Saturday, October 01, 2005
They've broken out the white sheets, the crosses and the gas
A contradiction I've noticed about GOoPers is, on the one hand, their high dudgeon when the left accuses them of racism - "You're playing the RACE CARD card (goddamn, I'm soooooooo sick of seeing that term "race card" because, in itself, it SOUNDS like a term a racist uses) - then, on the other hand, they use an Appeal to Authority to justify the obvious racism that seeps through.
Check Sully's ongoing affection for Murray's "Bell Curve" and the recent defense of Bennet's stupidity.
I mention this because if you check any blog, left or right, where race is an issue, you can read the comments and read just how stupidly racist rightards are. No apologies, "that sack of shit doesn't speak for me" but "well, if you look at the statistics..."
Except, as Disraeli said, "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." Looking at the trees but neglecting the forest fails to tell us anything. Bennet (in his now infamous blunder) quoted "Freakonomics" but failed to see the larger picture. Levitt clues him in:
Go to the link I just included and watch the righties squirm: they indeed want to justify their racism, without apology and with drooling alacrity. Without looking back and without embarrassment, they reveal their true colors (usually with the kind of witless sarcasm one sees on Free Republic of LGF).
My own sense is that quasi-racists like Sully want Murray to be right so they can justify a larger conservative fallacy, that some people are just genetically predisposed to rule while the rest (no matter their merit) are meant to serve. Utter shit, we know, but Sully and his ilk will draw on such pseudo-science in order to rationalize their closet monarchism. However, the vast majority of these neanderthals are simply enamoured by the notion that, by virtue of skin color, thay are superior to those with a darker skin color. It has nothing to do with the kind of Tory politics favored by Sully or, say, George Will, and everything to do with the kind of tribalist hoodoo that we should have evolved out of a long time ago.
Check Sully's ongoing affection for Murray's "Bell Curve" and the recent defense of Bennet's stupidity.
I mention this because if you check any blog, left or right, where race is an issue, you can read the comments and read just how stupidly racist rightards are. No apologies, "that sack of shit doesn't speak for me" but "well, if you look at the statistics..."
Except, as Disraeli said, "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." Looking at the trees but neglecting the forest fails to tell us anything. Bennet (in his now infamous blunder) quoted "Freakonomics" but failed to see the larger picture. Levitt clues him in:
It is true that, on average, crime involvement in the U.S. is higher among blacks than whites. Importantly, however, once you control for income, the likelihood of growing up in a female-headed household, having a teenage mother, and how urban the environment is, the importance of race disappears for all crimes except homicide. (The homicide gap is partly explained by crack markets). In other words, for most crimes a white person and a black person who grow up next door to each other with similar incomes and the same family structure would be predicted to have the same crime involvement. Empirically, what matters is the fact that abortions are disproportionately used on unwanted pregnancies, and disproportionately by teenage women and single women.
Go to the link I just included and watch the righties squirm: they indeed want to justify their racism, without apology and with drooling alacrity. Without looking back and without embarrassment, they reveal their true colors (usually with the kind of witless sarcasm one sees on Free Republic of LGF).
My own sense is that quasi-racists like Sully want Murray to be right so they can justify a larger conservative fallacy, that some people are just genetically predisposed to rule while the rest (no matter their merit) are meant to serve. Utter shit, we know, but Sully and his ilk will draw on such pseudo-science in order to rationalize their closet monarchism. However, the vast majority of these neanderthals are simply enamoured by the notion that, by virtue of skin color, thay are superior to those with a darker skin color. It has nothing to do with the kind of Tory politics favored by Sully or, say, George Will, and everything to do with the kind of tribalist hoodoo that we should have evolved out of a long time ago.
