Most Republicans insist that their judgments are color blind. True?

A recent AP poll found that 79% of registered Republicans expressed overtly racist beliefs. Of course if you believe that blacks actually are inferior, you won't believe you're PRE-judiced. You'll believe you're POST-judiced.

That is, if blacks really are inferior, a person who believes blacks are inferior isn't racist, and those who claim he is are just prejudiced against whites and/or "playing the race card."

I bring this up because I was just reading down the comment thread on the U.S News website about the 2nd Zimmerman juror who said he "Got away with murder."

If you skim down it a ways you'll see a lot more than the fact that nearly all who see themselves as conservative believe that George Zimmerman was totally justified in every single thing he did the night he shot Trayvon Martin dead. You'll see innumerable expressions of racist beliefs so hate-filled that I'd have thought I was on a Ku Klux Klan website.

These expressions were not needed to argue the facts of the case or how Florida's Stand Your Ground law exonerated Zimmerman. Or even simple self defense, though it should be obvious from the judge's instructions and the jurors' interviews that Stand Your Ground was integral to the case despite the defense team not citing it (because they knew the state of Florida would do it for them).

So these expressions were gratuitous expressions of hatred and contempt for blacks, not much different from what Southerners have been saying for hundreds of years in order to justify what they did to blacks.

Of course nobody said "I think blacks are inferior to whites." But..I don't even want to repeat what they said here. Just skim down the thread.

And after skimming down the thread, you should also understand why 95% of blacks vote Democrat.

Along with the vast majority of Americans who object to racism.

And you should also see why today's Republican Party is seen as primarily a regional party representing the Southern states along with their rural Midwestern and Southwestern satellites.

I was just reading a comment on another article--one in the NY Times--by a professional woman who with her husband moved to the Raleigh-Durham Research Triangle in North Carolina. Both had gotten great, well-paid jobs. They settled in and planned to make their careers there. But within a year or so the lady reported that they pulled up stakes and left the South despite the great jobs they had there, because both we so disgusted at the pervasive racism and misogyny.

Many Northerners just don't realize just how bad it is down there.

Does "Republican" = racist?

Not all Republicans are racists, and not all racists are Republican--but the Republican Party got a huge infusion of such people when the Dixiecrats went Republican en masse after Congress under Lyndon Johnson got civil rights legislation passed that had some teeth in it.

A CBS poll taken before the 2008 election showed this:

"72% of those who live in the West say most people they know would vote for a black person for president. 66% in the Northeast and 64% in the Midwest agree. But the figure is lowest in the South, where just 54% say most people they know would vote for an African-American for president. 33% there say most people they know would not."

I'd guess that more people are racist than will admit it to a pollster, so these figure should be regarded as a low estimate.

And to such people--roughly a quarter of the nation, but a much higher percentage of Republicans--President Obama's election was their Nakba (Arabic for "catastrophe"--how they refer to Israel becoming a nation).

It is this group--perhaps very roughly half of Republicans--that regards a black man in the White House as a thumb in their eye.

It is this group that desperately needs the President to fail because he's black, no matter how much their efforts to make him fail harm the country.

This also means that the other half of Republicans are not racially biased against him, though of course they still wanted Romney to win and mostly voted for Romney.

However, it's hard for this group to accuse half of their own party of Racism, no matter how rabid the Republican racists act. So mostly they wring their hands and wish the Teanderthals would shut up--because they know the damage this is doing to their party in the long run. 

What makes the Tea Party tick?

CSPAN's Book TV --which you probably watch if you're over 60--had a pair of sociologists on last weekend who had done a study and a book about local Tea Party activists. You can read about it on Amazon here.

The researchers struck me as being objective and thorough. And they added that they liked the people they met personally. So their conclusions didn't reflect any personal animus.

Here's what they found:

1. Tea Partiers are all anti-Federal government, anti-federal deficit, anti-taxes.

2. They mostly run small businesses themselves, and they like businessmen--very much including wealthy corporate businessmen, who they think of as small businessmen like themselves, only who made it big. 

2. Around 2/3 are Evangelical Protestant Christians; the rest are non-fervent. This is an internal schism, with the fervent Christians considering the somewhat more secular ones (who are also more urban & more educated) as being practically RINOs.

3. They're nearly all middle-aged and older whites.

4. Groups they dislike openly:
    a. Young people in general, who they consider lazy ingrates, entitled, disrespectful of traditional American culture and values, and disrespectful of their elders.
        So they greet all the talk about cutting student loan rates with hostility.
    b. Muslims. Not just Salafist and Wahhabist fundamentalist extremists, but all Muslims.
    c. College Professors, who they consider out of touch, infecting their children with loony pie in the sky social ideas--and also teaching their children disrespect for traditional American culture and values. This has a whiff of Town  & Gown antipathies from back in the day.
    d. Illegal immigrants--particularly from Mexico and parts south
    e. Legal immigrants--particularly ones from non-Anglo countries like Mexico and parts south
        --In general they have the same view of immigration that Mexican law does: that it should be prohibited where the numbers and cultural makeup of the immigrants would change the character of society.
    f. Homosexuals.
    g. Atheists.
    h. Democrats, who they see as the party of young people, Muslims, college professors, illegal immigrants, and legal immigrants--in short, anyone except for middle aged and older Anglo whites.
    i. ObamaCare--although they like its provisions when asked about them individually and when they aren't identified as part of ObamaCare, and although many Tea Party types are on MediCare and are collecting Social Security, and know these are government programs. But they believe they paid for them, while the groups listed above are freeloaders who are just mooching off them.
    j. Anyone who supports abortion rights. They don't see it as a women's rights issue, because they see fertilized eggs as little men and women whose rights completely override those of the hominid baby bags they're inside of.
    k. Liberals.
     l. Environmentalists.
    m. Overpopulation Jeremiadists like me.

