory.
What’s a racist troll to do?
bago
@JGabriel: Everyone should learn basic HTML, if not XML. In 20 years it will be impossible to serialize text without encoding context, and a markup language is perfect for that. Might as well learn the language of the future now.
cmorenc
Don’t get me wrong – I am progressive to the core and voted for, donated to, and did some foot-soldier canvassing for Barack Obama in the last election.
However, I’ve carefully read the Ross Douthat NYT column in question, and cannot find anything (not even a *wink* wink* dogwhistle sort of phrase) WHATSOEVER that can in even the most remote sense be considered racist or race-baiting. When we progressives have arrived at a point where it is considered “race baiting” to simply observe (quite correctly) that with the coming demographic dominance of a nonwhite majority electorate, that continuance of affirmative action as it currently exists will not only be corrupting, but provoke resentments within a section of the white minority electorate – we’ve arrived at a self-imposed delusional sense of “political correctness” where ideological correctness blinds us to objective facts, where reasonable exploration of politically inconvenient phoenomena becomes forbidden and we perceive anyone speaking of such things as serving as handmaiden to liars, fools, racists, or other anti-progressive demons.
This is bullshit, folks. I much prefer Paul Krugman to Ross Douthat, but OTOH we do need to have some “honest conservatives” like Douthat and Brooks around to keep our progressive perspective from becoming an echo chamber where we only hear the sounds of true believers. Even if Douthat and Brooks are much more often wrong than is e.g. Krugman. And yes, I recognize that we don’t need folks like Kristol around for this role.
ruemara
@Mr Furious:
seconded. & I love her soo much too.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
“Haiti under the French used to be one of the richest societies in the Western Hemisphere. They grew sugar. Now Haiti is poor. 3-Age populations are banned from owning land in Haiti.”
Haiti, under the French, was a slave state. Zimbabwe wasn’t much better off, under the Europeans. Turns out, if you enslave people and force them to work for you 18 hours a day for no compensation other than subsistence needs, you can increase their production, particularly in an agricultural context. The Soviet Union got a lot more production value out of Central Asia than Central Asia currently gets, because the Soviet Union forced people to work, stole the products of that work, and shot anyone who resisted.
A fun factoid about Haiti that most people don’t know about- Napoleon tried to recolonize it after it gained independence. He also tried to reintroduce slavery there, despite the French Republic’s abolition of slavery in 1795. He was in a bit of a race with the British, but malaria combined with Haitian resistance to fend off both groups pretty well. That ended Napoleon’s dreams of a New World Empire, so he sold off his land in North America for a pittance to Thomas Jefferson.
winguts_to_iraq
Biology v. unfairness aside, I do think we should be a little bit concerned about the drop-off of males enrolling in higher-ed compared to women.
Steeplejack
@DougJ:
The Staples do a good job. Here is the canonical version, by the Undisputed Truth. “Canonical” as in the one that was big on the radio back in the day. I think the song was first recorded by the Temptations but flopped. Dunno why–it seems like it would be a natural for them.
Don’t let the handshake and the smile fool ya
Take my advice, I’m only tryin’ to school ya
DougJ
However, I’ve carefully read the Ross Douthat NYT column in question, and cannot find anything (not even a wink wink* dogwhistle sort of phrase) WHATSOEVER that can in even the most remote sense be considered racist or race-baiting.
I have to disagree. The white-minority stuff is classic race-baiting. I’ve heard my uncle and grandmother talk about being scared by it after hearing it on right-wing radio.
And it makes no real sense, btw, since whites will still be a plurality. It’s a pure scare thing.
Ash Can
@RedKitten: This is a good reference site for manipulating HTML text.
(PS:
It appears that just as I once messed up the formatting of this site with an embedded link, JGabriel did something to italicize this whole thread.Never mind; it’s been fixed.)Adrienne
Nah, not us black folk. We voted like 96% for Obama. Weez got too much ‘sperience wit dis heah. We noez who da enemy iz. Da yella an’ brown folk iz new to dis but weez gon’ teach em!
FTW. When he shows you make sure I’m right behind you. I’m trynna get the hook up too. You know how us colored folks roll :-)
DougJ
This is bullshit, folks. I much prefer Paul Krugman to Ross Douthat, but OTOH we do need to have some “honest conservatives” like Douthat and Brooks around to keep our progressive perspective from becoming an echo chamber where we only hear the sounds of true believers.
I think what you’re saying is bullshit. There’s enough disagreement among liberals anyway. Krugman spends half his time criticizing Obama, for example. I argue with other liberals all the time about most issues.
I’m happy to read Larison, who identifies as conservative. And I’m happy to ignore most of the crap that supposedly liberal pundits write.
I just don’t see why I should lower my standards for Douthat because he’s conservative.
Steeplejack
@bago:
Thanks. Copied that from the source of a Balloon Juice page. Didn’t want to risk breaking the, uh, eccentric WordPress code handling.
Keith G
@Scruffy McSnufflepuss: I see as I was rechecking my class note (former teacher here), that the ignorant racist (redundant?) known as Bill has moved the ball a tad farther down the road.
Scuff, I was just going to add to your observation –
The University of Sankore in Mali was started about 990 AD. What was goin on in England at that time?
By 1320 (the reign of Mansa Musa), the Sankoré Masjid has room for 25,000 students and had one of the largest libraries in the world (from: Ibn Battuta in Black Africa)
Bill, the more you type, the stupider you get.
Brick Oven Bill
Haiti won its independence right about the same time as America did. George Washington stepped down from power. In contrast, Dessalines was murdered and his body mutilated. America is now a food exporter. Haiti is now completely dependent on international aid and Haitians seek to move to the land of their former oppressors.
They still ban white people from owning land in Haiti however. I think this makes them racists. Haitians would likely not agree with the premise that Almighty God created us all with identical plastic brains, and would therefore not get good grades at American colleges.
JGabriel
Brick Oven Bill:
BOB, Democrats across the country hope you and other Republicans keep talking that way.
Neolithic. You keep using that word, BOB. I don’t think it means what you it means.
The Neolithic era includes the development of agriculture and cities. The traits you keep using to describe a pre-civilization human society are characteristic of all peoples preceding the Neolithic era, which is generally known as the Paleolithic era.
Also, anyone who uses “3-Age” instead of “Third Age” is either lazy, or afraid of people (very properly) laughing at him for sounding like a Tolkien novel while discussing anthropology.
Care to tell us which book you got all this shit & nonsense from? I’m pretty sure you didn’t make up terms like “3-Age” or how to mis-use “Neolithic” in a consistent manner all on your lonesome.
.
Original Lee
OT, but I found the full Max Keiser segment that John referenced last week.
http://www.france24.com/en/20090716-wbenfaceoff12h12m090716flv-keiser-moncef-goldman-wall-street-profits
It’s really worth watching the whole thing.
gocart mozart
I have a history book about WWI called “The World War” written in the 20’s. It contains frequent references to the Irish race, German race, Jewish race, Polish race, etc. White race meant English ancestry exclusively. Pat Buchanan would not be considered white one hundred years ago. Funny that.
