Charles Murray: Important Thinker

So, if Charles Murray were totally high, like, maybe being high on himself (since he seems vaporous)? And I punched the shit out of his nose because he was totally asking for it? I'm pretty sure Charles Murray would, whenever he sobered up from being high on himself, totally turn around and be all up my ass for assault. As he should be, because just being drunk or high does not somehow make a person not a victim. Is he trying to say a drunk or high victim is not a very reliable witness?

Bingo. A high or drunk person is prone to remembering things badly and out of order and can't necessarily speak to what they did or did not do to defend themselves, for example. They were vulnerable, in other words. Which I think would make them more subject to being considered victims when someone took advantage of their screwed-up state, but I dunno. Maybe he's saying being fucked up enough to be vulnerable is your own damn fault, victims, so...

Ah. Maybe credibility is situational. Maybe more than one thing about anyone's life story might be dependent on the context of their lived experience. It could be that we don't live in a correlation/causation world, but a complex grid of inter-relating concepts where the experience of rape by a drunk girl is not dependent upon her being able to totally nail the obstacle of convincing judgmental old douches of her victimization, but of our ability to glean what happened in the context surrounding her (or him--men also experience sexual assault, and are also treated like shit for being imperfect victims.)

Does anyone exactly know what century Charles Murray is living in these days? I want to say the 19th because of the flagrant racism, but the rape-apologist edge  kind of makes him a man for all really awful seasons. That question might have seemed provocative to him--but it's old hat for people who care about victims' rights and the importance of hearing them out. So. Wow. I'm taking his brand-newness to this question very seriously. Does someone ask that question as an academic legitimately not knowing where it leads? Or is he trolling the contrarian point that imperfect rape victims must be liars, or deserving of what happened to them?

Both of those possibilities seem really horrible to me.  I just curate this comment for the benefit of my readers. Because otherwise--I can't sort out what else to do with it.

Privileged Ass Paul Ryan Decries Lazy Inner City Men

It's reaaaaallly unfair to categorize Rep. Paul Ryan (R) as a racist just because he endorses the studies of the basically white supremacist "scholar" Charles Murray, who is to race relations something like what Regnerus is to gay studies. (I am not even fooling with calling Murray a "white nationalist", even if I get that he's calling whites the real Americans. His line of inquiry seems to be why aren't ahem "other people" experiencing what white folks do and his results are predictably in line with the bias of the question.)  What I would say is that Ryan will use anything he finds to demolish any economic program servicing the poor whether it serves black, white, or tangerine people, because he thinks "poor" is a moral value. A bad one. If you are poor, you are bad and you should feel bad. It isn't about the color of anything but your money.

This is disgusting, though. It's like calling "health" a moral value and saying that people with any physical condition short of perfectly fit are bad and should feel bad. Cancer? Heart disease? Bad case of the old and ricketies? Ah, you should have thought of that before you had a fallible physical body, you shirking lazy bastard. So, sick? It's quite on you. Poor--that's you, too.

And if you are disadvantaged and tend demographically to be poorer, like "inner city" or is that "urban" or do we completely have your number, Rep. Ryan and can go ahead and say "black" people? Why, then, Rep. Ryan is fully on board with saying that the existence of the social safety net such as it is provides a disincentive to work! A hammock, if you will.

But you know what I think is the real disincentive? Work that doesn't pay. "Education" that doesn't educate. Our failure to translate the language of opportunity into applicability for young people who would succeed if they were shown ways to triumph instead of being chastised.

I dunno. There's a lot of benefits of society poured into Paul Ryan, and this is where his thought process leads him? He's swinging on a little net called privilege that doesn't ask him to try any harder to figure out how to rectify a troubled world. I can't say I am therefore rooting for his success. From those to whom much was given, should much be expected? Waiting.

About Last Night's Debate--

I caught dribs and drabs of this monstrosity, but I didn't see the whole thing. I think it bears saying that John King is just about hackiest hack who ever hacky-sacked in Hackersville. I thinks he most reminds me of a mutant tomato who longs to be a weatherman.  But it isn't his fault--I'll pretend.

But that Rick Santorum cites Charles Murray's cherry-picked guide to the power of positive scolding is kind of interesting.  I've seen people on the left provide critical reasoning to pick it apart--but he seems to consider this book, and Murray, cite-worthy. The book's conclusions aren't too different from his own, after all. I refrain from commenting on whether he agrees with the rest of Murray's scholarship.

Charles Murray has Discovered White People are Not a Monolith, Laments.

I am probably going to my library to read this one for teh lulz; the author, Charles Murray, who with Richard J. Herrnstein wrote the notorious The Bell Curve, has written a book on the startling notion that there is a difference between white people of different classes.

The rich, they're different.  Whodathunk?

Anywhoo, I found out about this thing of brilliance and scholastic achievement from both Roy Edroso and Erik Loomis today, and I am already astonished that this is where The Bell Curve's author wound up. Would working class whites like myself be better behaved if we spoke the same language as rich schmucks like Mitt Romney? Okay, player, you've got me. Or wait, is he saying they should learn how to talk down to us? Huh! Let me pause and reflect on that. If my betters, like George Herbert Walker Bush could only pretend to like pork rinds, or if his scion, could only be NASCAR-compatible, wouldn't we all get off the meth and lead more productive lives? 

Um, no?  But since I haven't read this, and all I really have is some of his recent dumbfuckery, let's look at some of that:

We are watching the maturation of the cognitive stratification that Richard J. Herrnstein and I described in "The Bell Curve" back in 1994. When educational and professional opportunities first opened up, we saw social churning galore, as youngsters benefited from opportunities that their parents had been denied. But that phase lasted only a generation or two, slowed by this inescapable paradox:

The more efficiently a society identifies the most able young people of both sexes, sends them to the best colleges, unleashes them into an economy that is tailor-made for people with their abilities and lets proximity take its course, the sooner a New Elite -- the "cognitive elite" that Herrnstein and I described -- becomes a class unto itself. It is by no means a closed club, as Barack Obama's example proves. But the credentials for admission are increasingly held by the children of those who are already members. An elite that passes only money to the next generation is evanescent ("Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations," as the adage has it). An elite that also passes on ability is more tenacious, and the chasm between it and the rest of society widens.

Oh fuck. He discovered the 1%, and now thinks they're a bloody meritocracy just because they've figured out the secret handshake.