The good news about Bobo’s new blog is that he will eventually say something so stupid and inaccurate and offensive that the project will be cancelled.
I’ve spend a lot of time thinking about why it is that I hate it when conservative non-scientists write about science. At first I thought it was just that I hate to see anything I hold sacred be defiled, like when Al Green was written into an episode of Ally McBeal, but that’s not it. What I dislike is how often amateur conservative forays into science drift towards theories about “improving” the human race. I’ve covered the conservative obsession with racial IQ differences before. Brooks takes a slightly different tack, he’s interested in building a better man, a la early 20th century communism. (Before you say I haven’t even read the book, Brooks is clear about what the book is about and I read a long excerpt in the New Yorker).
Brooks didn’t have to make his characters masters of the universe. In fact, given his premise, which seems to be something along the lines of all you need is love and a certain sort of conservative values, it would make more sense if his characters were supremely contented members of the middle-class. But he has to drive home the point that his characters are better than you and me and this can’t be done without making them wealthy.
Maybe I’m taking all too far, but I find Brooks’ (and Tom Wolfe’s and, to a lesser extent, William Saletan’s) attempts to use science to further his own radical ideology genuinely scary. At heart, they’re not much different than the crazy social Darwinist and eugenics theories that once sprang up.
I don’t feel this way about all science writing. I find John Tierney and Gregg Easterbrook concern-trolling climate change and musing about the speed of light irritating, but it’s reasonably harmless.
Am I being crazy here?
Cackalacka
No, but, I would invest in a big jug of antacids and cheap bourbon before you endeavor that mental enema you’re about to give yourself.
kdaug
It’s the same old story of twisting the facts to fit the narrative. Conservatism, failed, ad nauseum.
Punch through, though, and it’s fear and anger at the root.
Dunno, don’t care why they’re scared and angry. But that’s the wellspring from which they get their worldview.
themann1086
Tierney and Easterbrook drive me up a wall as well, but other than that quibble I completely agree with you.
Also, nice double post ;):P
Mark S.
Which is pretty ironic, since “conservative philosophy” usually holds that human nature is pretty static. At least, I think that was Burke’s main point, but Bobo probably understands him better than I do.
wsn
Not crazy.
Different strokes for different folks, and there is so much bs going around that there will never be enough people whose full-time employment is correcting it.
Given the nature of that reality, highly motivated amateurs (in the remunerated sense) are the best we got. If that motivation is the hatred of something with the passion of a thousand fiery suns, so be it.
In short, keep fucking that chicken.
Omnes Omnibus
@Mark S.:
Doubtful.
BGinCHI
There’s a place for people who don’t know much to write and talk about things they don’t know much about, like science or social science.
It’s called school.
The worst thing about Brooks is that he thinks and writes at a level far below someone ought to with his education and privilege.
Culture of Truth
No, you’re not crazy, but conservative writing on almost any subject is annoying.
Redshirt
To be fair, for the first time ever, these “conversations” about “creating a better man” have firm backing in scientific reality. Genetic engineering is coming, in a big way, and it’s going to change just about everything.
dmsilev
@BGinCHI: That assumes that those people know that they don’t know things.
Ignorance is curable. Willful ignorance, less so.
dms
Martin
@kdaug: This is why I think global armageddon would come if we ever discovered intelligent life off the planet. These guys can’t handle being peers with minorities, women, etc. Drop another space-capable life form on them and they’ll totally go to shit.
eemom
You TOTALLY intended that as a toko-loko siren call, didn’t you?
Lemme guess: you haz a jealous that ED gets all her attention.
BGinCHI
@dmsilev: Based on everything he writes about education and classrooms, he has never ever been challenged or called on his not-knowing.
It’s the perfect definition of white privilege in this country.
Omnes Omnibus
@BGinCHI: U of C is good undergrad, but a BA in history does not get one much street cred in the science world (or so I would think).
Kilks
All I know is Bobo is on NPR talking about his book and I had to run away.
gogol's wife
You’re crazy if you don’t think John Tierney is dangerous. They had him writing front-page “news” stories about John Kerry during the 2004 campaign, and they could pull that again.
jl
Wobbly DougJ Hill is driven mad with jealously because he has fallen in love with Erica, but even were she to exist, she would not have him.
Because math pheromes from the truthometric brain nuceloocomplex smell like skinny vegan biker BO to hot successful chicks like Erica.
While swauve, self assured pheromes emitted from the more developed swankozone neuroclinical pathway, embodied in the winners in the ‘heads I will tails you lose’ self reciprocal Nash evolutionary game theoretic BS equilibrium solution (like mine frinstance) are totally HOT!.
cyd
There isn’t any wrong, per se, with trying to improve the human race, nor is it very theoretical.
For example, we’re now at the point where parents with known genetic disorders can screen out embryos that carry the problematic genes. This is a great advance for humanity, and yes it’s one that’s based on eugenics.
Chuck Butcher
An author who writes about characters outside his experience isn’t going to be able to do much with them. If you think Bobo could pull off a working class narrative given his experiences you’re giving him more credit as a writer tban I do. I don’t postulate that, for example, Dickens went out and lived in poverty in order to write his social critiques, but he did pay attention to and look at the conditions of his characters. This fuck head doesn’t even know who has salad bars.
He wrote about people he knows from the point of view he knows and the outcome would seem pretty easy to predict. Not to mention that his op-ed fiction pieces are at least the common wisdom of his compatriots and that makes his success in playing that role at least somewhat understandable – a bit different thing than writing compelling ‘labeled’ fiction.
I guess I’m saying he wrote what he could write…
Church Lady
When you have to ask if you’re crazy……..
The Moar You Know
God, I wish I knew a bookie who would take bets on how long it’s going to be before Bobo shuts down commenting on his bleg.
BGinCHI
@Omnes Omnibus: Of course, but there as elsewhere you can learn a lot of stuff (and meet a lot of people) without learning how to think. Undergrad isn’t supposed to cement what you already knew when you got there.
patrick II
@kdaug:
I think what they fear is their own inadequacy. They have to justify to themselves why they have so much while others have so little, and deep down they know they don’t deserve it. So they try to rationalize.
Insecurity is at the heart of it. The prime example is George Bush’s obvious defensiveness and appeal to class to justify his position. Even he, deep inside, knows he wasn’t up to or deserving of the presidency., so his ideology of elitism and class justifies his privileged career and protects his ego.
Fuck U6: A More Accurate Measure of the Total Amount of Duck-Fuckery in the Economy
ChuckB: Actually, Dickens had to work from a young age due to his father’s run-ins with Debtors Prison, so he weren’t all that far from his ken.
kindness
I can finish one of Bobo’s columns. I don’t want to think about how reading a WHOLE book of his mish mashed bull shit would do to my mental and physical health. Why, I feel I’m a gettin’ the vapors right now just thinkin’ about it…..Swoon.
cokane
Brooks writing about science seems appalling because you can’t shake the feeling that this guy was horrendous at math in his younger years.
Fuck U6: A More Accurate Measure of the Total Amount of Duck-Fuckery in the Economy
And I mean ‘work’ in the Dickensian sense.
The Moar You Know
@Chuck Butcher: FYI: he did. Big time. Watched his dad get sent off to debtor’s prison, the family had to go with him, save Charles, who got to expeerience the joys of 19th century child labors firsthand.
Dickens knew what he was talking about. Bobo never will.
LikeableInMyOwnWay
No.
Fuck U6: A More Accurate Measure of the Total Amount of Duck-Fuckery in the Economy
And by ‘Dickensian’ I mean that he was a rent-boy for Bobo.
Pangloss
I hear Bobo got a minor in craniometry at U of C.
Keith G
Today he was interviewed here
http://www.npr.org/2011/03/07/134329412/david-brooks-defines-the-new-social-animal
In true Brooks form, he said some remarkable and interesting things sandwiched between head-slappers.
He really needs to not crack wise about Gandhi.
kdaug
@Martin: It’s also the reason that, had/when/if we found it, it wouldn’t be talked about. The tenuous grip on reality is real enough, no need to push any harder. There really are those people who would want to declare war, on them, on us, doesn’t matter – it’s not the target, it’s the fear.
When the baseline of a worldview is anger and fear… well, extrapolate.
General Stuck
White supremacy, born of an extra fear chromosome, sees threat behind every shadow. The wingnut must master his environment and control every aspect. That is his social and cultural environment, and extends to the natural one.
Every waking hour is devoted beating back all those demons, or winning, to put it in a word. And there is nothing scientific about men who battle their own minds and souls every minute, of every day. Science, like minority peeps of color, must be defined as controllable and inferior, or else the terrorists (equality and the random) win.
Truth is relative toward victory
Bob L
Am I being crazy here?
Yes, but that still doesn’t invalidate the point that it’s an easy step from “the good people (as in rich, American and white) have the good genes” to “let’s sterilize the people weakening the gene pool (as in poor and colored)for the good of humanity” If membership in the human race is determined by a taste for Yuppie Americana like Bobo does then eugenics is on the table.
kdaug
@patrick II:
Whence the fear. The anger?
cokane
@Pangloss: *phrenology
Omnes Omnibus
@BGinCHI: To be honest, I am not all that sure how much stuff he learned while he was there. FWIW UofC was in my undergrad’s athletic conference while Bobo and I each attended our institutions.
Marmot
@Redshirt:
I sure hope so! These jeans are always too tight in the butt and short at the hems!
Elia
@Redshirt: I think you’re but I also think we should regard it as we regard atomic power today (not how we did in ’45). But I really doubt we will.
