Category Archives: Affirmative Action

UPDATE II: Winning A Battle Of Wits With A Half-Wit (The Vicarious Pleasure Principle)

Affirmative Action, Barack Obama, Democrats, Intellectualism, Intelligence, Journalism, Liberty, Republicans, The State

The current column, now on WND, is “Winning A Battle Of Wits With A Half Wit.” An excerpt:

“It was hard not to feel sorry for President Barack Obama during what was the first of three presidential debates. The dejected demeanor and the perpetually lowered gaze conjured an unprepared student peppered by a pedantic teacher with questions he could not possibly answer.

The president’s pose spoke to the beating he was receiving at the hands of his opponent, Gov. Mitt Romney.

Obama campaigner Chris Matthews—a proxy for this president, who cloaks himself in the raiment of a newsman—demanded to know: Why was Obama staring down at his “notes” and scribbling? What was he waiting for?

To describe what Gov. Romney had done in the course of the 90-minute debate, Matthews, who possesses a nimble intelligence his candidate is without, reached for wild man Charlie Sheen’s zinger: ‘What was Romney doing? Winning!’

Moderator Jim Lehrer is an old-school newsman who has never in the course of a long and distinguished career revealed his own political bias. Now the pack men of the media were piling on the PBS anchor for not controlling the debate’s outcome, and for allowing a free to-and-fro between the men.

And since Mitt won hands down; the moderator must have been bad. Or so goes the loser’s lackluster logic. Never mind that reasoning backward is an error in logic. So how does post hoc ergo propter hoc work? Had Obama won the debate under the same emcee’s minimal intervention, Lehrer would have been lauded. …

… Also at MSNBC, Rachel Maddow provided the ultimate rationalization which her co-hosts on the network and elsewhere quickly embraced. ‘The presidency spoils your ability to be a good debater.’

‘In psychology and logic, rationalization (also known as making excuses) is an unconscious defense mechanism,’ writes Wikipedia. It is intended to shield the fragile ego from reality.

Like Maddow, presidential hagiographer Douglas Brinkley took cover from real life on Fox News’ ‘Cavuto.’ The yang to Lincoln idolator Doris Kearns Goodwin’s yin, Brinkley diminished Romney’s intellectual victory by applying that most stringent historical test to the governor’s performance: It was without a Reaganesque zinger. Obama, however, had not damaged his brand, claimed Brinkley. He was still a gifted ‘retail politician.’ (Read community organizer.) …

… Make no mistake; should he succeed in vanquishing Obama, come Nov. 6, Romney’s brand of “repeal-and-replace statism”—not to mention maniacal militarism and Sinophobia—will be no victory for liberty. …

Read the complete column, “Winning A Battle Of Wits With A Half Wit,” on WND.

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UPDATED I: The Vicarious Pleasure Principle. Even if you dislike the philosophy of both men (which exists on the same illiberal continuum), there is some vicarious pleasure in watching the one who has caused you such unhappiness whipped good and proper.

UPDATE II: IN HIS excellent column about Romney’s creaming of Obama, Pat Buchanan also draws on the boxing and school teacher metaphors.

Pat calls Obama’s “performance one of the worst in debate history,” and Romney’s “the finest debate performance of any candidate of either party in the 52 years since Richard Nixon faced John F. Kennedy, with the possible exception of Ronald Reagan’s demolition of Jimmy Carter in 1980.”

Fem Affirmative Action

Affirmative Action, Business, Feminism, Gender, Labor

Everyone is shocked—shocked—that “[a]mong the most distressing” information buried in the “jobs report for August” was the following, as reported by Economix’s Catherine Rampell:

The share of men actively participating in the labor force — that is, working or looking for work — was at an all-time low. Just 69.8 percent of all men over age 16 were in the labor force in August, compared to a long-term average of 78.3 percent since the Labor Department began tracking these data in 1948. The share has been falling pretty steadily over the last six decades but has declined sharply in the last few years.

All manner of explanation is floated for the increasing marginalization of men in the US labor force. Nary a mention is made of the gender-centric policies that govern both state and big-business bureaucracies.

Every one of us knows men who slog under these conditions. All too well do we know too that the ladies are getting a leg-up.

In certain fields—say, electrical engineering—women are so rare that no matter how mediocre an engineer the woman is; the men around will be expected, if implicitly, to valiantly compensate for her intellectual deficiencies. Their reward? She-devils that not only get credit for work they have not done, but begin to believe their own hype.

Understand, this is not to say that there are no outstanding females in the applied sciences; of course there are. But many more are the outstanding men who’re being sidelined to showcase what are, on average, mediocre women.

Speaking of a performative contradiction, Catherine Rampell, the reporter, should look to her left, on the perch at the Economix blog. What is the ratio of men to women among the “Featured Contributors”? Two to three.

See if you can spot the trend wherever you go. I do.

Just In From Mainstream: Barack Is As Thick As A Brick

Affirmative Action, Barack Obama, Debt, Economy, Foreign Policy, Media, Neoconservatism

Here’s an excerpt from the current column, “Just In From Mainstream: Barack Is As Thick As A Brick,” now on WND:

“… Nevertheless, Niall Ferguson has performed a small service, in so far as he has offered the first comprehensive, utterly damning case against Barack Hussein Obama, from establishment intelligentsia’s perspective.

Easily his greatest feat, however, is to have admitted that Barack Obama doesn’t comprehend the issues about which he is expected to decide; to intimate that the president is a product of—how shall we put it?—political grooming.