5. Groups they dislike implicitly:
     a. Blacks. Even in meetings where they don't think outsiders are present, nearly all Tea Party types won't talk about this openly, and Tea Party leaders--both grassroots and self-appointed ones working for the Angry Billionaires' Club and GOP operatives--hotly deny that there's the slightest whiff of racial animus in the Tea Party.
        Their feelings are rather nuanced. If a black were the Republican presidential candidate and a white were the Democratic one, they'd vote for the black, and mostly without hesitation. In the pre-1970 Old South, they'd talk about "our Colored folk" affectionately if paternalistically, contrasting them with the "uppity Negroes" who'd been "influenced by outsiders." But if someone espouses values the Tea Party types don't like, and that someone is black, like Obama (actually half black, but even the President doesn't call himself mulatto or mixed race), they'll get an extra dose of opprobrium, all of it attributed to policy stuff though.
    b. Members of religions that are not evangelical Christian, to the degree that the religion differs from evangelical Protestantism. Though they seem inclined to give Catholics who are Anglos a pass due to the abortion issue. Many of them do not consider the Mormon religion to be a Christian religion.

They'll still vote for Romney, in part because they believe President Obama is not a Christian, due to Reverend Wright's infamous condemnation of America from the pulpit, which they in turn condemn without regard to the life experiences Reverend Wright had had that led him to that oratorical moment. The fact of Romney's LDS faith had dampened their enthusiasm for him. It won't keep them from voting for him but it might keep some from campaigning for hims as enthusiastically as they would have for, say, Wealthy Lobbyist Sentorum.

In short, Tea Party types are Anglo-American tribalists, who feel embattled at every turn, who focus on economic issues in public by and large because that's the only way they can have unity within their ranks, but a majority of them expect politicians they help elect to pass and enforce socially conservative laws--against abortion and homosexuals for example. In practice this is what has happened--often ahead of taking action on economic issues. So to a degree the third of Tea Party types who aren't ardent social conservatives are being duped.

So are independents who vote for Tea Party-affiliated candidates in hopes of getting elected politicians who will  "mind the store" and focus on economic issues. Instead they've gotten anti-abortion jihadis.

Liberals, by the way, have the same problem when they elect candidates who then focus on causes they can't do anything about--like my local and very liberal city council spending hours on a resolution to urge the President of the United States to add a Department of Peace to his cabinet instead of acting on local issues--issue they could actually do something about.

And just as Tea Partiers have zero empathy for the Occupy movement and Democrats / Liberals in general, in my experience the reverse holds true as well, with many, many liberals not giving Tea Partiers any credit, not acknowledging that they could be responding to real problems, even if they disagree with the Tea Partiers' solutions.

The Tea Party movement is both an authentic grassroots movement and an example of AstroTurf pseudo-populism. that is, corporate special interests have been quick to adopt/co-opt the Tea Party movement and Fox News has worked tireless to organize Tea Partiers and give them a platform--as long as and to the degree that it will help elect Republicans who will vote the way Grover Norquist and his paymasters want them to vote. This doesn't mean the Tea Partiers were just sitting in their homes watching reruns of Lawrence Welk before this. And it doesn't mean they've all been co-opted successfully. It does mean that the effort is being made by well-paid operatives, and that it has had a degree of success.

And at the same time Liberal politicians have helped by campaigning on the behalf of citizens of other countries who are here illegally, on the behalf of granting special favors to every ethnic /racial group in this country except for Anglos, and on the behalf of public employees, even the ones who are compensated far better than their private sector counterparts.

Because of that, efforts Democratic politicians made to appeal to Anglo blue-collar populism are wasted effort mostly, because those pols aren't willing to change their stances on those issues, which are key ones for Tea Partiers.

And it leaves Democratic-leaning independents like me frustrated. We understand where the Tea partiers are coming from. They have an authentic Anglo-American culture, and it is being changed substantially by immigration from Mexico in particular, due to the huge numbers and the peasant demographics of those immigrants. Many public employees have been getting too much for their work. And it's long past ime for special legislative favors for anyone who isn't an Anglo to end.

At the same time the Tea Partiers hostility to the environment, to science, to highly educated people, to other ethnic groups, and above all to their eager embrace of precisely the people who have created their economic problems, all turn off independents like me. Their lack of skepticism towards their ostensible friends in high places, coupled with their rigid opposition towards anyone and anything they think is outside their tribe, make them perfect tools in the hands of the corporatists.

Just one more example of how tribalism is really the worst political problem of our era--and the most intractable.






  

   

George Zimmerman was not a Neighborhood Watch volunteer

The Neighborhood Watch movement was started formally in the US in the 1960s, and has spread to various other countries as well.

They vary, of course, but all have several key features in common:

1. People do not patrol alone. They ALWAYS go out at least in pairs, often more.
2. People do not carry offensive weapons. In some programs organized and trained up to 50 hours by local police forces, they may wear a kind of uniform and carry pepper spray. Most groups only carry phones.
3. People to not engage with people they find suspicious in any way--they phone the police. Period. They are trained to avoid contact. They are additional eyes and ears for the police. That's it.

George Zimerman patrolled alone, armed, and hunted his prey.

So by all three "prime directives" of all national and international neighborhood watch organizations, he was not a neighborhood watch volunteer, and such organizations are wringing their hands at the disrepute he's bringing up them.

George Zimmerman was a vigilante, and the mainstream press have proven once more that they aren't right wing or left wing--just lazy. If they were left wing--or speaking accurately--they'd call him a vigilante. They'd only call him a neighborhood watch volunteer if they were right wing--or lazy. Most journalists are registered Democrats, so you have to conclude that intellectually "lazy" best describes them.

Don't let people refer to Zimmerman as a "neighborhood watch volunteer." It's easy to explain why.

Also, I suspect that the special prosecutor threw the book at him because she found that was lying--starting with calling himself a neighborhood watch volunteer, following up by claiming that Trayvon hunted him down and attacked him, trying to kill him. In all likelihood the physical circumstances gave the lie to Zimmerman's alibi.

In addition, Trayvon had no history of violence; Zimmeman did.

True, in general prosecutors often over-charge people so they can plea bargain them into an easy conviction, running up the DA's record so he can run for governor on a getting tough on crime campaign. But not all do this, and not all do this all the time. Especially in a case that's being followed internationally. Most prosecutors don't want to do anything slimy when it's getting that much attention.

