Liberals wrestle with Ferguson facts: John McWhorter and John Judis
John McWhorter is an associate professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University. In a Time essay on Ferguson, he demonstrates his graceful way with words, and his struggle to fight the truth about Ferguson. It’s a struggle that he, rather than truth, wins.
The bit of truth that McWhorter allows to seep into the preferred narrative is this:
I’m not sure that what happened to Michael Brown – and the indictment that did not happen to Officer Darren Wilson – is going to be useful as a rallying cry about police brutality and racism in America.
McWhorter recognizes that, yet it is instructive to see the mental gymnastics he performs in order to stay with the liberal line:
The key element in the Brown-Wilson encounter was not any specific action either man took – it was the preset hostility to the cops that Brown apparently harbored.
So far, so true – although Brown’s hostility, and the acting-out of that hostility, seems hardly to have been limited to cops.
But then McWhorter writes this:
And that hostility was key because it was indeed totally justified.
So, despite the fact that McWhorter goes on to agree that Wilson’s actions were not necessarily motivated by racism, and despite the fact that he even acknowledges that Brown had just robbed a convenience store, and despite the fact that McWhorter knows nothing – absolutely nothing – of Brown’s actual attitudes towards police, why he might hold those attitudes, and what his previous encounters with police had been, he claims that this supposed attitude of Brown’s was not merely justified, but totally justified.
McWhorter goes on:
The right-wing take on Brown, that he was simply a “thug,” is a know-nothing position. The question we must ask is: What is the situation that makes two young black men comfortable dismissing a police officer’s request to step aside?
Let’s see: arrogance? Drugs? A sense of their own physical strength, and a history of using it to dominate over those smaller and physically weaker?
No, not at all:
These men were expressing a community-wide sense that the official keepers of order are morally bankrupt.
So, McWhorter knows that Brown’s actions were the result of his strong sense of morality, and his “totally justified” judgment that Wilson and all his fellows were “morally bankrupt.” A sort of moral civil disobedience, no doubt.
And what is to be done, according to McWhorter?:
What America owes communities like Ferguson – and black America in general – is a sincere grappling with that take on law enforcement that is so endemic in black communities nationwide. As Northwestern philosopher Charles Mills has put it, “Black citizens are still differentially vulnerable to police violence, thereby illustrating their second class citizenship.”
We troglodyte know-nothings, who cannot dismiss and/or imaginatively justify Brown’s reprehensible actions, refuse to take McWhorter’s far more nuanced position, which is that Brown was not the individual that he was, making incredibly bad choices. To McWhorter, Brown is a sociological construct responding to forces that justify any behavior, and it is white America which must always seek the answers within itself, because it is always and eternally guilty.
Black people in general are “differentially vulnerable to police violence,” but what might the cause of that be? Surely it can’t be that they are more likely to be violent criminals who attack police, as Brown was? That’s putting the cart and horse in the wrong order, according to McWhorter, who seems quite certain they are merely reacting to the perception that police are against them.
And I wonder what McWhorter would like to happen, other than “sincere” soul-searching by guilt-ridden white people. Should white police (or black police, for that matter; I’m not sure McWhorter exempts them, either) allow themselves to be beaten to a pulp or killed by their own service revolvers in order to demonstrate their sociological sensitivities towards violent criminal black youths such as Brown as interpreted by nonviolent professors such as McWhorter?
McWhorter goes on to add that (although there’s absolutely no evidence of this) Brown came back towards Wilson “likely trying to indicate surrender.”
But despite distortions of the record like that, McWhorter realizes that Brown represents a tough case to use to make the point he wants so desperately to make, and he at least is honest enough to say as much:
…I fear the facts on this specific incident are too knotted to coax a critical mass of America into seeing a civil rights icon in Brown and an institutionally racist devil in Wilson.
It appears that McWhorter would dearly love it if America could be “enlightened” (his word, not mine) by the Brown/Wilson case into believing just that, in order to reflect the higher truth of racism in America as he sees it. But he regretfully realizes that Brown was just too thuggish, Wilson too blameless, and the facts too stubborn (although not for lack of trying to misstate them).