Race is a human construct as someone pointed out upthread.
Hispanic is not a race. It is an ethnic group. In a few decades many Americans of Latino ancestry will be considered white.
Also, Brick Head Bill belongs to the Stupid Race.
tc125231
Ross D. is a tool, literally. His job, similar to that of David Brooks, also at NYT, is to use a sophmoric earnest demeanor to sell statements of “fact” that are anything but.
Basically, they are kinder gentler proagandists for the ruling classes.
You can bet the pay is good. For more detail, see Kurt Vonnegut’s “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater”.
gwangung
That far up the evolutionary scale?
bago
@Steeplejack: Actually, I wouldn’t blame wordpress per se, as it seems to be much more of a Content Management System. Instead I would blame the hodgepodge of scripts that manage the user content and the CSS for presentation. One script has one algorithm for pulling content out of a post, and another script has another algorithm, and when the two argue you get confused. The style section that handles caps is just pure WTF.
Steeplejack
@DougJ:
Damn you, DougJ! Now you’ve got me trolling through YouTube for other classics of ’70s soul, e.g.,–and thread-appropriate–the O’Jays, “Backstabbers.”
They smilin’ in your face
All the time they wanna take your place
Edit: Hey, no white kids on Soul Train. Racism? It would be foolish not to speculate.
Brick Oven Bill
Neolithic is basic agriculture in my mind. All modern humans, save a scarce few, practice some sort of agriculture. The BBC did some reality TV show on a supposedly ‘untouched’ African village, and they grew roots in a field. This village was ruled by a strong man with many children. He was an autocrat.
Mike in NC
BOB, get yourself to the local community college and sign up for something called Anthropology 101.
Steeplejack
@bago:
Which I abbreviate as “WordPress” for the sake of convenience, if not complete accuracy. Point taken.
JGabriel
@Ash Can:
Busted. But I fixed it meself, before the clock ran out.
.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
@Brick Oven Bill:
“Haiti won its independence right about the same time as America did. George Washington stepped down from power. In contrast, Dessalines was murdered and his body mutilated. America is now a food exporter. Haiti is now completely dependent on international aid and Haitians seek to move to the land of their former oppressors.”
Americans (well, white Americans, anyway) were not held in slavery at the time of independence. Americans had their own wealth at time of independence. They didn’t have their slave-masters running away and taking all of their moveable property with them.They also had a nice mercantile fleet that bypassed English embargoes post-Independence. Also, George Washington didn’t die during the course of a grueling, genocidal race-war, to be replaced by a dictatorial lieutenant who was succeeded by an endless stream of dictatorial rulers. So America caught some lucky breaks that Haiti never got, it’s fair to say.
“They still ban white people from owning land in Haiti however. I think this makes them racists. Haitians would likely not agree with the premise that Almighty God created us all with identical plastic brains, and would therefore not get good grades at American colleges.”
The only person I’ve ever heard argue about plastic brains is you, spoof.
DougJ
Damn you, DougJ! Now you’ve got me trolling through YouTube for other classics of ‘70s soul, e.g.,—and thread-appropriate—the O’Jays, “Backstabbers.”
Okay, I finally realized that you thought I was referencing “Smiling Faces”. I’m actually referencing “I’ll Take You There”:
Ain’t no smiling faces
Lying to the races
clone12
And I say this as a high achieving Asian American with an income in the top 2 percentile, one of my classmates at UCLA was a war refugee who as a child literally dodged bullets in Central America and was the first person in her family to have ever attended college. And upon graduation, instead of going for the big money jobs she decided to do something more mundane, like being a teacher her own neighborhood so she can help and inspire others.
And you know what? I am proud to have her as my classmate. If it took affirmative action to get her in, so be it. I rather have her represent my school than some legacy brat who partied his way to an MBA. She is what a university should be producing.
scav
@bago: everyone should learn html/xml etc. wave of the future etc.? Ahhh, as a user of troff and WordStar and other visible fomatting-command programs from the 80s that were supposedly made obsolete by the brave new future of wsywig, I’m giggling helplessly. I am so into the techy reruns.
Ben Lehman
America did not have a huge debt imposed on it by England to pay back the people who “owned” the Americans as chattel. Also.
Brachiator
@John Cole:
I am still astounded by the degree to which the GOP is grasping onto this lame strategy for dear life. No matter how hard they try to acknowledge the plain fact of America as a melting pot, they quickly fall back onto a vision of a sour stew in which their preferred brand of white stock rises to the top to rule over everyone else.
But few sane people give a rat’s ass about this strangely retrograde vision of America. And there are Polish Americans, Irish Americans, Italian Americans, and other ethnic Americans who can easily remember when they weren’t considered just other “white folks,” but were the feared Other endangering the purity of the Anglo Saxon stock. Hawaii is a multi-ethnic state and even Palin’s Alaskan family include nonwhites.
You really have to wonder, what are these people thinking?
Gee. I thought the Civil War would have marked the end of the days when “Jefferson Beauregard” would be considered the essence of America. Douthat’s identification with the ghost of the Confederacy is quite interesting.
I always get a chuckle when I hear talk radio shills claim that Americans hate Obama’s tax proposals and then listen to ads on the same stations selling home installation and other products and loudly declaring, “come on down and get your Obama tax cut deals!”
BDeevDad — Not enough Asians living in the south and midwest. They’re still concentrated on the coasts.
Even so, Asians often get overlooked because their total numbers are so small, they are sometimes not even considered in various political polling. I recall some polling on past California governor’s race that omitted Asians. And since Asians are not a monolithic group, once you start separating out various Asian groups, the numbers become even less statistically significant when compared to other groups.
Molly
@Brick Oven Bill: “Race is a construct of environmental evolutionary forces. ”
Bill, I am French-Irish-German-Scottish-Sioux Indian. Blue eyes, black hair, white skin, with a brother with very dark skin, sons with very dark skin and white-blond hair and blue eyes. My evolution was a bunch of people thrown in a certain locale who found each other interesting.
As others said, it’s much more a socioeconomic divide than a “racial” divide. We’re all becoming brown now.
Steeplejack
@JGabriel:
But Ash Can’s link in 77 is still busted.
DougJ
OT, Steeplejack, this live Donny Hathaway version of “Jealous Guy” may be the best 70s R&B song never to be played on the radio (you can’t get it on iTunes either).
Just awesome.
Zifnab
@Scruffy McSnufflepuss:
In my neighborhood and my school growing up, some of the biggest GOP diehards were the first and second generation asian immigrants from Taiwan and China.
The Chinese-American community in Sugar Land is nominally a big supporter of the GOP, but internally there is a lot of conflict as the old guard white folks continue to hedge out the rich and emerging rich asian families. That infighting helped undermine a lot of Tom DeLay’s supporters in my area, and helped elected a number of Asian Americans to state office on Democratic tickets in reliably conservative areas.