But to DougJ’s Q: I think this kind of supremacism talk is just an unavoidable end-point if you try to bring anything supposedly empirical to buttress conservative positions. It’s not pointed out often but probably the fundamental break between liberals and conservatives is the belief (or at least the intensity with which this belief is held) that some people just are better than others. Without that framework, conservatism crumbles.
IM
I liked the episode. So there.
Ash Can
This gets to the heart of it. Ultimately, Brooks doesn’t want to change other people for their own good, he wants them to change for his own good. He and the other smarmy charlatans you name aren’t using science to gain insight into people as they are so much as they’re using science to justify wanting people to behave in what they think is an optimal way. The fundamental premise of this approach is a value judgement, rather than a simple question or questions, about the subject matter. It’s the antithesis of science. And the fact that the subjects being judged are people makes this perversion of science all the more odious.
MattR
So which of those was the sacred thing that was defiled ;)
Tax Analyst
@BGinCHI:
Maybe he considers that part of his “privlege”. Maybe once you are in “the club” any old shit goes.
Considering it has rated him a regular column and now a NY Times blog maybe he is right, which is sort of a sad thought.
Cris
@Redshirt: My favorite exploration of genetic screening (not even engineering, just screening) is Gattaca. It depicts straightforward methods and good intentions, without anything especially sinister, more benign even than the social engineering of Brave New World, and yet it’s a dystopia.
Omnes Omnibus
@MattR: You are, of course, familiar with the concept of fighting words, right?
Brachiator
Not at all. Very few conservatives write intelligently about science, because they inevitably fall back into philosophy or religion or a fundamental misunderstanding about whatever scientific concept they think they grasp. Sweet Andrew Sullivan is, of course, the prime offender here.
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
kdaug
@Ash Can:
Yeah, I think you nailed it. What they lack is an empathy gene.
Childhood trauma?
“Hey kids, don’t bully others! They’ll grow up to be conservatives!”
Explains a lot – who cannot picture a 7 year old Limbaugh, Beck, or Brooks getting picked on?
And now they have their vengeance.
Explains both the fear, and the anger.
Omnes Omnibus
OT: Why is this page giving me ads for the perfect golf swing? I don’t golf and I don’t want to golf. Is it Bobo?
Cris
@kdaug: I don’t imagine Limbaugh, Beck, and Brooks actually got picked on any more than anybody else. But they probably believe they were far more victimized than they were.
Josie
@kdaug: The anger? My theory is that guys like this were pantsed or wedgied (or both) when they were in junior high and never got over it. If they weren’t, they should have been and were just really fast.
Cris
Better click the link to find out.
Joel
General Stuck
Man, crazy is relative. Now pass that doobie and let’s get deep.
Joel
I’m no mammalian geneticist, but were very far from human genetic engineering. Even introducing mouse transgenes and knockouts is not-trivial.
Marmot
@Brachiator: That’s what it is. When conservatives write about science that they don’t contest, it’s always filled with cherry-picking and confirmation bias.
Hell, one of the book reviews that DougJ posted the other day mentioned Brooks’ confirmation bias.
BGinCHI
@Omnes Omnibus: And you didn’t knock his teeth out?
Thanks for ruining America, selfish.
MattR
@Omnes Omnibus: Geez. I didn’t realize you were such a big Ally McBeal fan. I actually had the pleasure of talking to Mr Green for a couple minutes while we were waiting to board our plane from Winipeg to Newark a couple years ago. From that brief interaction, he seemed like a nice, down to earth guy.
Svensker
@Kilks:
But I heard that NPR is “snotty” and good ole boys don’t listen to it cuz they luvs them some Rush and Hannity. Even conservatives don’t like Bobo!
Litlebritdifrnt
Perhaps if he is going to be writing about the changes in culture he could address the fact that no matter how many times Scarboro spews it we are not a “center right nation” we are a “center left nation” just look a people’s attitudes with reference to bi-racial marriage, same-sex marriage, gay-lesbian issues in general, legalizing drugs you name the issue the country as a whole (based on polls) has shifted waaaaaay to the left.
I blame HGTV.
Chuck Butcher
@The Moar You Know:
Dickens was a poor example in regard to his youth. Point stands with “Dickens” removed.
Herbal Infusion Bagger
“For example, we’re now at the point where parents with known genetic disorders can screen out embryos that carry the problematic genes.”
I’ll be the second one to give a shout-out to GATTACA for how this leads to dystopia, although the movie tries to make you believe at one point that Uma Thurman carries genetic flaws, which strains credulity.
But seriously, this is a vexing issue – I’d understand why someone would be deterred from parenting an autistic, but given the role non-neurotypical folks like autistics and Asperger’s Syndrome have played technology development over history, I think humanity would be worse off if this became a general trend, and This Is A Conversation Society Needs To Have.
Redshift
@Ash Can: Exactly. As with creationism, Tobacco Institute “research”, climate change denial, etc., if you already know the answer and are just looking for “facts” to justify it, it’s not science.
Svensker
@Bob L:
How’d you make that blockquote yeller?
Also, too, Bobo is like catnip to young Doug Hill. Heh.
JGabriel
DougJ:
Ah. There we will have to agree to disagree. I find Tierney and Easterbrook just as offensive as Bobo. Tierney may be a slightly less soporific writer than Brooks, but it is so like comparing the depressant qualities of heroin vs. morphine, that the comparison does Tierney little if any credit.
.
Marmot
Come to think of it, everything Bobo writes is some cherry-picked nugget that he ties to some conservative political goal/ideal/viewpoint. It’s hard to believe that NPR is foolish enough to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Maybe this time Brooks has really understood and interpreted highly contentious neuroscience research!
Elia
@Svensker: That’s nothing new. Bobo’s audience is center-left people who want to feel reasonable for liking a conservative (liberaltarian people, whether they know it or not) and the precious few old New England-styled Republican voters who haven’t died yet.
Redshift
@Cackalacka:
Well, perhaps PZ Myers’ method of chanting “die, yuppie scum, die” at the end of every page will work for the blog as well as for the book.
FlipYrWhig
@Litlebritdifrnt: HGTV normalizes a lot of things. Gay couples, granite countertops, interracial couples, stainless steel appliances, and especially those man-caves for when straight couples don’t even like each other very much and want to create a way to make their disconnection literal.
Omnes Omnibus
@BGinCHI: He graduated from U of C in ’83; I graduated from LU in ’86. Not a lot of overlap. Besides, I am pretty sure Bobo did not play rugby.
patrick II
@kdaug:
Anger is the other side of fear — it is the response to a perceived threat. And since they fear attacks to the wobbly ideological structure in which they hold themselves aloof from the dystopian reality they are creating for the rest of us, they respond to threats angrily.
A person confident in his own skills and his own place is a calmer person.
Or, to put it more bluntly and crudely, a dog that is frightened is more apt to growl and bite.
Redshift
@kdaug:
Because the “little people” have gotten uppity enough to point out their inadequacy.
matoko_chan
That is why you should support my obsession with socio-cultural IQ differences now.
I believe that there are significant, measureable between group differences in COGNITIVE ABILITY/IQ between liberals and conservatives. One form is called Salam-Douthat stratification and it is documented on page 154 of Grand New Party.
Because if I can prove my thesis, conservatives are going to run from the IQ debate like scalded cats.
How long before Bobo deletes my first comment?
Make a pool?
;)
MattR
@patrick II: Yoda agrees.
Omnes Omnibus
@FlipYrWhig: Isn’t a ” man cave” simply a 21st century version of the garage or the shop at one SES level or the study or billiard room at another?
FlipYrWhig
@Omnes Omnibus: Kind of, only with a lot more defensiveness and butthurt.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@BGinCHI:
And that may sum up what pisses me off the most about Bobo.
matoko_chan
The good news about Bobo’s new blog is that he will eventually say something so stupid and inaccurate and offensive that the project will be cancelled.
Why would you think that?
Has FOXnews been cancelled?
Has Douthat’s NYT column been cancelled?
Has the Glibertarian Hivemind at TAS been cancelled?
Has Reason been cancelled?
Has HotAir been cancelled?
Has PW been cancelled?
Has redstate been cancelled?
I could go on, but I’m sure you get the point.
AkaDad
You’re only registering a 2.5 on the Michelle Bachman Crazyometer.
BGinCHI
@Omnes Omnibus: OK, but if you see him in Madison I expect some aggression.
Cris
He missed the “b-quote” button and hit the “code” button. Says somebody who’s done it.
Omnes Omnibus
@BGinCHI: Deal. I can think of the 3 or 4 places he might be found if he were in town. It might be a few more, if as I suspect, he is into leather bars.
JPL
Did Bobo come into and stay in this country legally? He certainly is not a real american...
Svensker
@Cris:
Like this?
Svensker
@Svensker:
Cool.
grillo
Well,
Science is supposed to be about truth. Not to get all Karl Popper on your posteriors, but that is the gist of that scientists and their work are supposed to aspire to.
You can get post modern and say it’s all culturally relative and the like, but objective truth is where it’s at, or supposed to be at.
It would seem, based on my experience, that, while there are many voices on the left that have some kind of ax to grind who produce sophistry, and not science, I have difficulty of thinking of even one right wing voice that actually tires to follow the truth wherever it goes, at least in recent times.
That’s kind of what bugs me. THe whole taking a system that is supposed to be all about truth, and using it to lie.
But, that’s just me.
General Stuck
a challenge for Hotel Dougj. Can he spoof Brooks to the point of madness in comments?
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@General Stuck: I’m pretty sure he can. But will he be bothered? I suspect that’s where the serious money will be placed.
