Tal Fortgang, demonic freshman!

TUESDAY, MAY 6, 2014

Carol Leifer’s joke: Demonically, Mary Elizabeth Williams seems to agree with something Tal Fortgang said!

For the record, the aforementioned Fortgang is a college freshman. For that reason, there’s no obvious reason to care about the things he says, or to expect great insight from him.

We don’t mean that as a criticism. Tal Fortgang is still a teenager. Like most teenagers, like all adults, he has a lot to learn.

Young Fortgang’s views don’t exactly matter. But over at the new Salon, they’re staging their latest group nervous breakdown about something the demonic freshman wrote for a campus newspaper.

Williams authored one of the pieces in which Salon kills the pig.

Even for the new Salon, this has been a pitiful breakdown. But good lord! Williams seems to agree with Fortgang’s basic point, to the extent that he managed to state one.

In a piece for The Princeton Tory, Tal Fortgang ’17 complained about being told, during discussions, that he should “check his privilege.” And good lord:

This directive can be dumb and annoying, Williams basically says:

WILLIAMS (5/5/14): To be fair to [Fortgang], though, “Check your privilege” has become the “Is there gluten in this?” of public discourse, an expression so promiscuously deployed it’s bound to incite a few eyerolls along the way. And it can be a pretty damn convenient way of shutting down conversation, suggesting that someone who hasn’t faced certain biases firsthand has no right to comment on them. We certainly saw plenty of how that line of thinking can miss the point entirely just a few weeks ago, when white male Stephen Colbert was the subject of misguided outrage when a satirical bit was taken out of context.

Williams, an outlier at Salon, thinks it can be annoying and dumb when people are told to “check their privilege.”

Williams admits that this command can be dumbly deployed—that it “can be a pretty damn convenient way of shutting down conversation.” But that’s pretty much where the underaged Fortgang started:

FORTGANG (4/2/14): There is a phrase that floats around college campuses, Princeton being no exception, that threatens to strike down opinions without regard for their merits, but rather solely on the basis of the person that voiced them. “Check your privilege,” the saying goes, and I have been reprimanded by it several times this year.

Has this expression been dumbly deployed in response to things Fortgang has said? There’s no way to answer that question. Young Fortgang never explains what he said to occasion this rejoinder, and—being a college freshman—he quickly wanders off into the high grass from there.

Fortgang is a fuzzy thinker and writer—but then, he’s a college freshman! On that basis, it doesn’t exactly matter what he has thought or said.

That said, the clueless people at Time magazine reprinted his sophomoric essay. The slightly older children at the new Salon pounced.

By now, the site has engaged in an orgy of Salonsplaining aimed at the demonic freshman. In one inevitable example, Katie McDonough attacked the “ridiculous baby tantrum” which identifies The Evil One as a “white racist.”

Pathetically, Salon has published four separate screeds denouncing the Fortgang of One. That’s four separate screeds and counting.

Can we talk? Salon’s work is pitiful, hopeless, cosmically dumb. If the new Salon didn’t exist, the Koch Brothers would invent it.

In fairness, it would make sense to criticize Time for reprinting Fortgang’s jumbled piece. His piece is fuzzy, virtually worthless. At Time, no one could tell.

Alas! The overwrought children of Salon aren’t challenging their counterparts at Time. They’re deconstructing the fuzzy thoughts of their most-despised college freshman.

This has made us think of Carol Leifer’s old joke, a joke we’ve cited before. The joke used to go something like this (for all we know, it still does):

Carol would describe the way people like to fool their dogs by pretending to throw a ball. The punchline would go something like this:

“How far down the evolutionary scale do we have to go to find someone to whom we’re superior?”

The new Salon has answered the question posed in Leifer’s old joke.

A basic change in framework: Needless to say, privileged people of various kinds may well have their perspectives affected by their status in life. In some circumstance, it may be helpful to remind someone of this.

Elsewhere, the direction to “check your privilege” becomes the latest Mao-flavored technique for triumphantly stopping discussion, as Williams managed to note.

It’s interesting to ponder a shift in perspective. Decades ago, discussions turned on the basic concept of “discrimination.” People challenged inappropriate acts aimed at members of “minority groups.”

At some point, the Stalinist-inflected youngsters substituted “privilege” for “discrimination” as the basic conceptual framework. This provides a wondrous way to attack all claims from Otherized bourgeois groups.

(It's no longer “discrimination” when a black person can’t get a cab. It’s “privilege” when Fortgang can! Unchallenged, this change in perspective can give our rampaging Maoist children big tubs of rhetorical power.)

The new Salon is a troubling place to visit. Quite often, the work at the site is remarkably dumb. As an obvious matter of corporate policy, its click-bait headlines are absurdly dishonest, as everyone has noticed.

Quite often, Salon makes progressives look stunningly dumb. The Salonists seem intent on sowing divisions within the 99 percent.

Did the Koch Brothers invent the site? We no longer feel entirely sure, but this is how power survives.

TUSCALOOSA LIBERALS: In search of Central High’s senior class!

TUESDAY, MAY 6, 2014

Part 2—Hannah-Jones softens the blow: We the people should thank the gods for kids like D’Leisha Dent.

Dent is a student at Central High, one of Tuscaloosa, Alabama’s three public high schools. She’s president of her senior class. Last fall, she was homecoming queen.

Dent is a highly accomplished athlete, a three-time individual state champion in track. Most important:

Based on the recent profile of Dent by Nikole Hannah-Jones, D’Leisha Dent wants to do good and do well in the world. It sounds like she’s a superb young person, like many others in Tuscaloosa—white and black, city and county.

Hannah-Jones' lengthy report appears in The Atlantic. For background, see yesterday’s post.

There is one downside to this portrait. Dent doesn’t exactly “excel in school,” though Hannah-Jones makes that peculiar, feel-good claim near the end of her report, which runs more than 9900 words.

Before she does, she cues the violins and starts to build the pathos, offering this portrait of Central High and the “stigma” it bears. In this way, Hannah-Jones softens the blow before presenting Dent’s academic profile:

HANNAH-JONES (4/16/14): [I]n many ways Central is like any other high school. It’s got its jocks, its nerds, its mean girls and band geeks. D’Leisha herself is the all-American girl—the homecoming queen dating a football player. But students and staff say most people see only one thing about Central: it’s all black. And that still bears a stigma...

The principal struggles to explain to students how the segregation they experience is any different from the old version simply because no law requires it. “It is hard, it is a tough conversation, and it is a conversation I don’t think we as adults want to have.”

Standing one day last fall outside the counselor’s office at Central, D’Leisha looked up at the college bulletin board. It was dominated by National Guard and Army flyers, with some brochures for small Alabama colleges tucked among them. Students with D’Leisha’s grades and tough honors coursework often come home to mailboxes stuffed with glossy college brochures. But most days, nothing showed up in the mail for her, and no colleges had come calling.

As she continues, Hannah-Jones describes the one downside to this superb young person—in at least four tries, she hasn’t scored well enough on the ACT to qualify for attention from a four-year college. But before we’re given that news, we get the pathos, as we’re told that Dent has achieved good grades in “tough honors coursework” at Central.

