The editorial contains the inevitable slash at the greed and deceptiveness of Wall Street, but that part feels tired and pro forma.Even the NYT can’t fail to observe that this dynamic involves failures of governance on the part of the trustees of public pension funds. Either the trustees are stupid and credulous, or they are “willfully blind”—they choose to ignore the risks and odds because they need to throw Hail Marys to get the kind of returns they need to meet their unrealistically aggressive growth targets.
This is another way of saying that public sector unions—and state and municipal governments—have made promises to workers about their pensions without setting aside enough money to fulfill those promises when they came due. As a result, pension managers are forced into the casinos to make risky bets. But because they tend to be among the stupidest players in the financial market, they all too often end up getting hosed.
Funny how that works.
Over and over again, the answer is large but unfunded pension promises. Union leaders can posture to their members about all the lovely bacon they are bringing home, and politicians can posture to the taxpayers about how fiscally prudent they have been. The game depends on the unions shutting up about the underfunding of the pensions. If the politicians had to fund the pensions at the real level of these promises, they couldn’t make the promises.
Oops.
The Gray Lady, to her credit, realizes that something terrible has happened, and she is doing what she does best: sounding the alarm. But she is still doing her utmost to pretend that there is no real cause for this terrible, multi-trillion dollar hole in the pension system. She sees no systemic flaw in the way that the modern progressive city and state are both designed, no structural defect that produces these terrible consequences in cities as different as Houston, New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, and in states ranging from tiny Rhode Island to giant California, New York, and Illinois.
That would require … oh, what was the word … oh, yeah, journalism.
My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.
After an initial burst of interest spurred by CBS’s big-bucks saturation advertising campaign for “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” the show’s ratings have tanked and it is now running third in late night behind NBC’s Jimmy Fallon and ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel, who rarely has managed second place before.
The reason? A survey by the Hollywood Reporter found that conservative viewers are turning off Colbert in droves. Nearly twice as many Republicans are watching Kimmel as Colbert, who has turned “Late Night” into a sort of wannabe MSNBC show.
The pattern is familiar: When a Democrat is the guest, Colbert is Barbara Walters. When a Republican is on, he turns into Tim Russert.
Gosh, whoever could have predicted that?
I, for one, have never found Colbert all that funny. He gets laughs from the people who are delighted by snide treatment of the sort of people that Colbert gives snide treatment to.
I wrote earlier today about the liberal media attacking Donald Trump’s statement that on 9/11, “thousands and thousands” of American Muslims in Jersey City celebrated the successful terrorist attacks. Another Democrat who got into the act was the Washington Post’s fact checker, Glenn Kessler. He addressed Trump’s claim here, and, calling it “outrageous,” awarded it four Pinocchios.
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This assertion is astonishing, because it means that Kessler is ignorant–or pretends to be–of his own newspaper’s reporting. As I wrote in the earlier post, the Washington Post, on September 18, 2001, wrote:
In Jersey City, within hours of two jetliners’ plowing into the World Trade Center, law enforcement authorities detained and questioned a number of people who were allegedly seen celebrating the attacks and holding tailgate-style parties on rooftops while they watched the devastation on the other side of the river.
Somebody at the Washington Post lied? Say it ain’t so!
Did Kessler know about his own paper’s September 18, 2001 news story or not? If he didn’t, he is a lousy fact checker. If he did, his column was deceitful, to put it politely. So far, Kessler has refused to answer that question. I he does respond, I will publish an update. In the meantime, I award Kessler four Pinocchios.
One of the weirder trends in American discourse these days is the decline in any sense of how long ago specific dates in the past were when asserting theories of historical causality. Black students at Princeton are oppressed by Woodrow Wilson, while Genius T. Coates blames everything on FDR’s FHA.
America may be obliged, for reasons unrelated to the inscription on the Statue of Liberty or holiday season humanitarianism, to accept Syrian refugees. But there’s a right way to talk about this—and a wrong way—irrespective of one’s position.
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When it comes to partisan cheap shots, however, President Obama was in a class all own. For three straight days he lashed out at Republicans who expressed opposition to accepting Syrian refugees, and did so while on foreign soil.
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“When you start seeing individuals in position of responsibility suggesting Christians are more worthy of protection than Muslims are in a war-torn land,” he added, “that feeds the [ISIS] narrative.”