In all likelihood Zimmerman got lost in a fantasy where he's a heroic cop, and where people-who-look-like-crooks were to be driven off "his" turf. And black people "looked like" crooks just a bit more than others. Every police department knows about the wannabes in their territory. Many find work in private security, having failed to get into actual police forces. There's even a dark comedy about this: "Paul Bart, Mall Cop."

But when the Keystone Kops start shooting real bullets, the comedy disappears.

How much racism is out there?

For a gut feel about how much racism is left in America, read the comment threads on relevant news/opinion items in the mainstream media, such as the Washington Post or other big city main newspapers.

For example, I was reading the comment thread about an article concerning a 10 year old Indian girl in Venezuela giving birth, and it had a surprising number of racial comments about Obama--even though the article had nothing to do with the President. Of course all the mainstream media forbid blatant statements, so it's all thinly veiled. Very thinly.

My conclusion from reading widely in such media is that there's a powerful racial undertone to this election that as a native Californian I was unprepared for.

Many people are still fighting the Civil War--even if they've never been in the South themselves.

What's a racist?

Racism, as a political baseball bat, has been wildly misused by both sides. Lefties are way too quick to cry racism when the answer is more complicated and long before actual racism can actually be proven. But Righties are way to quick to get on their high horse about charges of racism, acting as if public opinion must conform to the strictest rules of a court of law, otherwise it's absolute proof that no racism was involved.

Even in a court of law, being acquitted is not the same as being proven innocent, just as being found guilty is, unfortunately, not always the same a being proven guilty.

Thus in the Zimmerman/Trayvon case, the fact that Zimmerman has black defenders doesn't prove that race didn't play into his motives. Racists often make exceptions for personal relationships.

And in fact I'm far less concerned with whether Zimmerman was racist or not as with whether the cops who tested Trayvon's body for drugs but not Zimmerman were racist. Or the police chief who closed a case that was hardly open and shut. And the police department that obliterated nearly all the evidence that would be required to prosecute Zimmerman.

As for refusing to arrest him--well, Zimmerman is apparently free to do as he pleases. He was previously arrested for domestic violence, resisting an officer without violence and than resisting an officer with violence (a felony). Yet mysteriously all three charges were dropped. BTW Zimmerman's father is a retired local judge who has loudly defended his son in this case, accusing all who call for his arrest as being full of racial hatred (against whites). 

My own guess is that Zimmerman might have followed a white or Hispanic teen in a hoodie in "his" neighborhood--but his numerous calls to the cops in the months preceding this incident, along with other details of his history, shows that Zimmerman is a type of person most cops recognize--the wannabe cop who gets carried away with his fantasy about being a cop, with a cop's importance and authority, when in fact he isn't one.

And whether Trayvon attacked the man who was following him with no authority (like a badge) to justify doing so is only relevant if you think Florida's "stand your ground" law doesn't apply to blacks. That law works both ways unless it's applied as a tool of racism. So either it isn't--and Trayvon was right to jump his stalker--or it is racist, in which case a very ugly reality of Southern culture is shown to have not suddenly disappeared in 1970 or thereabouts.

So I don't think Zimmerman was a down and out racist, but more likely a wannabe cop who was at least a bit racist (using racial profiling). Neighborhood watch people are suppose to watch--hence the name--and not to be armed. To call the cops, not to imitate cops.

I also think it's possible that Trayvon did jump him, which I'd disapprove of, but which does appear to be justified by these "stand your ground" laws that every police dept. I know of oppose strongly, and which thugs have been using to escape prosecution for murders. All so elderly, fearful, angry old Southern white men can feel more virile--if they could be honest with themselves and with the rest of us.

Why do they hate President Obama?

Talk to a lot of Republican voters, and you'll hear them describing Obama using amazing language. They tell me--who they know as a Democrat--that he's a Fascist, a Communist. Literally. They'll tell me how much they dislike him personally. Since by any rational standards he has governed as a moderate, pragmatic center-left Democrat, it's hard to understand them talking about him as if he were Hugo Chavez. 

Here's one possible explanation--though they'll never admit it (often not even to themselves):

Racism isn't exactly racism

As a scuba diver I should have realized this: racism isn't racism.

It's actually a natural part of speciation--the way in which one species of animal or plant divides into different races, then into different species (more on this later).

Our race has outgrown the need for what we call racism, but treating it as innately evil is a big mistake.

You can't "cure" people of a natural trait, nor can you stamp it out with moralizing and accusations. Those can shut people up--but they'll keep on muttering the things you don't want them to say, and they'll say them out loud to like-minded people, while using cover terms with you that give them plausible deniability.

Thus "keep the Negro down" morphs into "states' rights" and a devotion to "limited government." And that makes it triply hard to do anything about it, even when proponents of these things don't hesitate to trample on states' rights and aggressively expand government when it suits them.

So first we have to understand just what racism/speciation is.

Basically, it's the way in which a new part of a species consolidates whatever evolutionary advantage that caused the new race to develop in the first place. Humans are visual animals, so the differences we use are mainly visual. A scent-oriented species would focus more on differences in smell.

Suppose some members of some animal species start to exploit a new ecological niche. I'll illustrate this with a neutral example, from another species.

The Namib desert beetle was originally a black beetle, and it still is across most of southern Africa's Namib desert. The beetle's black shell enables it to crawl out into the sunlight at dawn and warm up quickly (remember, insects are cold-blooded). It goes about its business until the heat of the day, when it hides from the sun and takes a siesta to avoid overheating. In the late afternoon it comes out again, and uses its dark shell to stay active as late as possible.

But some of these beetles wound up living on the coastal strand of the Namib desert. There the noonday heat isn't so hot. There a beetle with a light-colored shell can stay active through the heat of the day, which more than makes up for them having to wait longer to get going in the morning (because the light shell doesn't absorb heat so well).
s
Where what we call racism comes in is how did each Namib beetle race "fix" its geographical advantage? Speciation works not just from isolation, but from the speciating races coming to prefer their own kind when it comes to mating. That preference preserves the advantage. Otherwise you'd get a mid-hued beetle that's inferior to the white and black phases in each one's ecological niche.