The word “stigma” is littered into the portrait, pleasing our lazy hearts.

Can we talk? This superb young person isn’t facing an empty mailbox because of a “stigma” attached to her school. D’Leisha Dent, a superb young person, isn’t getting approached by colleges because of her low ACT scores, which suggest that she possibly shouldn’t have been assigned “tough honors coursework” at all.

Finally, Hannah-Jones delivers the bad news. This news defines one part of our brutal American history. It helps define the size of one problem we still face moving forward.

That said, Hannah-Jones has filled our heads with many distractions and misdirections before she delivers this unwelcome news about a superlative kid:

HANNAH-JONES (continuing directly): She had taken the ACT college-entrance exam twice already. The first time she scored a 16, the second time a 17. Her mother’s alma mater, the University of Alabama, expects a 21, the national average. Many four-year colleges will not even consider students who score below an 18.

“My biggest fear right now is the ACT,” D’Leisha said. “I don’t have a good score. It’s been on my mind a lot.” She described an ACT study session she’d attended last summer at a community college. “We were with kids from Northridge, and they knew things we didn’t know,” she said. “They had done things we hadn’t done.”

Because D’Leisha excels in school and everything else she’s involved in, her teachers and counselors don’t worry about whether she’s on the right track. They’re stretched thin trying to keep in class the seniors—roughly 35 percent of them—who fail to graduate each year. But in December, at home texting with her boyfriend, D’Leisha admitted that she’d filled out only one college application. Lately, she said, she’d been looking more closely at those military brochures, just as her grandfather had, something that angers her mother. “I am kind of clueless how to get stuff done for college,” D’Leisha told me, looking down and fidgeting with her phone. “They are supposed to be helping us, but they think because I am the class president I know what to do. Sometimes I don’t speak up, because I know people have expectations of me.”

[...]

Late last year, D’Leisha took the ACT for the third time, but her score dropped back to 16. So early on a Saturday in February, she got up quietly, forced a few bites of a muffin into her nervous stomach, and drove once again to the community college where the test is administered. A few weeks later, she got her score: 16 again. She contemplated a fifth attempt, but could see little point.

That passage describes a series of failures. On its surface, it describes a failure by Dent’s teachers and counselors, who assume she knows what she’s doing with respect to her pursuit of college.

Beneath the surface, it describes at least two other failures. It describes an apparent failure by Melissa Dent, D’Leisha Dent’s mother, a university graduate who ought to be helping her child with this daunting task.

In our view, it also describes a failure by Hannah-Jones, who has spent many thousands of words filling the heads of liberal and mainstream readers with a succession of feel-good themes before she drops this information at the end of her lengthy piece. In this way, she helps us persist in our cluelessness and our lack of concern about the depth of the challenge described in this tribally feel-good piece.

Does D’Leisha Dent “excel in school?” Dent is a superlative kid—but actually no, she does not. (Neither do many others.)

Should Dent have been taking “tough honors coursework?” Did she take tough honors coursework? Let’s recall the description of her Advanced Placement English class:

HANNAH-JONES: She [Dent] eventually broke free from a tangle of girls to enter Tyrone Jones’s Advanced Placement English class and take her seat at the front. She dropped two black bags taut with notebooks and binders beside her desk.

Jones didn’t waste time setting the boisterous class to task. The AP exam was approaching. Students who didn’t score high enough wouldn’t get college credit for the class. Even though the 17 girls and boys gathered in front of him made up Central’s brightest, their practice essay about a poem hadn’t gone so well.

D’Leisha raised her hand, her brow furrowed. How many kids had made the cutoff last year? she asked. Only two students had, but the teacher dodged the question. “I really do believe all of you can make those scores,” he said.

Based upon enrollment figures, the 17 kids in that AP class constitute perhaps the top twelve percent of Central High’s senior class. And yet one of those kids, a superlative person, can’t come close to producing a score that might get her those college brochures. Even with her superlative citizenship and her athletic success, colleges aren’t interested.

You can trust us—that lack of interest isn’t because of a stigma. It’s because of those low ACT scores.

Please understand: If Hannah-Jones can be trusted at all (and she can), D’Leisha Dent is a superb young person. But also understand this:

Based on what we’ve been told, it seems the ninety percent of Central High’s kids may “excel in school” even less than she does—and plainly, she seems to be struggling.

By normal standards, D’Leisha Dent is struggling in school—and yet, she seems to be in the upper ranks of her school’s senior class! Adjusting for kids who have dropped out, she probably ranks in the top ten percent of the freshmen who entered Central High four years ago, in her class.

Why does such a superlative kid find herself in this position? And what about the rest of those kids, the kids who are doing less well?

For decades, mainstream and liberal writers have handed us feel-good treatments of these important questions. On balance, we’d have to say that Hannah-Jones has extended that tradition.

We liberals—you might call us “Tuscaloosa liberals” this week—seem to prefer it that way. To all appearances, we “Tuscaloosa liberals” don’t care much about superb kids like Dent.

We like to have our tribal beliefs reinforced in familiar, feel-good ways. If that doesn’t help superb kids like Dent, that seems to be too damn bad.

Tomorrow: Explanations, good and bad

Breaking: You aren’t allowed to invent your facts!

MONDAY, MAY 5, 2014

In writing opinion columns: Are you allowed to make up facts in writing an opinion column?

Several readers of the Washington Post don’t seem to be entirely clear on this question. For reasons which aren’t entirely clear, the Post decided to publish their letters this weekend.

The most recent flap began with this letter from Brant Olson, campaign director of an organization called Forecast the Facts.

Olson’s organization had petitioned the Post, and other newspapers, not to publish false information concerning climate change. In his April 11 column, Charles Krauthammer referred to Olson’s group as “thought police on patrol.”

Obviously, a newspaper shouldn’t publish false information about any topic. And no—the fact that you’re writing an “opinion column” doesn’t give you the right to invent and publish false facts.

People will often disagree about which “facts” have been established. But no—writers of opinion columns don’t get to make up their facts.

You’d think that everyone would understand this basic idea. On Saturday, the Post published letters from two different people who seemed unclear on this point.

The first letter started like this:

LETTER TO THE WASHINGTON POST (5/3/14): The April 26 Free for All letter from Brant Olson of Forecast the Facts argued that The Post should stop publishing “misinformation” about climate change on its opinion pages. Apparently, Olson thinks there cannot be two opinions on this issue if one of those opinions conflicts with “the conclusions of climate scientists.” He then went on to say that climate scientists have “different answers” as to what civilization will look like in the future based on computer modeling and “educated guesses.” Despite these different answers, he alleged that there is a consensus among climate scientists and that anyone who disagrees with it is spreading “misinformation.”

This first letter struck us as rather garbled. It seemed to us that it muddled the things Olson said.

