I don’t usually blog on politics. It’s just not my thing. Not that I don’t have opinions—I just save the research and writing for my own specialty. But this went so far over the line that I can’t leave it alone. I’ll give you the specifics, but this viscious attack on Obama’s parentage is belongs at a Klan rally rather than a respected (by some) national publication. Let me show you…
[A]ll of my mixed race, black/white classmates throughout my youth, some of whom I am still in contact with, were the product of very culturally specific unions. They were always the offspring of a white mother, (in my circles, she was usually Jewish, but elsewhere not necessarily) and usually a highly educated black father. And how had these two come together at a time when it was neither natural nor easy for such relationships to flourish? Always through politics… Usually the Communist Youth League. Or maybe a different arm of the CPUSA. But, for a white woman to marry a black man in 1958, or 60, there was almost inevitably a connection to explicit Communist politics.
So, by generalizing your limited experience, it is clear that all mixed race couples came together through communist mentors. Care to offer up some actual data? Of course not. It’s too absurd.
I don’t know how Barak Obama’s parents met. But the Kincaid article referenced above makes a very convincing case that Obama’s family, later, (mid 1970s) in Hawaii, had close relations with a known black Communist intellectual… it’s an open question what it means practically to have been politically mentored by an official Communist. (emphasis mine)
Exactly the point…you don’t know how they met, and yet you are willing to (literally) tar him with your racist brush. And, yes, despite your protestations below, it is racist. I’ll explain in a bit. And of course, since his parents knew a communist, Obama is a communist. Is that the transitive theory of communism? Is it the Lamarckian communist theory? How does that work? Has Obama written, said, or otherwise proposed centralized ownership of the means of production? DO YOU HAVE ANY DATA TO BACK UP YOUR RIDICULOUS ASSERTIONS???
Political correctness was invented precisely to prevent the mainstream liberal media from persuing the questions which might arise about how Senator Obama’s mother, from Kansas, came to marry an African graduate student. Love? Sure, why not? But what else was going on around them that made it feasible? Before readers level cheap accusations of racism — let’s recall that the very question of interracial marriage only became a big issue later in the 1960s.
P.C. was invented to keep people from asking about interracial couples’ private business? How…far-sighted of them, whomever “they” may be. Racism isn’t a “cheap accusation”. You have taken an individual and made certain very offensive and harmful assumptions about the person based on senseless generalizations, and published them in order to cause him harm. You just can’t get anymore racist without a hood and a noose.
It was, of course, an explicit tactic of the Communist party to stir up discontent among American blacks, with an eye toward using them as the leading edge of the revolution. To be sure, there was much to be discontented about, for black Americans, prior to the civil-rights revolution. To their credit, of course, most black Americans didn’t buy the commie line — and showed more faith in the possibilities of democratic change than in radical politics, and the results on display in Moscow.
Time for some investigative journalism about the Obama family’s background, now that his chances of being president have increased so much.
And to cap it off, an invitation for the rest of America’s racists to jump on her Klandwagon.
This is easily the most offensive piece of mainstream journalism that I’ve seen in years. I’m hoping it is a measure of how desperate those on the far right are as their ideas have bankrupted the country, morally and financially, over the last 7 years. Lisa Schiffren should be ashamed. But of course, she has no shame.
Where in THE HELL did you find this article? Did I miss the reference? Was this really mainstream journal?
Never thought I’d see something like that.
Linky is up in the first paragraph…
Don’t worry. I’m sure democratic senator Byrd from West Virginia, who is an admitted member of the Klan, will probably vote for Obama. He has no shame either.
Lisa Schiffren is a former speech writer for Dan Quayle and was instrumental in fanning the “Murphy Brown’s baby” silliness. Unfortunately, the National Review has provided her with a regular soap box for her small-mindedness. Democrats are “commies” and liberals are the enemy. At a Nancy Pelosi fund-raiser that she writes about (NR Jan. 9) she notes she endured being seated with “Jews from the Upper West Side of Manhattan” and drank wine that was “probably Italian.” Other people at the dinner are singled out for their ethnicity. Pelosi is called a “prom queen.” Schiffren goes on, and on, and on about the event, from the size of the pearls in her necklace to who had botox. I hope you, PalMD, plan to cancel your NR subscription.
LOL! I hope I never have a subscription! Someone clued me in to the article. I don’t think I’d ever been to their site before this. I’m not sure I have enough emesis basins to allow me to go back there again.
heh, I almost wonder what people like this would do if America DID go commie.
Ah, Dan Quayle’s speechwriter! That explains the dumb spelling of “persuing” and the excessive use of commas.