I brought up my experience as a scuba diver because tropical coral reefs are the richest, most diverse habitats on this planet. And it has become clear that the wild color and fin variations among similar races/species aren't just mating displays--they help those races/species preserve the advantages they have in each one's ecological niche.

That advantage doesn't have to have anything to do with the differentiator. Thus one butterfly fish might have a longer snout but a smaller mouth, letting it get at prey in crevices that others can't reach. However, its color/fin scheme could be what helps males and females find each other.

And once two races become reproductively separated, they progress to becoming actual different species--i.e., the different species don't produce fertile offspring if they mate with each other. A horse can breed with a donkey, but the resulting mule or hinny is sterile, and so take no part in evolution.

The trick with the human species is that we've been around long enough--perhaps 100,000 years--to divide into different races and subraces, each adapted to a different environment, but not long enough for those races to become different species. And once we started adapting the environment to ourselves instead of vice versa, and started flying all over the place, the process of speciation stalled, and will probably never occur now, although we keep evolving at a microscopic level.

So--racism is really just an aspect of speciation. It isn't immoral or moral. It's an evolutionary holdover designed to keep, for example, the Oriental's epicanthic fold over their eyes and flatter nose and thicker, coarser hair, all to protect their eyes and faces and heads from the incredibly harsh winters on the steppes of central Asia. These adaptations to nothing to help a Han Chinese in Shanghai or an Indonesian living on the equator, but they stick around because the adaptations don't reduce their effectiveness elsewhere either.

Whereas Oriental skin tone does vary from Siberia to the equator, because that does make a difference. Though now there are light-skinned Han Chinese living in equatorial Sulawesi. They just use lots of sunblock.

You might ask why, then, is there so much plastic surgery done in Asia to make Orientals look more Caucasian; why Tehran is the world nose job capital; why the first black millionaires in America made their fortunes from skin lighteners and hair straighteners; why there are more bottle blondes of every race than real blondes. And why so many mixed-race marriages occur.

The answer is that the human mind is flexible. You can find individuals who go against the tide about almost everything. Also, there's an additional human trait, which pushes against incest (children never fall in love with parents they were raised with, nor siblings), and towards exogamy (hybrid vigor--visit Pitcairn Island and you'll understand).

It's also possible that blondes are regarded as prettier for biological reasons we don't fully understand. The zoologist Desmond Morris has some interesting speculations about this in his book "the Naked Woman."

Racism is speciation. It exists, and its universal, not just among humans, but among most if not all living organisms. For humans it's also obsolete (unless we start colonizing other planets with really different conditions). But the way past it isn't enraged accusations of immorality. At worst the racists are just atavistic. Mainly it's an educational challenge.

That still leaves us with about 20% of Americans unable to admit that President Obama is a smart guy (independent of whether you agree with his policies), solely because of his skin color.

We just have to keep patiently pointing out the flaws in their reasoning. Or, if you share my mischievous streak, you could try to explain to fundamentalists (as most of them are) that they're just being Darwinian when they do this.

Letters, we get letters

I got a lengthy comment on several of my posts. Here's the comment, followed by my answers to his numbered points:

1. Obama is a snob. No kidding. Don't believe me? Check out "Obama Visits Billionaires Row" (http://zombietime.com/obama_visits_billionaires_row/). His visit to Billionaires row is notable not just for his (very) well received fund raising, but what he said (privately, it leaked anyway) while he was there. I quote "And it's not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations" Elitist? I think so. Obama was challenged about his statement some number of times. His response was "it's true isn't it?".

2. On Bank Regulation. You critique of the GOP and bank regulation is only partially correct. Remember that the House Republicans voted against TARP and killed it for a while. Why? Because a great many of them believe that free markets including the right to fail, not get bailouts. I know a few Republican Congressmen and they were (are) just as opposed to Wall Street handouts as Matt Taibbi. By contrast, Obama appointed Timothy Geithner as the Secratary of the Treasury after he did such a great job as the chairman of the New York Fed and paying his own taxes...

3. Accusations that Lou Dobbs is a racist are laughable. His wife is Mexican-American and they have two daughers together.

4. You have the politics of Eminent Domain wrong. Ordinary Republicans and Republican politicians were outraged by Kelo vs. City of New London. Of course, Republican property developers were presumably thrilled. However, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelo_v._City_of_New_London#Congressional_reaction. Note that the New York Times and the Washington Post endoursed Kelo. For the record, I supported Kelo as well. I strong oppose using eminent domain for private purposes. However, I don't think it is unconstitutional, merely dismal public policy.

5. You have the details of Bush and Rangers stadium wrong. No land was "stolen for pennies on the dollar". Eminent domain was used to obtain 13 acres of land (not 200 acres). The owners of the land (the Mathes family) sued claiming that the land was worth more than they were paid. A jury agreed with them and awarded a $5 million judgement. With interest this came to $7.5 million. The legal case was against the development authority which paid the judgement. The development authority claimed that the team was liable for the cost of the judgement under the terms of the original development agreement. Initially the team refused to pay, but eventually did. Note that the team was later sold at a very large profit to Thomas Hicks. The gain to the original investors (roughly $160 million) dwarfed the difference over the value of the Mathes land. See http://www.austinchronicle.com/gyrobase/Issue/story?oid=oid:519405 , http://www.answers.com/topic/texas-rangers-baseball , and http://www.houstonpress.com/1998-01-29/news/bush-s-big-score/ There are any number of things that I find objectionable about Bush's dealings with the Rangers and the City of Arlington. However, the "theft" of private property isn't one of them.

------------------------------------------

My responses:

1. Obama snob?

If you think humility is the key trait of a great president, you get Gerald Ford and probably no one else in the last century. I'm sure Obama thinks he's hotter stuff than some high school dropout who bags groceries for a living. Well, he is. Did you see him at the healthcare summit? No notes, yet he showed an immense grasp of the subject. I'm not saying this means you should agree with him about healthcare.

But it doesn't mean you should disagree.

The right wing blogosphere obsesses over this. But it didn't over Bush II, who acted like he was better than everyone else all the way back to his college days. The difference is that he was defeated once early in his political career by someone who out-Bubba'd him, and he swore he'd never let that happen again.