The second letter was much worse. In our view, it completely misunderstood the nature of Olson’s petition:

LETTER TO THE WASHINGTON POST: In his April 26 Free for All letter, “Missing the mark on climate change,” Brant Olson of the group Forecast the Facts took issue with Charles Krauthammer’s April 11 op-ed column, “Thought police on patrol.” Krauthammer’s piece appeared on the op-ed page, which is where opinions are printed. Olson wants “The Post’s leadership” to “step in” to stop Krauthammer and others from expressing certain views on climate science, stating that they “should have no place in a space intended to further an informed debate.” This certainly proves Krauthammer correct about the “intolerance” and a “totalitarian” attitude by some with regard to dissenting viewpoints on climate change.

This writer seemed to have no idea about the nature of this problem.

Krauthammer wrote for the op-ed page, this letter writer correctly said—and that “is where opinions are printed.” She didn’t seem to understand a very basic rule of the road:

If you write an opinion column, you aren’t allowed to include false facts. You can state your opinion or view about the problem under review. But in the process, you aren’t allowed to make up bogus facts.

Has Charles Krauthammer published false facts concerning climate change? The question must be evaluated on a fact-by-fact basis.

But we couldn’t help wondering if the Post should have published these letters. They took a basic conceptual point and muddled it up pretty good.

Final point:

In a slightly more rational world, the logicians and philosophy professors would help us sort these matters out.

In our world, the philosophy professors regard such basic matters as being beneath their dignity. Instead, they publish thoroughly incoherent work of their own.

They then accept tuition fees to spread their own forms of confusion around. Parents rush to pay these fees, wanting the best for their kids.

Your Daily Howler calls its shot!

MONDAY, MAY 5, 2014

Dowd says Clinton loves cash: As Maureen Dowd keeps getting more fatuous, her paper—the famous New York Times—keeps giving her columns a higher platform.

Yesterday, she was on the front page (Gack!) of the Sunday Review again. By her third paragraph, she was typing the name most sacred within her religion, the name she loves typing best:

DOWD ((5/4/14): The First Family is all over the news, discussing the management of the economy, income inequality, raising the minimum wage, the vicissitudes of press coverage and the benefits of healthy eating.

Everywhere you look, the Clintons rule.

Bill popped up on the front page of The Times giving a speech at his alma mater, Georgetown University, in which he defended his economic policies and chastised the press for its tendency to create a “storyline” that doesn’t match reality. (Sort of like the storyline the Clintons created about Monica Lewinsky being a delusional stalker.)

It represented the fifth time Dowd has mentioned Miss Lewinsky in a column. By that, we mean the fifth time this year, almost twenty years later!

Before we share a prior example, let’s note the way we called our shot again last week.

Last Thursday, we noted Gail Collins’ snarky remark about Hillary Clinton’s offensive money-grubbing. To recall our prescience, click here.

Lady Collins had two separate complaints. Hillary was getting paid too much for her speeches. And she was getting paid too much by a lower industrial class.

It had the slight feel on an onrushing meme. And sure enough! There was Dowd in yesterday’s column, skillfully reinforcing:

DOWD: Some Obama aides get irritated when Hillary distances herself from Obama and when her advisers paint her as tougher than Obama, someone who wouldn’t be afraid to drop the hammer and sickle on Vladimir Putin.

And some in Obamaworld think she could have skipped her $200,000-plus speeches to Goldman Sachs and helped the stumbling president make his push on health care, given that the push was focused on moms and kids, an area of interest for the woman who would be the first woman president.

For the record, we think politicians like Hillary Clinton make too much money too. But we know Dowd and Collins do!

(For the record, Dowd bumped Clinton’s speaking fee down from where Lady Collins had it.)

Last Thursday, we suggested the natives were getting restless about Clinton. Yesterday, Dowd’s latest tedious, high-profile effort showed that we called our shot.

Clinton and Clinton are money-grubbers! The natives are starting to cast about for snarky themes they can beat to death.

But one beloved snarky theme will never die for Dowd. She expressed it best at the start of the year, as she pondered the political problems of pizza:

DOWD (1/15/14): Pizza can be hazardous to an administration. We all remember what happened when a Clinton intern delivered a pie to the Oval Office during a government shutdown.

We all remembered what happened in 95? With Dowd around, who could forget?

Why was Dowd pondering pizza that cold winter day? Jon Stewart had joked about the way Bill de Blasio eats his pie.

This reminded Dowd of “that woman.” But then, as we see in yesterday’s column, almost everything does!

TUSCALOOSA LIBERALS: Portrait of a superb young person!

MONDAY, MAY 5, 2014

Part 1—A strange journalistic claim: We’ve never been to Tuscaloosa, but we can assure you of this:

With the inevitable struggling exceptions, Tuscaloosa is full of good kids and fine young people.

They love their parents. They want to do good and do well in the world.

D’Leisha Dent, 17, is one such outstanding young person. She’s a senior at Central High, one of Tuscaloosa’s three public high schools. Extending back through three generations, her family’s educational history is described in “Segregation Now,” Nikole Hannah-Jones’ flamboyantly-titled, lengthy portrait of Tuscaloosa’s schools.

Hannah-Jones’ lengthy piece appears in The Atlantic. We strongly recommend it. Given our modern liberal values, you’ll see it discussed nowhere else!

Who is D’Leisha Dent? At one point, Hannah-Jones describes her as “the all-American girl—the homecoming queen dating a football player.”

However you feel about that honorific, Dent seems to be one of her school’s outstanding citizens. Along with being homecoming queen, she’s president of her senior class.

Like her mother, Melissa Dent, she’s also an outstanding athlete—“the three-time state indoor shot-put champion,” Hannah-Jones reports. Because she has achieved at that level, we’re going to guess that D’Leisha Dent knows how to apply herself.

We’re going to guess that D’Leisha Dent is a superb young person. At one point, Hannah-Jones sums it up like this: “D’Leisha excels in school and everything else she’s involved in.”

That strikes us as a slightly strange, but rather revealing, journalistic claim.

Does D’Leisha Dent “excel in school?” On balance, we don’t quite know why Hannah-Jones chose to say that. On an objective basis, D’Leisha Dent, a superb young person, doesn’t exactly “excel in school.”

We base that assessment on Hannah-Jones’ reporting. For starters, consider the passage where she describes Dent’s AP English class:

HANNAH-JONES (4/16/14): She [Dent] eventually broke free from a tangle of girls to enter Tyrone Jones’s Advanced Placement English class and take her seat at the front. She dropped two black bags taut with notebooks and binders beside her desk.

Jones didn’t waste time setting the boisterous class to task. The AP exam was approaching. Students who didn’t score high enough wouldn’t get college credit for the class. Even though the 17 girls and boys gathered in front of him made up Central’s brightest, their practice essay about a poem hadn’t gone so well.

D’Leisha raised her hand, her brow furrowed. How many kids had made the cutoff last year? she asked. Only two students had, but the teacher dodged the question. “I really do believe all of you can make those scores,” he said.

Only two kids at Central High had passed the AP exam the year before. That tells us nothing about Dent’s scholastic standing, of course.