Here is the best example of McWhorter struggling with the truth, and partially accepting it:
The Ferguson episode…requires, as a rallying point, a degree of elision, adjustment. It will require turning away from Brown’s criminal act just before the incident, and his conduct toward a police officer a few moments later, based on the tricky proposition that these things must have no bearing whatsoever upon how we evaluate the succeeding sequence of events. The now iconic gesture, the hands up in “Don’t shoot” surrender, will become sacrosanct regardless of the evidence as to whether Brown actually held his hands up in that way. Icon, sacrosanct – there is an aspect of the ritual here.
But ritual dazzles more than it convinces. Beyond the converted, the less committed observer will see the facts piling up and conclude that one can be fully aware of racism’s persistence and yet still feel that the part racism played in Brown’s death is too abstract to qualify as a Selma-style – or even Trayvon-style – teaching moment. We need here Selma, Sanford – we want to make all of America put down their beers and feel this turning point.
McWorter wishes Brown were a better victim, and Wilson a better villain, than they actually were. Another Selma—now, that would be the ticket! But at least he acknowledges that Wilson and Brown didn’t quite fit the bill. The amount of “elision, adjustment” that would be required to believe they do—the ability to say that 2 + 2 = 5 with a straight face—is just a little bit beyond him.
However, John B. Judis manages to go further towards truth in his TNR piece on the very same theme, “The Ferguson Decision Was Not a ‘Miscarriage of Justice.’ Liberals Need to Accept That.” Judis regretfully writes:
While the grand jury and federal and local investigators received witness testimony that was contradictory (which is in line with what criminologists expect in these kind of cases), it received physical evidence from autopsy and DNA and hospital reports that wasn’t open to the same kind of questions. This evidence suggested that there were grounds for believing that Brown had scuffled with Wilson in the police car and had even grabbed the officer’s gun. That conformed roughly to Wilson’s own account of what had happened in the police car.
The physical evidence ruled out that Wilson had shot Brown in the back while running away, as Brown’s companion Dorian Johnson initially had claimed. And it was not conclusive one way or the other on whether Brown had, after he turned around to face Wilson, tried to surrender. In all, the forensic evidence did not prove Wilson innocent of killing Brown when he was trying to surrender, but it also did not give the grand Jury “probable cause” to indict him on that basis. Other evidence may surface, but from what the grand jury learned, I think it did the right thing, and that it’s also unlikely – given this evidence – that the federal government, which must meet an even higher evidentiary standard, will choose to indict Wilson.
There’s a lot more hemming and hawing and parading of liberal bona fides by Judis in the article to prove that his heart’s in the right place and that of course there’s plenty of racism among American cops, probably even in Ferguson. But in this case? No:
Liberals took the decision by the grand jury to symbolize, or stand in for, the greater injustice of the Ferguson and of the American criminal justice department. But in fact the reverse occurred. They projected the larger injustice of the system onto the grand jury’s ruling.
I’m not sure why Judis was able to go this route and allow that much truth into his column. And what does it mean that he does? Probably not much, although it interests me (I’m always interested when people depart, even a little, from the party line). Judis’ article may merely be an illustration of what Churchill once said:
Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.
What articles like these two probably mean is that the liberals and the left realize that the facts of the Ferguson case present them with a particularly uphill battle, and that they would do well to stumble, pick themselves up, bide their time, and wait for the next opportunity to indict white America.
[NOTE: I knew next to nothing about McWhorter prior to reading his Times article on Ferguson and writing this post, including whether he is white or black, or what his specialty is. When I looked him up, I saw that he is youngish (to me, anyway), black, and a linguist specializing in Creole. Even more interesting are his politics, which the push-pull of his Time article reflects:
McWhorter characterizes himself as “a cranky liberal Democrat”. In support of this description, he states that while he “disagree[s] sustainedly with many of the tenets of the Civil Rights orthodoxy,” he also “supports Barack Obama, reviles the War on Drugs, supports gay marriage, never voted for George Bush and writes of Black English as coherent speech”. McWhorter additionally notes that the conservative Manhattan Institute, for which he works, “has always been hospitable to Democrats”. Regardless, McWhorter has criticized left-wing and activist educators in particular, such as Paulo Freire and Jonathan Kozol. One author identifies McWhorter as a radical centrist thinker.
Maybe “radical centrist” means someone who allows in a tiny trickle of truth at times, only to clamp down harder against what it would mean if he let just a little bit more in.]