Notwithstanding the fact that Obama’s story line has taken hold in the mainstream media, this is precisely backward. Syrian Christians are fleeing their home country because they were ticketed for extermination. “Genocide” is the word you’d hope administration officials would use, not “narrative.” What Obama is really doing is demonizing political dissent. His default response to anyone who says his foreign policy is a disaster is to label them racist or un-American.
Obama doesn’t give a shit about refugees, he’s reaching for any stick he can grasp with with to beat Republicans.
Sanders’s democratic socialism isn’t socialism. He disclaims public ownership of the means of production. Sanders’s socialism is Franklin Roosevelt’s Second Bill of Rights, only more so. It’s the welfare state above all, in which income and wealth are confiscated from some and redistributed to others in the interest of “equality” and “security” and all things good.
Well, that’s all right, then.
Whereas Roosevelt connected welfare rights with the Bill of Rights, Sanders connects “democratic socialism” to Roosevelt. In Sanders’s manifesto, as among Democrats generally, everything is up to date if the date is 1944. Only the animus is really of the moment.
They’ve gone about as furr as they kin go … not really.
To invoke the marketing cliché, in his speech Sanders “rebrands” Democratic Party orthodoxy as “democratic socialism.” Democrats prefer the camo.
Dear Reader (Including those of you stunned by the news that Charlie Sheen has a sexually transmitted disease. Not since Jim J. Bullock announced he was gay have I been more shocked),
If you Google “Christian terrorism,” you’re probably a jackass to begin with. But if you do — bidden not by your own drive to jackassery but by the natural curiosity inspired by this “news”letter — you’ll find lots of left-wing trollery about how the worst terrorist attacks on American soil have been committed by Christians. Much of it is tendentious, question-begging twaddle. But I really don’t want to waste a lot of time on whether Tim McVeigh was a Christian or not (he really wasn’t).
What I find interesting is that many of the same people who clutch their pearls at the mere suggestion that Islamic terrorism has anything to do with — oh, what’s the word again? — oh right: Islam, seem to have no problem making the case that “Christian terrorism” is like a real thing. Remember how so many liberals loved — loved — Obama’s sophomoric and insidious tirade about not getting on our “high horses” about ISIS’s atrocities in the here and now because medieval Christians did bad things a thousand years ago? They never seem to think that argument through. Leaving out the ass-aching stupidity of the comparison, it actually concedes the very point Obama never wants to concede. By laying the barbaric sins of Christians a thousand years ago at the feet of Christians today, he implicitly tags Muslims with the barbarism committed in their name today.
Now, I see no need to wade too deeply into the theology here, but I think I am on very solid ground when I say that Islamic terrorism draws more easily and deeply from the Koran than Tim McVeigh drew from the Christian Bible. Of course, you’re free to disagree. In a free society, everybody has the right to be wrong in their opinions. (But don’t tell anyone at Yale that.)
Modern politics grew more coherent, if not rational, when I realized that discussions like terrorism or the Syrian refugee crisis are all hormone-flinging directed at the flesh. Your Progressive overlords think you’re stupid, and will attempt to herd you with guilt, fear, and bribes to Do What They Say.
Conversely, there is shag-all interest in rational discussion, analysis, and a dispassionate effort at finding an optimal overall solution. “They never seem to think that argument through” because #ShutUp. There is power to be protected here, and allowing any sort of intellectual exchange is a direct threat to that power.
Obama is what you get when kids grow up without a father on hand to smack the silly notions out of their heads when necessary.
According to a report by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), one of the world’s most influential conservationist groups, global warming is now the single biggest threat to the long-term surival of the polar bear as a species.
Of course, the chances of an organization named ‘International Union for the Conservation of Nature’ releasing a report that says polar bears are find and ‘climate change’ no big deal are — let me hit the calculator quickly — let’s see — less than zero.
Farid Esack, a former professor of Islamic Studies at Harvard University, blamed the West for the Paris attacks in a post on his Facebook page, calling them “your chickens come home to roost.”
By this logic, Negroes are to blame for being lynched by the KKK.
Esack, who is now a professor at University of Johannesburg and a prominent activist in the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, has previously spoken at interfaith events aimed at mutual understanding.
Sounds as if he’s a little unclear on the concept of ‘mutual understanding.’
These are the people teaching the future Ruling Class. Be very afraid.
On Tuesday, Mrs. Clinton unloaded on Mr. Sanders, charging that he wants to raise taxes on the middle class to pay for his single-payer health care plan, whereby the government would replace private insurance companies and pay for almost all health care costs.