Based upon enrollment figures, those 17 kids in that AP class seem to be roughly the top twelve percent of Central High’s senior class. Dent’s inclusion in that group might lead you to say that she has “excelled in school.”

But at the very end of her lengthy report, Hannah-Jones profiles the college prospects of D’Leisha Dent, a superb young person who is one of her school's most respected seniors. The great disgrace of our American history is on display in the following passage, along with the great challenge our miserable history throws us:

HANNAH-JONES: Standing one day last fall outside the counselor’s office at Central, D’Leisha looked up at the college bulletin board. It was dominated by National Guard and Army flyers, with some brochures for small Alabama colleges tucked among them. Students with D’Leisha’s grades and tough honors coursework often come home to mailboxes stuffed with glossy college brochures. But most days, nothing showed up in the mail for her, and no colleges had come calling. She had taken the ACT college-entrance exam twice already. The first time she scored a 16, the second time a 17. Her mother’s alma mater, the University of Alabama, expects a 21, the national average. Many four-year colleges will not even consider students who score below an 18.

[...]

Because D’Leisha excels in school and everything else she’s involved in, her teachers and counselors don’t worry about whether she’s on the right track. They’re stretched thin trying to keep in class the seniors—roughly 35 percent of them—who fail to graduate each year. But in December, at home texting with her boyfriend, D’Leisha admitted that she’d filled out only one college application. Lately, she said, she’d been looking more closely at those military brochures, just as her grandfather had, something that angers her mother. “I am kind of clueless how to get stuff done for college,” D’Leisha told me, looking down and fidgeting with her phone. “They are supposed to be helping us, but they think because I am the class president I know what to do. Sometimes I don’t speak up, because I know people have expectations of me.”

[...]

Late last year, D’Leisha took the ACT for the third time, but her score dropped back to 16. So early on a Saturday in February, she got up quietly, forced a few bites of a muffin into her nervous stomach, and drove once again to the community college where the test is administered. A few weeks later, she got her score: 16 again. She contemplated a fifth attempt, but could see little point.

If that 16 is a composite score, it places Dent in the 22nd percentile nationally. On that basis, we can’t help wondering about the slightly strange journalistic claim that Dent “excels in school.”

Hannah-Jones closes her report with a profile of Dent’s college prospects. “As of this writing, [her college hopes] largely hinge on the tenuous promise of a coach at a small, historically black college outside of Birmingham, who has told her that the school will have a place for her despite her score,” Hannah-Jones writes. “No official offer of admission has yet arrived.”

We’ll bet the farm on our basic premise; D’Leisha Dent is a superb young person. It’s astonishing, and a national problem, that she may not move on to college, even with her athletic success.

All through her lengthy report, Hannah-Jones attempts to explain this puzzling state of affairs. We’ll admit it! On balance, we aren’t fans of Hannah-Jones’ report, although we strongly recommend it as a fascinating history.

In our view, Hannah-Jones’ lengthy report is also a fascinating study of the way we liberals tend to approach public school issues. On balance, we don’t mean that as a compliment.

All week, we’ll review Hannah-Jones’s fascinating report about the Tuscaloosa schools—her fascinating profile of this superb young person about her family’s previous two generations.

By the end of the week, we may be calling Hannah-Jones a “Tuscaloosa liberal.” If we do, we won’t mean that as high praise.

Tomorrow: Familiar ways to feel good

We’ve got your bad explanation right here! (Not really all that wonky)

SUNDAY, MAY 4, 2014

In search of GodelThink: Kurt Godel is one of the greats, or so you’ll routinely be told. The leading authority on his work says it went something like this:

Kurt Friedrich Gödel (1906-1978) was an Austrian, and later American, logician, mathematician, and philosopher. Considered with Aristotle and Gottlob Frege to be one of the most significant logicians in history, Gödel made an immense impact upon scientific and philosophical thinking in the 20th century, a time when others such as Bertrand Russell, A. N. Whitehead, and David Hilbert were pioneering the use of logic and set theory to understand the foundations of mathematics.

He’s right up there with Frege—and with Aristotle, who “defined motion as the actuality of a potentiality as such.” (For additional details, click here.)

Godel is considered one of the greats. In her 2005 book, Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Godel, Professor Goldstein ranks Einstein, Heisenberg and Godel as the great revolutionary thinkers of the last century.

We’re not saying Professor Goldstein is wrong! We’re merely wondering what it is that Godel determined, devised or discovered. Why is Godel one of the greats? This is where our love affair with bad explanation comes in.

Why is Godel one of the greats? And can it be explained to us rubes? As we noted in yesterday's post, Professor Goldstein’s book was aimed as non-specialists—and it was hailed by three other professors for being “remarkably accessible.”

Is Professor Goldstein able to explain what Godel said or did? In a series of posts, we plan to let you be the judge.

What the heck did Godel say, determine or discover? Early in her book, Professor Goldstein’s explanation starts as shown below.

She pictures Godel (“the logician”) in one of his conversations with Einstein, the friend of his later life. The two men often strolled through the streets of Princeton:

GOLDSTEIN (pages 20-21): The topics of their daily conversations range over physics and mathematics, philosophy and politics, and in all of these areas the logician is likely to say something to startle Einstein in its originality or profundity, naivete or downright outlandishness. All his thinking is governed by an “interesting axiom,” as Ernst Gabor Straus, Einstein’s assistant from 1944 to 1947, once characterized it...

An “interesting axiom” governed Godel’s thought, we’re told as our journey begins.

The reader leans forward, expectant. But here’s what the reader gets next:

GOLDSTEIN: The topics of their daily conversations range over physics and mathematics, philosophy and politics, and in all of these areas the logician is likely to say something to startle Einstein in its originality or profundity, naivete or downright outlandishness. All his thinking is governed by an “interesting axiom,” as Ernst Gabor Straus, Einstein’s assistant from 1944 to 1947, once characterized it. For every fact, there exists an explanation as to why that fact is a fact; why it has to be a fact...

Below, we’ll provide the full text of this lengthy paragraph. But in our view, our long day’s journey into bad explanation rather plainly starts here.

In that passage, Professor Goldstein endorses the view that Godel’s thought stemmed from “an interesting axiom.” She then presents two formulations of that axiom.

One of her formulations seems completely mundane. The other is quite hard to parse.

This is how bad explanation starts! Let’s consider the two formulations which constitute Godel’s “interesting axiom,” at least as explained by Professor Goldstein.

(1) “For every fact, there exists an explanation as to why that fact is a fact.”

On its face, that seems to be the most mundane assertion on earth. On its face, that claim would seem startling, controversial or insightful to almost no one.

Almost everyone is familiar with the idea that factual claims must be supported. You can’t simply make a factual claim. You have to back it up.

For every fact, there exists an explanation as to why that fact is a fact? On its face, it’s hard to see how this could possibly constitute “an interesting axiom,” let alone serve as the foundation for revolutionary thought.

On its face, that seems like a mundane statement. Let’s move on to Professor Goldstein’s second formulation:

(2) “For every fact, there exists an explanation as to why that fact has to be a fact.”

