This is another “negative associations” test. Such tests are very problematical for a number of reasons — one of which is that some actively anti-racist people score highly on them — so claims that they measure racism are extravagant. What they most usually “measure”, if anything, could well be past bad experiences with blacks.

Further notes: 1). It could be quite rational to trust in a plan authored by Clinton rather than Obama — as Clinton was the centrist that Obama only claims to be; 2). The fact that Prof. Lowery is black may have influenced the results; 3). There seems to be no claim that the people quizzed were a random sample of any known group so the generalizability of the results is unknown. One word summary: Crap

Does racism affect voters’ responses to President Barack Obama’s policies? In September, former president Jimmy Carter argued yes in an interview with Brian Williams of NBC. A Democracy Corps focus-group study published on Oct. 16 disagreed, concluding that racial issues do not affect voters’ beliefs, and that it was time for those who think otherwise to “get over it.”

Recent research from the Stanford Graduate School of Business finds that Carter is correct –– race does matter. People’s implicit racial prejudices corresponded with a reluctance to vote for Obama and with opposition to his health care reform plan, the study finds. In fact, when a description of a health care reform proposal was attributed to former President Bill Clinton rather than Obama, reactions suggested that individuals high in non-conscious anti-black prejudice tended to oppose Obama, at least in part because they dislike him as a black person.

“Many people are influenced by race, and either will not admit it or don’t know it,” says Brian Lowery, an associate professor of organizational behavior. To find evidence for “implicit,” or non-conscious prejudice, he and two other investigators ran a computer-based test on more than 200 subjects prior to the 2008 presidential election. Individuals were asked to quickly pair “black” names (Aisha, Jamal, and so forth) and “white” names (Brett, Jane) with good words such as “beauty” and “friendly,” or bad words such as “evil” and “hate.”

Non-conscious prejudice was measured according to how quickly and easily people could identify the “bad” words after seeing African-American names (Aisha, Jamal, and so forth) as opposed to Anglo names (Brett, Jane). Lowery and his coauthors found [asserted?] that fewer errors, when African-American names (as opposed to Anglo names) were paired with a negative word, indicated that individuals had internalized negative associations with black people –– and served as a measure of non-conscious prejudice.

In the month after the election, participants were asked how they had voted. Those who made few errors on the black/bad pairings were nearly 43% less likely to have voted for Obama than those with average scores. “As implicit prejudice increased, the likelihood of voting for Obama decreased,” explains Lowery.

Nearly a year later, in October 2009, some of the same participants rated their attitudes about Obama’s approach to health care reform. Others were randomly assigned to read a description of health care reform framed either as being President Obama’s plan or Bill Clinton’s plan.

Once again, increasing implicit prejudice was associated with negative attitudes toward Obama and decreasing support for his health care policy. Prejudice scores did not correlate with favorability toward the plan when it was described as coming from Clinton, but they did result in a more negative assessment when it was described as coming from Obama.

“This study represents a powerful demonstration of the fact that racial attitudes still operate in the political arena,” says Lowery, who conducted the research with Stanford doctoral student Rebecca Schaumberg and Eric Knowles, assistant professor at the University of California at Irvine. “It also suggests that Obama is likely to encounter some degree of prejudice-fueled opposition to his policies across the board.”

SOURCE

Posted by John Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.). For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. To keep up with attacks on free speech see TONGUE-TIED. Also, don’t forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me here

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A federal judge ordered the Tangipahoa Parish School Board this week to hire qualified black applicants for administrative positions until 40 percent of these positions are held by black educators, court records show.

Blacks make up only 29% of Tangipahoa Parish’s population.

Lemelle has imposed his racial preferences from the bench before:

Last year, Lemelle ordered the School Board to hire a black coach who had been passed over for a job opening at Amite High School.

Say a candidate for an administrative job in the schools of Lemelle’s fiefdom has no qualifications whatsoever other than the one that matters, black skin. The superintendent can refuse to recommend him, but…

If the superintendent does not recommend a black applicant for a position, he must submit written reasons to a committee made up of the chief desegregation plan implementation officer, director of personnel and minority recruitment officer.

This committee then may interview the rejected applicant and decide whether to recommend that person to the School Board anyway.

The objective of course is “diversity” — that is, naked anti-Caucasian racism.

On a tip from Andrea. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

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Such thinking was once dominant in Anglo-Saxon philosophy schools but the great expansion of tertiary education in recent decades has meant that many less rigorous thinkers have been employed as philosophers, some even being third-rate enough to find enlightenment in the words of an obsolete economist called Karl Marx. So philosophy schools are now replete with people who seem to think they are being profound when they say: “There is no such thing as right and wrong” or “There are many realities”. To an Anglo-Saxon empiricist, such statements are simply confused.