Look at their biographies. Bush was born rich, grew up rich, and has lived rich his entire life. Obama was born in an educated home but one with little money, and he bootstrapped himself.

If he were a jerk personally it would show in his relationship with his wife and daughters. Yet obviously he's a better family man than any previous president in memory, back to and very much including Ronald Reagan.

It also shows in his hires. He hires really smart people, and he hires ones who don't necessarily agree with him. He carried over Bush's secretary of defense, and obviously listens to him and backs him. He hired Jim Jones. Bush never did anything of the sort.

And this openness to different ideas goes back to when he was editor of the Harvard Law Review, and the black ideologues and white liberals there were furious with him because he included a number of real conservatives on his team.

If he were a snob he'd only have yes-men around him.

I suspect that what the Right calls snobbery is actually self-respect.

He thinks he's smart and knows a lot because he is and he does. If he thought there was no difference between his intelligence and education and that of Joe Lunchbox I'd think he was insane. {None of this means Obama is always right. He isn't. And he agrees with that, by the way.)

So let's look at it from the other end: why do so many right wingers talk about his supposed snobbery?

a. Anti-intellectualism: Americans--myself included--are descended from peasants. Mine were sharecroppers in Scotland. And not so long ago, either. My grandpa said he raised hawgs "'cause they didn't take no plowin'." The country rejected the Europeans respect for authority, and it shows in our anti-intellectualism. I grew up in white blue-collar neighborhoods, and kids repeatedly accused me of cheating on tests because they couldn't imagine any other reason why my grades were so good.

I'd guess--without recourse to any research--that at least half of Americans are pretty strongly anti-intellectual.

b. Racism: I know, lefties cry "Racist" if a Republican blinks...but the Right also cries "Socialist" if a Democrat advocates any kind of government regulation.

So granting that both sides call each other names constantly, and often without foundation...we all know that a substantial minority of Americans are racist. My father was a racist from Georgia. My mother was not. So my sample of two comes out 50-50. And in fact the most racist people I've met in my life here in California were ghetto Blacks in Richmond and Oakland.

So we should all agree that every race has its racists.

So...what percentage of American voters are racist enough to let race color (so to speak) their vote? Can we all agree that it's at least 30% (remember, the South is nominally part of America)?

Now if you were a Republican strategist, you'd want to keep those people voting against Obama by riling them up. Yet you wouldn't dare say "Don't vote for a Nigrah." So you use code words that are defensible. Hence "snob," which a racist hears as "uppity Nigrah" (which Southern racists like my dad regard as possibly the worst human being this side of a serial killer). Yet if you use "snob" you have what lawyers call "plausible deniability." That is, you can claim it's not racism.

It's the perfect attack, because racists can read the subtitles, and the larger group of anti-intellectuals can also have their buttons pushed--all without having to admit to any feelings that you can't defend in public.

That's why the right talks about Obama's snobbery. It's a tactic and the wrapping paper that hides something darker.

And yes, Black pols routinely use racist appeals in their districts. A few years ago two blacks were vying to be elected mayor of Newark. But the young guy was educated, centrist, and supported by a coalition. The old black crook who opposed him ran a blatantly racist campaign, centered on the them of saying of the new guy "He ain't black."

And yes, Obama shifts into Black-ish dialect when he talks to Black audiences. Exactly the same as Bush abandoning his Harvard MBA-talk and gettin' all Bubba when he spoke to redneck audiences.

The race card gets played by some folks on both sides.

2. Bank regulation.

"Free market" is an ideological term. There's no such thing in reality. I've spent time in countries--like Indonesia--with profoundly "free" markets. The result is always the same: monopoly, enforced by bully boys with guns and government bureaucrats whose job is purely to protect the rich and powerful.

The problem the right wing has is that Ayn Rand saw the Commies confiscate her parents' property, so she concluded that all government control is evil. And the billionaires who bankroll the Republican Party agree with her, since they have no need for any kind of government social services or, for the most part, for infrastructure building/repair either, except for porkbarrel projects like Alaska's bridge to nowhere.

But there's a whole lot of territory between Communism and no government at all (as in Somalia). A modicum of regulation keeps the playing field level, even as those with money and power never stop striving to tilt the playing field and turn what started as a competitive advantage (better products, better service) into monopoly.

Obama's hiring Geithner proves how conservative he is. That hire and others shows he's trying to rescue our American free enterprise system, not destroy it.

TARP was a Hobsian bargain. He felt he had to save financial institutions whose failure would have brought about a collapse rivalling the Great Depression. And that situation came about precisely due to the lax regulation of the Republican years. Yes, subprime mortgages went to those they shouldn't. But that problem would have been isolated from the rest of the economy if the Republicans hadn't let banks turn into gambling casinos on their watch.

Personally I think he should have used managed bankruptcy instead of the bailout Bush engineered and that he kind of got stuck with when he took office (as Paul Krugman advocated), and I think any business too big to fail is too big and needs to be broken up in exchange for government help--as is happening with GM, I notice, and AIG too.

The things Republicans now advocate (as opposed to what they did under Bush) are common sense solutions--let the chips fall where they may, let good businesses survive, bad ones fail--but it's more complicated than that, unfortunately, and I don't want to cut off my nose to spite my face.

I've said that America's economy has gotten too complex for the average guy to understand--and that this fact is extremely dangerous for democracy. It's emotionally gratifying to hear politicians claim it's not that complicated, your common sense is enough, and here's the simple solution.

But whenever a politician says something I find flattering and emotionally gratifying I start to worry--and I feel my hip pocket to make sure my wallet's still there.

And when it's the part not in power that's advocating these simply, gratifying solutions I get doubly suspicious.

The left made the same kinds of errors when they tried to solve centuries of segregation and slavery with affirmative action and the welfare state.

That, too, was a solution too simple for the situation.

3. I've never accused Lou Dobbs of being racist--especially since I'm even more opposed to illegal immigration than he is. And I knew about his Latina wife. You must have me confused with someone else. Look in my archives to see what I've said about him and illegal immigration.