For every fact, there exists an explanation as to why it has to be a fact? Do you have any idea what that means?

Frankly, we do not. Consider:

“Boise is the capital of Idaho.” Most people would regard that as a statement of fact.

You could explain why it’s a fact. But could you explain why it has to be a fact? Would you even have any idea what such a request would mean?

Frankly, we would not. For ourselves, we have no idea what that second formulation means.

At this point, we’re flirting with bad explanation! Professor Goldstein has given us two formulations of the “interesting axiom” which lies at the heart of Godel’s revolutionary thinking.

One formulation seems highly mundane; the other seems incoherent. But Professor Goldstein doesn’t seem to notice this problem. She simply moves ahead in this, her complete, rather flowery paragraph:

GOLDSTEIN: The topics of their daily conversations range over physics and mathematics, philosophy and politics, and in all of these areas the logician is likely to say something to startle Einstein in its originality or profundity, naivete or downright outlandishness. All his thinking is governed by an “interesting axiom,” as Ernst Gabor Straus, Einstein’s assistant from 1944 to 1947, once characterized it. For every fact, there exists an explanation as to why that fact is a fact; why it has to be a fact. This conviction amounts to the assertion that there is no brute contingency in the world, no givens that need not have been given. In other words, the world will never, not even once, speak to us in the way that an exasperated parent will speak to her fractious adolescent: “Why? I’ll tell you why. Because I said so!” The world always has an explanation for itself, or as Einstein's walking partner puts it, Die Welt is vernunftig, the world is intelligible. The conclusions that emanate from this rigorously consistent application of the “interesting axiom” to every subject that crosses the logician’s mind—from the relationship between the body and soul to global politics to the very local politics of the Institute for Advanced Study itself—often and radically diverge from the opinions of common sense. Such divergence, however, counts as nothing for him. It is as if one of the unwritten laws of his thought processes is: If reasoning and common sense should diverge, then so much the worse for common sense! What, in the long run, is common sense, other than common?

Die Welt is vernunftig, Gödel said. He hadn’t read this book!

If you’re an obedient student or reader—if you’re in the (very bad) habit of deferring to intellectual authority—you may simply say all those words to yourself and just continue reading. You’ll fail to note that you have no idea what this professor is talking about, if she knows herself.

If you are one of her fellow professors, you will agree to compose a back-of-book blurb about how “beautifully written” or “artfully written” this “remarkably accessible” book is (Professors Lightman and Greene). If you’re Professor Pinker, you’ll blurb that “this book is a gem,” that it has been “written with grace and passion” by a “gifted novelist and philosopher.”

If you’re less inclined to defer to authority, less flattering thoughts may enter your head. You may consider the possibility that this long paragraph is an example of pure argle-bargle, composed by a gifted novelist who may not be real clear as to what she’s talking about.

You may note that this large bouquet of flowery language emerges from that one highlighted passage, in which the novelist attributes two ideas to Godel—one of which seems completely mundane, one of which seems incoherent.

Let’s be fair! In our view, Professor Goldstein swings and misses as she tries to explain the “interesting axiom” at the heart of GodelThink.

But in fairness, her book has barely started. Speaking of incompleteness, Professor Goldstein’s “Introduction” starts on page 13; pages 1-12 are unaccounted for. The professor’s explanation is just getting started as this passage appears.

As advocates of fairness, we didn’t stop reading at this point. Generously, we moved ahead, hoping for clarity.

We were quickly rewarded. On page 23, Professor Goldstein quotes an account of Godel’s seminal incompleteness theorem in which, she says, that theorem is “rendered in more or less plain English.”

In our next post, we’ll show you that rendering. For ourselves, we would say that the rendering in question doesn’t involve “plain English” at all. The fact that Professor Goldstein thinks it does may teach a key lesson about a key topic—where bad explanation comes from.

In one area after another, our American national discourse is built around bad explanations. In a slightly more rational world, ranking professors would push back, skillfully and hard, against that state of affairs.

In our world, professors hand us work like this; other professors praise such work for its remarkable clarity. When our ranking professors function this way, we are all lambs in the end.

Our love affair with bad explanation! (Possibly somewhat wonky)

SATURDAY, MAY 3, 2014

Incompleteness incompletely explained: As we noted a few weeks back, we’ve conducted a long love affair with bad explanation.

The affair may have begun in September 1965, when we enrolled in Professor Nozick’s “Problems in Philosophy” class.

Who are these “problems” problems for, we found ourselves brightly wondering.

Years later, we began to suspect that the course had been designed to ensure that no one would major in philosophy. In fairness, though, that was pure conjecture.

Whatever! In recent weeks, we’ve been spending our spare time with Professor Goldstein’s 2005 book, Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Godel. We’re going to make a lover’s confession:

We’re fascinated by the book’s mastery of bad explanation.

Who the Sam Hill is Kurt Godel, you ask. Early on, Professor Goldstein links him to Einstein and Heisenberg as a revolutionary thinker of the last century.

“His work was, in its own way, as revolutionary as Einstein’s,” Professor Goldstein writes (page 21). Godel’s work should “be grouped along the small set of the last century’s most radical and rigorous discoveries, all with consequences seeming to spill far beyond their respective fields, percolating down into our most basic preconceptions.”

According to Professor Goldstein, Godel’s incompleteness theorem (or theorems) “is the third leg, together with Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and Einstein’s relativity, of that tripod of theoretical cataclysms that have been felt to force disturbances deep down in the foundations of the ‘exact sciences.’ ”

As far as we know, these are highly conventional judgments—hence the professor’s book. If Godel’s incompleteness theorem is as significant as is commonly said, it makes sense to write an accessible book explaining what he discovered, devised or invented.

That’s what Professor Goldstein set out to do. Her book is designed for non-specialists, for rubes like you and us. Indeed, the three blurbs on the back on the book stress how “accessible” it is:

Professor Pinker says that Professor Goldstein “offers us...a lucid exposition of Godel’s brainchild.” Professor Greene, of “Einstein made easy” fame, credits the book with “a detailed yet remarkable accessible account [Godel’s] most stunning breakthrough.”

Professor Lightman makes it three, crediting Professor Goldstein with a “penetrating, accessible, and beautifully written book.”

After all that, you open the book and start reading. But we don’t think that what you find is “remarkably accessible” at all!

According to us, you find something quite different—you find a fascinating compilation of wonderfully bad explanations. And, as we’ve already confessed, we’ve conducted a love affair with this literary form for perhaps four decades now.

Within the academy, Godel is famous, revered, regarded as deeply important. Does Professor Goldstein’s book offer “a lucid exposition” of his thought? Are her presentations “remarkably accessible?”

To the contrary! We’d say her work is fascinatingly muddled. In line with our true confessions, this attracts us all the more.

In our spare time, we’ll be doing some posts on Professor Goldstein’s book. In part, here’s why:

Our national discourse is virtually defined by bad explanation. Journalists rarely seem to notice, and professors like Professor Goldstein rarely intervene.

The professors leave us to twist in the wind. Left to themselves, they produce brilliantly muddled work which gets praised by gangs of their colleagues.