Such confused thinking is usually described (rather fancifully) these days as “postmodernism” but for historical purposes it is probably best subsumed under the broad category of “existentialism” — and there were many prominent existentialist thinkers in the first half of the 20th century, particularly in Germany. And many existentialist thinkers at that time were sympathetic to National Socialism (Nazism), just as their counterparts today are solidly in favour of all sorts of Leftist thinking. So existentialist thinking and Leftism have always been intimately associated among many who call themselves philosophers. And it should therefore be no surprise that prewar existentialists sound very profound to existentialists today.

The Nazi connection is however embarrassing. Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, DeMan and others sound very good and wise and profound to Leftist philosophers today so how do you cope with the Nazi connection? Easy: In the traditional Leftist way of dealing with all inconvenient facts — by ignoring it.

One of the holier of today’s existentialists has however recently upset the applecart by pointing out that the great god Heidegger was a Nazi and calling for all Heidegger’s thinking to be denounced and renounced. Leftists are not letting go of such an inspiring (to them) figure as Heidegger, however. What Heidegger says is central to what they say, so to denounce Heidegger would be to denounce most of their own thinking. And there the matter rests at the moment. A small excerpt from a NYT story about the matter below. That Nazi thinking is one subset of socialist thinking is, of course, never acknowledged:

For decades the German philosopher Martin Heidegger has been the subject of passionate debate. His critique of Western thought and technology has penetrated deeply into architecture, psychology and literary theory and inspired some of the most influential intellectual movements of the 20th century. Yet he was also a fervent Nazi.

Now a soon-to-be published book in English has revived the long-running debate about whether the man can be separated from his philosophy. Drawing on new evidence, the author, Emmanuel Faye, argues fascist and racist ideas are so woven into the fabric of Heidegger’s theories that they no longer deserve to be called philosophy. As a result Mr. Faye declares, Heidegger’s works and the many fields built on them need to be re-examined lest they spread sinister ideas as dangerous to modern thought as “the Nazi movement was to the physical existence of the exterminated peoples.”

First published in France in 2005, the book, “Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism Into Philosophy,” calls on philosophy professors to treat Heidegger’s writings like hate speech. Libraries, too, should stop classifying Heidegger’s collected works (which have been sanitized and abridged by his family) as philosophy and instead include them under the history of Nazism. These measures would function as a warning label, like a skull-and-crossbones on a bottle of poison, to prevent the careless spread of his most odious ideas, which Mr. Faye lists as the exaltation of the state over the individual, the impossibility of morality, anti-humanism and racial purity.

The book is the most radical attack yet on Heidegger (1889-1976) and would upend the philosophical field’s treatment of his work in the United States, and even more so in France, where Heidegger has frequently been required reading for an advanced degree. Mr. Faye, an associate professor at the University of Paris, Nanterre, not only wants to drum Heidegger from the ranks of philosophers, he wants to challenge his colleagues to rethink the very purpose of philosophy and its relationship to ethics.

At the same time scholars in disciplines as far flung as poetry and psychoanalysis would be obliged to reconsider their use of Heidegger’s ideas. Although Mr. Faye talks about the close connection between Heidegger and current right-wing extremist politics, left-wing intellectuals have more frequently been inspired by his ideas. Existentialism and postmodernism as well as attendant attacks on colonialism, atomic weapons, ecological ruin and universal notions of morality are all based on his critique of the Western cultural tradition and reason.

I go into some detail about the confusions of “postmodernist” thinking here

(For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, DISSECTING LEFTISM, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena . List of backup or “mirror” sites here or here — for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is “down” or failing to update. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.)

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Our world is upside-down. Democratic leaders say they do not share the concerns of the Republican members of the House Intelligence Committee that Nidal Hasan’s red flags were, perhaps, ignored.

Just a few short months ago, Speaker Nancy Pelosi called the CIA liars, offered no proof and then refused to talk about it again – leaving the stain on the agency’s  credibility in full view for the world to see.

Yesterday, Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI) accused Obama of withholding “critical” information. The House Intelligence Committee, chaired by a Democrat, dismissed Hoestra’s concerns.

Rep. Hoekstra went even farther and effectively said the President was not truthful when he claimed that Hoekstra and other intelligence committees had been “briefed:”

Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI) is blasting President Obama for withholding from the Congressional intelligence committees information on the Fort Hood killings suspect, while at the same time acknowledging the leaders of those panels — including Hoekstra himself — have indeed been briefed on Nidal Malik Hasan.