J.W. Hamner
@JGabriel:
I find those two to be wrong on the merits, but I don’t have a problem with the concept of them doing science writing. Mainly because most scientists are incredibly crappy writers. Sometimes skeptics are right. Gary Taubes is an example of a non-scientist science writer who advocated for a skeptic/minority position in science community regarding dietary fat who has been proven correct.
Judas Escargot (aka ninja fetus with a taste for bruschetta)
@Joel:
Most excellent summary of conservative thought, ever.
matoko_chan
@grillo: that is so good. This is why 94% of scientists are not-conservative.
Because scientists are empirical and conservatism is anti-empirical.
Mike Furlan
What is the point of fussing about Brooks and his “Master Race” problems on a blog with a link to Daniel Larison?
You are just one click away from a guy who is a proud member of an “explicitely racist” group.
http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-files/groups/league-of-the-south
matoko_chan
@Ash Can: Conservatism is anti-empirical. That is why 94% of scientists are not conservatives, and why it is so difficult for glibertarian grifters to exploit science.
Bobo is a first culture intellectual.
The second culture is scientists, and the third culture are ….a kind of cyborg.
They are scientists that are also public intellectuals….like Dawkins and PZ and Jerry Coyne and Sean Caroll and Steven Pinker and Stephen Hawking.
There are no third culture intellectuals on the Right, because third culture intellectuals are all empiricists.
the third culture
matoko_chan
@Mike Furlan: agree. The League of the South has been designated a white supremicist organization by the SPLC.
We are not the same. I wish people would stop buying into that calumny.
The whole EDK scam was an attempt to find reason and sanity on the Right.
He exploited that mercilessly.
There are not any sane reasonable people on the right….they are all just faking it. Otherwise they would be on the left.
Except for Dr. Manzi.
;)
gelfling545
Want to “improve” the human race? Great – here’s how: make sure everybody has adequate nutrition, health care and education. That would be a giant step forward, no test tube needed.
matoko_chan
I have said this before, but conservatives discussing science is like apes discussing philosophy.
Science is based on empiricism….conservatism is anti-empirical.
Omnes Omnibus
@gelfling545: They will need lots of test tubes in science classes. Just sayin’.
Mike Furlan
Why the link to Larison if the problem with Brooks is his racial views?
Is it just a matter of style?
If Brooks wrote at the same intellectual level as Larison, he could have a link here too?
And I certainly _do not_ think that all the fine folks here are anything like Daniel Larison. Otherwise I’d be foolish to spend any time here.
I just wonder how anyone can disapprove of Brooks while at the same time endorsing Larison?
Omnes Omnibus
@Mike Furlan: Not a Larison fan myself, but I think the difference is that Larison can offer good writing and interesting thought on some topics. Bobo, based on his career output, cannot.
Mike Furlan
So Daniel Larison is this blog’s “Jack Abbott”? His sins will be ignored because of his talent.
Tim F.
Conservative science has nothing to do with making people better. The whole idea of ‘progress’ up to and including eugenics belongs in the progressive sphere.
When conservatives talk about human science it serves the same purpose as when they talk about anything else: to comfort the comfortable and keep the afflicted in their place. The Charles Murray stuff exists to make wealthy whites feel better about their privilege and to fight redistributive measures that might help minorities escape their station, as they are inherently inferior and deserve their place.
Needless to say conservative climate science does the same thing. Creationism is a stale biscuit they toss laughing to glossolalic chumps.
matoko_chan
@gelfling545: yes! that is applied global social justice. I’m all for that.
But you see….there are other considerations.
One of the most terrible things Bush did was to set biotech back a decade by using the medieval religious concept of ensoulment to demagogue the religious right. And at this point we need to admit that the Right is all religious.
Josh
@Tax Analyst, there was a nice article a few years ago about why GWB and Howard Dean have lousy grammar: basically, when you’re born into privilege, you don’t have to care about the doing or learning the things that the rest of us are taught will help us rise up in the world. In fact, any indication that you do can be a violation of your class’s norms. Pierre Bourdieu was very good on this topic too, when he wrote of of the middle-class type “who takes the game of culture too seriously.”
So yes, it’s absolutely part of his privilege.
Chuck Butcher
Our society’s inclination to engage in marginalization and demonization of groups based on immaterial basis has serious outcomes in education, criminal behavior, economic failure, and social failure.
I’m not going to denigrate our social programs, but I don’t see much actual progress happening without a societal change that is deep and broad. There are a lot of things you can legislate, but emotional response isn’t one of them. It sure doesn’t help to have some media beating the drum to reinforce the bullshit. But do what about that?
I’d hoped that the way kids were raised from the 60s on would have far reaching effects. I’m not seeing it all these years later as transformative rather than marginal. Sure, we elected a black man as President – and look at the push back and the percentages.
Tim F.
What the hell happened to the edit function…
***Edit:*** open ‘edit’ in a new window.
Omnes Omnibus
@Tim F.: Right click on the edit button and then open in a new tab or window. Not an elegant work around but it works.
Anne Laurie
Last week I linked to Tom Scocca’s “The Politics of Entitlement: David Brooks Will Decide When It’s Time for You to Die“, but I didn’t include his final paragraph:
David Brooks and the Robber Barons he so assiduously serves have turned something they call “science” — especially the ‘dismal science‘ known as economics — into a replacement for what his protofeudal ancestors knew as “religion”. Early monotheists used their interpretation of religion as an excuse for war against their neighbors: “It says right here in our holy book that God intended all the good grazing land for us, His people. Since the guys across the river are squatting on our God-given turf, piety requires us to go kill them and take it back, for Him.” Later European missionaries would refine this: “God demands that we spread His word to the primitive heathens. If doing this should require that we take their resources and enslave them, well, who are we to argue with God?”
Brooks and his fellow media courtiers, blatantly copying the most user-friendly tactics of the last Gilded Age, misinterpret Science as a new form of bad religion: “Economics (eugenics) requires us to eliminate the unproductive and inefficient worker-units in service of attaining peak value-per-human-unit. Who are we mere mortals to argue with the SCIENCE?”
It makes you crazy, Doug, because idiots like Easterbrook are just attempting to remove useful bits off the edges of Science to beat their opponents with, like monkeys tearing the grills and mirrors off a car to whack the smaller monkeys on the head. But Brooks and his more sophisticated courtier-monkeys are chewing on the steering wheel and pushing their monkey hands on the gas pedals, in hopes of making the science-car run over their monkey rivals. You know their chances of success aren’t good, but meanwhile they’re shitting up your nice useful vehicle — and even if they succeed, they’re going to run the car into a tree.
nestor
@Mike Furlan:
Is there a linkable cite that directly connects Larison to The League of the South?
Just curious.
matoko_chan
I sometimes call DougJ a bioluddite, but that isn’t strictly true I guess.
What DougJ really has is IQ-panic. He is terrified that there are significant measureable between race differences in IQ. And that is why when I try to talk about about socio-cultural differences in IQ everyone calls me…a racist? a eugenicist?
I am neither of those things.
I am interested in the mechanism.
But refusing to have the discussion just makes it possible for first culture intellectuals like Bobo to blow smoke up the base’s ass.
It is analogous to solving the Israel/Palestine problem. Everyone starts screaming anti-semite and nothing gets done.
matoko_chan
@Tim F.: right click on edit
Marmot
@Josh: What? That’s bull. Bush didn’t take grammar seriously because he never mastered it. Because he’s just not very smart.
And Howard Dean? He’s got grammatical problems? Did I miss something?
Marmot
@Chuck Butcher:
From the older set, primarily. Which kind of reinforces your hopes, right?
I have the same hopes, but you’ll still have crazy people who make up bull about any Dem, regardless of color. And you’ll still have a set of racists whose half-life in the overall population is rather long. Longer than we’d like, at least.
mclaren
@Chuck Butcher:
I really love it when someone on this blog says shit like this…because I’m the first person hordes of commenters start screaming insults at and marginalizing and demonizing as soon as I point out that Obama is violating the 5th and 6th and 8th and 14th amendments of the constitution by ordering the kidnapping of U.S. citizens without charges or a trial, and when Obama orders the assassination of U.S. citizens without even accusing ’em of a crime.
Yeah, let’s not marginalize anyone who disagrees with us. Let’s not demonize anyone who states facts we don’t like.
Yeah, right. Don’t make me laugh.
The only discernible difference twixt Tea Partiers and liberals is that when the self-identified liberals tear you limb from limb for telling them facts they don’t want to hear, they’ll make sure to do it with political correctness.
matoko_chan
@Anne Laurie: that is a sweet analogy, but the glibertarian grifters are much more sophisticated than that.
They are extemely opportunistic and exploitive.
Consider Our Very Own EDK perverting Heckman’s study of early childhood poverty and scholastic achievement into a free market strategy of “fixing” schools.
Sorry, no link, I dont give hits to wretched gliberatarian hives of scum and villany if I can avoid it.
But you see Anne Laurie….it much more subtle, and much more effective.
It sounds reasonable doesnt it?
matoko_chan
@mclaren:
That is bullshytt, sorry. We are not the same.
nestor
@matoko_chan:
Here there be monsters. This way to perma-ban.
matoko_chan
@nestor: As a member of the League of the South
Marmot
@mclaren:
Dude, you’re just seriously Off Topic. Not to be politically correct, whatever that means.
nestor
@matoko_chan:
I guess that settles that…
Wow.