Before you know it, parents are paying tuition fees to expose teenagers to their work. And we know this! It happened to us!

The anthropologist in us regards this as a major discovery, a discovery concerning a form of life. Occasional weekend posts will follow, probably starting tomorrow.

This story is about Tuscaloosa’s schools!

FRIDAY, MAY 2, 2014

And about schools near you: In the current Atlantic, Nikole Hannah-Jones has written a lengthy, fascinating report about the racial history of the Tuscaloosa (City) public schools.

She describes the way Tuscaloosa integrated its dual school system after being taken to court in 1975. Starting in 1979, the city began operating a single high school for all its students, white and black, and a single middle school.

The new arrangement was “clumsy and unpopular,” Hannah-Jones writes, “but its consequences were profound.” Here’s the way it worked:

HANNAH-JONES (4/16/14): In the fall of 1979, Central High School opened to serve all public-high-school students in the district—no matter their race, no matter whether they lived in the city’s public-housing projects or in one of the mansions along the meandering Black Warrior River. The mega-school, a creative solution to a complex problem...was spread across two campuses—ninth- and 10th-graders at the former black high school, now called Central West; 11th- and 12th-graders at the old white high school, called Central East. (The judge’s order also created three single-grade middle schools.)

Without any doubt, that was a “clumsy” arrangement. Presumably, it required a lot of travel by students. It also meant that students attended six different campuses in their last eight years of public school, starting in fifth grade.

No doubt, that’s a “clumsy” arrangement. But it also meant that all of Tuscaloosa’s kids, black and white, were attending citywide schools together from sixth grade on, black and white together.

In theory, that was a very good idea. At various points in her report, Hannah-Jones cheerleads for the positive aspects of this arrangement on the high school level.

Central High “was one of the South’s signature integration success stories,” she writes, citing the school’s National Merit Scholarships and its gridiron wins. As Hannah-Jones later notes, some of those successes were occurring because Central High was a very large school by regional standards.

You can win a lot of football games if you’re the biggest school in the region.

Central High won a lot of games and a lot of awards. But in the end, was it as big an “integration success story” as Hannah-Jones suggests?

A very familiar worm starts to turn in this paragraph:

HANNAH-JONES: The school was hardly perfect. Black students were disproportionately funneled into vocational classes, and white students into honors classes. Some parents complained that competitive opportunities were limited to just the very best students and athletes because the school, at 2,300 students, was so large. And the white flight that had begun when the courts first ordered the district to desegregate continued, slowly, after the formation of the mega-school. But despite these challenges, large numbers of black students studied the same robust curriculum as white students, and students of both races mixed peacefully and thrived.

We’d recommend caution concerning some of those upbeat claims. We’d also recommend caution concerning some of those apparent complaints—the implied complaints about the “funneling” of students.

Next week, we’ll try to consider those claims and complaints in a bit of detail. For today, here’s our basic question:

Was Central High really an “integration success story” if “white flight” drained its enrollment figures in the way Hannah-Jones describes?

In this passage, Hannah-Jones describes the state of play across the system by the 1990s. Again, be careful about her first claim:

HANNAH-JONES: Central continued as one of the state’s standout high schools. But over time, local leaders grew more concerned about the students who didn’t attend the school than those who did.

White students once accounted for a majority of the Tuscaloosa school district’s students. But by the mid-1990s, they made up less than a third. Total enrollment had dropped from 13,500 in 1969 to 10,300 in 1995. Many white parents had decided to send their children to nearly all-white private schools or to move across the city line to access the heavily white Tuscaloosa County Schools.

Tuscaloosa’s business leaders and elected officials had witnessed the transformation of other southern cities after their school districts had reached a tipping point—the point at which white parents become unsettled by the rising share of black students in a school, and pull their children from the school en masse. School districts in cities such as Birmingham and Richmond had seen their integration efforts largely mooted: just about all the white students had left. As white families had moved out to the suburbs, eroding the tax base, both the schools and the cities themselves had suffered. Many officials in Tuscaloosa obsessed about the rippling consequences of continued white flight.

As she continues, Hannah-Jones describes the process by which Tuscaloosa decided to return to a “neighborhood school” arrangement for its middle and high school students. Today, the city runs six middle schools and three high schools, as described in this earlier post.

One middle school in Tuscaloosa is 78 percent white. One middle school is all black.

In two of Tuscaloosa’s high schools, there are lots of black and white students together. But the city’s third high school is all black. All in all, for better or worse, a great deal of racial disproportion has returned to the city’s schools.

Essentially, “white flight” caused Tuscaloosa to reconfigure its schools. To do this, the city had to be released from federal school desegregation orders, a practice which began occurring across the South in the 1990s.

As such, Hannah-Jones largely tells this story as a Southern gothic. In the passage above, she compares Tuscaloosa to Birmingham and Richmond, failing to note that the basic problems being described have occurred all over the nation, in northern, midwestern and western districts as well as in the South.

We would say that’s a shortcoming in Hannah-Jones’ report.

In August 2000, Tuscaloosa’s school board voted to dismantle the citywide, unified single-school arrangement which created Central High and the city’s one middle school. Hannah-Jones tells this story in a fascinating, detailed way, but a problem lurks:

A northern liberal might get the idea that he’s reading a story about the South. Warning! Everything happening in this story has also happened near you!

We find a lot to criticize in Hannah-Jones’ approach to this story. We’re especially struck by her approach to the question of what constitutes a “good” or “bad” school—by her insouciance concerning the basic problems involved in running low-income schools.

In our experience, that insouciance will be found wherever journalists discuss public schools. We’ll take a look at this problem next week. For today, we’ll only say this:

It’s easy for liberal readers to roll their eyes as those hopeless mossbacks in the South. We even think Hannah-Jones has perhaps encouraged that reaction a small tiny tad.

In this case, we think that would be a strongly unhelpful approach. This story is about Tuscaloosa’s schools, but also about schools near you.

O’Reilly’s remarks about Donald Sterling!

FRIDAY, MAY 2, 2014

We regard this as good news: Over the weekend, Cliven Bundy basically disappeared.

The kooky rancher was blown away by Donald Sterling, the pitiful NBA owner. On Monday evening, Bill O’Reilly opened his Fox News program with extended remarks about Sterling.

Below, we show you a large portion of what O’Reilly said. For background, see our previous post.

We regard it as good news that Fox News viewers have been hearing these remarks and quite a few others like them. You’ll never be told about this at Salon, where you’re constantly propagandized and trained in tribal hate. (In fairness, that’s probably good for the corporate bottom line.)

That said, here’s the bulk of what O’Reilly said on Monday night. There’s a lot of crap at Fox. But we regard this as good news:

O'REILLY (4/28/14): Hi, I'm Bill O'Reilly. Thanks for watching us tonight.

Another racial controversy in the USA. That is the subject of this evening's Talking Points Memo. Let's take it step-by-step:

Last week, Nevada Rancher Cliven Bundy, who defied the U.S. government by not paying grazing fees for his cattle, made some ridiculous comments about black Americans and slavery. Mr. Bundy instantly lost any credibility he might have had.