In his statement, Hoekstra repeated Obama’s plea that we not “jump to conclusions” about the alleged Fort Hood killer:

…but the administration is in possession of critical information related to the attack that they are refusing to release to Congress or the American people,” Hoekstra said

Hoekstra said he was concerned that more information had been provided, piecemeal, to the news media by anonymous sources than had yet been provided to the Committee. He criticized the Obama administration for not being more immediately forthcoming with details and specifically requested information, and for restricting the limited information provided so far to the so-called “Gang of Eight.”

So perhaps the Gang of Eight is the problem? No. Hoekstra is a member of the Gang of Eight. Members are Nancy Pelosi, John Boehner Harry Reid, Mitch McConnell, Silvestre Reyes, Pete Hoekstra, Diane Feinstein and Kit Bond. So what is going on? Was Hoekstra appropriately briefed as Obama claims, or was he not? And how about Pelosi and Reid? What do they know?

This is the height of hypocrisy and the culmination of evil. The administration and Democrats are salivating over Eric Holder’s investigation into CIA so-called torture of Guantanamo prisoners - after promising the Bush administration that they would drop that atrocious idea.

But today, with the Fort Hood memorial tribute still on the calendar, they have no concern that intelligence and the U.S. Army may have put troops side-by-side with a radical jihadist – with red flags flaring.

Democrats know Americans are fed up with their politically correct posture. We know Americans are dying in this country, in Afghanistan and still yet in Iraq because military fears the wrath of Congress, and the administration, loathes any attempt to profile or point a knowing finger at an extremist. In the video below, Hoekstra speaks about preventing terrorism and keeping soldiers safe…February 2008. Listen as he talks about homegrown terrorism. Democrats told him the “threat is not real.”

Pete Hoekstra  “threat not real”

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On MSNBC on October 27, Rachel Maddow interviewed Jane Hamsher, well-known Hollywood roustabout and left-wing blogger for FireDogLake.com. The subject was the progress of Obamacare in the Senate and Senator Joe Lieberman’s warning that he might join a Republican filibuster of the Baucus bill if it contained the so-called public option.

During the discussion, however, Hamsher went off on a tangent about the 1964 Civil Rights Act and made the allusion that the famed anti-civil rights Dixiecrats joined Republicans to stand in the way of civil rights during the 1964 debates.

Maddow: Let me ask you about the statistic I attributed to you in my intro there – I know you have been doing some digging on this issue – of a Democrat joining a Republican filibuster. How, how unprecedented would a move like this be for Senator Lieberman?

Hamsher: Well, we have seen a number of the other party cross overs…well we remember the Dixiecrats joining the Republicans in the sixties on civil rights filibusters …

Naturally, host Maddow did not correct Hamsher’s misleading claim that the GOP stood in the way of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. In reality, Republicans were great supporters of the legislation. Leave it to MSNBC to continue the left’s favorite myth that Republicans are against civil rights for blacks.

Of course, the truth is, the 1964 Civil Rights Act saw strong Republican support. In fact, of the total number of Republicans then serving in Congress, support never dipped below 70% on any of the final vote counts. The original House version got 80% GOP support, the Senate version got 82% and the final vote in the House was 82% of Republicans in support. On the other hand, Congressional Democrats never saw higher than 69% of its membership in support of civil rights for blacks.

And who was one of the leading voices in favor of passage? It was Illinois Senator Edward Dirksen, a Republican. Who was a leading voice opposing civil rights? Senator Robert Byrd, Democrat from West Virginia and still serving in that chamber.

If it were up to Democrats in 1964 the Civil Rights Act would never have passed. Yet here is the uninformed Hollywood Author Jane Hamsher of the extremist website FireDogLake falsely claiming that it was the GOP that stood in the way of civil rights for blacks. And it is MSNBC letting her get away with the falsity.

(Hamsher’s bit is at around the 4:10 mark)

(H/T ProteinWisdom.com)

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Hot Air: Fiorina: Government has to regulate “wild west” Internet
Moxie: Really terrific episode of PennSays
D-Vice: Skiing Robot
Greg Hendler: Rep. Grayson: FOX & GOP Are Enemies of America, Peace, and Education
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Obama’s Desire To Control Fox News, The Media & Everything–UPDATED
Dan Riehl: Give Scozzafava Credit Where Due
QandO: TARP Report – “We don’t even know where the money went”
Big Government: AP: Video Makers Release Tape of Philly ACORN
Michelle Malkin: Obamacare doctor bribe fails in Senate, Reid whines
Gateway Pundit: Is it Al?… Or, Is it Jesse?… “Racist” MSNBC Host Confuses Jackson for Sharpton (Video)
Another Black Conservative: Paul Krugman and Ezra Klein Caught On Tape Spilling The Beans On Health Care Reform Deception
Big Government: The Media’s Complicity: Analysis of ACORN Coverage
Moe Lane: 61% of Americans un-American?
Atlas Shrugs: Obama’s Website: Obama is the new [and improved] Jesus
Gateway Pundit: WH Loves Mao
Sister Toldjah:
MadisonConservative: Dem Temper Tantrum

Outrage of the Day: VIDEO: Jay Leno makes fun of WH war of words with Fox News

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The U.S. military is not just fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, America’s most renowned investigative journalist says.