Anne Laurie
@matoko_chan: I refuse to take responsibility for Kain, present or absent. I never read his stuff elsewhere, I didn’t get any forewarning when Cole invited him to front-page, I pretty clearly didn’t think much of his posts here, and I wasn’t surprised when it turned out his road-to-Damascus ‘conversion’ was a marketing ploy. But THIS IS NOT MY BLOG, nor yours either; like Islam, Balloon Juice is a monotheism, albeit one open to petitions from its followers and interpretation by multiple representatives. If you want your own
monotheismblog, Matoko, surely your superior IQ-educational matrix enables you to set up a MOAR BETTER INTERFACE that will allow full expression of your ministry to us cudlips?mclaren
Actually, Marmot, I don’t think I am off topic. And what’s more, I think I have some pretty solid reasons why my comment was exactly on target.
If you read it again, you’ll recognize that Doug’s post about David Brooks is really about how Brooks rejects facts and rationality in favor of vicious behavior (“sterilize all the darkies,” or whateverthefuck Charles Murray Bell Curve bullshit he’s spewing, it’s all basically the same) that serves to nail Brooks as a solid member of his conservative in-group.
What my comment talks about is how universal this repulsive group behavior is –namely, advocating insane vicious policies in order to maintain street cred with your in-group. Bobo’s conservative in-group eagerly advocating sterilizing blacks because of their allegedly “low IQs,” while the liberal in-group on this blog eagerly advocates labeling anyone as mentally ill when they cite inconvenient facts about Obama.
In both cases we’re dealing with people who cannot tolerate those who disagree with their bizarre worldview. Black people make Bobo uncomfortable, so he needs to have them sterilized or lobotomized or whateverthefuck these conservative Charles Murray assholes propose (ship ’em back to Africa, lock ’em inside razor-wired ghettos, send ’em all into prison, kill ’em all, whatever). People who state inconvenient facts about Obama make liberals uncomfortable on this blog, so a bunch of mirror images of Bobo crawl out of the woodwork like cockroaches screaming for someone to silence me, throw me in a mental institution, whateverthefuck.
Two sides of the same coin. Murderous primates gone wild. Smart monkeys, stupid choices. That’s the short description of all human history, right there.
matoko_chan
@nestor:
Yes. Exactly. Monsters like Bobo, Douthat, and EDK. We want so badly to believe that we can persuade them to sanity, that our loving kiss will wake them from their long tribal madness to our shared humanity.
But monsters they remain.
matoko_chan
@mclaren: no, you are wrong. Bobo’s calumnies are perversions of science, empirical data. OTOH, people randomly and hysterically criticizing Obama for things he cannot mend do appear to be empirically insane.
matoko_chan
@Anne Laurie: I am not asking you to take blame for Kain.
I’m just pointing out that you were snakepoking.
Out here in the west we have a whole class of citizens that we call snake-pokers.
They come in to urgent care with a snakebite and their story is always the same….they were jogging or cycling, just exercising their peaceful constitutional right to freedom of exercise, and the snake jumped out and bit them!
….but….the snake bite is always on their hand or wrist.
so obviously these peaceful free exercise advocates had picked up a stick and were snakepoking.
You poked the snake.
What did you think would happen?
Thank you for admitting EDK is a glibertarian grifter.
Now, to further refine your monkey metaphor, the monkies learned to drive the car well enough to put it in the ditch.
Which is where we are today.
mclaren
Hey, Matoko Chan, I’m genuinely curious. Why do you feel EDK was a monster? What specifically was monstrous about him, or about his posts?
Douthat and Brooks…yeah, I’m right there with you. Monsters. These people are apologists for the worst kind of evil — police state, torture, aggressive war that we were lied into, slashing the social safety net in order to pay for tax cuts for billionaires, they’re behind that shit 110%.
But Kain? I dunno, how did Kain identify himself as a monster?
matoko_chan
my response to Anne Laurie is [sadly] in moderation.
apparently snake p-o-king is a Bad Word.
Here is the reference.
but here is the relevent part.
To further refine your monkey metaphor, the monkies learned to drive the car well enough to put it in the ditch.
Which is where we are today.
mclaren
@matoko_chan:
Are you absolutely certain that you want to claim that the president of the united states is incapable of following the law?
That’s such a breathtaking statement, you may want to think about that twice or thrice.
matoko_chan
@mclaren: He is the same as Brooks and Douthat and McMegan. A glibertarian grifter.
EDK used his formula of “run a meme up the flagpole, get ass kicked in comments, rinse, repeat” until he hit pay dirt with the unions and the teachers.
Then he made his unions roundtable and parleyed that into a paid column at Forbes.
mclaren
Matoko Chan, I must be really stupid or really ignorant, because I still don’t have the faintest idea why you consider EDK to be a monster.
matoko_chan
@mclaren: He is following the law as interpreted by his staff. He can do nothing else.
Levenson laid out the 411 here at BJ.
matoko_chan
@mclaren: you admit Douthat and Brooks are monsters. EDK is ISOMORPHIC with Brooks and Douthat.
Therefore EDK is also a monster.
QED
arguingwithsignposts
@mclaren:
Dammit, man. Don’t keep feeding the troll. She already NEVER SHUTS UP ABOUT KAIN without you egging her on.
matoko_chan
@mclaren:
you can talk about the credibility of Obamas actions, or the motivations behind them, or the viability/legality of of the DoJ’s interpretations but when you talk about Obama breaking laws you are wearing crazypants.
matoko_chan
@arguingwithsignposts: Anne Laurie brought it up.
Bitch at her.
I double dog dare you.
;)
mclaren
Correct me if I’m mistaken, but EDK was running some very different memes up the flagpole than Brooks and Douthat and McAirhead. Brooks/Douthat/McAsshole all repeat memes like “more tax cuts for the rich will boost the economy” and “Bush was right about Iraq and Egypt/Libya proves it.”
Kain’s meme about unions & teachers, as far as I can tell, involves telling the conservative “school reformers” to back off and stop the authoritarian top-down mussolinismo. That’s wayyyyy different from the Brooks/Douthat/McArdle line, isn’t it?
The standard conservative/libertarian meme on education is: privatize it all. Treat teachers like marine corps recruits. Crack the whip. EDK is saying the exact opposite, as far as I can tell.
Moreover, Kain has been saying the exactly opposite of Bobo and the rest of the conservative bobbleheads for as long as he’s been posting here. At least, as far as I can tell.
So I just don’t understand how Kain is saying anything even remotely similar to what Brooks or Douthat or McArdle say. Kain has been really explicit about the need to repair the social safety net, the evil of the Iraq war, the need for higher taxes on the rich…I honestly can’t say I see anything in those policies that paints Kain as a “monster.”
Southern Beale
Yeah I hear ya. Just learned that the mansion that F. Scott Fitzgerald used as the model for Daisy Buchanan’s mansion in The Great Gatsby is about to be torn down.
nestor
@mclaren:
That’s not what she said.
Asshole.
arguingwithsignposts
@matoko_chan:
Oh, bullshit, m_c. You’ve been pumping that shit since EDK came on the blog. You are a stalker. Not a troll. A Stalker. You make Glenn Close look sane. I actually think AL pretty much smacked your shit down a few comments ago.
Funnily enough, I thought your meds might have finally kicked in today, since you were back on your memetic selection hobby-horse. Clearly, not the case.
Cudlip. Walla. OODA, WAI!
matoko_chan
@mclaren: jesus-h-keeyrist-inna-handcart you are stupid.
educate yourself you fucking retard.
I am a free market evangelical
why did Cole kick him off the masthead?
why have DougJ and mistermix stopped linking him and pimping the LoOG?
this isnt my job.
Conservative solutions for education reform are ALL free market solutions.
Like NCLB.
“Fixing” teachers, “fixing” schools, “fixing” students.
You are just sukking down the monkey chow.
eemom
And, behold! As I saideth, so hath it cometh to pass.
Superluminar
Did you even see what he did to that Abel dude?
matoko_chan
@arguingwithsignposts: lie. i was fine for EDK for a while until I saw the scam.
EDK even tried to use that when I started callin’ him out.
He said we had made “peace” in emails.
arguingwithsignposts
@matoko_chan:
m_c: you were all up in his grill about the abortion stuff from day 1. You’ve just ramped up the crazy over the last few weeks. If you were “fine” for EDK, link to your comment when you welcomed him to the blog, cudlip.
JonathanW
Wait, what’s this about ED Kain’s conversion toward liberalism being a marketing ploy? Did I miss something?
mclaren
@matoko_chan:
New York Times, 6 April 2010:
Constitution of the United States of America–Amendment V:
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation.
Obama’s order to assassinate a U.S. citizen without a trial and without charges violates Amendment 5 of the constitution of the United States. That is a federal felony.
Constitution of the United States of America–Amendment VI:
In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense.
Obama’s order to assassinate a U.S. citizen without a trial and without charges violates Amendment 6 of the constitution of the United States. That is another federal felony.
Constitution of the United States of America–Amendment VIII:
Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.
Obama’s order to assassinate a U.S. citizen without a trial and without charges violates Amendment 8 of the constitution of the United States. That is yet another federal felony.
Obama is guilty of multiple federal felonies, not just three. Glenn Greenwald, 27 June 2009:
Obama contemplates Executive Order for detention without charges
Constitution of the United States of America–Amendment V:
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation.
Obama’s executive order to kidnap U.S. citizens without charges and without a trial violates Amendment 5 of the constitution of the United States. That is a federal felony.
Constitution of the United States of America–Amendment VI:
In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense.
Obama’s executive order to kidnap U.S. citizens without charges and without a trial violates Amendment 6 of the constitution of the United States. That is another federal felony.
Constitution of the United States of America–Amendment VIII:
Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.