Hillary Clinton doesn’t favor raising taxes on the middle class? Hillary Clinton doesn’t favor single-payer health care? Oh, wait, she’s lying again … never mind.
Of course, I’ve often written about this scam here. What the Crust mean by ‘wealthy should pay more in taxes’ is that ordinary income tax rates ought to be raised; of course, they don’t get their wealth through ordinary income, so it won’t touch them.
And even if it did, their focus is on income taxes rather than wealth taxes; nobody dares mention the latter, because the wrong ox would get gored. (Pun intended.) If you’ve already got a hundred million dollars, it’s no skin off your wallet if the government taxes income at 75% — you’ve got enough to live in comfort for the next five generations. All it means is that there are less grubby entrepreneurs and farmers and contractors getting in your way when you want to book a table at the French Laundry or buy a condo on Central Park West.
In the case of the Clintons, their actual power comes through the financial leverage of their foundation(s), and so even if they didn’t have two dimes to rub together they’d still be getting their butts licked by people who want ‘funding’ via the sacred foundation grant. (‘Funding’ is a fine Crustian term for ‘money I get to spend that I don’t have to work for’, like a teenager’s allowance or food stamps.)
Read it. And watch the video of your tax dollars at work … sort of.
Deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes made the rounds on the Sunday morning gabfests yesterday. The burden of Rhodes’s comments as he made the rounds was to explicate Obama’s declaration on Thursday that ISIS had been “contained” just before ISIS demonstrated its reach with the massacres it committed in Paris on Friday. Rhodes danced as fast as he can to explain that Obama didn’t mean that ISIS was “contained.”
And those Syrian refugees Obama is admitting to the United States? Don’t worry, they are fully “vetted.” Who ya gonna believe, political hack Ben Rhodes or FBI Director James Comey?
Jonathan Butler played high-school football at Omaha Central High, where he won a state championship, and earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Mizzou, the newspaper reports. He is working toward a master’s degree in educational leadership and policy.
He is a member of a prominent Omaha family. The newspaper says that Butler’s father is Eric L. Butler, executive vice president for sales and marketing for the Union Pacific Railroad. His 2014 compensation was $8.4 million, according to regulatory filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Guess he isn’t really an oppressed black dude from the ‘hood after all.
… which everyone will ignore because they do that all the time anyway, so what’s different?
Perhaps College Republicans could return the favor by tweeting accusations of fascism during the next Democrite ‘debate’ (sorry, to have a debate you have to have more than one set of opinions on display) — but it’s just easier to post the video afterwards.
A graduate student at the University of Missouri has begun a hunger strike that he says will not end until either he dies or university president Tim Wolfe is fired.
Jonathan Butler, who describes himself as a “liberation activist” on his Twitter profile, sent a letter to the UM Board of Curators on Monday morning, laying down the terms of the strike.
I’m sure they trembled in their boots. Well, Birkenstocks.
“During this hunger strike, I will not consume any food or nutritional sustenance at the expense of my health until either Tim Wolfe is removed from office or my internal organs fail and my life is lost,” Butler claims
Sounds like a plan. What’s not to like? Unfortunately I’m sure he’s going to keep blathering during the process, so there’s no rose without a thorn.
In the publicly-posted letter, Jonathan Butler blames President Wolfe—whom he referred to as “decaying flesh”—for “a slew of racist, sexist, homophobic, etc[.] incidents” since Wolfe took office in 2012.
Butler, who is receiving a master’s in education, according to his LinkedIn profile, lists the university’s decision to cancel its contract with Planned Parenthood as one of those “racist, sexist, homophobic, etc[.] incidents.”
I guess he’s worried about getting pregnant and not being able to afford a you-know-what. You know what student budgets are like.
Butler also claims that the loss of health insurance for graduate students—the result of an IRS ruling on Obamacare—is another example of what he says is the failure of the university to create “a safe and inclusive place” for “marginalized/underrepresented students.”
Well, he was the kind of guy Obamacare was aimed at. Seems to me his beef is with Obama, not Wolfe.
Several students have publicly voiced their support for Butler on Twitter, telling him to “remain strong” and declaring themselves in “solidarity” with him.