4. I think we agree about eminent domain.

It's needed for freeways and reservoirs and railroad right of ways and national parks--not luxury developments by private developers. And I think the wording of the Constitution can be interpreted to support this interpretation.

The problem is that rank and file Republicans feel as I do about eminent domain--but Republican fat cats and their billionaire backers want to use it for private gain, leading to a disconnect between rank and file Republicans and the Republican leadership.

Similarly, many rank and file Democrats oppose special favors for everyone but whites, and actually support colorblind social policy with special support for the poor and disadvantaged of all races, equally. But the Democratic leadership is so beholden to racialist special interest groups it's hard for them to pry loose from that.

5. The Bush-Rangers deal:

I was speaking from a bottom line viewpoint about the complex series of steps Bush used. It wasn't simple theft. It was complex theft. Like Woodie Guthrie said, "Some men rob you with a six-gun--some with a fountain pen."

I agree with the thorough analysis made by Pulitzer-prize-winner economic journalist David Cay Johnston, described in his book "Free Lunch: How the wealthiest Americans enrich themselves at government expense (and stick you with the bill)".

I have to believe that if rank and file Republicans realized how much their leadership preys on them, using socialism for the rich and capitalism for the rest of us, that they'd rise up in revolt.

The bottom line for Bush is that he got rich at taxpayer expense, not through building a business that sold goods and/or services whose honest profits made him rich. And his chicanery was only possible through dynastic use of his wealthy family's connections.

I hope these answers help to show that I'm neither a leftist nor a rightist, but rather a reformer who wants there to be leftists and rightists in government--I just want them to be true to their own principles.

Japanese reaction to Obama

This entry was a comment on a Washington Post article discussing Japanese reactions to Obama (the photo is of one of many signs on businesses in Japan excluding foreigners--a growing trend):

I recall riding on a Tokyo subway back in '81. Every single person on that subway car--other than my spouse & me--had the same color hair, eyes, skin, and, roughly, height. And every single man was wearing a white--and I mean snow-colored white--shirt and a black tie.

Heck, even Japanese nonconformists operate in identically-costumed groups.

Any society that homogeneous and that isolated (i.e. on a string of islands) is bound to be racist, and the Japanese are, in spades.

How could it be otherwise? Rural Britain is no different. The difference is that urban Japan is no different--just quieter.

Their self-obsessed exceptionalism has also resulted in their inability, as a people, to own up to their part in WWII, in stark contrast to the German people.

I wasn't an enthusiastic Obama supporter because he believes Mexico's ruling elite should be allowed to outsource its homegrown overpopulation crisis to America. But I voted for him after McCain picked a vice-presidential candidate who was spectacularly unqualified to serve as President.

So from that perspective I'd say to the many right-wing posters on this thread: I can't prove it but rather than thinking that the Japanese response to Obama having nothing to do with racism, I'm more inclined to think that the paranoid frenzy of your opposition to him does have something to do with racism. Obama won because your leaders robbed us blind for six years and saddled us with multigenerational debts, and because you gave us precisely the gigantic, self-dealing, uncaring, incompetent, arrogant government you warned us about. Become actual Republicans again and the plurality of moderates will listen to you again.

Inserting these sour-grapes screends into a thread about Japan accomplishes nothing but making you sound like a bunch of whiners unable to man up and reform the Grasping Old Party.

As for Japan--I've been to Japan, as I indicated, and I've also studied the sociology of Japan for decades.

Japanese popular culture today is rife with the sorts of images of blacks that America sported in the 1930s.

But it's not just blacks. The Japanese are prejudiced against Japanese whose skins are slightly darker than other Japanese. You'll still see some Japanese women (mainly older, I'll admit) marching around on sunny days carrying parasols.

My brother was stationed on Okinawa during the Vietnam war, and he told me even the houses of ill repute there were segregated, with separate ones servicing black soldiers.

BTW the Japanese also consider themselves to be a different race than other Asians. Books are regularly published discussing how Japanese have different brains than other humans.

So it's both racism and exceptionalism.

I do cut them a little slack given their situation--they live with a level of racial and cultural homogeneity few Americans outside of, perhaps, Appalachia could imagine. They don't get many tourists because it's so expensive. They don't have many immigrants to multiculturalize them. They do have some thousands of Brazilians living in Japan--Brazilians who are the offspring of Japanese who'd emigrated to Brazil. So they're 100% Japanese racially, although they're Brazilian culturally. And they're generally not very accepted.

So I'm sure a fair number of rural Japanese perceive President-Elect Obama as some sort of talking monkey, while urbane Japanese give no voice to their thoughts but feel a sense of unease about him that stems from his race. Or, rather, his mixed race.

Note that mixed-race Japanese have a tough time of it--especially if there's a black in the mix.

This is the land where a popular saying goes "the nail that sticks up gets pounded down."

Obama's presidency will be good for them...even if they don't realize it.

Racism Shmacism

Yes, there's still racism--by whites against blacks, blacks against whites, Mexicans against blacks, blacks against Mexicans, light-skinned Indians against dark-skinned ones, light-skinned blacks against dark-skinned ones, Mexician mestizos against Mexican Indians (quite intense BTW)...

There's also sexism. After all, blacks got the vote in 1865. Women had to wait until 1920. Blacks got a presidential candidate in 2008. Women? Well, not yet. And the misogyny Clinton got dwarfed the racism Obama's gotten.

But wait, there's more! How about classism? Try getting a decent white-collar job if you talk like a hick and scratch where it itches. A white like that hasn't got a chance against a college-educated, well-spoken black.

It doesn't stop there. How about looks-ism and obese-ism? Try being ugly and/or fat? How do you suppose Denzel Washington would go in a job interview against an equally qualified ugly fat woman?

Then there's accentism. People with impenetrable Chinese or Indian accents can only get civil service jobs and then drive the rest of us nuts at the Post Office or the DMV as we vainly try to grasp what they're saying.

And intelligence-ism. I grew up in blue-collar neighborhoods. I looked like the other kids but had about twice their IQ. I was shunned and harassed nonstop until I went to college. Even the teachers gave me a hard time. (Okay, constantly correcting them didn't help.) I would have been far less discriminated against if I'd been a black with a talent for football and no excess smarts.