Obama’s executive order to kidnap U.S. citizens without charges and without a trial violates Amendment 8 of the constitution of the United States. That is yet another federal felony.
I have identified six different federal felonies Obama has committed by flagrantly violating the basic law of the land of the United States of America, the constitution.
Explain how my statement of these documented facts means that I’m mentally ill.
matoko_chan
@arguingwithsignposts: lie. i wanted him to recant that true. Like pulling teeth wasn’t it?
But actually I linked his Beck and the Red Knight post and the Lincoln honey drop statement, and even said he belonged at BJ when the Omsbudman controversy was rampant.
Want links?
You know I can get them them.
The Internetz is forever.
n/e ways, what is your explanation of why EDK has vanished? Why did Cole strike him from the masthead, why are DougJ and mistermix no longer linking him?
Enquiring minds want to know.
;)
matoko_chan
@mclaren: take it up with DoJ crazyperson.
;)
Mike Furlan
@nestor:
Larison, League of the South and all that:
http://larison.org/2008/01/16/my-noxious-views/
mclaren
@nestor:
Not what Matoko Chan said? How so?
Details, please.
“Asshole” is not an argument. I just don’t know what you’re saying. Nobody seems to be able to explain why Kain is so monstrous, other than claiming (without any evidence) that he is.
Unsupported claims aren’t proof.
Can you link to something Kain said that’s monstrous? I’m genuinely curious, ’cause I never got that vibe off Kain in any of his posts here. Maybe I’m totally ignorant or completely stupid. But I just didn’t get that Limbaugh-Coulter-Brooks-McArdle vibe off Kain, ever.
arguingwithsignposts
@nestor:
True that.
But I didn’t stalk all the front pagers demanding explanations for things incessantly, polluting thread after thread with my single-minded conspiracy theories.
@matoko_chan:
Pull them up, m_c.
And I don’t have an explanation, because I don’t need one. If I were to hazard a guess, I’d say Kain now working for Forbes, it was prob. not in his interest to have his name on the masthead of BJ. But I don’t know, and – more to the point – I don’t care. I do care about your constant harping about something that has no bearing on the general topics that are being discussed on this blog.
matoko_chan
@JonathanW:
you sure did.
Click on the snake poking link above.
Mike Furlan
@matoko_chan:
To make a statement about “race differences in IQ” means that you must first define “race.”
Good luck with that.
eemom
And, lo, there came forth upon the Blog, a Battle of the Trolls! And each most fearsome to behold; and each more fearsome unto the Other.
And the Lord saideth unto The Cole, behold! Verily hast the Lord thy God spaketh, that thou shalt not suffer a Troll to Comment. O ye of little Faith! For the Trolls thou hast bannedth not; and now shall the Trolls unleash their fury unto thy blog, laying waste thine labor; mercilessly shall they smite thy brethren the Righteous Commenters; and there shall be great Flame Wars, and gnashing of teeth; and thy Page Clicks shall perish and die upon the Vine.
matoko_chan
@Mike Furlan: not my problem.
I am not talking about “race differences in IQ”.
I am talking about socio-cultural differences in IQ.
You guys are scarily pavlovian. Whenever i say IQ you hear “race differences in IQ”.
;)
matoko_chan
@mclaren: i just did. it is also an example of monkey-conservatives perverting science to support free market solutions.
Can’t you read?
Rupert Morlock
I’m chuffed to report I made comment #13 on Bobo’s blog:
Karl Bunting
Slickpoo, Idaho
March 7th, 2011
8:56 am
I, for one, shall waste no time getting to the bookstore to purchase your latest opus!
This is of course a paraphrase of Disraeli’s remark that he would ‘waste no time in reading’ an author’s work — I love me a good double entendre.
eemom
@nestor:
if that means what it appears to mean, all jokes are off. You are an absolutely despicable person.
Mark S.
@Anne Laurie:
Ha!
mclaren
@matoko_chan:
Is your argument actually that whatever the U.S. Department of Justice does must be legal, because the DOJ does it?
So that means that Woodrow Wilson indicted and prosecuted Kate Richards O’Hare for making a speech against American participation in WW I in North Dakota, that was legal because the DOJ did it?
Do you actually seriously mean to claim that when the U.S. department of justice arrested and indicted Eugene V. Debs, Socialist Party presidential candidate in 1904, 1908, for making a speech against WWW I, and sentenced him to 10 years in prison and stripped him of his United States citizenship and turned him into an unperson, that that was legal?
Are you absolutely sure you want to make that claim?
That’s the same defense the Nazis used at Nuremberg, wasn’t it? “It was legal because the Reich ordered it.”
That defense didn’t work at Nuremberg. It also didn’t work when Richard Nixon tried to defend the crimes he ordered his DOJ to commit when Nixon claimed “When the President does it, that means it is not illegal.”
Are you absolutely certain you want to make that claim, Matoko Chan?
nestor
@mclaren:
I never said that.
What you do on your time is none of my business.
Superluminar
@eemom
Actually they all make very important points, but I feel that there has been a lack of emphasis on discussions of legal matters by non-experts recently so maybe it’s worth soliciting m_c and maclaren’s thoughts on those issues?
Rupert Morlock
Sorry, I was on-topic. Didn’t realize there was a flame war going on. Hide the children!
matoko_chan
@arguingwithsignposts: AGAIN.
Can’t you read?
I didnt bring it up here.
Anne Laurie did.
bitch at her.
Mike Furlan
@matoko_chan:
Sorry, I misread your post.
Not race, I got it.
Uloborus
@matoko_chan:
Alright, one chance. What is your experimental methodology?
mclaren
@matoko_chan:
Apparently I can’t. Because I can’t find any quotes you cite from Kain that would suggest he’s a monster. I’m seeing vague claims and unsubstantiated assertions, but no actual evidence that Kain has advocated any policy positions that I (or any reasonable person) would consider monstrous.
nestor
@eemom:
OK mom.
arguingwithsignposts
@matoko_chan:
Actually, no, m_c. You did.
Her point was about Brooks. You did the pivot to EDK. LIKE YOU ALWAYS DO.
matoko_chan
@Superluminar: yup. If Bush could suborn the American legal system to legalize torture, why is McLaren making such a fuss about Obama’s DoJ?
Obama is not doing anything ILLEGAL.
He can’t, by definition.
That is why I think mclaren is empirically wearing crazypants.
Omnes Omnibus
@eemom:This is becoming the Worst Thread Ever. Just nuke the thing from orbit.
arguingwithsignposts
@Omnes Omnibus:
Worse than the late night open thread explosion a few days ago?
eemom
@Superluminar:
touche.
I’m getting out of here before I lose what little remains of my sanity. See y’all at The Rapture.
eemom
…..but not before I’ve said, I FUCKING TOLD YOU SO.
(I don’t hate to say that.)
matoko_chan
@mclaren: YOU said Douthat and Brooks are monsters. I just proved EDK is isomorphic with Brooks and Douthat. Therefore EDK is also a monster.
QED
@arguingwithsignposts: I used a handy example of a glibertarian grifter monkey perverting science (Heckman’s study) to support Anne Lauries monkey thesis.
She brought up the liberal marketing ploy.
So touchy AWS. You relly believed in EDK didnt you?
Did he break your heart?
awwwww.
arguingwithsignposts
@matoko_chan:
Fuck no, i didn’t “believe” in EDK, any more than I “believe” in anyone posting shit on the Internet.
I don’t care one way or the other. get that through your thick skull, cudlip. I grew incredibly weary – as did 99.9999 percent of the rest of the commentariat here – of your thread-jacking to get your jollies off in threads that were *clearly* not at all related to EDK (remember the college sex thread mistermix posted?).
I’d have said the same if you went after any of the FPers. Give it a rest and go back to your dumbass salam-douthat stratification memetic selection. Hell, enlighten us all about how you know Islam is built to withstand evangelism or whatever. But give it a rest already.
matoko_chan
@Mark S.: I am trying to work on the condescension. Cole is forcing me to write in sentences and jinxtgr told me to slow down.
I do have problems.
I’m the Angry Aspie White Girl.
josefina
@kdaug: Awareness (however sublimated) of the inadequacy.
nestor
@eemom:
You have control issues.
Omnes Omnibus
@arguingwithsignposts: mclaren fighting with m_c? It has the capability of plumbing new depths.
arguingwithsignposts
@Omnes Omnibus:
well, that is true. On the other hand, maybe they’ll cancel each other out.
We can always hope, right?
mclaren
@matoko_chan:
Wha…??????
Did you just say that the president of the united states, by definition, cannot break the law?
That’s Richard Nixon’s defense for the crimes he ordered his DOJ to commit: “If the president does it, that means it is not illegal.”
Are you absolutely sure you want to make that claim?
Omnes Omnibus
@arguingwithsignposts: I may keep an eye on this to see if it happens.
rikyrah
you are NOT being crazy.
not at all.
nestor
mclaren +18
mclaren
@Omnes Omnibus:
You could hardly call it a fight: at this point, it’s the scene from the very end of the first Matrix film, and I’m playing Neo.
matoko_chan
@arguingwithsignposts: well, I am sorry you suffered. But I think I was entitled to salt mistermixs wounds a bit.
Think of yourself as collateral damage.
Like the vietnamese.
;)
matoko_chan
@mclaren: empirically it is true.
Nixon was not prosecuted, and neither was Bush.
eemom
That’s what I mean by the Battle of the Trolls. We are in the presence of a clash of cosmic magnitude here. Batshit vs batshit. Won’t ever shut the fuck up vs. won’t ever shut the fuck up.