So, in Houston at least, you see a large conservative base backed up in part by a GOP-friendly asian community that has been shifting away from the party as it has found itself struggling to get its own community leaders on to local ballots.
That’s my experience down here in the Lone Star State.
kid bitzer
“the Atlantic circle-jerkers drool all over Douthat for being a “reasonable conservative””
agreed; douthat is a new david brooks, selling right-wing lies with easy listening prose.
i’m hoping tnc will call him out on this.
Steeplejack
@DougJ:
D’oh! I’ll just fuck off, then, shall I?
And I won’t mention that I found the full 11-minute version of the Temptations doing “Smiling Faces Sometimes.” Epic. But I can see how it doesn’t lend itself to being cut down to a three-minute radio hit.
Okay, gotta go Afropik my ‘do.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
@Keith G:
“The University of Sankore in Mali was started about 990 AD. What was goin on in England at that time?”
The English were a bit too preoccupied with fending off Viking conquerors to do much of anything else. It was about 76 years before the Norman conquest, after which things began to settle down a bit. Of course, they still had “gangs,” Neolithic-style feudal aristocratic factions, pretty much until the advent of Henry VII in 1485 (if not later, maybe post-Cromwell).
Punchy
Rookie! How will Kris ever teach her child to flush and use a toaster?
JGabriel
@bago:
Bago, I agree, but if someone doesn’t already understand basic HTML, then they won’t understand the fairly technical descriptor-type language you used to explain it. For instance, I know exactly what this means:
But it may as well be C to someone who doesn’t already know HTML.
.
Common Sense
Has anyone seen this yet?
I can transcribe any text to audio and make an animated movie? With bad automated voices? Blog fights can now be transcribed to cheesy robotic voiced animated form. The possibilities are limitless. My mind is reeling.
Molly
@Brick Oven Bill: “They still ban white people from owning land in Haiti however. ”
No, Bill. The original Haitian constitution had that provision. It was removed in 1918.
bago
@scav: Nothing about wordstar implies contextual tagging, except for the replacement tokens. This was implemented in Word, but still isn’t the kind of expansive meta-tagging I am talking about.
Zach
@DougJ: I thought it was a velvet underground lyric… smiling faces not forgotten ’cause I love you, etc.
I’m a proud product of a lineage of 3-age success stories. Also, I think it’s beyond question that the 3-age Italian immigrants to America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were not remotely prone to gang behavior.
GregB
To racist white douchebags like Jefferson Davis Sessions and Pat Bukkkanan, a majority non-white America is the end of the world as they know.
And I feel fine.
-G
bago
@JGabriel: That’s why I linked to w3schools. They rock.
gocart mozart
I am Anglo/Italian. My skin color is not white but rather sort of beige: Nicely tanned if I spend enough time at the beach.
I have never met a black-skinned person (or red or yellow) but I have met many people whose skin color ranged from light brown to dark brown.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
@Zifnab:
Interesting. I had no idea that Chinese-Americans in Texas were so Republican. I’d forgotten the Taiwanese, they’d be a natural GOP constituency. But the Taiwanese and Chinese people I knew growing up (in Delaware) were pretty much all hardcore Democrats.
In Northeastern urban areas, I think Asian-Americans have tended to vote more for Democrats. That’s my anecdotal understanding, anyway, from talking to Asian-Americans. (My wife is from Hong Kong, and she went from not giving a shit about American politics to becoming a hardcore Democrat in early 2006, when the immigration kerfluffle really heated up.)
Ash Can
@JGabriel:
Which is a whole lot more than I was able to do when I broke a thread myself. And speaking of which,…
@Steeplejack:
Shows what I know. Thanks for letting me know. Let’s try this again…
HTML reference site
This link works all right, at least for me. If you or anyone else has a problem, please let me know.
LarryB
John,
To me, this is a distinct issue:
The fundamental calculus of class-based “affirmative action” is that without it, you get Argentina. Disadvantaged programs are all about leveling the playing field between the kids of the winners and losers of the previous generation. The public need to recycle the human potential of the offspring of failed parents will never go away unless you’re happy with a system of extreme economic castes.
The fundamental calculus of affirmative action is that it is bad for all of us if group X is excluded from the American dream. Affirmative action was always considered to be a temporary expedient to remedy the historical results of active discrimination against some group or other. That means that we should always review affirmative action programs to see if they’re still needed with the expectation that eventually we can discard them. That, unfortunately, does not prevent crypto-racists from trying to kill them by prematurely proclaiming the death of discrimination.
For many (white) people like us it’s easier to contemplate programs to help poor kids than it is to help group X people because racism is hard to talk about. However, since the issues do overlap (discrimination –> poor) I’m ok with using the the former as a rhetorical proxy if that’s what you need.
Steeplejack
@DougJ:
Thanks for that gem. I love Donny Hathaway. I won’t even link to my favorite, “The Ghetto.” (Actually, I would, but I can’t find it by him on YouTube.)
Brick Oven Bill
American trends do not suggest that we are ‘all becoming brown’, as Molly suggests. Trends point to America becoming Balkanized, at least among Whites. My theory is that people are drawn to mates of similar genetic makeup and as the populations of immigrants increase, inter-racial dating will likely decrease, and Balkanization will continue.
Inter-racial cohabitation/marriage is largely hype even today. For instance:
“96.25% of married white men have a white wife, 0.18% a black wife, 1.79% a Hispanic wife, etc. Among married black men, 5.55% have a white wife, 90.72% a black wife, 1.77% a Hispanic wife”
All of the data is interesting and well-researched.
Mike P
@MBunge:
Well yes, but I think Douthat is reading it wrong. Just because there will be more black/Asians/Latinos doesn’t mean they’ll automatically have more access to services, be on a more level playing field, etc (and I’m well aware of the general differences that are at play between the African American/Latino experience and the Asian American experience).
There are still some underlying structural issues at play that I don’t think Douthat wants to address and that’s why I’m not sure I can take his points at face value.
I do agree with the general need to shift from a race base to a class based A.A. system, though.
Steeplejack
@Ash Can:
No, that one works fine. And I wasn’t meaning to carp. Usually I’ll do a “copy link address” and fix it myself, but it didn’t even show up on yours.
DougJ
And I won’t mention that I found the full 11-minute version of the Temptations doing “Smiling Faces Sometimes.” Epic. But I can see how it doesn’t lend itself to being cut down to a three-minute radio hit.
Yeah, I thought I remembered a long version of it. The Temptations are great in an epic format. (Papa Was A Rolling Stone)
Steeplejack
@DougJ:
I think that they, inspired by the Beatles, aspired to something beyond the three-minute-song format, but it never quite came off for them. But we got some great music out of it.
RedKitten
Dude. I’m 8 1/2 months pregnant, stuck in an uncomfortable office chair in 29 degree heat (plus humidity.) I have a small foot wedged up firmly between my ribs, so that I can’t even sit up straight, I haven’t shit in three days, and I’m trying to get as many loose ends wrapped up at work as possible, all while dealing with bosses who are a) trying to squeeze as much out of me as they can before I go and b) not even trying to hide their sentiment that I’ve fucked up their lives by getting pregnant. I have to measure every fucking bite of food that passes my lips, and have been running on about 2 hours of sleep a night, after you take off the time I spend flipping over, getting up for a drink, getting up for a pee, dealing with leg cramps, and dealing with Braxton-Hicks contractions.