Heather Mac Donald get Ferguson right.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/393676/finding-meaning-ferguson-heather-mac-donald
Let’s have a real life experiment across the nation and remove all police from predominantly black neighborhoods for 5 years as we collect data on homicides, rapes, assaults, robbery, and arson. Until reality undisputedly trumps the progressive narrative there can be no hope or change for the black underclass.
Liberals wrestle with facts, facts loose. They have wrestled the facts into submission. It’s like the old joke about statistics, If you torture the data enough you will get the desired answer.
“One author identifies McWhorter as a radical centrist thinker.”
Yeah . . . I recall well, many years ago now, when Al Gore tried to package himself as a “radical moderate”.
neo then remarks, “Maybe “radical centrist” means someone who allows in a tiny trickle of truth at times, only to clamp down harder against what it would mean if he let just a little bit more in.”
That was never true for Gore. I think his “radical moderate” pose was supposed to mean “I’m not like those lefties, from whom many of you shy away (and with good cause); I’m just a regular Joe Six-Pack, just like you, who’ll fight and fight and fight for you.”
I think he really believed it. So many lefties actually fancy themselves to be “not like those lefties” — like those people in 80-20 communities that we-all talked about this past weekend [in another neo post].
Like Dan Rather actually believing his news broadcasts were “straight up the middle” (as he once termed it, when asked).
Fish don’t realize they’re wet.
“Radical centrist” indeed. But so many “radical centrist” types actually believe it!
This fellow, Mc whorter has been on oreilly about 3 yrs ago.
He was assailing his fellow minorities for having no desire to
studious or even making an effort for efforts sake.
He comes across as somewhat bitter. You get the impression that HE feels whites think less of him because
of his race. He also gives the vibe that he is sexually conflicted, but maybe he has since comeout.
He’s very obama like in demeanor..
..
The black violent crime rate is seven times the white rate. That is why there is so much contact between cops and young black males. Police are trained to be aware of someone trying to get their weapons. They are also taught that when someone coming at you gets within ten feet, you may not be able to effectively defend yourself. That is why a suspect is told to get on the ground. Witnesses said Wilson told Brown to get down. Reports have Brown falling ten to fifteen from Wilson. The wound in the top of Brown’s head is evidence he was diving toward Wilson.
Cops are also taught that if you have to fire your weapon, you should keep firing until the attacker is stopped. You don’t shoot once and look.The audio recording had multiple shots divided by a pause. That is evidence that Brown was not stopping after the initial volley.
With many blacks, tribal loyalty trumps the facts. I recall that a large proportion of blacks said O.J. was innocent. Few believe that now.
The left is using a talking point of “unarmed black male.” Black victims are seen as choir boys.
Re: Judis. I’m guessing he was one of the true believers that hoped Obama would be The Lightbringer. Six years later he has probably accepted that this is not the case and that frees him to be more honest and realistic in his analysis. As honest as a commie can be anyway.
They are trying to find common ground with a moral consensus (i.e. religion), while preserving the benefits (e.g. leverage) gained from their preferred narrative.
parker : I’d say let’s only allow black policemen. Then there would be no racism.
Time magazine apparently trying to elbow their way into the “progressive” left market currently populated by Salon and Mother Jones. Good luck with that.
The wound in the top of Brown’s head is evidence he was diving toward Wilson.
———————–
I’ve heard that the head wound is because Brown had finally started to collapse after the previous gunshots.
In any event, he was moving pretty quickly. iirc, investigators found Brown’s body 25 feet away from the bloodstains marking where he was hit first.
The people trying to cite other causes for Brown’s actions avoid, for obvious reasons, another – and perhaps much more important item in Brown’s background. Brown’s family was the kind of loving, nurturing environment were a woman (i.e. Brown’s mother) feels justified in hitting her own mother (i.e. Brown’s maternal grandmother) in the head with a lead pipe after the maternal grandmother tried to sell Brown memorabilia without giving Brown’s mom a cut.
Priorities.
Thank you, Neo, for taking the time to analyze this essay.
I am surprised, and a little disappointed that McWhorter’s piece was to tightly choriographed to allow the truth to intrude so little into his analysis. He is usually a much more careful thinker.