Figgers Cole would go AWOL on the eve of Armaggeddon.
matoko_chan
@Omnes Omnibus: its like the War of the Garguantuas.
I tend to see life through the prism of the kaiju eiga.
I blame nestor.
He broght in the monsters.
Parallel 5ths (Jewish Steel)
@Rupert Morlock: I saw that!
Slickpoo. Heh.
matoko_chan
FIRST JAPANESE SCIENTIST [paging through the Big Golden Book of Monsters]:…if these two monsters should ever meet, it will mean the destruction of the world!
matoko_chan
Look mclaren.
Anne Laurie agrees with me.
El Cid
I think the parallel to Brooksian pseudo-science is more accurately that of inspirational capitalist-funded boosterism for bootstrap-pulling heroic capitalist individuals.
Your Horatio Alger children’s stories were one manifestation of the trope: by willpower a person, particularly a young person, chooses to embody the best principles of individual struggle, and success comes to them. And in such stories, success in a universally admirable fashion.
Poor streetkid meets someone who inspires him and he chooses to live a more moral and aspiring life, and, poof, there you go, resolve has corrected a life and brought it success and happiness despite humble origins and adverse conditions.
Meaning, every other one of you worthless poor fuckers is just failing to adopt the right values and use your gumption to straighten yourself out.
And using government or other patronizing aid simply demonstrates our failure to come up with Brooksian rants which inspire all our poor kids and adults to adopt the wisdom and strength of any of our Puritan-values inspired Founding Fathers.
We don’t fucking care about lessening or moving or removing all the barriers so many face in achieving some degree of success.
We’d rather keep in place policies and structures and institutions which still ensure that most fail, but we need to make sure to blame their failure on their own inability to be truly heroic.
It’s also the perversion of self-help by actual capitalist boosters who are not simple hucksters, but are precisely because of their inspiring biographies of success-over-adversity the paid clerics of the actual capitalist class who want there to be inspirational propagandists out there pushing their ‘think and grow rich’ stuff. (Bearing in mind, however, that the biographical version of their suffering would increase as necessary to tell the story.)
For example, the incredibly famous “Acres of Diamonds” speech in the early 20th century in that era of telling everyone of the morality of striving to be among the capitalist class (there’s always time to update the notion that wealth is God’s blessing upon you) by Russel Conway:
Followed up most famously by the 1950s success-by-gumption spiritualist Napoleon Hill — “Think and Grow Rich.”
Hill was born, as the story was told repeatedly, in a one room cabin etc. etc., and struggled as a young poor reporter and paid his way into law school and so forth.
But he got his start as a speaker and writer (and course and tape seller) of self-inspired success and wealth by interviewing and studying Andrew Carnegie himself.
Carnegie then paid Hill to go interview lots of other successful rich people. This resulted in awestruck admiration for the godlike willpower and humility of all these successes.
Hill learned the lesson quick: Come up with some simple lessons of how they all did it, and then think and grow rich by selling people their formula to self-disciplined success and by so doing get rich himself.
From the Napoleon Hill Foundation’s official timeline of Hill’s life.
There you go, David Brooks.
The way for every American to succeed is to become a hired propagandist teaching that you too can be an Andrew Carnegie if you get your heart and mind right and have Batman-level willpower.
nestor
@matoko_chan:
With a purposeful grimace and a terrible sound
He pulls the spitting high tension wires down…
Anne Laurie
@eemom:
I don’t know the name of the corollary to Godwin’s Law that states “Those who are most often called trolls shall be the first to demand others be banned as trolls“, but I’m sure there is one.
Joel
@grillo: Well said.
Anne Laurie
@matoko_chan: Don’t be deliberately obtuse. Here I agree with Mclaren, much as it may pain me to do so: I think what the DoJ is doing in the referenced case, and so many related cases, is A VERY BAD THING.
El Cid
@El Cid: Shit. Russell Conwell.
matoko_chan
@Anne Laurie: well….what I said is that Obama is operating under DoJ legal supervision…so he cannot be doing anything illegal. They interpret the Law.
per se.
My argument is that mclaren appears to be empirically (under OBSERVATION) crazy in accusing the president of of breaking the law…
Did you not understand the original complaint he made?
matoko_chan
@nestor: hahaha! sweet.
matoko_chan
@Parallel 5ths (Jewish Steel): sadly, my comment is still in moderation.
Do you suppose they have a sincerity detector?
WarMunchkin
Well, if all his posts are either semi-relevant like the one about social status and elite colleges or funny like the one about post-election-victory pornography, then I won’t actually complain too much.
matoko_chan
@Anne Laurie: I agree about the Very Bad Things. I have written quite a bit on my muslim blog about these issues. I have also fought the good fight at TAS the Glibertarian Hivemind until the repeated comment deletions and bannings finally sapped my will.
But my point IS that mclaren looks like a crazyperson when he blames Obama and says Obama is breaking the law.
You are tilting at a windmill….or boxing with a strawman.
Parallel 5ths (Jewish Steel)
@matoko_chan: Do you think that there are any non-trolls commenting at his blog?
matoko_chan
@Parallel 5ths (Jewish Steel): unknown.
ABT.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@eemom:
Fix’t that fer ya.
Ecks
@maktoko_chan
So as proof that EDK is isomorphic with brooks et. al. you link to an article from EDK which says the following:
Yeah, that sounds Exactly like David Brooks… in an alternate pointy-beard-wearing world.
Give it up, your case just doesn’t have legs.
@mclaren I think a lot of liberals ARE pretty disappointed at how Obama has handled the whole security BS thing. There’s some question of how much of it is quite his choice (e.g., he tries to shut down Guantanamo, and Congress says “nuh uh”), and inasmuch as the situation is generally murky, and we generally trust him, we tend to give him the benefit of the doubt a lot… but yeah, for all the great things he’s done, not having a more transparent and less blatantly illegal security aparatus is a pretty scary outcome and is a major major strike against him.
We’re also aware that our only viable alternatives to him are even more batshit crazy, so… I guess I vote for Kang on this one.
matoko_chan
@Ecks: no…. the example i used was EDK twisting Heckman’s SCIENTIFIC study to support free market solutions for education reform.
Like the monkies breaking off a grill in Anne Lauries example.
That utopian bullcrap pulls you sukkahs in every time doesn’t it?
The Founding Fathers were fucking utopians.
Fake-reasonableness…..its what’s for dinner!
You just fell for EDK’s marketing ploy, like 90% of the retards here.
Dumbass.
matoko_chan
@Ecks: and do you know what is FUCKING POINTLESS you moronic EDK fanboi?
ANY free market solution for education reform.
There is 30 years of EMPIRICAL data showing the problem is parental involvement and parental SES, and free market solutions DO NOTHING TO FIX THAT.
NCLB is a free market solution.
Schools get funding by test results.
AMG do you have to be so fucking painfully stupid?
matoko_chan
No wonder the GOP carried the house.
Retards abound.
Ecks
@matoko_chan: Who said EDK fanboi?
You contend that he’s some wall of unmitigated evil and stupidity, and I’m saying that your case for this is not very convincing so far. I don’t think EDK is great, I’m actually pretty agnostic about him. I just think YOU haven’t made a very good case at all yet.
And as for your screeching about me not knowing the education data, I concede it isn’t my area of academic expertise. BUT I suspect it isn’t your either, you don’t talk like someone deeply familiar with research literatures, or frankly like someone who knows how to read them and evaluate them carefully. For instance, I do know that there are a lot of studies that show, as you say, that parenting matters a whole lot. But I also know that there are a lot of studies that say teaching quality is ALSO critically important. Having a high quality teaching can make an enormous difference in educational outcomes. I could cite the studies showing that a good teacher can produce a +/- 1SD difference in learning per year… Or I could cite an annecdata from my own life if you prefer. See I had this teacher in the equivalent of about grade 5 who was TERRIBLE. She just didn’t give a crap, she was not that smart, and she had very few social skills that pertained in any way to kids. If you looked at the reading age of all the people at my school it went up steadily year by year until people hit her class, then it sat unchanged while we were in it, then it resumed rising the next year once we got a better teacher.
Does that mean anything particularly much to do with charter schools? Not necessarily. I’m kind of agnostic about what should be done. EDK rants at length about top down Rhee style changes being bad and that teachers should be left to do it however they feel best. This strikes me as being somewhat reasonable, though probably not the whole story.
Now do you have any ACTUAL reasons that EDK sucks, or are you just going to keep repeating “OMG he’s just like David Brooks”? Because that line isn’t looking very convincing. If you can show me, side by side, EDK and Brooks saying the same thing, and not just in one instance, but over and over again then I’ll start to believe you. Until then I say you’re just full of hot air and indignation.
Ija
I agree with the person upthread who said that Brooks is just writing what he knows. He obviously knows nothing about the middle class, why would he write about them? Maybe he took some creative writing classes in preparation for writing the book. They always tell you “write what you know”, right?
I think Doug is being naive if he thinks the blog will end when Brooks say something stupid. Douthat has had a blog for longer, and he has said some spectacularly stupid things, and yet, the blog remains. Do you really think they are going to punish Original Recipe Bobo for saying stupid things when they have given Junior Bobo such leeway? Not possible.
Ecks
@Matoko: Oh, and BTW, that year we had the awful teacher and our reading ages collectively stalled? Yeah, we didn’t have different parents that year.
So y’know how a few minutes ago you were slinging terms at me like “retard”, “dumbass,” and “painfully fucking stupid”… yeah, it’s not looking like you’re overly qualified to be on the transmitting end of those words.