The army is also “in a war against the White House — and they feel they have [President] Obama boxed in,” Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Seymour Hersh told several hundred people in Duke University’s Page Auditorium on Tuesday night. “They think he’s weak and the wrong color. Yes, there’s racism in the Pentagon. We may not like to think that, but it’s true and we all know it.”

In a speech on Obama’s foreign policy, Hersh, who uncovered the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War and torture at Abu Ghraib prison during the Iraqi war, said many military leaders want Obama to fail.

“A lot of people in the Pentagon would like to see him get into trouble,” he said. By leaking information that the commanding officer in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, says the war would be lost without an additional 40,000 American troops, top brass have put Obama in a no-win situation, Hersh contended.

“If he gives them the extra troops they’re asking for, he loses politically,” Hersh said. “And if he doesn’t give them the troops, he also loses politically.”

Got that? The military is waging war on Barry. Intentionally. However, I would think, based on Obama’s numerous campaign talking points about increasing troop strength by several brigades would be a win, politically. But, it is a shame that the Left has to think about war in terms of what is politically best, rather than what is best to win. Of course, politics is life for the Left.

Anyhow, this article brought on some interesting comments from the Reality Based Community

• I’ve never been very comfortable with Gates in Obama’s administration. He doesn’t do anything really crazy to to get attention (and I sleep better knowing that Mr. Ding “Don” Rumsfield is out of the picture)…but, any Bush holdover, especially in Defense, is dangerous. I hope Hersch is over-reacting, but if he isn’t, I hope Obama’s got a plan to deal with all of these guys, at once. (don’t worry, I’m sure Obama has plenty of plans to deal with American’s who disagree with him. None to deal with threats to America, though)
• The Pentagon is hopelessly infested with neocons and Christian fanatics……who believe they’re in a “crusade” against Islam. (translation: too many Joooooooo lovers and non-Muslim religious folks)
• I agree. They are dangerous fanatics. (but, Islamic terrorists are “freedom fighters“)
• This is much of the problem. They can’t think outside the ‘end times’ box. (I guess they are all “fundies,” as well)
• Here we see the real enemy of our nation – once again the enemy within - the military industrial organization – the military and the corporations. POWER. (got that? The military, established by the Constitution, is the enemy)
• I’d start by reassigning McChrystal. That was a punk move by him. Obama needs to let those boys know that he’s in charge. (I thought Rahm Emanual and David Axelrod were in charge)
• Have you seen him, heard him talk? He’s an a**hole, bitter and dictatorial. (Is the DUmmy talking about McChrystal, or Barry?)
• He should be replaced on principle.These are not zealots but patriots fighting invaders. (Told ya! The Islamists are patriots, the US military is the bad guy)
• I’m sorry to say that I cannot respect military brass. The military seems to be corporate – evangelical – bigoted – and many have not grown up enough to treat women of the nations they are invading and occupying like humans – as well as our own – their co-military female soldiers. (DU moonbattery wrapped up in one nice, neat ball)

You just knew that, at some point, this thread had to move from “barking moonbat” to “bat sh*t crazy,” right? Here we go!

Red Cloud: Line up those who oppose their President and shoot them. Pre Pinochet thinking here. Their job is to do or die, not to become the Pentagon Propaganda machine (no comment necessary)

Wetzelbill: They flat refused to snatch terrorists when Clinton was president They did it several times. I think even The Weekly Standard wrote about that before. Richard Clarke discusses this in his book, Against All Enemies. There are people in the military status quo who will go along with any harebrained GOP scheme yet fight tooth and nail against anything that a Dem president wants. That’s just how it is. (huh? Now they are blaming the military for Clinton not accepting Osama on a platter three times?)

Greengestalt: How ’bout using force?…… And I’d just PURGE the NeoCON and “Dominionist” plants overnight. All of them, dishonorably discharged, no leave, no pay, no medical, no disability. I’d have the media, on threat of “Abuse of the Patriot act” quickly throw together made for TV movies that show them as child raping, “Non-Christian troop” fragging, psychopathic Nazis and take a few (quite a few, actually) examples of them harassing and threatening other troops and make sure those are played to ‘balance’ if they ever manage to get on the news about that. That way they’d be a huge burden on the “Religious Right”, while the rest of the real army could be repaired and mobilized for peaceful (non-armed) civilian public works projects.