“You can’t just march in and make that argument and then have him [Obama] make a decision,” [Lawrence] Summers told [Peter] Orszag, “because he doesn’t know what he’s deciding.”

About the president’s comprehension skills, the one Harvard professor seconds the assessment of the other, quoted above. Writes Ferguson: “I have heard similar things said off the record by key participants in the president’s interminable ‘seminar’ on Afghanistan policy.”

Now, that is remarkable.

When “You Can’t Fix Stupid” was published (April 15, 2011), legions of WND readers wrote in to patiently and laboriously explain to me that Barack Obama was not “stupid,” only evil. An evil genius, if you like.

If indirectly, Ferguson disproves that misconception.

Yet I have to wonder who here is the real schmo—the man who was led to believe throughout his “career” trajectory that he was up to the task, or the sycophants and enablers, equally represented among The American People, and among those who’ve pirated the ghost-ship of state. All have helped enforce Barack Obama’s delusions of grandeur. …”

The complete column, “Just In From Mainstream: Barack Is As Thick As A Brick,” is now on WND.

Also available from WND or from Amazon is the prophetic “Into The Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid.”

If you’d like to feature this column, WND’s longest-standing, exclusive libertarian column, in or on your publication (paper or pixels), contact ilana@ilanamercer.com.

JOIN THE DISCUSSION, AND DO BATTLE FOR LIBERTY:

• At the WND and RT Comments Sections.

• By clicking to “Like,” “Tweet” and “Share” “Return To Reason” on WND, and the “Paleolibertarian Column” on RT.

What’s Next? Lobotomy for Asian Overachievers?

Affirmative Action, BAB's A List, Education, Intelligence, Multiculturalism, Political Correctness, Race, Racism

What’s Next? Lobotomy for Asian Overachievers?
By Myron Pauli

Fairfax County, Va., is one of the wealthiest counties in America – naturally, right outside Washington DC (as Ilana would say, home of the “Oink Sector”). Nevertheless, a shocking article exposed rampant racism even in such an elite location! It turns out that a group of conspirators known as “Asians” are taking over the local magnet school, Thomas Jefferson High School of Science and Technology.

The racist youths are engaging in such underhanded techniques as: (1) studying, (2) working hard, (3) getting good grades, (4) learning, and (5) competing. In fact, Thomas Jefferson High School’s mean SAT scores are 65 percent above the Yale University freshman class! The Asian conspirators now take up 64 percent of Jefferson’s freshman class! As a result, blacks are not being admitted to the school which US NEWS called # 1 in the country!

Naturally, the mentality is to view achievement as some zero-sum game, where the more the Asian kids study, the worse off the black kids become! Presumably, giving every Asian kid a lobotomy would make blacks and Hispanics all smarter! As they say, in the world of the blind, the one-eyed man is King!

Meanwhile, as I write this, there is a nearby school that is 99.6 percent black – Ballou High School – the nearest high school to the United States Naval Research Laboratory (NRL):

NRL even has an outreach program with Ballou. In spite of that, no Ballou student has EVER passed an Advanced Placement test. Apparently the Ballou students are suffering because Ballou is “not a good school.” [Don’t you love those circular arguments, Myron?—IM] I guess Jefferson has better teachers, windows, chairs, bathrooms, etc. (actually, it is a very old school building). So I would suggest transferring the Asian racists to Ballou, and the local DC black children to Jefferson and see how those kids do one year later – after all, it is the “school” that is important and not the child (or his culture or home environment).

My speculation is that the result would be shootings at Jefferson, and that Ballou would become the best public school in the Metropolitan DC area (even if the teachers stink, the kids will just look up information online and study on their own).

The NAACP, of course, which is suing, is permanently locked into a mindset that we are still living in the 1920’s when lynching and Jim Crow were rampant. Perhaps the education of the appropriate minorities (as Orwell would put it, all minorities are equal but some minorities are more equal than others) can be improved by Congress – clearly the Civil Rights Acts have not been enough but we could bring back the Chinese Exclusion Act.

There is, naturally, a severe penalty for schools that prefer scholarship over “diversity”. Take Caltech, which admits vast numbers of Asians.

According to the New York Times, “Its baseball team has lost 227 games in a row and its women’s volleyball team has lost all 168 of its conference games. In 2011, the men’s water polo team snapped a seven-year winless drought, and the men’s basketball team ended a 310-game conference losing streak.”

Ironically, the NAACP, while living in the mindset of the 1920’s might have a hard time proving discrimination. In 1924, Virginia passed the “Racial Integrity Act” which, by law, established only two races, white and “colored.”

It turns out that all those Nehrus, Tanakas, Moons, Nguyens, and Wongs are really “coloreds,” and therefore the actual distribution at Thomas Jefferson High School comes out as 74 percent colored and 26 percent white, even though the white school-aged population is nearly 50%. Clearly the school system is discriminating against whites!

******

Barely a Blog (BAB) contributor Myron Pauli grew up in Sunnyside Queens, went off to college in Cleveland and then spent time in a mental institution in Cambridge MA (MIT) with Benjamin Netanyahu (did not know him), and others until he was released with the “hostages” and Jimmy Carter on January 20, 1981, having defended his dissertation in nuclear physics. Most of the time since, he has worked on infrared sensors, mainly at Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC. He was NOT named after Ron Paul but is distantly related to physicist Wolftgang Pauli; unfortunately, only the “good looks” were handed down and not the brains. He writes assorted song lyrics and essays reflecting his cynicism and classical liberalism.