Ben
A general difference between conservatives and liberal theories about anything. Conservatives (and libertarians) are unaware or often ignore variables, liberals tend to include as many as possible. (It probably also explains why so many scientists are liberals because science seems to require a liberal mind, forgoing your own assumptions and conventions.)
matoko_chan
@Ecks: The reason I know this argument cold is because this is the SAME argument I have had with Jim Manzi at TAS Glibertarian Central for two years. The same TAS, Manzi and Millman posts EDK links.
“fixing” teachers, “fixing” schools, all free market solutions.
No.
There is no relationship between “good” teachers and student performance. There is no relationship between charter schools and school performance.
They all know this, EDK included.
NCLB is a free market solution.
How well has that worked?
The problem is the last 30 years of shrinking the middle class, the inequality gap, the failure of the safety net, the loss of real income, the loss of jobs, the whole free market evangelical schtick is just throwing radar chaff to obscure the real problem.
EDK is just another glibertarian grifter.
He conned BJ.
Own it and deal.
matoko_chan
@Ben: No. The difference is free market solutions versus social justice solutions.
You decide.
Ecks
@matoko_chan: Granted that parental stuff is important – their SES, support, funding for the school district, direct involvement with their kids life, parenting skills… All of that stuff is critically important. Even the most important thing.
But there’s a world of difference between “most important thing” and “only important thing”. If you think that teacher quality doesn’t matter then you are just on crack. Here’s some research for you:
JOURNAL OF PERSONNEL EVALUATION IN EDUCATION
Volume 11, Number 1, 57-67,
“Teacher and Classroom Context Effects on Student Achievement: Implications for Teacher Evaluation”
Authors: William L. Sanders, S. Paul Wright and Sandra P. Horn
Teachers College Record Volume 104 Number 8, 2002, p. 1525-1567
Authors Brian Rowan, Richard Correnti & Robert Miller
How about another:
Teacher Quality and Student Achievement: A Review of State Policy Evidence
Author Linda Darling-Hammond, Stanford University
1999
A report to the Center for the Study of Teaching and Policy
A National Research Consortium
UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON (lead institution)
STANFORD UNIVERSITY, TEACHERS COLLEGE/COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN, UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA.
So there are three relatively recent large scale empirical quantitative and qualitative studies saying that, as common sense leads you to expect, teacher quality fricking matters.
Now what bearing all this has on Charter schools is a completely different question. Whether or not they are effective means to develop quality teaching I do not know, and I don’t think anyone has this one completely unravelled yet.
But here’s the important point. Quoth you:
How would you like your crow? With sauce or without?
matoko_chan
@Ecks: flawed study.
How do you define a “good” teacher?
You see…NCLB had at its core an impossible premise.
To make all students about average.
This teacher bullshytt is the same conservative crapology.
Make all teachers above average.
Mathematically it cannot be done.
I repeat.
The single GREATEST correlate for student achievement is parental involvement, the single GREATEST correlate for school performance is parental SES.
“fixing” teachers is just trimming around the edges.
Glibertarians DO NOT WANT TO ADDRESS social justice issues.
It cuts into their profit margins.
matoko_chan
But please, go right ahead and suck down that glibertarian ditch liquor.
Useful idiots like you are why the bad guys are winning.
Ben
@matoko_chan: We’re arguing the same thing. Conservatives believe a free market naturally produces just and good social outcomes while ignoring the reality that there are many variables at play and that it is not really a free market just because there’s no regulation.
matoko_chan
@Ben:
we are making the same argument exactly.
and they scam the useful idiots like ecks into going along with their invisible hand of the market fantasies.
The argument I have with my beloved enemy Dr. Manzi, goes like this…
His position…(i think) is how much social justice can the free market afford.
my position (still evolving) is how can we bricolage existing free market structures to deliver social justice…..umm…..affordably!
I have had to explain the glibertarian slyness of EDK one time too often, im getting pissy. I wish Cole would just put up a post about it.
The FPers all know the score. From upthread.
Ecks
@matoko_chan: Flawed studIES, not flawed studY. I cited several of them.
You say:
And I repeat:
Right now the argument you are making is akin to this: “Exercise is the most important factor in how fit a person is, therefore all of these people saying we should pay attention to nutrition are wrong, because exercise is the most important thing.”
It’s, frankly, a high school level argument, and you should know better.
Oh, and here’s another study: The Impact of Individual Teachers on Student Achievement: Evidence from Panel Data.
By Harvard professor Johan E. Rockoff.
American Economic Review; May2004, Vol. 94 Issue 2, p247-252
This article starts off by acknowledging that there have been mixed findings on teacher quality in the past, but employs a superior method: A panel design in which students are followed over time through several classes. This allows the observation of the same teacher with multiple sets of students and also the same students with multiple sets of teachers. It also tracks school effects (like principal quality) and time-varying school effects, and uses a random-effects meta-analysis approach which mreasures variance of teacher fixed effects while taking explicit account of estimation error that would otherwise bias upwards estimates of teacher effects.
Empirical results show “large differences in quality among teachers within schools. A one standard-deviation increase in teacher quality raises test scores by approximately 0.1 standard deviations in reading and math on nationally standardized distributions of achievement. I also find evidence that teaching experience significantly raises student test scores, particularly in reading subject areas. Reading test scores differ by approximately 0.17 standard deviations on average between beginning teachers and teachers with ten or more years of experience.”
So that’s quite a lot of evidence, and some of it from very good methodologies. But science is an empirical field not one that takes well to arguments from authority and that is lucky because you are losing those kinds of arguments very badly right now. But the empirical gauntlet is thrown down. Here’s a whole bunch of evidence that teacher quality does matter (in addition to all those parent variables), now tell me what is wrong with them? Show me the flaws in the studies. I’m all agog to see your analysis Dr. Chan. It’s time to put up or shut up. And I don’t mean saying “oh, everyone knows those studies are wrong.” That don’t cut it. I mean specifically, tell me what the exact problems are with these studies that invalidate their results. I’m open to persuasion, but rather skeptical that you can do this. I suspect that you’re talking waaaay over your head here, but by all means, prove me wrong.
matoko_chan
@Ecks:
The “single greatest correlate” has a specific meaning in statistics. It means there is no relationship between “fixing” teachers with merit pay, breaking tenure, more edu credits or indeed, in making all teachers “above average”, with the core correlates of parental involvement and parental SES. That is just trimming around the edges and not addressing the underlying problems.
Go fawn over EDK at his new digs.
I’m sure he could use your comments…he hasn’t got many.
;)
Ecks
@matoko_chan: Oh yes, and you also say:
Show me one thing I’ve said here that is in support of “free market” or “invisible hands”. One thing. All I’m disputing, and I’ve been very repeatedly clear about this, is that your confident assertion that teacher quality doesn’t matter does not seem to have strong traction with reality. I think it clearly matters. I’ve never ever said what to do about this – whether free market or not. In fact, I’ve repeatedly said that I don’t know WHAT the extended policy implications are. But here you keep imputing them to me anyway. Which is, frankly, enormously intellectually dishonest of you.
BTW, keep up with the ad hominem attacks, it REALLY reinforces your credibility as a
jackassthoughtful and knowledgeable interlocutor.Peter
This thread is a beautiful, beautiful trainwreck.
El Cid
@Ecks: A good test would be to take students with the same measurable background factors at the same schools and lock some in a room in the dark with sound effects of parrots screaming all day and have others in regular classrooms, and see if the different environments have an effect. That would allow one to tease out some effect of classroom, perhaps even teacher, causal variables.
matoko_chan
@Ecks: “fixing ” teachers is a free market solution. Like NCLB.
Like I explained for the fourth time, improving teacher quality has zero relationship with improving parental SES or parental involvement.
You and EDK and the rest of the glibertarian grifter posse are just beating Basil’s car.
Ecks
@matoko_chan: I’m going to Fisk you here.
Yes. It means “the correlation which is larger than any other correlation.” So if being pretentious correlates .6 with being a jackass, and while being smug correlates .4 with it, and assuming you know more than you really do correlates .5, then the “single greatest correlation is being pretentious… But being smug and thinking you know more than you do also correlate.
Noooo… It just means that if you could change a kids parents it would have a BIGGER effect than changing their teacher. Similarly, shooting you in the head would have a bigger impact on your health than kicking you in it, but I’m assuming you aren’t going to volunteer for a boot to the noggin, amirite.
So you keep claiming. I’m still waiting for a single solitary shred of proof to back this up. If you are the expert that you seem to think you are, then this should be a trivial request. Your silence speaks volumes.
Actually I’d rather not if it’s all the same to you. Now do I get to suggest what YOU should go fawn over?
Ecks
@El Cid: Not sure if serious… ;)
matoko_chan
@Peter: a beautiful disaster, don’t you mean?
Ecks
Well it could be. Or you could “fix” teachers with more intensive training that is better designed to work with them. Or you could try to come up with any number of creative solutions to do it.
Well of COURSE it doesn’t. Nobody ever said that it did. But, y’know, if you can’t replace a kids parents then you’re stuck working with the variables that you CAN influence. That’s how things work over here in the real world. I suggest you visit some time it’s really not as bad as you’ve probably heard.
“libertarian (Noun): One who disagrees with Matako_chan.”
It must be fun rewriting the dictionary there all on your own.
matoko_chan
@Ecks: no thanx, im not much for sucking glibertarian cock, but you go right ahead.
I’m mortally afraid of catching cyberstds, since all glibertarians are intellectual whores.
My point is free market solutions are incapable of solving of solving the core problems with education reform, which are only addressable with applied social justice. Perhaps you can make some marginal improvement with more education and certification programs, but that is just NCLB for teachers with certification replacing standardized test scores…..