His linguistic work has taken on some of the progressive linguistic preference that ones language has a powerful influences on your world view. This view was used to show how ‘primitive’ languages were more profound in how they viewed time etc. The fundamental point was European languages bad, other language groups good.
McWhorter pretty effectively refuted this in his book “The Language Hoax: Why the World Looks the Same in Any Language” (Oxford Univ Press).
I would also recommend almost any of his other books that you find on Amazon (using the Amazon portal on this site, of course) esp. “The Power of Babel” He is no mean linguist.
The sad part is that while bias is indeed intrinsic, prejudice or expressive bias is either learned or motivated by circumstance. Their narrative does nothing to help the People or our Posterity. In fact, I would argue that is counterproductive to realizing its stated goal.
That said, like their efforts to degrade human life (e.g. spontaneous conception, generic clump of cells) in order to normalize premeditated abortion, their strategy to denigrate individual dignity will also backfire. The predominant moral consensus in America still has a characteristically Judeo-Christian perspective. A large minority, and likely majority, of Americans understand that respecting individual diginty and acknowledging intrinsic value are the prerequisite for liberty.
Hearing O in the background on my radio. I am sooooo tired of him saying, ” that is not who we are “; like he knows or gives a damn about regular Americans and that we’re just one big collective that shares his set of values.
How smart do you have to be to know you should be on your best behavior when you deal with cops? When pulled over, you keep your hands in view on the wheel. You do what you are told with lots of yes, sirs. If you have to reach into the glove compartment or a pocket to get a license or proof of insurance, you have to tell the cop where and why you will be reaching. Then you move slowly.
Copping an attitude with people in authority is just stupid and perhaps dangerous.
THANK YOU, Charles Barkley, for having the very large Black Huevos to speak the blunt, non-PC truth regarding the Ferguson looters: “SCUMBAGS”. He fully supported the Ferguson police and the Grand Jury. Nice being your neighbor here in Winter Park, Mr.Barkley!!
Only when we accept a “no fault’ morality can we be truly one …
Or some crap like that.
What kind of psychic lives do modern liberals have, I wonder. Is there anyone really there ‘inside’ the yammering carapace we all can see? If not, why should I care? Insofar as there might be, how can even they stand their own, stultifying, humid, grasping, lunatic and venomous, neediness?
Here’s Frederic Wilson II, telling it like it is. Pretty good advice, no matter your ethnicity.
http://youtu.be/gPUcA7yrErg
You can find articles by McWhorter at City Journal. Search the archives for John Mcwhorter rap and you will find a good description of what he thinks this crappy music did to black youth. There are also many other pieces by him but I didn’t have time to read them all. It seems like he is trying to be rational about lower class black culture but doesn’t want to be completely evicted from the tribe.
I read that Obama invited Sharpton to the WH today for a discussion about things like community policing in black neighborhood to try to solve the problen of racist police officers. Why can’t the smartest man in the world figure out that if parents can’t form a bond with their kids when they are toddlers, they won’t have much influence on them as they grow older. When there is no man to show boys how to be a man, the boys will get their lessons on the street. We need a very vocal mass of people saying that the acting white BS has to stop, that it is constraining the young to a provincial thuggish world, that it makes the binding of women’s feet by the Chinese or hiding women behind burkas look enlightened. Instead of Maya Angelou, the kids should be reading books like Chinese Girl in the Ghetto to get a picture of how their behaviour looks to an outsider who had nothing to do with slavery or Jim Crow.
JJ,
Wilson is good. I wish there were more delivering that message, like athletes, movie stars, musicians, and politicians. There must be a tipping point somewhere that puts the racebaiters in the minority.
McWhorter has some interesting things to say. He is well worth reading, esp., as someone else has noted, on things linguistic. But some of the things he says about race are not what you’d expect from an academic. I confess I was a little surprised by his take on the Trayvon Martin — and now Michael Brown — affair.
What does Ferguson owe these people?
I sympathize with Mr. McWhorter because I too would do anything to avoid working for a living. Who would have thought finding a way to fight heroically for a struggle that was won 50 years ago could be so profitable. I guess that is where the real money is in Obama’s America.
I sometimes wonder whether anyone would want to write a history of our times if this is what is considered important. It would be like writing a history of candy wrappers.