Cut me some goddamn slack, will you? I will learn HTML, but now is NOT the time.
Surly Duff
@ redkitten
Well, it sure ain’t gonna happen after the baby arrives.
RedKitten
At the same time? I don’t think I want them to learn that, thank you.
The Grand Panjandrum
@John Cole:
The HRC campaign sniffed around the edges of that steaming pile of shit. Fortunately, Obama played them like Albert King on a Gibson Flying V. But, yes, this really is the final arrow in the old Atwater/Rove playbook. Until the GOP leadership changes hands and a more civilized group takes over that is all we should expect.
bago
@RedKitten: Ehm, I’m the ML advocate. Get mad at me. As a peace offering I give you a Nirvana Rickroll.
I watched it to the end.
Steeplejack
I think much of the “blindness” of the Republican pundits comes down to day-to-day experience vs. vague “polls” and “trends.”
If, say, I live in a gated community with a bunch of other affluent white people, I go to my job at the Whitepaper Institute or the Whitington Corporation, and all my friends are either from work or from back in my days at White U., that is my reality, and it is going to trump all your polls and trends. I don’t see them, so they don’t exist. A lot of it is as simple as that. And anything that threatens to change my current reality is automatically a threat.
And if I venture out, in the spirit of “research,” to the mythical Applebee’s salad bar in search of the “real America,” the result is going to be predictably farcical. Like saying I understand the Jamaican experience because I went to Ocho Rios on vacation that one time.
Finally, a lot of the time when we are talking about race i America we are really talking about class, and I think it would be extremely helpful if that one idea was clearer in people’s minds.
Joel
@kwAwk: This issue is far more complicated than you make it appear. But playing within the rules of simplification, I’ll put on my Sextus Empiricus cap:
You say:
A) non-white children of immigrants are just as successful as their native born white counterparts (I’ll assume you mean a simple metric such as high school achievement scores, and nonwhites as asians).
ergo
B) what is holding back certain minority groups is no longer the oppression of whites on blacks but something in the culture of the specific minority group itself
one could easily argue
C) what is holding back certain minority groups is no longer the oppression of majority group on the specific minority group itself
May be true, may not. Equally logical.
This is beside the point, because you’re starting from the point that affirmative action is designed to correct “oppression”. This is not the case. The aim of affirmative action designed to provide equality of opportunity. I think that’s an admirable goal, and certainly argues for a class-basis of affirmative action. I agree with that approach in theory. I’ll support a workable solution when I see one. The feebleminded bloviator Ross Douthat has no such thing.
Comrade Jake
I don’t know, while I haven’t been impressed by Douthat’s NYT columns, he’s still much improved over Kristol. I’m sure there are and were better choices, but I have a hard time reading this piece and getting all that worked up about it.
Meanwhile, the Erin Andrews peephole story is just friggin bizarre.
Betsy
@RedKitten:
Everyone has their thing that “everyone” should know how to do. Bike people think “everyone” should know how to do all their own maintenance. Some foodies think that “everyone” should be able to make bread, soup stock, and raspberry jam from scratch. Tech geeks think “everyone” should be able to code html and build their own computers from parts. Lots of other examples; I’m sure others here could add to them. If everyone could do all the things that “everyone” should, none of us would have jobs or a life.
Also, hang in there! I’m sorry about your asshole bosses. It’s not your fault that our economy is not designed around the reality that employees are going to have babies sometimes. Do any of them have kids? Because if so, and if they or their spouses took any time off work for the births or adoptions, they really need to STFU. I mean they need to STFU anyway, but especially if they have kids of their own.
Betsy
In case it’s not obvious, I’ve had a run-in or two with some smug assholes who think that because they can replace my bike brakes they are morally superior to me. It is annoying.
Hob
@Brick Oven Bill: “Neolithic is basic agriculture in my mind”
Doing some basic agriculture in your mind would be a good idea.
Joel
@Betsy: Bike snobbery is annoying. Amazingly, in a bike town like Seattle, it’s diminishingly uncommon (at least in bike shops).
Anyhow, I’m pretty experienced with the wrench and adjusting brakes is a serious f’in pain in the ass. Especially the older models. Worst is derailleurs. Frankly, if people think everyone should know X, they should offer free lessons.
-> Park Tool, however, does offer detailed repair instructions on their website, and are quite helpful on the phone! Minnesotans. Gotta love em.
Brachiator
The problem here is that racism in America was never class-based. Restrictive real estate covenants, for example, did not have a provision that said that nonwhites with money were OK.
Racial (and gender) exclusion laws were exclusionary, period. While one can argue that middle and upper class members of a group have more resources to fight against exclusion, to try to substitute social class for race “seems” more fair, but really isn’t.
Bull puckey. This is like saying that everyone needs to know how to drive a manual transmission. Computers are tools, and the only tools worth using are those that are easy to use. When I pick up a pen, all I have to do is start to write. I don’t have to think about nibs or ink. Nor should I have to.
Comrade Kevin
@kwAwk:
If you feel the need to hastily add some sort of pre-emptive “I’m not a racist” comment to your statement, there’s something wrong with the original statement.
Steeplejack
@Joel:
Bike snob!
bago
@Betsy: Language is the primary vector of intelligence. Just sayin.
RedKitten
First of all, sorry for the rant — it was undeserved. (I’m really feeling the heat today, and desperately need a nap, and so am rather grumpy.)
And yeah, the bosses are a married couple, and they’ve got two kids, but when she had her kids, she was working as a bookkeeper for a church, and took the babies to work with her, after only a week off. (She’s reminded me of this about 6 times now.) Ah well, fuck it. At age 34, I can’t exactly put my reproduction on hold for a time when it doesn’t inconvenience them (we’re a two-woman office, so there would NEVER be a good time), and considering that I net less than $20K Canadian a year, I refuse to feel bad about it.
Common Sense
@Zifnab:
What High School did you graduate from and what year?
Clements class of ’96 myself. couldn’t say definitively that the school was majority Asian (including Indian, Pakistani, Chinese, Taiwanese, Japanese etc.), but it sure seemed like it. And yes, the students as a whole (regardless of race) trended strongly Republican. It ain’t a race thing. It’s an income/status thing. My mother still lives out there and there is definitely both an Asian and creepy socon feel.
I also have a Taiwanese turned American stepmother. She is most definitely a Republican — she was one of the first people to convince Michael Berry to run for mayor of Houston and is a close friend of his (Indian) wife.*
* — For those that don’t know him (ie everyone else), Berry is a former City Councilman turned spectacularly unsuccessful mayoral candidate turned typical right wing afternoon talk show host. Texas has a few of these guys. Google Dan Patrick some time.
bago
@Joel: I linked w3schools, a free lesson. Not trying to be a snob, just expounding on language!
