In fairness, he does know a thing or two about bone-deep ignorance.
Archives for April 2010
Still the King
Everyone say Happy Birthday to Tunch, who is eight years old today!
Someone will be getting some tuna in a little bit.
Uncle Rahm
Left-wing Rahm-haters just can’t compete with right-wing Rahm-haters :
American Jews, I have one request of you: please pull your heads out of your posteriors.
I mean that in all sincerity. Your continued support for Democrats and an administration that is openly anti-Semitic is a disgrace. Your embrace of a party that seeks to hamstring Israel in the name of a wholly fictitious Middle East peace process is contemptible. Your loyalty to a president who consistently sides with Palestinian and Iranian mass murder-supporters is disgusting.
Your backing of a man who has spent his life surrounding himself with the worst anti-Semites America has to offer — Jeremiah Wright, Rashid Khalidi (former Palestinian terrorist spokesman), Louis Farrakhan (“I don’t like the way [Jews] leech on us”), Samantha Power, Robert Malley, to name a few — is nothing short of reprehensible. Rahm Emanuel’s presence in the Obama cabinet doesn’t ameliorate Obama’s anti-Semitism — it just provides it convenient cover. Al Sharpton wrongly called Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell “house negroes”; Emanuel is a kapo.
I threw up in my mouth a little when I read that last line. A kapo is “A concentration camp inmate appointed by the SS to be in charge of a work gang.”
It’s entirely possible that the guy who wrote this is a liberal plant.
Don’t Eat the Brown Acid
I can’t begin to make sense of Red State’s offering in the “epistemic closure” debate. You give it a shot:
Of course, it is our fault, not theirs. As the New York Times notes, “[Epistemic closure] is being used as shorthand by some prominent conservatives for a kind of closed-mindedness in the movement, a development they see as debasing modern conservatism’s proud intellectual history.” It is important to note that we wouldn’t even have this conversation about the left because the left is not really proud of and tries to ignore its intellectual history.
We conservatives are just not serious enough according to the vegetarian philosophers. Note too that a lot of the handwringing is by vegetarian philosophers that no conservative thinks is actually a conservative, but these vegetarian philosophers will fight to the death if you dare suggest they are something other than a conservative. Their friends and fellow travelers are all on the left, but with the ranks filled up there, they pose as conservatives, or at least right-of-center intellectuals who reject all the intellectual history of the right while perversely crying that those faithful to the history are ignorant of it.
If you would like to save yourself some time, “vegetarian philosophers” are people who can’t handle “red meat rhetoric.” If you really want to save some time, just watch this:
I’ll be in my basement room, with a needle and a spoon
It’s nice to see the Senate has its priorities in order (via Atrios):
Word is that the Democrats might make the Republicans actually filibuster FinReg tonight. That is to say, stand on the floor and talk and talk and talk. And if the Democrats are serious about forcing the Republicans to really filibuster the bill, this is the right week for it: The Kentucky Derby starts Friday, and Kentucky’s senior senator, Mitch McConnell, would surely prefer to attend. Given that his members are already talking about breaking ranks, McConnell may find himself eager to get this kabuki dance over with a little bit early.
I’ll be in my basement room, with a needle and a spoonPost + Comments (56)
The sweetest taboo
Racial supremacy is a fairly taboo topic in the media. That’s why William Saletan thought it was exciting to tell liberals that they were no better than creationists if they failed to accept the “studies” done by white supremacist J. Philippe Rushton. It’s also why Andrew Sullivan and George Will thought it was exciting to promote The Bell Curve. It doesn’t matter that there is little-to-no scientific evidence for any of it. What matters is that taking on an edgy topic like this proves you are a brave media maverick.
But I’d argue that Saletan’s and Sullivan’s flirtations with white supremacy are mostly symptomatic of the general Slate/TNR fetish for contrarianism. Sure, you think that white supremacist notions are just for bigots, but once you get past the conventional wisdom of our hippie overlords blah blah blah. In particular, Saletan’s white supremacist piece could just as easily have been a multi-part treatise on why Creed is underrated.
The popularity of Steve Sailer among principled, intellectually honest conservatives is much more troubling. Sailer writes for site called VDARE.com; the name is taken from the name of the first white English child born in North America. After Hurricane Katrina, Sailer wrote
What you won’t hear, except from me, is that ‘Let the good times roll’ is an especially risky message for African-Americans. The plain fact is that they tend to possess poorer native judgment than members of better-educated groups. Thus they need stricter moral guidance from society.
(This was criticized harshly by Jon Podhoretz — I’m certainly not claiming that all conservatives agree with Sailer.)
I’ve mentioned before that David Brooks has cited Sailer’s work (in passing) in his Times column. Well, it turns out that Jon Tierney once based a good chunk of a column on Steve Sailer’s estimates of Bush’s and Kerry’s IQs (Sailer estimated that Bush’s was four points higher, something Tierney — now a Times science reporter — thought this massive IQ gap would be Bush’s “secret weapon”, I kid you not). Of course, one could argue that they didn’t know really know who Sailer was and that, in Tierney’s case, it’s pretty likely that he was also engaging in Slate/TNR contrarianism.
But here’s something striking: when he was at the Atlantic, Ross Douthat linked to Steve Sailer at least eight times (here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here), approvingly in each case. Douthat also wrote that “….Will Saletan bravely attempts a summary of the emerging scientific consensus on racial differences in intelligence, another issue where the left doesn’t much care for science has to say” (Douthat later semi-retracted).
I’m just a shrill vituperative D-list blogger, so I don’t expect anyone to reply to this, but Andrew Sullivan, Matt Yglesias, and the rest of the At Pack: you have spent a lot of time promoting Douthat, did you ever call him out on his frequent links to Steve Sailer and Vdare.com?
And can we all stop pretending that there isn’t a sizable racial supremacist component to much of mainstream conservatism?
Update. Balloon-Juice favorite Daniel Larison also has VDARE on his blogroll. VDARE publishes a lot of stuff, much of it crazy, but I am not sure that it is all crazy. So I don’t know what to make of this exactly.
Update. Loneoak makes a good point in the comments:
When the Sailer zombie meets the Bobo sociology, bad things happen. Because Bobo/Douthat/respectable conservatives are not bound to standards of rigor in their observations of human behavior, it is far too easy for them to pick up on ‘science’ that conforms to their weaksauce sociology. This is not to say that sociology could not ever support politically conservative politics, but rather that our toxic media atmosphere only supports conservative pundits who can effortlessly repackage ‘common wisdom’ about human behavior as ‘hard truths.’ Because we live in a society whose ‘common wisdom’ is often white supremacist, the Sailer-Bob nexus is any ugly one.
More whining
The Politico has published what may be the longest piece in the publication’s hallowed history. Predictably, it’s an extended whine about how Obama treats the press. Most whine off the record, but Iraq war cheerleader George Packer, at least, doesn’t:
“I don’t think they need to be nice to reporters, but the White House seems to imagine that releasing information is like a tap that can be turned on and off at their whim.”
Well, they don’t have to be nice to reporters. And releasing information is like a tap.
I sympathize with reporters on this, but it’s simple: the George W. Bush administration made you their bitch. Now you’re every administration’s bitch.