What i see as the problem is the general ignorance of the population as to how various things actually work. all too often people use their imaginations to fill in the gaps as to how things work, and tend to refuse to believe how they actually work – often making the comment that “it should” be a certain way.
the left constantly feeds into this social view vs reality view, claiming the social view IS the reality view.
so the social view is that all the races and people are the same, as in equal. so people purposely attempt to think this way and just ignore the things that contradict it. ultimately, this then creates the situation where anyone who reports the actual reality of things, as per lots of studies, and other sources, becomes a mean person who is ignoring the socially constructed reality
the point being that humans dont actually live in reality, they live in their minds construct of reality. the more real information that its constructed from, the more able they potentially are in the real world, the less real informaiton, the more disfunctional they are in reality (as their mind models are broken)
people with such broken mind models have no way to fix them without abandoning them on some level and having the impetus to learn a lot more about the world around them – which they are too lazy to do.
so its easier to think of things the way they are told or pick up than it is to actually find out how they actually are. this sets up the whole situation in which to win one has to feed the lie rather than question it, and those to validate it are liked and followed over those who would wish to teach otherwise.
apply this to women, and you then want women to serve as marines – when they cant, you have to find something to blame other than the world view that has it wrong. same with blacks and relative aggressiveness, so its easier to blame skin color, while ignoring dark skinned people from india are not having such problems, nor are they picked up and thrown in prison in such rates.
such constructs turned spanish from europeans of which lucy and ricky were seen as a white couple, to today where they would be seen as a mixed race couple. all that changed was the social construct that was constantly reinforced – to the point that south americans will blame the british for ills they suffer and not the spanish conquistadors, nor that spain was part of europe and still is (last i heard – though the jury is now out on portugal).
the frequency in which blacks cause crimes, and act out is ignored, to the point its forgotten. while the lower frequency of other things are fluffed up by over attention to them and the perception of higher frequency manufactured by disproportionate social attention.
so we remember Trayvon, brown, and so on, but forget Anthony Harris, Larry Craig Green, Jessie Lee Cooks and J.C.X. Simon from the 70s… or how their crimes were committed or anything about them including their being part of the nation of Islam…
anyone remember those names? anyone?
anyone remember what they did?
“. . . make all of America put down their beers. . . .”
Oh! An exquisite!
Snob, that is. C’est typique.
…Wilson and all his fellows were “morally bankrupt.”
As opposed to Brown who shoved a store clerk aside in order to steal cigars. Yes, he was a model of rectitude.
Oh, I forgot, we’re supposed to give him a pass on thuggish thievery, because of his color. Or something.
John McWhorter wrote:
“These men were expressing a community-wide sense that the official keepers of order are morally bankrupt…What America owes communities like Ferguson – and black America in general – is a sincere grappling with that take on law enforcement that is so endemic in black communities nationwide.”
Because they are materialists the left has trouble understanding conscious causation. They have stripped their “victims” of all moral agency and explain everything individuals from the victim class do by blaming external circumstances. In their minds, when a black man is violent he is no more responsible than when an animal is violent – the animal has no moral agency and thus has no moral responsibility for its behavior .
While materialism requires that the consistent leftist should explain white behavior in the same way, that doesn’t happen. This is where leftists go off the rails. From a materialist’s viewpoint, we could just as easily flip John McWhorter’s statement around the opposite direction. Perhaps the hostile attitudes of the black community towards everyone else causes white police to act with hostility towards blacks. Perhaps it is the black community that owes it to the rest of America to grapple with the impression by other communities that view blacks as “second class” citizens” because of their hostility and violence.
Better yet we could abandon materialism altogether and recognize that both black and white people are free moral agents. In that case each individual is responsible for his/her own behavior.
Harry The Exremeist
Time magazine apparently trying to elbow their way into the “progressive” left market currently populated by Salon and Mother Jones. Good luck with that.
That approach really paid off for Newsweek, didn’t it ? 🙂
My primary education in life matters was the seven years I spent working in an inner-city emergency room, on nights, so that I became very familiar with our mostly-black clientele as well as with cops. There were also black cops and black security guards. I’ve been told “You can kiss my black ass” maybe, I don’t know, 50 to 100 times. Anytime a black patient was unhappy the ER doctor/staff/nurses were told we were racist, so I’ve heard all that a lot.
But we generally saw people at their worst. You couldn’t make sweeping judgments based on the behavior of those we saw.