DougJ
The problem here is that racism in America was never class-based. Restrictive real estate covenants, for example, did not have a provision that said that nonwhites with money were OK.
I know that’s true. At the same time, if you’ve ever been around a certain segment of poor, rural, white America, it’s hard not to think that someone from there trying to be the first in their family to go to college should get some special consideration.
Betsy
@Joel:
Yeah, I should be fair – it was only at one particular bike shop that I’ve ever experienced that. I shouldn’t paint all bike folks with the same brush. “Some of my best friends are…” and all that. ;) I just have a kneejerk dislike of certain “hardcore” affectations, whether the activity in question is hiking, biking, baking, gaming, or antique-spoon-collecting. The sad result of my own insecurity about my lack of hardcoreness. :)
That’s nice to hear about Seattle – altogether a good town, from what I can tell. I would not at all be sorry to end up there, depending on where the job apps take me over the next couple of years.
JGabriel
RedKitten:
Wow, you weren’t kidding. Structurally, it’s such a perfect paragraph by paragraph example of winger logic and blame-everyone-else-ism that it’s almost a parody. I’ve broken it down for entertainment value for everyone else:
Paragraph 1, Thesis:
P. 2, Nostalgia for the past:
For the record, Jimmy Carter won the 1976 election. There was some issue with something called “Watergate” and a letting off a guy named “Nixon” that made winning the 1976 elections a little difficult for Republicans, no matter what the other circumstances may have been.
P. 3, Blame the Spics:
P. 4, Blame the Kidz:
P. 5, Blame the Media:
P. 6, Blame Marketing (This is actually a valid point.):
P. 7, Blame the Minorities for Hiding in Plain View (Missing The Racism For The Redistricting):
P. 8, Blame the Base (For Being Xenophobes?!?!):
Right, there was never any Republican rhetoric that might have, you know, led the GOP base to be anti-immigrant.
P. 9, Democrats Are Racists Too!:
P.10, Blame California:
P. 10 cont’d, But Really It’s Still The Spics:
P. 11, Deny Reality:
That’s easily the funniest paragraph in the whole essay.
P. 12, Restate the Thesis …:
P. 13, … And Completely Miss The Point:
Dude, it’s your basic principles that offend these key voter groups! Sheesh.
.
Molly
@Common Sense: For Zainab: “What High School did you graduate from and what year?”
Kempner High School, 1991. :)
Brachiator
By the way, tweaking a conservative friend about the election results, I noted that McCain did well with the pre-dead, winning 53% of the over-65 vote.
Ash Can
@Steeplejack:
Oh, I didn’t think you were. I was sincere about being appreciative; I hadn’t clicked on the original link to check if it worked, and I’m not the world’s best typist, so I could easily have messed up a manually-entered command. Not to worry.
JGabriel
Fucking WordPress! Those paragraphs are supposed to be labelled, “P.2, P.3” etc.
WordPress stripped them out, leaving it looking like “2, 3,” etc., which is frickin’ ugly.
.
Betsy
@RedKitten:
Then she is naturally encouraging you to bring the little one with you when you return to work?
Seriously, you should NOT feel bad. I sympathize with the heat and sleep deprivation and grumpiness, and I hope it gets better soon (one way or another!). And congrats and best of luck with the birth!
(Sorry to derail.)
asiangrrlMN
Hello. It’s a bit more complicated with us Taiwanese American folks (and I can really speak to this as I am Taiwanese American). Many Taiwanese people voted (in the past tense) GOP because of the Taiwan issue. They felt that the GOP was more likely to support Taiwan than was the DFL. In fact, I knew someone who voted for W. the first time around for that very reason. I think many of them have realized that this is bullshit.
In addition, my father left America to return to Taiwan some years ago when he felt that the racism he encountered in this country wouldn’t allow him to climb any higher than middle management. Now, he is an Obama guy, and he really likes Michelle Obama. In other words, here in the podunk Midwest at least, the tides seem to be slowly shifting.
I think the younger generations of Asian Americans trend more to the left than do the older ones. That’s pure speculation on my part, though.
As for Douthat, I forced myself to read the whole article, and it reeked of dishonesty and race-baiting. From his repeated mangling of the ‘wise latina’ remark, to his willful misunderstanding of what affirmative action is meant to do, he continues to show his ass. I, for one, never thought he would be ‘better than’ Kristol–whatever that may mean.
Betsy
@bago:
Saying…what, exactly?
This kind of reminds me of a time I was visiting a good friend of mine who is French and at the time lived in Lyon. We were having dinner with an acquaintance of hers, who asked me if I spoke French. I apologetically said no, to which she replied, “Yes, Americans don’t speak other languages.” It never occurred to her that perhaps I speak a 2nd language other than French.
The fact that one doesn’t have the particular skill you consider valuable does not mean that one is less intelligent or that the skills one does have are less valuable.
Napoleon
@JGabriel:
Jgabriel said: “7, Blame the Minorities for Hiding in Plain View (Missing The Racism For The Redistricting)”
I actually think that is not accurate (well not completely, at least). Black political leadership wanted majority/minority districts also. I recall thinking at the time that it really was not a smart idea and would kill the Dem party for years (it did), but at the same time it really was not something the Dem leadership could oppose because it would be so easy to mischaricterize it as motivated by racism.
scav
@bago: I think I was still in the single-digits when I was playing with wordstar. I remember visual tags and having to hit something a lot to manually repaginate after I did anything. The lines on the screen didn’t match up with what came out the printer which was probably a daisy-wheel. I admit freely that at 8 I hadn’t a clue what contextual mapping is and at my current geriatric status, I’m assuming it maps to what I call intelligence-tagging. blah blah. But the basic point stands: the brave new future seems to cycle. At one point, the BNF is our being able to ignore what goes under the hood in computing and then the BNF is us tagging everything manually. I can even remember when the BNF was to never having to answer the phone unless we wanted to, those spanking new answering machines would handle it for us. Now, only old fogies fail to be phone-accessible at every single minute of the day.
Anne Laurie
“Refuse to remember”? Hell, the little putz masturbates to Woodrow-Wilson-era race-baiting*… Oh. You mean “refuses to acknowledge”. Carry on.
*which is where the current BOB spoof is stealing its racist justifications, apparently. Anybody ever seen BOB and Ross Douchehat in the same room?
Punchy
@JGabriel: Damn, that numbering system is ugly. ;)
matoko_chan
I didn’t read all comments but this is obviouso.
Douthat is just an Affirmative Action Concern Troll.
like we haven’t seen that before.
bago
@Betsy: It’s more of an abstract argument. In order for an idea to pass through a physical substrate or carrier, it needs to be encoded in some manner. The only way you can encode an idea is if there is a common protocol shared by the entities involved in the transmission. As such, any idea you want to get out of your head needs to be serialized in a parsable format. That shared understanding of how to parse serialized data is called a language. Thus language is the vector for intelligence.