Although not, of course, to the extent of going on a hunger strike as well. You know how it is — an expression of solidarity is sufficient, without, like, actually doing anything. We’re with you, brother. [burp]
Butler previously led a group of black students in forming a human chain to block president Wolfe’s car at the university’s homecoming parade in October, as part of the students stated goal of new “inclusive policies” at the university, “as well as an overall shift toward a safer and more inclusive campus environment.”
Human chains to block people’s cars are an obvious step toward a safer and more inclusive campus environment, don’t you know.
The university has promised to require diversity training for all six thousand incoming freshmen, and already allows students to turn in their peers and professors for so-called “bias incidents.”
That worked so well for the old Soviet Union that it has quickly become a fashion in this country. We long to get rid of that dead weight Obama and have a leader like Putin that will get things done.
Despite these concessions, however, Butler and other students continue to call for Wolfe’s job. In addition to Butler’s hunger strike, Missouri students have launched a Change.org petition addressed to Missouri Governor Jay Nixon, demanding that he fire president Wolfe.
Let the world tremble before a Change.org petition; since Jay Nixon is a Democrat, this actually might work.
No trace of Politically-Incorrect-Cooties must be allowed to exist.
If these guys are so offended by the seal, they ought to go to a different law school. C’mon, put your tuition where your mouth is. (Never happen, of course, they need that Harvard Law School ticket stub.)
The family of a Chicago man gunned down during a robbery attempt are calling for his shooter, a concealed weapon permit-holder, to be prosecuted for the shooting. The Washington Post is helping to further that effort, suggesting the failed robbery could even be a Halloween prank gone horribly wrong.
Police say Saturday night Reginald Gildersleeve walked into the small bodega Agencia Mexicana while wearing a mask and announced a holdup, whipping out what appeared to be gun. Moments later he was gunned down by an unnamed patron. It was later discovered that Gildersleeve’s gun was a paintball gun.
Think of it as evolution in action.
But now, Gildersleeve’s family is calling for charges to be levied, saying that the habitual criminal didn’t deserve to die. Igbinosa Oronsaye, Gildersleeve’s stepson, told The Chicago Tribune the shooter overreacted in shooting multiple times.
“Some people don’t actually know how to use guns,” Oronsaye said. “They go to firing ranges, but it’s not the same as a bullet going into someone’s body, it’s not the same as a bullet going into flesh. They should be able to wound first, kill next. He didn’t deserve to get shot multiple times.”
Uh, yes he did.
The family’s argument is being pushed along by The Washington Post, where writer Michael Miller says the shooting is “raising questions.” Miller wrote up Gildersleeve’s death Monday morning in a manner that seems intended to frame Gildersleeve in the best possible light. Miller, for instance, describes the shooting as “mysterious” because it “occurred on Halloween and involved a man in a mask with a fake gun,” although robberies with fake guns happen all the time.
From Hillary Clinton to Reginald Guildersleeve, the Washington Post never met a criminal it didn’t like.
Biden goes out of his way to assert that Trump’s opposition to illegal immigration is an “attack on all immigrants.” Why lie? Anyone who is paying attention knows that Trump’s position on immigration is addressed to illegal immigrants. Why efface the distinction between legal and illegal immigrants?
Biden is utterly representative of Democrats on this point. It could be that Biden and his fellow Democrats such as Hillary Clinton see no distinction between legal and illegal immigration. It could be that Biden sees illegal immigrants as a core constituency of the Democratic Party. It could be that Biden thinks it is in the Democrats’ interest to foment confusion among voters on this point. It could be that the man is a natural born demagogue. It could be all of the above.
In the wake of the CNBC debate debacle, Joe Scarborough went on an epic rant on liberal media bias on today’s Morning Joe. He summed things up this way, in challenging the panel: “you can’t do it and nobody here can do it:name the single Republican that has hosted a Sunday show, that has been an anchor of a news network for the big three networks over the past 50 years: you can not do it.”
So what if he stole your stuff? Doesn’t make him a bad person, does it?
In the site’s Crime and Safety area, where residents share strategies for fighting crime, Malkia Cyril of S.F. suggests that her neighbors stop using the label because it shows lack of empathy and understanding.
Cyril pointed out that instead of calling the thief who took the bicycle from your garage a criminal, you could be more respectful and call him or her “the person who stole my bicycle.”
“I [suggest] that people who commit property crimes are human and deserved to be referred to in terms that acknowledge that,” Cyril, who’s the executive director of the Center for Media Justice in Oakland, writes in the thread.