A short time later, the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Clippers basketball team, 80-year-old Donald Sterling, was embarrassed when his mistress released tape recordings of him insulting black people. Reaction was fast and furious, led by President Obama.

OBAMA (videotape): The United States continues to wrestle with the legacy of race and slavery and segregation. That's still there—the vestiges of discrimination. We've made enormous strides but you are going to continue to see this percolate up every so often. And I think that we just have to be clear and steady in denouncing it, teaching our children differently.

O'REILLY: Well, that's right. American children have to be educated about why, why this stuff is happening. But so do adults. Sterling's comments are just despicable. There is no excuse. And like Mr. Bundy, he's finished in the court of public opinion.

But why would these men say these things? The answer is twofold.

First, both men are ignorant. Bundy has no idea what slavery was, and Sterling doesn't seem to understand that in America you cannot deny anyone anything because of race.

Second, both men have a sense of entitlement and that's the key. Cliven Bundy sincerely believes that he should be exempt from paying grazing taxes, an insane sense of entitlement when others in his circumstance have to pay them and are paying them. Sterling has too much money and thinks he can shoot his mouth off and say whatever he wants because he has bought his way out of past controversies.

In 2005, Sterling settled a discrimination suit brought by some of his minority tenants in Los Angeles. In 2009, he settled a federal discrimination lawsuit and had to pay close to $3 million. Also in 2009, the general manager of the Clippers, NBA legend Elgin Baylor, sued Sterling for racial discrimination among other things.

Mr. Baylor lost that one. However, there is no question that Sterling has a problem.

But here is the headline. It's primarily his problem, not the country's problem. He is shameful but does not represent anyone other than himself. However, Sterling has brought pain to other people.

The coach of the Clippers, Doc Rivers, is a fine man. How do you think he feels? His team is in the playoffs. Twelve of the 14 players are black. Mr. Rivers is a man of accomplishment and pride. You can imagine what this has done to him and his team, which has worked hard all season.

Other NBA legends have been insulted as well:

MAGIC JOHNSON (videotape): I met with Donald two or three times. He wanted to discuss the issues with his Clipper team. So I had a friendship with him. So for him to then make these comments or alleged comments, about myself as well as other African-Americans and minorities, there is no place in our society for it.

CHARLES BARKLEY (videotape): We cannot have an NBA owner discriminating against a league that—we're a black league, Ernie, we are a black league. I don't know the number. But I would probably say 80 percent of our players are black.

O'REILLY: Now, the outrage felt by those men and others is a positive thing. They have a perfect right to be angry and to demand that Sterling be punished and he will be. He will most likely lose control of his team. I can't imagine that he can hang on to the Clippers but not all the reaction to Sterling was appropriate.

[...]

The bigger picture, there are bigots in every country, there are bigots of every race. For example, what are we to think of the thousands of people who go to hear Louis Farrakhan to rant against whites and Jews? But those folks represent a very small portion of the African-American community.

Same thing with Reverend Jeremiah Wright who has made a number of anti-white comments and was condemned in his own country. The vast majority of black religious people are good and decent, so it's not fair to draw any general conclusions from Wright or Farrakhan or Sterling or Bundy. They are just misguided individuals.

Nevertheless, the anger they engender is real. I believe when most Americans see and hear racism in their own lives, they get furious. One of the strongest scenes ever in a movie was this upcoming sequence in Mississippi Burning when FBI agent Gene Hackman confronts a racist deputy:

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
GENE HACKMAN, Mississippi Burning: I've got a question for you, Clinton. You don't mind if I call you Clinton, do you? I feel like I know you so well.

On the night of the murders, you made a short speech as the bulldozer buried the kids in the dam. How does Lester tell it? "Mississippi will be proud of you. You struck a blow for the white man." Is that what you said, Clinton?

You've got a stupid smile, you know that? Can you see it? Good!

Did you smile when the bulldozer ran over the black kid's body? Did you? Did you smile when the bodies were covered over? Did you? Did you smile that same stupid smile? Did you?

Make no mistake about it, Deputy. I will cut your (EXPLETIVE DELETED) head clear off and not give a (EXPLETIVE DELETED) how it reads in the report sheet.
(END VIDEO CLIP)

O'REILLY: Now, that scene epitomizes how most decent people want to confront individual racism. But we can't. We can't. We have to leave it to the authorities. And understand that this country has come a very long way from the days when denying Americans opportunity because of their skin color was acceptable in some places.

Now, racists pay a huge price. For the rest of his life, Donald Sterling will be a pariah. He will not be celebrated anywhere or welcomed anywhere other than the lunatic fringe precincts.

Finally, there will be people who seek to exploit Sterling and Bundy. Right away, Al Sharpton began threatening to boycott if Sterling wasn't dealt with the way he, Sharpton, thinks he should be. Instead of allowing the National Basketball Association to investigate, then issue a ruling, which it will tomorrow, Sharpton exploited the situation immediately, trying to bring attention to himself. Really sad.

In the end, racism will never be wiped out. It's a neurosis, a mental deficiency, it will always be around. But America is a place that no longer tolerates it in the public arena, as Donald Sterling and Cliven Bundy have learned the hard way.

And that's the Memo.

Next on the rundown, reaction: Mary Catherine Ham, Juan Williams, Charles Krauthammer. The Factor will be right back.

As a courtesy, we left in the parts about Sharpton and Wright so we can find ways to maintain our sense of tribal division and hate.

We think it’s a very good thing that Fox News viewers heard that commentary. O’Reilly has continued pounding Sterling; Hannity’s critique of Sterling has been similar.

Some viewers haven’t agreed with what they’ve heard. On Wednesday, this was the start of O’Reilly’s letters segment.

First, O’Reilly reads a letter, then he replies:

O’REILLY (4/30/14): Now the mail.

Madeline Norton, Frisco, Texas: I can't believe after all the years of watching you, Bill, you're not standing up for Donald Sterling and his rights as an American citizen. His comments were reprehensible, but he has a right to his opinion.

Not if his opinion denies opportunity, Madeline. Sterling clearly told the woman that taped him not to take blacks to the Clipper games. That's a civil rights violation because he has power in the marketplace, Sterling does. He's not just some clown spouting off.

Dave King, Fort Worth, Texas: Bill, you don't speak for everyone. The man makes a mildly racist statement. Shame on him, but he did not bomb a church.

So what, Dave, so what? He brought shame to his industry and the league has a right to hold him responsible, a legal right.

Ed McNulty, Bridgeport, Connecticut: Bill, why did you call Jim Gray “Gray” and [former NBA player] Cuttino Mobley “Mr. Mobley?” You treated the black man differently and that is called discrimination.

Hard to believe Ed—hard to believe. I've known Jim Gray for years. He is a friend, and I call many friends by last names. I don't know Mr. Mobley. So he got the “Mister.”

Now let me ask you a question. Do you think you qualify for pinhead status?