Betsy
@ruemara:
I hear you. No one told me where the lesbian abortion classes were taking place either, but Pat Buchanan keeps telling me that’s what I do.
freelancer
Shorter Douthat as Matt Damon from The Good Shephard:
And that’s the way it is, for them.
TONY SMITH
A black progressive responds to Douthat: Racial Exhaustion in the New York Times
RedKitten
@JGabriel: I know — and if you read the letters that the article provoked, pretty much every last stinking one of them is saying, “Um, you’re trying to put sparkles on a cow turd and sell it to us — THAT’s what the problem is, you know.” I wonder if the author will read those comments and think about them a bit. I responded to one guy who was saying that only the GOP stood for family values, rule of law, fiscal responsibility, etc., by saying that those were great standards, but if he’s looking for them in the GOP, he’s looking in the wrong place, ’cause they just pay lip service to that stuff but don’t actually STAND by any of it. His general response was that a) who sez torture and warrantless wiretapping are illegal? and b) it doesn’t matter if none of the goopers can keep their pants on, because at least they’re SAYING the right things.
Unbelievable.
bago
@scav: By
BNF do you mean Backus-Naur Form?
Pagination has to do with layout. The particular point I was trying to illustrate about markup languages was the surrounding ability.
Joe Lisboa
“Washington DC and Detroit” = “Neolithic-formed populations”
Well, as a Detroiter who just finished cooking chicken over an open fire, I suspect you may have a point. A spoof-worthily racist point, but one nonetheless.
gwangung
I think it’s accurate, though.
Like I said, I just have to laugh. I think Republicans could have made real inroads into Asian American voters; in Washington, there was at least one Republican Asian American mayor (in the pre-Gary Locke era), and that was of a major suburb of Seattle (Bellevue, close to Microsoft). Ya think that could have made a solid foundation for electoral gains?
But, noooooo…..the Republican clowns ran some real winners in major races (Bachman-level wingnut, radio talk show hosts for governor). I think the general population thought, “if these nimrods can’t do anything better than to field this, they must not be a very good party to vote for.”
JGabriel
@Brick Oven Bill:
Which leads to inbreeding. If that were the case, BOB, we’d all be much more attracted to our siblings.
Thank FSM for the sexual curiosity and perversity that leads so many people of different races, ethnicities, and cultures to mate outside their local gene pool and thereby increase our genetic robustness.
You really are clueless about genetics. And so much more.
.
bago
@bago: In other words you could make a heirarchial tree using markup to describe your point and how context affects it. It’s much more precise than english, as in english it all revolves around conjugatios of the verb “to be”, and gets really messy.
Betsy
@bago:
Obviously. But you said that in response to a comment about what “everyone” should know, so it seemed that you were suggesting that knowing html=knowing language=expression of intelligence, or at least that it was a more important thing for everyone to know than how to cook or do bike repair, a suggestion I would dispute.
JGabriel
@RedKitten:
GOPer logic: Our politicians are better than yours, because ours lead by word and not by deed, by rhetoric and not by example! Goddammit!
.
Anne Laurie
Old joke: You know why t-shirts & polos became the standard uniform for the geek squad? Because they’re too lazy/klutzy/timid to learn basic mending, and not wealthy enough to keep throwing away every shirt that loses a button. Hah, “everyone” can sew on a lousy button, right?
I’m old enough that my dyslexic, ADHD brain was supposed to learn cursive using a fountain pen. My third-grade teacher, Sister Augustine, was considered daringly progressive because she let us use cartridge pens instead of self-filling models. The only thing I really learned in penmanship class was a deep aversion to “Everyone should… “ pieties.
JGabriel
Napoleon:
Napolean, I don’t think it’s an accurate description of redistricting, but it’s an accurate description of Bill Greener’s argument – that he misses the GOP’s racism by blaming the Republican’s farcical response to minorities as a product of redistricting.
.
jenniebee
@Betsy:
it’s being directed at all the man-hating feminazis (woot! represent!) who feminized education and discriminate against all the boys in grade school and high school. Because if it’s boys falling behind, it’s not possibly because they’re not as qualified, or biologically less well equipped (as the argument goes when it’s girls or blacks or whatever else); it’s because they’re treated unfairly. Also.
Testify, sister! What really drove me nuts about the “education failing our boys” meme is that it’s premised on the notion that it’s unfair to expect boys to behave themselves and pay attention the way that girls do, and it’s double-plus-unfair to penalize them for it instead of putting up with it with gentle good humor.
Betsy
And see how it’s harmed you to go through life unable to properly fill a fountain pen? You’re a warning to us all.
Third Eye Open
BOB,
Stick to topics where the physical science is less settled, it will make the schtick more authentic.
you still didn’t answer my question, what race do I belong to?
Calouste
@gocart mozart:
People who think that the English are somehow “racially pure” always make me laugh with their ignorance of history. English are a mixture of Celts, Picts, Romans, Angles, Saxons, Danes, Norse, Normans (who are themselves a Norse/French mixture), French Hugenots, Flemish and a probably few other that I can’t remember.
Brick Oven Bill
One reason that God makes us fight with our siblings, JGabriel, is so we do not want to know them in a carnal manner. It is kind of like the seven-year marriage thing, but more powerful.
Behold, the ways of the universe are very powerful, and all roads point to Darwin.
Llelldorin
My impression (from growing up in a city with a large Asian minority) was that the Republican success with Asians has been collapsing for two basic reasons:
(1) Republicans used to be much, MUCH better at dogwhistling than they are today. In the 80s, at least, Republicanism had a slick glibertarian facade that was extremely attractive to a lot of Asian entrepreneurs. At the time, many of the real racist mouthbreathers were still Dixicrats in the Democratic party, so the Republicans were free to make muted “we’re really on your side” racist appeals without being quite so blatant about it.
These days, the racist Dixiecrats are the Republican Party; even a lot of the old corporate types are now Democrats. That makes for a much less attractive party for nonwhites. (We’ve talked before about how many current Republicans seem to thing dogwhistling is best done by amplifying a fingernails-on-chalkboard sound through a bullhorn.)
(2) There are many more second, third, and higher-generation Asians voting these days. As with most immigrant groups, by the third-generation the group starts to be almost indistinguishable from the general population, and younger Americans (Asians included) went overwhelmingly for Obama.
jenniebee
@Brick Oven Bill:
Do we need to start a paypal collection to get Bill the medications (and set of encyclopedias) he clearly needs?
“Metals developed at latitudes above the Sahara” – ye gods and little fishes. This guy, reading Lord of the Flies probably thought “sure, they adopted murderous, cannibalistic, gang-like behaviors, but they were British boys of the right sort, so their murderous rampages had the right tone“
Brachiator
@DougJ:
But it is not Either/Or, and shouldn’t be. I know people who are against race-based affirmative action because it specifically attempts to aid blacks or Latinos, but are all for legacy affirmative action in which the sons or daughters of alumni get preferential treatment. They claim this is race-neutral, but this is often a dodge, especially when the college discriminated in the past.