And handicapism. Try being deaf, or blind, or crippled. Try having, say, one hand deformed. Any of those will result in vastly greater discrimination (outside rural Alambama) than being black--especially if you look like Beyonce Knowles or Kanye West.

Or heightism. Even seen a short guy who slouched? You never will. Why do you think Tom Cruise is such a head case?

Or try being Arab American. Or a Sikh with a turban.

And why is it blacks talking about racism never talk about their own racism? I remember back in college in the 60s, when a black guy in our dorm went around selling tickets to a party at his black fraternity. My Jewish roommate and I thought these were actually tickets to a party...so we went. Try to imagine the reception we got. Woo hoo.

And the blacks I knew in college despised the African exchange students. Called them spear-chuckers.

Then in the 70s I worked as a substitute teacher in ghetto schools. I remember being unable to convince my black 5th grade class that there were more than a dozen stars. They'd never seen more. And they knew all whites lie--their parents had taught them well--so they certainly weren't about to believe anything a white teacher said. And just as whites back then would affect a black accent to portray someone stupid, the black kids would affect a Mexican accent to portray someone stupid. And their mothers tried to keep the Mexican mothers out of the PTA.

Later I taught in a ghetto junior high school where whites were a persecuted minority who skulked around always with their backs to a wall. Heaven help them if they wore a nice coat to school. I guarantee you they wouldn't get to end of the day still possessing it.

So yes, there's racism in America. But there are many other -isms here and everywhere else, and those other ones may well have a far greater effect on someone's life.

There's a similar situation in Canada, where most Canadians have had it up to here with Quebequois whining and exceptionalism and demands for special treatment.

Everyone tends to magnify the slights and snubs they've experienced, while excusing the slights and snubs they've handed out.

So how about this deal: I promise to take your grievances seriously if you promise to take everyone else's grievances seriously--and quit acting like your group is the only group that's had it tough.

Otherwise, get over yourself (-elves). We all have our trials.

And ultimately how does all this blather boil down to policy? Either we go the affirmative action route or the difference-blind route. I'm starting to think blacks would have done better in the long run if we'd gone the difference-blind route. Because affirmative action has mainly served just to extend the slave mind in black American culture.

Remember Malcolm X talking about the slave mentality? If you're a slave you can't advance yourself. All you can aspire to is to shirk work and make excuses. I'd do that if I were a slave. But unfortunately cultural artifacts tend to outlive their usefulness, and black American culture preserves the slave mind like a fly in amber.

My postman is a Mexican-American citizen, and in a moment of candor he mentioned to me how the blacks at his post office do as little as possible while the rest bust their humps. That's the slave mind still at work.

Work on that.

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PS: I got a comment on this post from Eric's SoulFunkPunk Experience http://www.blogger.com/profile/15966846631112257495, but I couldn't post it as is because it was full of obscenities. However, here's an, um, redacted version, followed by my comments:

>>Stop being an @#$%^*! Mormon boy, nobody cares about what you have said except your dumb white paranoid %$^!!! Anyone who would worship a religon based in New York is a @#!$%@!## along with their supporters quoting Malcolm X is not going to impress me in any way shape or form, Pasting your blog posts on WaPo is intellectual laziness at it's worst.I love how you quote your Mexican friends on black people being lazy, I have worked with more lazy white people than I care to remeember. You are what I call a condesending white person. Just admit you are a bigot like every other American who is $%$##! over Hillary Clinton. I am all for racially separate Lands on American Soil, get your state Senator and supporters who don't like Blacks and get 38 states to pass it and you will have 'racial harmony'.<<

Okay, let's see:

1. I'm not Mormon. Never said I was. My spouse is. Perhaps the gentleman was upset over my remarks and not using his full faculties. In fact most religious people would consider me an atheist (I explain how that's not true in a post on this blog).

2. At least one person cared what I said--this gentleman. Even took the trouble to address my points. Mainly with ad hominem attacks, but hey, you take what you can get.

3. Seems reasonable to assume a black separatist--which this gentleman said he is in his reply--wouldn't be impressed by anything a white person said about anything, particularly race relations. So me quoting Malcolm X is irrelevant. Actually someone who'd truly studied Malcolm X would refer to him as El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz. I didn't for the sake of communication, since so few know him that way. But that name reflects his abandonment of black separatism as a result of the spiritual enlightenment he experienced on his haj. Such a journey might help Eric etc.

4. Actually I don't paste my blog posts on WaPo, I paste my WaPo comments on my blog, and I attribute them correctly as WaPo posts if the remarks depend on that context. They didn't here.
This practice seems like a way to drive traffic to my blog as I reach out different audiences in newspaper forums. It would be intellectually lazy if what I wrote was just a rant and not germane to whatever article I was responding to. But I'm not, it's not and it is, in that order. Usually people accuse me of overthinking stuff. Being called intellectually lazy is a first for me.

5. I never said black people were lazy. Only that the slave mind hasn't died out yet, in part due to the South re-winning the Civil War during Reconstruction, such that southern blacks at least were largely kept in near-slavery conditions until the 1960s or thereabouts. And of course the welfare state serves unintentionally to perpetuate the slave mind. That's why the Grameen Bank microloan people can't do it in countries like ours that have a social welfare safety net.

6. There's an abundance of lazy people of all races and ethnicities. I've seen plenty of entry-level workers in offices I've worked at coming in with a slacker attitude.

But the slave mind is different. Truly lazy people are just mentally inert. Human vegetables. The slave mind often works hard at not working, and often does this not working with a lot of attitude--daring others to challenge it/him/her/them. It's slacking as an expression of resentment against historic wrongs--a way of extracting reparations from the great-great-grandchildren of Massa down on the plantation. You really should read what Malcolm X had to say about this. And, today, of course, Bill Cosby (I bet you love him).

7. Condescending? Hmm. Could be. But it's more a sense that I don't belong to the same species as most people around me. As a kid I'd read science fiction and dreamed of my real parents coming to take me away from this mudball. Since then I've found peers and a mate who's as smart as me and generally feel a lot better about the human race. But still when it does try my patience when I see people arriving at opinions without using thinking to help form them.