I’ll spare you any of the lurid or grimly amusing anecdotes I could relate. I’m tired, and they wouldn’t alter anyone’s conclusions about the recent business in Missouri.
Related:
http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2014/11/30/left-out-of-the-narrative/?show-at-comment=1064766#comment-1064766
As far as the good professor is concerned:
“…based on the tricky proposition that these things must have no bearing whatsoever upon how we evaluate the succeeding sequence of events.”
Etc., etc., ad nauseum, ad po-mo nauseum, ad victimology nauseum…
McWhorter is, of course, speaking nonsense.
As he was trained to do.
As is expected of him in the mileu he inhabits.
A linguistics professor with no grasp of semantics. But then, Truth does not exist for these characters; words have no meaning (rather, words have every meaning under the sun); and therefore, one can make it all up depending on how one feels at the moment.
Self-expression. Creativity. Destruction.
Poetry, actually.
Yes, he is a poet, communicating “higher truth”, “meta-truth”, “uber-truth”.
And knowing this, one might, at least, grant him poetic license….
“These men were expressing a community-wide sense that the official keepers of order are morally bankrupt.”
I.e. “society made them do it!”
Didn’t that become a bad joke c. 1980 or so? Pathetic.
“He comes across as somewhat bitter. You get the impression that HE feels whites think less of him because”
Molly, I believe it was mcwhorter who remarked once that he did not like being shuffled off into the “African American” section of the bookstore, although it’s possible in remembering that wrong and it was Thomas sowell.
Regardless, I’ve always found him an interesting character, precisely because he does think for himself and has a unique perspective.
I’m a little biased, but since no one mentioned this, I feel like I need to say this:
As an individual in the “profession”, its borderline amusing for me to see how these “experts”, who have no idea of use of force policies, make comments regarding what transpired. Even in the above comments, there are references to distance and what not, which is incorrect — as a matter of fact, the current thinking is more like three times that distance — which if correct, reflects the approximate distance that Brown traveled — 25 feet.
I believe in most policies, a “gun grab” automatically elevates the threat level to “lethal”. In some, a “furtive movement” can constitute a lethal response. All this with the “suspect” being “unarmed”. If the individual is armed, game on. Think of all the good shoots with kids toting toys that look real.
Brown being unarmed is revealed after the fact. Until that point, the officer doesn’t know if the individual is armed or not. The officer has to consider the very real possibility that the individual is armed. Consideration must also be given to the “disparity” of physical capacity — perceived or not.
Myself, and others like me would appreciate if “experts” who never had to work a day on the road refrain from making authoritative statements about something they have no clue about.
Those who protest the “lack of justice” for Michael Brown and condemn the police with hands-up gestures will, in the next election, go right back to voting for big government doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results. It makes one think that Gruber might just have a point.
The Leftist rejection of INTJ intellects — as they are ALL ESFJ personalities… at the top. A psychopathic ESFJ is an absolute terror.
Myers Briggs personality typing is extremely revealing for such controversies.
The single most common personality type that is attracted to Lefitst dogmas: ESFJ.
Kaci Hickox (nurse ebola) was and is a certified ESFJ personality.
http://www.16personalities.com/esfj-strengths-and-weaknesses
“Inflexible – ESFJs place a lot of importance on what is socially acceptable, and can be very cautious, even critical of anything unconventional or outside the mainstream. People with this personality type may also sometimes push their own beliefs too hard in an effort to establish them as mainstream.”
In the case at hand, “mainstream” means the zeitgeist of the Left — the hard Left.
“Vulnerable to Criticism – It can be especially challenging to change these tendencies because ESFJs are so conflict-averse. ESFJ personalities can become very defensive and hurt if someone, especially a person close to them, criticizes their habits, beliefs or traditions.”
In the case at hand, what you run into is defensiveness. It’s impossible for a ESFJ personality to accept logical refutations of their policy/ values cluster.
This is why they can’t sit still for critiques of open borders — which is causing families to break apart by the thousand.
The short term financial and health care reward blinds unlawful aliens to the repercussions: of the distress inflicted upon their sons and daughters.
As for ESFJs, they can’t face the obvious: that this policy is financing the coyotes. No-one would be trafficking in poverty imports unless Uncle Sugar was paying out big.