My gawd what a horror. You are an idiot.
NTLB….No Teacher Left Behind. That is what you are proposing.
Making all teachers above average is just as impossible as making all children above average.
And that is what the family of free markets solutions suggests.
NCLB for teachers.
El Cid
@Ecks: It is a simple thought experiment allowing someone to think about whether a factor (independent variable) has no effect on the result (dependent variable). If a causal variable has no effect on a result, then it is irrelevant when that variable is set to an extreme rather than an expected value. So if, say, room temperature were said to play no role in education outcomes, it shouldn’t matter whether the room temperature be at roughly Antarctic average or Death Valley maximum. Because no role is no role, right?
matoko_chan
@Ecks: oh please. show me a libertarian left in America.
Libertarianism is one leg of the conservative stool, the other two legs being fiscal conservatism and social conservatism.
They agreed long ago that socon rights trump human rights and citizen rights, and sold their souls to the bankstahs.
There are no libertarians in America. They are all glibertarian grifters like EDK.
Ecks
@matoko_chan:
So let me get this right. I ask you for evidence to back up the strong claims you are making, and your response is “I’m not much for sucking glibertarian cock.” So you apparently have total contempt for evidence and proof, and are homophobic to boot.
Why am I talking to you?
The flaw in your argument here is the word “only”. I’m all for social justice, and I fully expect that improving the lot of parents could be the single best thing you could do. But saying it is the best thing you could do does NOT mean it’s the ONLY good thing you can do. The logic simply is not there. I can increase my lifespan the MOST by getting regular exercise, but I can ALSO increase it somewhat by better nutrition. According to you that means I should exercise like crazy and then eat a crap ton of cheeseburgers, because only the MOST important thing counts and everything else is irrelevant. Just dumb dumb dumb.
WOO HOO! We have the first shifting of the goalposts. Truly, the sign that an argument is not going well for you but that you are too intellectually honest to admit it. We’ve now gone from “teachers have no effect” to “weeeeell, they may have a BIT of an effect, but, y’know it’s totally not that big.” That’s very gracious of you to concede young Chan. Well done for being so open minded.
Well, that all depends on how they do it now, doesn’t it.
ah yes, back to the unsubstantiated personal abuse. I was starting to think you’d turned all reasonable on me here.
Non-sequitur much?
I like El-Cid’s logic here. If you say that teaching quality doesn’t matter, then why not have the courage of your convictions: Do away with teachers entirely, and hire a bunch of 15 year old kids to babysit the classrooms for minimum wage instead. Then invest the money you save on paying the teachers to support low-income parents. The 15 year olds may not be able to teach their way out of a paper bag, but as you keep insisting, teacher quality is irrelevant, whereas extra resources for patents is pretty much a magic bullet. So we lose nothing from having uniformly terrible “teachers” and gain a great deal from helping the parents, it’s an enormous net win!
Or do you not believe your own rhetoric now all of a sudden?
[listens for the sound of further shifting goal posts]
Ecks
@matoko_chan: I don’t disagree with this in general terms. I just fail to see what it has to do with the present conversation.
You seem to be in love with applying absolute labels to people. If someone shows any glimmer of support for something that a glibbertarian might at some point also support, then this person MUST be an unreconstructed glibertarian themselves, and everything they say is henceforth categorically evil. Sounds pretty stupid when you spell it out like this doesn’t it? Well it IS pretty stupid. Grow up.
El Cid
@Ecks: Are you required to pay 15 year olds minimum wage? Seems to me there could be some savings here.
Ecks
@El Cid: In Canada when I was growing up there was a separate lower minimum wage for minors, I have no idea what the American laws are. Maybe we could pay the 15 year olds 4 bucks an hour like waitresses get, and then they can get tips from the students if they do a good job.
Oh but wait, would tipping make it a free market solution? Because if so then it’s totally glibertarian so it wouldn’t work anymore. That’s science.
matoko_chan
@Ecks: /yawn
do you think I havent heard all this free market glibertarian bullshytt before?
and strawman for you and el campeador. he is still butthurt over the Muslim Brotherhood..
I think funds are a limited resource, and No Teacher Left Behind would be a riddickulous waste of fundage, just like NCLB.
Fixing teachers does nothing to address the core problems. It is just glibertarian radar chaff that retards like you fall for.
Im not the one that got spoofed by EDK.
;)
matoko_chan
@Ecks:
I repeat, there are no libertarians left in America.
hey, el Campeador….weren’t you an EDK fanboi too?
El Cid
@matoko_chan:
If so, I don’t recall every putting such words in print. And here I thought I was just being a methodological minimalist.
Many adults remain unaware of the risk of EDK affinity, and without seeing a doctor EDK affinity could go undetected until a dangerous eruption later. Ask your doctor about the little mauve pill.
But since I actually am the libertarian left, all I can say is that Protestants rock, and we need to press for school vouchers to fire unproductive teachers so that we can more effectively crush the Muslim Brotherhood, a biological item, in our plan to prevent social network theory from uncovering our secret racial IQ information, and once we finish that we need to reconquer the holy lands — all in order to cut taxes on the rich there because it will increase worker productivity and they can finally afford to fire bad teachers and hire better ones. This will finally allow all of Islam to be conquered by the forces of Max Weber.
Ecks
@El Cid: [slow clap].
You only forgot that once we’ve fired all the bad teachers we will enforce No Student Left Behind standards on the others, and this will help bring tax cuts to our arugala factories and condemned asparagus cos we’re a bunch of glibertarian pinko communist free market magikers.
No wait, I think I got the wires crossed here. It’s so goddamned hard to remember which elaborate conspiracy to ruin America I’m supposed to be a part of today. Maybe we should sit Matoko and Rush down in a room together, and not let them out until they’ve figured out once and for all exactly what it is that we believe. It would save just enormous amounts of time and energy.
chopper
@matoko_chan:
Radio host: Sir, if I can just break in for a moment…
Homer: Yes, Roy.
Radio host: Do you have a question for Sandy Koufax?
Homer: Yes, Mr. Koufax, don’t you think Flanders is a big jerk?
matoko_chan
/yawn
I think the EDK/ECKS No Teacher Left Behind law carries the day for eumemes.
Here is something I saved for you el Campeador.
Since I know you dig the Brothers.
lawl. Sillie chopper, this is what I say.
matoko_chan
@El Cid:
that sums it I think. No humans in islamic cultures want anything to do with your tedious dreary Anglosaxon Protestant anti-intellectual proselytizing and your ridiculous human godhead.
And what is worse, islamic cultures are immunized against your endless evagelism, shielded in the elegant and powerful defense against proselytization of shariah law, like Thetis dipping Achilles in the Styx.
The more America proselytizes judeochristian democracy, the more fiercely muslims resist.
Because (muqawama) resistance is part of al Islam.
And you feeble old juiceless protestants can’t turn it off.
El Cid
@matoko_chan: That’s too bad, because Protestants are genetically superior to other religions, partly because of our ability to wear more Western dress styles. If the Islamic hordes are unable to listen to my superior rationality, then I must bring with me sufficient electronic amplification so that my voice is much louder.
I will completely defeat the Muslim Brotherhood with my quick footwork in tap-dancing, since we already know the Muslim Turks are vulnerable to the Sufist whirling Dervishes. There is no social network theory strong enough to employ biological bases for behavior in the face of a truly inspiring tap routine.
In my favor will also be the superior Western music notational system, given that the predominantly equatorial centered Islamic civilizations formed along trade routes have genetically absorbed the rhythmic stepping of camels.
You Muslims can brag now about your eventual victory, but when I rally such forces as the Mattel toymaking company and photographers documenting the Great Pacific Plastic Patch, I can see no future other than utter defeat.
The Crusades will finally achieve the occupation of the Holy Lands for the DNA revivification of Jesus from the Shroud of Turin. It has already been proven to be the highest IQ DNA samples of all history from its light and shadow patterns.
In addition, we can activate at any time the IED’s buried within the Social Brain Hypothesis. It is the perfect hiding place for plastic explosives given that the meme will be adopted entirely by the unsuspecting. And the trigger mechanism can be tied to the level of acceptance by an individual on the hypothesis.
You will know when the final battle has been launched when teaching standards in the USA include design of high power PA system and tap dancing skills.
bjacques
Assuming this thread isn’t totally hosed, has anyone noticed what sort of people Harold and Erica are? As far as I can tell, Harold is a junior executive / philosopher-in-training, but Erica is definitely a member of the intendant class.
Yep, the height to which people like you and me can aspire, when not sniffing each other’s butts, is that of holding the coats of the super-rich, in Erica’s case, or justifying them to hoi polloi, as perhaps Harold does.
For the super-rich are beyond our ken–and that of David F. Brooks. Analysis of their pheromones or whatever makes them tick is impossible and–dare I say it?–presumptuous. They are beings of pure light (the kind in the old Star Trek episode that the Klingons unsuccessfully try to execute, not the kind that flounce about like a Regency squire and mess people over for giggles–as if we could possibly to judge them one way or the other).
Pheromones are destiny. Cloudberry gelato is yum.
Peter
@El Cid: You are a master of your craft, sir.
El Cid
@bjacques: See above the inspiring formula for success discovered by inspirational author and speaker Napoleon Hill.
El Cid
@Peter: Thank you. I look forward to your contribution to the war effort. Upon hearing the secret coded activation call appearing Enzyte commercials, report to your local training spaces in the back of the Subway “Sandwich Shop” closest to you.
bjacques
@El Cid: Indeed, sir. Although I lied about cloudberry; I’ve never tried it.