8. All Clinton supporters are bigots? Really? Including the hundreds of thousands of blacks who voted for her in the primaries before Obama caught fire? As for my own bigotry--I live in one of the most multiracial/multiethnic regions on Earth and in history, and I live here because I like this. Unfortunately, most actual bigots do think all blacks are lazy. They must have never seen James Brown. But it's possible to believe the slave mind is alive and well today and not be a bigot. Unless you define bigot as "white person." But that would be, um, bigoted, wouldn't it?

9. Oh, and I'm not a Clinton supporter. Nor an Obama supporter. Nor a McCain supporter. Because all three of them believe that Mexico's ruling elite ought to be allowed to determine America's demographic composition by outsourcing their overpopulation crises and entire social welfare infrastructure to the United States. I believe all three of them have betrayed American working-class blacks and whites--and Latinos for that matter--because the policies all three support have led to working class Americans' wages falling by 5-25% (depending on job and region) due to competition from illegal aliens. If I had my way blacks would be a lot better off because we'd make it impossible for people who aren't here legally to work here.

10. And if we did it your way, perhaps we'd have "racial harmony" but we wouldn't have gender harmony! Nor looks harmony. Nor age harmony. Nor religious harmony. Nor political harmony. So why focus on race? Well, for you, perhaps it's because to a hammer everything looks like a nail. You might try asking the black women you know if they'd experience "harmony" if all they had to deal with were black men. I believe Mary J. Blige has had quite a bit to say on the subject.
BTW can we keep Mariah Carey and Kelis and Obama? Since all three are 50% biracial and you're a black separatist, surely you wouldn't want them in your black paradise. And of course all the self-identified blacks who aren't as dark my friend from Kenya are part white or Indian or something. So they'll have to go too. And that's a majority of self-identified blacks in this country. Most of them wouldn't even be considered black if they visited Africa.

Might be a mighty small paradise.

[I do know one guy who approves of your plan: a white separatist named Jared Taylor. Look him up. Actually he wants the whole South to secede again and give a state to the blacks--Alabama, I think he said.]

BTW when Kanye West said Bush "doesn't care about black people" he was dead wrong. He cares deeply about black people if they're Republican. And he doesn't care in the least about all the white people who are Democrats. He also doesn't care about poor people, as New Orleans discovered. But he doesn't discriminate against blacks. Hello, both his Secretaries of State were/are black.

Yet another proof that looking at everything through a racialist lens is putting on blinders.

Obama as racial bargainer?

Today's Wall St. Journal published an editorial by conservative writer Shelby Steele that described Obama as a "bargainer" like Oprah Winfrey--someone who, without ever saying so, offers whites absolution for their racist sins in exchange for whites' support. My spouse (unwaveringly Republican from birth) sent me the editorial. Here's a link to the editorial:
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB120579535818243439-lMyQjAxMDI4MDE1ODcxOTg1Wj.html

And here's my reply to my spouse:

I’d pretty much agree with this. But I wonder why Steele didn’t avail himself of this opportunity to mention that Obama’s support for illegal immigration extends the bargaining past just white guilt over blacks but white guilt over Latinos as well. I wonder if Steele is so focused on black-white relations that he missed this? Of course it’s a point that the WSJ’s corporate-tool editorial position doesn’t want to talk about…

I do think he’s right (i.e. he agrees with what I’d already said to you) about Obama’s reasons for attending a black nationalist anti-white church—and marrying an “all black” woman—he was trying to become what others saw him as—black—despite his having been raised by a white in areas nowhere near black communities. I’m guessing he has unresolved inner conflict over his biraciality. I don’t think this disqualfies him for the presidency, but I’m sure he lacks inner peace because of it. I wonder what Michelle’s relationship with his mom was like?

One cavil—Obama’s first memoir is by all accounts extremely self-revelatory (while his second is standard P.R. fare). So he precluded being a cipher in this regard.

Let me add that assuming he gets the nomination, even if everything Steele says—and other things his detractors say that are factually correct (as opposed to all the Swiftboating that has already started), we still have to evaluate him vs. the GOP nominee—not against our abstract notions of who we’d like to have as our president.

Maybe the purely symbolic aspect of an Obama presidency would be worth it. The country won’t go to hell in a handbasket with either Obama or McCain—if it could, it would have after eight years of epic mismanagement under the biggest spendthrift in American history (when you take into account the long-term costs of the Iraq war and occupation and the long-term consequences of massive business deregulation).

My personal dilemma is that I get the impression that an Obama presidency would be better for you & me personally (via reforms in medical care especially) but a McCain presidency would be better for America in the long run (providing a check to opposite-party Congress).

Or to put it another way:

Being black is a disadvantage if you look and talk Ghetto. Being white is a disadvantage if you look and talk Hick. Being white is an advantage if you look and talk College Educated--and being black is an even bigger advantage if you look and talk College Educated. True, you'll still have trouble hailing a cab at midnight in D.C. But you'll have a leg up in corporate America, as any Human Resources pro will tell you in private.

American society, in various aspects, discriminates by dress, speech, race, gender, and other factors. Any of these factors can be an advantage or disadvantage in different circumstances. For example, even though uneducated-sounding speech generally hampers anyone in business regardless of race or gender, Bush's success depended in part in sounding like an ignorant yahoo (with a Harvard MBA). Hence "new-kew-lur" for "nuclear," along with innumerable malapropisms--none of which were apparent in public speeches and debates at the start of his political career.

Steele's comment on Obama's bargaining is true, I think, on a subliminal level, for many Americans. I regret that Steele apparently didn't see that Obama's support for illegal immigration extends this bargaining to Mexicans. Obama's candidacy must have a powerful psychological component--otherwise how could you explain so many people supporting Obama when his preference for illegal aliens undercuts the Democratic Party's traditional mainstay--blue-collar American workers, who have seen their wages depressed 10-20% due to competition from illegal aliens.

It's as if Obama has taken a page out of the Republican Party's playbook--developing emotional appeals strong enough to get people to vote against their economic self-interest. And he is an apt student, isn't he?