Anthropology is one of those fields where politics trumps science more often than not. Not as bad as economics, of course, but then it doesn’t, like economics, purport to be a science.
Another feminist intellectual finds herself in the crosshairs of the safe-spacers: Germaine Greer, a feminist academic and author, is scheduled to give a lecture at Cardiff University in Wales next month, but students are circulating a petition demanding the cancellation of the talk.
That’s because Greer, a self-proclaimed Marxist anarchist who opposes hierarchy and capitalism, is nevertheless out of step with the modern left on transgender issues: she does not recognize “men who believe that they are women and have had themselves castrated to prove it” as women, according to her 1999 book, The Whole Woman.
Here’s the narrative: mass killers are almost always white men. The Daily Kos recently published a piece with this headline: “How come we can’t tell the truth about the White Mass Killer Problem?” It asks, “Just what the fracking hell is the matter with all these mass-murdering white people?” Certainly mass killers are almost always men. But they’re not almost always white men. Overrepresented? Perhaps. But almost always white? No.
Chris Harper Mercer walked into Oregon’s Umpqua Community College and killed nine people, wounding nine more. On a dating site, Mercer, whose father is white and mother is black, referred to himself as “mixed race.”
If Obama is black, this guy is black.
As to non-white mass killers, Selwyn Duke, writing in American Thinker, cited a Mother Jones Magazine compilation of data on mass shootings from 1982 through, at the time of Duke’s writing, September 16, 2013 — after the Washington Navy Yard murders. Duke wrote:
“Of the last 20 mass killings of that period, 9 were perpetrated by non-whites.
“That would be 45 percent, which exceeds non-whites’ 37 percent share of the population.
Don’t expect to read that in the MSM.
The media are often accused — by the eternally offended crowd — of intentionally “undermining the image of blacks.” In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. The media lean over backwards to avoid any hint of anti-black sentiment. In the case of Mercer, a man with one black parent and one white parent, the narrative of mass-killers-are-almost-always-white caused the media great difficulty. But they tried their best.
After all, Rachel Dolezal, the white former NAACP chapter head who pretended to be black, says we’re whatever race we think we are.
It’s a funny thing: papers like the Times are always telling us about the torrent of financial support for the GOP, yet in virtually every contested election, more money is spent on behalf of the Democrat. Moreover, with respect to this election cycle, the Times never considers the possibility that more money is flowing into the GOP side because its candidates are more numerous, more diverse and more appealing. The Democrats have nothing on offer but elderly, warmed-over leftists.
The combined wealth of the Grant-Gordon whisky family, Highland Spring water owner Mahdi al-Tajir, oil tycoon Sir Ian Wood and former Harrods owner Mohammed Fayed dwarfs that of the one million people who make up Scotland’s poorest 20 per cent, according to a report by Oxfam Scotland.
1. Three individuals and a family doesn’t make it ‘families’.
2. Two of those guys aren’t even Scottish, but Arabs. Send them back where they came from and half the problem disappears. (See how simple that was?)
Whatever point Oxfam is trying to make is thoroughly lame.
Did it actually make any difference? Well, not really, but we got great news coverage!
There you go. Mission accomplished.
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on Powerful Photographs of Lithuanians Staging Mass Lie-Down to Demonstrate Country’s Disproportionate Suicide Rate
On September 30, the New York Times published a long article about Donald Trump’s wife Melania in its Fashion and Style section. The article said little of substance–Mrs. Trump is a nice lady, apparently–but it resulted in an epic sequence of five corrections.
The film Truth premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 12. Starring Robert Redford as Dan Rather and Cate Blanchett as Mary Mapes, the film retells the Rathergate scandal based on Mary Mapes’s memoir Truth and Duty. I must be one of the few people in the United States actually to have read the book.
Mapes is the hero of her memoir and the hero of the film. In Mapes’s telling, she is not the perpetrator of a scandalous hoax. Rather, she is a liberal martyr to the truth. If she’s a martyr at all, she’s a martyr a la Julius Rosenberg and Alger Hiss. In other words, she’s guilty as hell but she’s not confessing, ever, and now she has the best of Hollywood to lend her aid and comfort. The left does not give up promoting them, as we can see also in Kevin Williamson’s timely NR column “Codename: LIBERAL.”
Earlier today, a 20-year-old man named Chris Mercer murdered 10 people at a community college in Oregon. At this moment, little is known about Mercer or his motives. (No doubt he had grievances.) Three handguns and a rifle reportedly were recovered at the site, but we don’t know whether he obtained those firearms legally or illegally. At this point, it is hard to say anything intelligent about the shootings except that they were a horribly evil deed.