There has always been some form of affirmative action for the poor. And there should be. But people either forget, don’t know, or don’t want to know that many colleges quietly put aside or sought to change scholarships that sought to help a worthy poor boy who was Protestant, Catholic, son of a union member or factory worker, or who was born in a certain city or neighborhood, etc., — but which restricted this aid to someone who was white.
And people either forget, don’t know, or don’t want to know about the past and people like Anita Hemmings, who applied to and was accepted by Vassar College in 1893:
But when a roommate’s father hired a private investigator who verified suspicions that Anita was passing for white, she was almost thrown out of the school even though her academic and social record was outstanding. And Vassar did not accept an acknowledged black woman until 1940.
A story about Anita Hemmings can be found here (Passing as White: Anita Hemmings 1897)
http://www.aavc.vassar.edu/vq/articles/Anita_Hemmings
JGabriel
Brick Oven Bill:
Eep. So why fight with all of us, BOB? Are you really that polymorphously promiscuous?
.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
@Brick Oven Bill:
“One reason that God makes us fight with our siblings, JGabriel, is so we do not want to know them in a carnal manner. It is kind of like the seven-year marriage thing, but more powerful.”
Obviously, this spoof has never been married, and doesn’t know that the sex in a marriage is punctuated only by arguments.
Keith G
@Common Sense: & Zainab. Current Houstonian here. Adding to your commentary: From my Montrose/Upper Kirby perch I deal with some Viet property owners. A conserative lot, whew!
Balancing that out are the (Americanized) Asian UH students who are, at least now, rather progressive and quite fun to hang with.
/generalizations
gex
@DougJ: I agree that educational inequality is/can be a problem also. But I can’t help but wonder if having this problem for a while is what’s necessary to get women more broadly represented in upper management and board rooms. It might take a while where the majority of qualified graduates are women to make dent in that problem.
gex
@Hammy: Speaking as an Asian-American, I can tell you that being called “the good kind of minority” is rather off-putting as well. We’re still bad, of course, just not as bad is we could be.
DougJ
But it is not Either/Or, and shouldn’t be.
I agree. I’m just agreeing with Douthat that there is a place for class-based affirmative action. (As you point out, it probably already exists.)
Brick Oven Bill
I don’t fight with Laura W.
LD50
Wow. Suddenly we can predict with total accuracy what our computers will be like in 20 years, in total massive contrast with any 20-year time period in the past?
jl
Lotta comments already, but I am a White Man, and need to say that my reaction to Douthat’s column is -Jebbus, what a loser. I cannot remember the day in my life when I considered myself a part of Session the Third’s America. The column is too sad sack to be termed bitter.
I will add my pet theory. The current GOP retro-conservatism, and the glibertarian version as well, is dead for the next generation. I think pretty much everyone under 30 or 35 regards themselves as some kind of oppressed minority, even suburban white kids. They watched their elders live high on the hog off New Deal, the GI bill and other government programs, all proclaim themselves self made, and then systematically deny their children and grandchildren all the advantages that they had received from the government.
And as commenter above said, the dog whistle is not very subtle anymore.
The young, Hispanics, Asians, all see how the GOP inner circle, composed basically of Sessions the Thirds in thin disguises, push more and more people out of the life boat as these upright White Men suck the country dry like leeches that don’t know when too drop off and digest their meal for awhile. They have caught on to the game.
Too bad a lot of middle aged and older White Men are too stupid or too invested in bogus tribal identity to understand that they are on the menu too. Too bad. At some point, the you snooze you lose principle kicks in. Douthat should just sit down and shoot beers and feel sorry for himself and Sessions, and be done with it.
Betsy
@gex:
The pipeline question is a really interesting one. I was at a conference last year in which the keynote was a discussion of the breakdown of women and minorities at different levels in history departments. What was interesting was that since the early 80s, history departments were graduating roughly equal numbers of male and female PhDs, but despite this men dominated four to one in full professorships. Thus, it can’t just be a pipeline problem; otherwise the numbers would be much closer to equal, since today’s full professors (not emeritus) would have finished their degrees roughly between the early-70s and the mid-1990s.
So the pipeline is critical, but not sufficient, at least in this particular field. I imagine that this would be true in other areas as well.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
“I don’t fight with Laura W.”
Online marriages don’t count.
jl
Regarding affirmative action, I do believe aspects of it are flawed. From what I saw in academic job market and course of early careers, a lot of minorities are disillusioned about how things work. They suspect a ‘pump and dump’ operation. Hire a lot of new people, get the quotas, shove ’em out the door before you have to give them tenure.
My own opinion, which is limited to the social sciences, is that any system is imperfect and affirmative action does have to change with the times. But I am also sure that the GOP wants to go back to bogus standards and frank inequality of educational opportunity and revive discrimination under various pseudo-scientific glibertarin cover.
My own very cynical opinion in social sciences is that a lot of senior people making tenure decisions now were hired during the boom years 30 years or more ago when everyone got a job. And I do not see how some of those people are really qualified to judge anybody, even minority candidates they look down on as affirmative action second raters. But that is just an IMHO.
LD50
I haven’t gotten a single Soros check yet, and I’m starting to worry they’re being sent to the wrong address.
Llelldorin
@jl:
A hell of a lot of modern Repubicanism seems to boil down to pointing at the Obama administration (headed by a mixed race guy who spent some time growing up in Indonesia, putting forward a Latina from the Bronx as a Supreme Court Jusice, and so on), and expecting whites guys everywhere to recoil at the foreignness.
That only works for people old enough to have grown up in segregated cities, which these days means middle-aged to very old. To anyone younger than about 40 (including white guys like me), this just looks like any professional environment we’ve ever worked in, and the increasingly shrill posturing by Sessions and Graham just seems outlandishly weird.
gex
@Betsy: True. I suppose the balance will never become so great that it directly causes more equal placement of women in those positions. Doubt the pipeline will ever graduate 9 women for each man — or whatever ratio it would take to get placements to balance out.
gwangung
Well, you’re just not associating with the right kind of folks, then….
Yeah, the Model Minority crap rankles me (and has for the past four decades). I wish we could put it to bed, but that stuff lingers, like a bad odor (or white Republican leaders)….
bago
@JGabriel: Don’t stress the poor boy. The idea that one class could encapsulate multiple subclasses would blow the poor things’ mind.
bago
@LD50: Angle brackets are like pointers. They ain’t goin away. They might be wrapped with fancy syntax like delegates, but they’re still there.
anonymous
@DougJ:
One point that Andrew Hacker makes is that there’s a substantial number of white kids who are “poor” because their parents divorced and they live with the mom in a decent neighborhood with decent schools, but the actual income in the household (w/ no dad) is pretty low. Given the nice nd and school, such students wouldn’t appear to be truly disadvantaged.
He claimed that 25% or so of “poor” whites fit into that category, IIRC.
jl
@gwangung: My experience from teaching diverse populations in different areas, and hearing the variety of experiences, is that a ‘good’ minority changes into a ‘bad’ minority very quickly, at the convenience of the majority, as local conditions permit and allow.