And, obviously, that the open border is adversely selecting for criminals. The commission of a serious crime is ALWAYS a super strong motivator for moving on.
This motivation was elevated to high parody by “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.” Eli Walach, as Tuco, was really motivated to get to the next town.
&&&
It’s taboo to mention it, but the NUMBER ONE source of Medicare/ Medic-aid fraud is that contingent of licensed doctors who are first generation immigrants.
And these are LEGAL immigrants.
You just about NEVER read or hear of native American doctors committing Medicare billing fraud.
The figures astound. This is but a sliver of why America should stop importing so much medical ‘talent’ — when there are countless native Americans willing and able to become doctors — if the ‘system’ would expand the number of seats in our licensed medical colleges.
How big are the numbers? One clinic in one Florida county grabbed HALF of all the monies paid out for one program! No wonder it ran wildly over budget!
In the meantime, all Third World nations are medically brain-drained. Look at the medical talent poverty of Liberia — BEFORE the ebola nightmare.
The larger problem with ESFJ personalities is that they are so numerous… and anti-factual.
That is to say, that FEELINGS dominate their decision making not FACTS nor LOGIC.
This is why neo and the rest of this commentariat are frustrated.
We’re confronted by a huge segment of humanity which — at a fundamental level — can’t think straight. This is not to say that they are stupid. Rather, they are wired differently.
I strongly urge everyone to study up on the 16 Myers-Briggs personality types.
“Please Understand Me: Character and Temperament Types”
(Paperback)
by David Keirsey
ISBN-13: 978-0960695409
http://www.amazon.com/Please-Understand-Me-Character-Temperament/dp/0960695400/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1417532715&sr=8-1&keywords=please+understand+me
Use neo’s portal… It makes a great holiday gift… to yourself.
rubber-ducky:
too bad i cant connect. i invented a way in which an officer can get an idea of whether or not someone is armed or not (non invasive, does not use radiation).
its not a 100% thing, but niether is an airport scanner in which they do use radiation, and the subject is cooperative. in this case, the officer would have gotten a indication of the likelihood of the other being armed.
its some interesting tech…
but i am great at design and so on, abysmal at the other part of the task to bring it forwards, no matter how good it is. no one leads a path to your door – ever
sadly, i have notbooks full of tested tech that people could or would use (with a percentage having now been done by others)… but given aspergers and my isolation… i am just hanging out waiting to die rather than having the adventure of my life bringing things to market and enjoying improving others lives.
🙁
This is an extremely important issue to get straight and keep before our minds if ever we wish to understand what is “befalling” us.
That fact is, that monist materialism, of a kind so intense it almost morphs into a kind of subjective idealism, has become the default intellectual stance of the postmodern left.
As you point, out the political positions of persons embracing such world-interpretive principles are rife with what should be obvious chasm-like inconsistencies and contradictions. But until those on the moderate realist side fully grasp where the postmodern values nihilist is coming from psychologically, we will continue to misapprehend the origin and depth of the problem, and fail to understand why it constantly recurs and cannot seemingly be resolved.
We end up chasing their tails as they go in circles. A futile act which seems not to disturb them in the least. And given their primary assumptions, why should this circular motion of theirs disturb them in any event, since they are convinced that ultimately, there is nowhere to go anyway.
Imagine trying to hold a resolving conversation with one of the more ardent types. We start where you did.
Artfldgr, they were the Zebra killings done by a gang of black Muslims who were defended by the Nation of Islam. Pretty gruesome stuff. I vaguely remember the case because I had layovers in San Francisco from time to time.
Airline crews laying over in strange cities require a bit of defensive awareness of the crime scene occurring there – especially serial murders or attempts at such. I have many stories I could tell about layovers in Detroit, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Chicago, Cleveland, Baltimore, and New York. Situational awareness was needed to avoid problems or to be ready for problems if they arose, which, unfortunately, they sometimes did.
Blert, thanks for the link to the book on personality types. Appears to have some useful info in it. I’m getting it today.
J.J.
BINGO!!! 16 dead… 8-10 injured..
almost no one remembers things like that. given my autism, i cant forget… i have one of those memories that i remember details that others forget over time… i also get flooded by information as it doesnt get pared down
congrats!!!! i would send you a kewpie doll if i could!!!!