That, of course, doesn’t stop our president from trying to make political hay. He immediately took the podium to demand that Congress pass more gun control legislation–any gun control legislation, apparently, whether it has any relationship to this crime or not.
Chances are it was a ‘gun-free zone’ (boy, that worked, didn’t it?) and so the shooter knew he had a blank check.
Rise of Austrian Right Lengthens Shadow of Nazi Era
The NYT achieves Godwin’s Law in 8 words. No beating around the bush here!
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Modern progressives increasingly believe that geographic locations emit powerful magic emanations that control the behavior of people who subsequently settle there. Thus inner city neighborhoods in America cause gun violence and poor test scores. Similarly, the Nazi-tainted geography of Austria will no doubt hoodoo the poor innocent Muslim youths into taunting and beating Jews they happen to find on their turf. National borders are just artificial lines drawn on a map, but geographic juju is forever.
The incident happened Tuesday night, when students thought they found several nooses hanging from a tree. Word quickly spread as campus officials swiftly released a statement condemning the foul hate crime. But come morning, police said a short investigation had led them to conclude the “nooses” were really just the remnants of paper lanterns from an event held all the way back in June.
Unperturbed by the truth, students launched an assembly following the incident to speak as though the hate crime really did happen. According to The News Journal, a local paper, the assembly was held “to find ways to change the campus climate” in the wake of the bad atmosphere apparently exposed by a fictional hate crime.
It ought to have been real, and that’s good enough, see?
The naked partisanship of Stephanopoulos is not merely “liberal bias”; it is outright propaganda on behalf of the Democrat Party, which reflects ABC News policy of supporting Democrats. All of the producers and executives at ABC News are also partisan Democrats, so that the network has an organizational mission of advocacy on behalf of the candidates and policies of the Democrat Party. This is not only dishonest (because it presents partisan propaganda as objective “news”), but also dangerous, in that individuals like Stephanopoulos and organizations like ABC News cannot be expected to report honestly about the failures of Democrat officials and policies. The public is deliberately misled about, for example, the effectiveness of the Obama administration’s foreign policy, because many millions of citizens are spoonfed disinformation from Democrat partisans like Stephanopoulos.
They’re right — rather than using pigs, they ought to have used animal-rights activists. The patterns would be more realistic, and they wouldn’t be wasting valuable animals.
About a decade ago, I coined the term Occam’s Butterknife to characterize the contemporary liberal insistence upon implausibly convoluted explanations.
But now that race man Ta-Nehisi Coates is back with a giant article in The Atlantic about “The Enduring Myth of Black Criminality,” I need a more all-encompassing term to describe this increasingly fashionable rejection of reality. Let’s try: Occam’s Rubber Room.
In “The First Rule of White Club,” I reviewed Coates’ best-selling mini-book Between the World and Me about how as a nerdy child he had been terrified of Baltimore’s black thugs, which, due to redlining by the Roosevelt administration, were all the fault of white people. Or, excuse me, of “people who think they are white.”
Fortunately, The Atlantic’s staffers have edited out of the new article some of Coates’ more eye-rolling verbal tics (such as “black bodies”) and left us with 18,000 words of generic professional magazine prose. In the wake of a swarm of derisive comments citing the abundant statistical evidence that black criminality is no myth that greeted a preview of the article, the title is now “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration.”
DOES the college lecture discriminate? Is it biased against undergraduates who are not white, male and affluent?
The notion may seem absurd on its face. The lecture is an old and well-established tradition in education. To most of us, it simply is the way college courses are taught. Even online courses are largely conventional lectures uploaded to the web.
Yet a growing body of evidence suggests that the lecture is not generic or neutral, but a specific cultural form that favors some people while discriminating against others, including women, minorities and low-income and first-generation college students. This is not a matter of instructor bias; it is the lecture format itself — when used on its own without other instructional supports — that offers unfair advantages to an already privileged population.
People get paid good money for writing this stuff.
The New York Times today offers up a table examining the Democratic (but not Republican) Senators and House members opposed to Obama’s Iran agreement, noting whether they are Jewish and the proportion of Jewish constituents in their state or district.
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Nice that they use yellow highlight for this feature. Only thing missing is the Star of David in place of an asterisk.