Origuy
@Calouste: The Roman legions on Hadrian’s Wall had soldiers from all over the Empire, including legions from Syria and North Africa. Some of those legionnaires married local girls and settled down when they retired. Officers and others brought their families with them.
BTW, Bill, read Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond. You’ll see a different view of how societies developed.
LD50
@bago: Write out a 2-page list of the issues that you think will still be important in computers 20 years from now (including things about computers you think ‘people will need to know’), and put it in a safety deposit box. Then, in 2029, get the list out, blow the dust off, show it to some young computer programmers, and I guarantee you, they’ll laugh their asses off at 98% of it.
JGabriel
Origuy:
Yes, BOB, give Guns, Germs, and Steel a try. It’s an excellent book.
.
steve s
I would like to see some good age-based polling data. I’ve spent lots of time in 4-5 college downs over the past 15 years, and my impression is that intelligent people roughly 30 and under now view republicans as roughly the party of their semi-literate racist white uncle. And that group did go for Obama 2-1. But I’d like to see specifically what associations the younger voting demographic have about the parties, where those associations came from, etc.
steve s
My generation (I’m 33) was born on the cusp of some things. I learned cursive, but the schools here don’t even teach it anymore, ’cause no one cares. I had a typing class in 8th grade, which they don’t teach anymore ’cause all the internet babies grow up typing 50 wpm.
Llelldorin
@steve s:
Heh. I’m 35, and we still learned things like interpolation in tabulated functions and taking powers using logarithm tables, but I suspect that was because one of my math teachers was a guy who thought that he’d developed the perfect lesson plan in 1958 and wasn’t going to change it now, no sir.
Little Dreamer
Minority majorities? Ummm, hate to say this, but isn’t that an oxymoron?
bago
@LD50: I think you’re confusing form for function. Serialized meta-data will be important in any conversation. The protocols and form might change, but the underlying aspects of information will remain solid.
steve s
I’ll do this just as soon as I finish hole-punching these 5.25 disks, and plugging my lightpen in.
Llelldorin
@steve s:
It’s not quite that bad. By 1989, the workhorse Mac was the IIci, running System 6. Old-school, yeah, but a nice solid system for its day. If you had a bit more scratch, a SPARCstation 1 would feel much more familiar to modern computer users.
Zifnab
@Common Sense: No shit. Yeah, I was Clements class of ’01. Most of my asian friends were rock solid Republicans. I don’t know if you remember Jennifer Chang, but she’d been campaigning for Tom DeLay every two years forever.
Of course, it was Clements, so nearly everyone was a die-hard Republican. Maybe we’re just working out of a skewed same size.
I did like David Wallace as Mayor. He did a respectable job of not fucking up.
Hemi
BoB, your “Gang” mindset theory (aside from being COMPLETELY racist and false) comes upon a stumbling block: the ancestors of most white folks were more “gang” like up to 1000 years ago than their black counterparts. Most of us are descended from a bunch of thuggish, nomadic drunkards who lived in the forests of Northern Europe and got schooled by the “civilized”, “Metal Pressure” society of Rome (and don’t even THINK of asserting that whites are racially close to classical Romans… The lot of us are descended from Barbaroi.). So… Evolutionarily (assuming that we are all mouth-breathing nitwits who believe that the last 5000 years have seen massive evolutionary separation) speaking its the white folks who ought to be the brutes.
 
Unless, of course, what you meant to say was that the development of Heavy Metal was what made Europeans superior. In that case, I must agree fully. Because, indeed, I want to rock.
Keith G
@Hemi: You do rock.
JGabriel
bago:
Damn. My conversations have always been in parallelized meta-data. Or in stand-alone episodes. Now I’m gonna have to learn how to do it serialized, like monogamy?
Fuck.
.
HRA
Dear BOB you are certainly confused in your quest to explain the Neolithic Age. Others here who are learned have shown you the way and you still deny it. I will confess I do not know the entire facts about the Neolithic Age. I only know the name of the tribe which still exists in a family name and in a town in Greece. They came from the Near East during the Neolithic Age. Did they originate in Africa? I tend to believe it to be true.
Let me explain something to you about Africa. I belonged to a committee whose purpose and meetings were ancestral findings. A few of the members who were decidedly descendants of Irish and Scandinavian ancestry sent their DNA to a place for testing of their origins. The line drawn on a map began in Africa before it ended in Ireland, Norway, Denmark, France, etc.
BTW I did my own research long before this committee. I don’t want you to think I based my own findings of African origin on those committee members DNA testing.
Is gold a heavy metal? Some of my other ancestors were goldsmiths.
bago
@JGabriel: You serialized that entire message. Good Job!
DougJ
He claimed that 25% or so of “poor” whites fit into that category, IIRC.
I believe it. But that leaves 75%.
I grew up in a rural area with some poor, backwards-ass white people around. And I’d like to see their kids get a piece of the pie if they’re willing to work for it.
Common Sense
@Zifnab:
Small world. Maybe we have Nancy Liscum to blame for this. I don’t know if we knew each other since we apparently weren’t there at the same time, but my brother graduated in 2000. I’m betting you knew him or his friends — Justin Dineen, Ryan Keesler, and a few others that I don’t recall the last names of. I remember Jennifer Chang quite well actually.
David Wallace wrote a book about politics in the age of the internet. I haven’t picked it up but I went to a literacy function at the Town Square Marriott and heard him speak about it. The speech turned me off instantly.
@Keith G:
I lived in the Midtown area for years. Interesting part of town. Bigots or those with a certain quaint view of Texans may want to head about 20 miles away to be reassured. To generalize further, that place makes San Francisco look like Orange County. There is no way anywhere on earth gets as freaky as the Montrose Kroger on a weekend night.
@Molly:
Was Kempner the one with the exact same floor plan as Clements? I know Willowridge did. All I know is that Elkins was the fifth high school in Sugar Land and opened in 1992. I don’t even know how many there are in Fort Bend any more — I’m pretty sure it’s doubled.
DaBomb
@Zifnab: @Common Sense: Fellow Houstonian here. Graduated High School for Health Professions ’97. Different demographic primarily African-American and Asian. Pretty liberal. Very smart group of kids.
I don’t know what’s up with Sugar Land, but there are a bunch of Neocons out there.
Tongue of Groucho Marx
If we force pundits to pander in real time, rather than come up with nonsensical ‘scripts’, I suddenly have newfound faith in Ross Douthat’s ability. Previously, I suspected that Bill Kristol was the unsurpassed master in avoiding the Marxist advocated ‘scripting’. It appears my deepest held beliefs are not vindicated.
The America of Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III cannot rely on ‘scripting’ anymore. Fortunately, Ross Douthat has picked up on this.
Rebecca
@BDeevDad
Not enough Asians living in the south and midwest. They’re still concentrated on the coasts
Not necessarily. I grew up in Wisconsin and our biggest non-white population was Hmong refugees.