🙂
Gaslighting
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslighting
what the left does to its own people…
Living by factual knowledge is to put aside belief in favor of the reality. Most people do not have the knowledge of engineers and so forth, and so on some level everything they know or act upon is based on the belief handed to them by others they deem to trust, or do not even notice they pick up. once this is realized, the game becomes one of creating beliefs, and manipulating beliefs, regardless of reality, so that the person infected refuses to put aside belief in favor of a reality they cant tell is not just another belief.
Blert,
In other words ESFJs are no more fit for self rule than a child and their society will always turn into Lord of the Flies.
Sophistry.
I was a little surprised by the McWhorter piece. He did, after all, write “Losing the Race: Self-sabotage in Black America,” well worth reading, as is “Winning the Race: Beyond the Crisis in Black America.” He is usually good at mixing in common sense with professorial airiness, but this time I think the professor won out. (He probably got tenure.)
Rubber-Duckey, here in WI, we rain with 21 feet as the critical distance. I am sure you have seen Calibre Press’ uber scary training film Surviving Edged Weapons. Not for the faint of heart!
I have always hated knives more than guns. The average Bad Rabbit with a gun is using it as a force multiplier, as a very scary thereat. But the person who chooses a knife has already come to the conclusion that he does not mind the idea of sticking it in someone.
How’bout the Congressional Black Caucus showing up on the floor of the House today with their dear, homey hands up…In, I’d remind them, the late 6th year of Obam-Bam’s immaculation.
Cannot—Simply CANNOT—Make This Shit Up.
“radical centrist thinker” The contradictions inherent in that phrase makes my head hurt.
I’m not sure what the race-baiters want “us” to do. How can we, as whites (or at least non-blacks) solve the problems in the black community? Even if we could, would it be accepted? Doubtful. And in a way, assuming that they cannot solve their own problems is racist at its core. The most serious problem (besides soul killing Dem policies) is the existence and influence of the race hustlers (Sharpton, Jackson, etc). Listening to someone like Crosby or Barkley would be the best thing “they” could do.
~~
There are dog signs out there that show a GSD, rottie, etc with the slogan ‘I can make it to the fence in 2.3 seconds. Can you?’ While dogs are faster then people, it doesn’t take much longer to run a short distance. As alluded to above, people move fast and decisions MUST be made in a split second. If I’m armed and the other person knows it and still runs towards me, the decision is pretty clear. And typically in ALL self-defense, it’s shoot to stop. At least that’s the safest thing to verbalize if you ever need to explain yourself.
Lea wrote:
Regardless, I’ve always found him an interesting character, precisely because he does think for himself and has a unique perspective.
roc scssrs wrote:
He is usually good at mixing in common sense with professorial airiness, but this time I think the professor won out. (He probably got tenure.)
I recall reading articles by McWhorter perhaps as early as 2002 or 2003 (City Journal and elsewhere) and having a similar impression, that he was intelligent, perceptive and followed his own path.
My theory about McWhorter is that he completely lost his mind after King Barack won the 2008 election. Though he previously showed a fair amount of common sense, he was absolutely giddy with anticipation of the magnificent transformation about to begin with the presidency of The One. I totally lost respect for McWhorter’s judgment when I heard him state in an interview that because of the election of Obama, he expected racial problems in this country would soon ameliorate dramatically and then dissipate away.*
Kinda ironic given the current abysmal race relations, Ferguson and McWhorter’s tortured piece quoted in this post, eh?
(roc scssrs: note that the two books you mention were from 2000 and 2005, well before McWhorter became unhinged by an intense Obama Swoon.)
* I’m working from memory and don’t have a transcript, but I’m almost certain my rendering accurately reflects what he said–despite how ridiculous this may seem.
The Narrative:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGTUcS-yQtQ&feature=player_embedded
Ignored by the masses and covered up by the jackasses (well, those in the Donkey Party).
Just to address a few of the comments — I apologize for being tardy with my replies.
Artfldgr:
“i invented a way in which an officer can get an idea of whether or not someone is armed or not (non invasive, does not use radiation).”
I know in some jurisdictions this can be a 4th Amendment violation. In one of my previous employments, IR/thermal imaging would violate the “expectation of privacy”
SCOTTtheBADGER:
The 21 foot rule is old and outdated. The Teuller drill has been extended to 30 feet.