I’d want to cut defense spending by 2/3, with 1/3 going to paying the debt, 1/3 to infrastructure. Laid off troops would become public servants in the new mass-transit systems. Due to all the enemies America has earned we’d need a small but still top trained army and a small nuclear ‘deterrent’, and sadly that would be the remaining 1/3. Basically, enough to defend the homeland, launch a limited “Precision Strike” if we decide to and the “MAD” option but in a smaller state.

But don’t say that the Left hates the military.

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove

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The Justice Department’s ruling, which affects races for City Council and mayor, went so far as to say partisan elections are needed so that black voters can elect their “candidates of choice” – identified by the department as those who are Democrats and almost exclusively black.

The department ruled that white voters in Kinston will vote for blacks only if they are Democrats and that therefore the city cannot get rid of party affiliations for local elections because that would violate black voters’ right to elect the candidates they want.

Several federal and local politicians would like the city to challenge the decision in court. They say voter apathy is the largest barrier to black voters’ election of candidates they prefer and that the Justice Department has gone too far in trying to influence election results here. Stephen LaRoque, a former Republican state lawmaker who led the drive to end partisan local elections, called the Justice Department’s decision “racial as well as partisan.” “On top of that, you have an unelected bureaucrat in Washington, D.C., overturning a valid election,” he said. “That is un-American.”

The decision, made by the same Justice official who ordered the dismissal of a voting rights case against members of the New Black Panther Party in Philadelphia, has irritated other locals as well. They bristle at federal interference in this city of nearly 23,000 people, two-thirds of whom are black.

In interviews in sleepy downtown Kinston – a place best known as a road sign on the way to the Carolina beaches – residents said partisan voting is largely unimportant because people are personally acquainted with their elected officials and are familiar with their views.

More here

Posted by John Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.). For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. To keep up with attacks on free speech see TONGUE-TIED. Also, don’t forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me here

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“I think I’ve got it—the hate in America and where it’s coming from. Rush Limbaugh’s effort—aborted by his fellow investors, it seems—to buy the St. Louis Rams has given me the insight…

So the hate: I think people have a natural instinct to want to declaim, to inveigh, denounce, opine, and show-off to great rhetorical effect. It’s as natural as dreaming of playing major league baseball (it is, speech for speech’s sake, like baseball, a man’s thing). People (men) just want to hear themselves talk….

And the people who do it well, the only people who do it with any formality and structure, are conservatives. The art of this—the formal discipline of rhetoric taught in classrooms for generations—has fallen out of fashion in our era. Except, that is, on right-wing radio and on Fox News. It is the mesmerizing thing about all of these conservatives, not just the bile, but the cadence.. conservatives practice old-fashioned big-breath talking, long oom pa pa flights of castigation and censure and reproach and excoriation and threat and blame and denunciation in which meaning takes a back seat to verbal skill and style….

Losing out on the pure joy of owning an NFL team—as close as you get to being a true potentate in America—Rush may be facing a level of personal disappointment that few of us can truly appreciate, but he’s not weeping. Instead he’s blissfully self-dramatizing, channeling his pain into a great rhythmic flow which blocks out the sound of anybody else.

This, I think, is the root of hate speech: The conservatives talkers have shown many fragile people how to use rhetorical effect—repetitions, rising and falling pitch, tempo, structured breathing, metonymy, synecdoche, and a variety of tried-and-true tropes (“our country over 200 years old now”), combined with passionate enmity —to achieve a little place in the sun….

Source

The writer above is Michael Wolff, a journalist. He is a former columnist for New York magazine and currently is the media columnist for Vanity Fair magazine as well as a television commentator on CNBC. As such he appears pretty eloquent. I guess that makes him a practitioner of hate speech too. He clearly hates Rush. From his argument above, it would seem that his hatred of Rush has quite deranged him. I wonder has he realized that his criticism of Rush would apply equally well to Obama!

The source of some of the the libels against Rush has now been tentatively identified. It is a super-”correct” NYC law firm — Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler LLP — with far-Left connections and which has been a big donor to Obama. It has a specialty in sports-related matters. Lying is apparently part of that specialty. Being truthful is not part of “correctness”, it would seem. Let’s hope Rush takes them on in the courts.

(For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, DISSECTING LEFTISM, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena . List of backup or “mirror” sites here or here — for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is “down” or failing to update. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.)

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