[...] ein Präsidentschaftskandidat derart umstritten? ~ Obamas Worte sind nicht einfach Blasen ~ Is this for real? ~ Barak Obama is the Antichrist? Thursday, February 21, 2008 | at 9:49 [...]
While mainstream, the National Review isn’t exactly a centrist publication. William F. Buckley and Michelle Malkin are regular contributors, and Ann Coulter was until she said something so over the top they canned her. (I don’t remember what.)
What cracked me up about the part you copied is this: “Political correctness was invented precisely to prevent the mainstream liberal media from persuing (sic) the questions which might arise about how Senator Obama’s mother, from Kansas, came to marry an African graduate student. Love? Sure, why not? But what else was going on around them that made it feasible?” Um. Classes, perhaps? Universities have brought together many couples odder than the parents of Senator Obama.
Eww, that was just ugly. I really would have thought that in 2008 we would be beyond the point where a person could be tarred in this way, but I guess not.
I think I understand what is going on and how this happens. Yes, it does involve nitric oxide.
I think it relates to Theory of Mind (ToM), and how people form mental representations of other people and so impute motivations to what they do and try to figure out how they will react in different circumstances. In order to understand another person’s motivations and reasoning, it is necessary to emulate that person. Humans (and other social animals) have neural structures to do exactly this. These neural structures are not well understood. However they are involved in communication and in mimicry. Part of this system is known as “mirror neurons”. These neurons become characteristically activated when a person observes someone else doing something, for example reaching for an object.
In autism spectrum disorders, it is observed that there is a disruption of mirror neurons, and that people with ASDs don’t have the neurotypical (NT) ToM. Some consider this to be a “defect”; others consider it to simply be a difference. People with ASDs do have a ToM, it is just different, and often is a ToM that NTs cannot understand. If you cannot understand a person’s ToM, you cannot understand that person. Often when people do not understand another person’s ToM, they project their own ToM onto that person, imputing the motivations that they would have were they in that circumstance.
When interacting with a person that cannot be understood, a normal human reaction is to externalize the “fault” in understanding, that it to impute pathology, or difference, or malevolence on the part of the individual that is not understood. This is commonly known as xenophobia. People experiencing xenophobia perceive the objects of their xenophobia as “other”, as not a member of their “group”, and in extreme cases as not even being human. As non-humans, the objects of xenophobia cannot be expected to exhibit the traits that real humans exhibit, such as love, compassion, trust, reason.
I think this is the fundamental cause of the xenophobic hatred expressed by Lisa Schiffren. She is unable to understand the liberal ToM, so she feels that anyone who has a liberal ToM is essentially non-human and therefore incapable of the important “human” aspects that she feels about herself and the “real humans” that she does understand. A liberal can’t simply “love” another liberal because liberals are inherently unlovable and inherently incapable of love. The only possible reason (that she can conceive of) that two liberals would stay together is because of their shared pathological political viewpoints.
I know that you are all eagerly waiting to hear how this all relates to NO phsyiology. I think that xenophobia is the “default” state of very high stress, and a high stress state is characterized by low NO. NO is one of the things that regulates functional connectivity in the brain, and the more stressed one becomes, that functional connectivity become shorter range. The effect is that the “closely coupled” volume elements of the brain become smaller, and so are only capable of doing things that are more simple (than under low stress conditions), but they can be done faster. As your stress level increases, your ToM becomes more simple because only smaller brain regions remain closely coupled and a small region can’t support a big complex ToM schema. Your responses become more simple (and more predictable), but more important, your ability to understand other people’s ToM becomes impaired unless their ToM closely matches your own now simplified ToM.
I think this type of behavior is readily observable. Under conditions of extreme stress, one aligns with those with shared ToMs. Stress makes the ToM more simplistic. I think this is the source of the psychology of mobs. The ToM of the members of the mob seeks the lowest common denomenator, usually a xenophobic lowest common denominator.
I think this is why politicians (virtually always of a certain type) invoke fear of terrorists. That fear invokes stress, which lowers NO, and induces a simplistic ToM, causing the stressed people to align with politicians with the same simplistic ToM. Any source of stress will move people toward a more simplistic ToM, in a more xenophobic direction, in a more conservative direction.
Understanding, compassion, non-xenophobia are characteristics of low stress, characteristics of individuals with high NO levels. Individuals that characterize these two extremes are the Dalai Lama (meditation (especially of the type he practices) raises NO levels), and George Bush (extreme aerobic exercise lowers NO levels as does cocaine abuse). Compassionate conservatism is an oxymoron.