Jim Gregson, Calgary, Canada: When Snoop Dogg makes vulgar racist comments, is he banned from the music industry for life?

No, he is not Jim, because that industry doesn't care what rappers say. But Mr. Dogg has no power over anyone and that's the big difference legally between him and Sterling.

In our view, his answer to the woman from Frisco doesn’t really make much sense. But we think it’s good that Fox News viewers are hearing this type of discussion.

(Last night, O’Reilly said that about ten percent of his mail is defending Sterling. He sighed as he said it.)

Hannity’s comments have been similar, though less extensive. You will never be told this on MSNBC or at Salon, where you’re constantly propagandized and urged toward tribal hate.

(In fairness, these are sound business decisions.)

Is it true? Have Americans “come to an overwhelming consensus that racism itself is evil?”

In the end, we don’t know how to answer that question, which involves several hundred million people. But we think it’s good that viewers of Fox are hearing these analyses.

We think it’s bad that people like Saint Joan Walsh don’t want us liberals to know about this. We’re glad to see these views broadcast on Fox.

Why can’t we liberals know?

EYES OFF THE PRIZE: The things we liberals can’t be told!

FRIDAY, MAY 2, 2014

Part 4—Saint Joan keeps us barefoot and clueless: In large part, we agree with something we read in Salon.

Can things like this be said at Salon? In a typically muddled piece designed to stir our liberal hate, Paul Rosenberg said something good about the racial attitudes of the American people:

ROSENBERG (5/1/14): [Donald] Sterling’s self-immolating drama vividly illustrates what the questions involve. It’s not just that Americans—unbeknownst to Sterling, Cliven Bundy and Limbaugh—have come to an overwhelming consensus that racism itself is evil, though that’s certainly enormously important in and of itself. But there’s also the additional factor of interpersonal depravity—psychopathy, if you will, which people are increasingly coming to see as significantly overrepresented in the 1 percent.

Is that true? Have Americans “come to an overwhelming consensus that racism itself is evil?”

We wouldn’t go that far. And for the most part, we tend to stay away from the E-word altogether.

But we were pleased, and quite surprised, to see this statement at Salon, which more typically tries to claim that a ridiculous outlier like Bundy represents the American norm. (Just see our earlier post.)

All too often, Salon seems eager to fuel your hate—and to keep you barefoot and clueless. What is it like when we liberals got conned by our Fox-like leaders?

What’s it like when we got played? Consider what Joan Walsh did.

On Wednesday, April 23, Bundy shared his ridiculous thoughts about race in America. The next morning, Walsh swung into action, inventing various bogus claims about Rand Paul and pounding away at Sean Hannity.

Over the years, there’s been a great deal to pound away at Hannity about. The liberal world has done an extremely poor job confronting the reams of disinformation he has constantly spread.

On this particular day, Walsh was in her glory. She closed her piece with a bit of McCarthyism—and with the latest sign of her own wondrous good faith:

WALSH (4/24/14): Let’s face it: Paul’s been a better ally to Cliven Bundy than to the inner-city poor. I’m not saying he would endorse Bundy’s remarks about “Negroes”; he knows better than that. At least I think he does. But culturally and politically, he’s quicker to empathize with the lawbreaker in Nevada than those thugs in Chicago.

[...]

Here’s hoping that Rand Paul denounces Bundy’s remarks early Thursday. It won’t change the sad fact that way too many people who think like Paul politically think like Bundy racially.

I don’t expect Hannity to say a word about Bundy’s predictable descent into the muck of racism, but I’d love to be surprised.

In truth, Paul had done very little “empathizing with the law-breaker in Nevada,” although a range of pseudo-liberals (and mainstream reporters) took turns telling you different. Feeding bullshit to us rubes isn’t just for Fox anymore!

In best McCarthyite fashion, Walsh said that “many people who think like Paul politically think like Bundy racially.” Then again, many people who think like Walsh journalistically have been involved in world history’s worst racial and ethnic slaughters!

Whatever! As she closed, our own emerging Saint Joan shared her greatness with us. She said she didn’t expect to see Hannity reject Bundy’s racial theses—but she’d love to be surprised!

The very next day, our emerging saint engaged in an act of self-abnegation.

On Thursday evening, Hannity had given Joan exactly what she wanted. Right at the start of his Fox News program, he denounced Bundy’s racial lunacy, just as Saint Joan had hoped:

HANNITY (4/24/14): And we kick things off tonight with reaction to some disturbing comments that are being attributed to Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy. Now, they appeared in today's New York Times and were made by Bundy in what the paper likened to a town hall meeting with supporters. Now, audio was recently posted of the alleged remarks on line. Take a listen.

[clips of Bundy’s racial remarks]

HANNITY: All right, allow me to make myself abundantly clear. I believe those comments are downright racist. They are repugnant. They are bigoted. And it's beyond disturbing. I find those comments to be deplorable, and I think it's extremely unfortunate that Cliven Bundy holds those views.

Now, while I supported the Bundy ranch as they took a stand against the Bureau of Land Management, I was absolutely dismayed and frankly disappointed after reading the article and then hearing the commentary.

Saint Joan’s dreams were coming true! Hannity started the evening’s second segment like this:

HANNITY: And welcome back to Hannity. Now earlier, we told you about the disgraceful comments made by rancher Cliven Bundy. Now, Cliven addressed those racist remarks during a press conference today. Take a look:

[clips of Bundy’s additional racial remarks]

HANNITY: Joining me now with reaction in studio, radio talk show host—and by the way, you fill in on this show—our good friend David Webb is here.

“It is racist what he said,” Webb declared. “And that he goes back and supports it proves that he’s an idiot.”

Saint Joan’s dream had come true! She didn’t think Hannity would “say a word about Bundy’s predictable descent into the muck of racism,” though she said she’d “love to be surprised.”

Well hallelujah! Hannity had gone on the air and denounced Bundy’s “disgraceful comments,” his “racist remarks!” Surely, Walsh was surprised—and pleased!

That’s where the saintly self-abnegation came in.

Every saint must be willing to deny herself worldly pleasure. On Friday, April 25, Walsh wrote about Hannity again, even discussing the previous evening’s program.

But how strange! Saint Joan never told her readers about the way Hannity had denounced Bundy’s “racist remarks.” Apparently, we the peasants who read Salon had no need to know!

We tend to agree with the gist of Rosenberg’s statement. By and large, we’re inclined to think that the bulk of the American people turned the corner on these matters quite a while ago.

No situation is perfect, of course. And no one will ever be quite as perfect as we the liberals are. But we tend to agree with what Rosenberg said, although we’d tone it down.

Have Americans “come to an overwhelming consensus that racism itself is evil?”

We wouldn’t be quite as dramatic as that. But on balance, we think most people are ready to continue moving into the all-American future. We think most people would like to be inspired and challenged about our all-American future rather than propagandized and taught to hate, the way we get taught at Salon.

Objectively, Walsh is a hater. She’s also a stone propagandist. That said, here’s the good news, the news you will never hear at Salon:

When it comes to the racial nonsense of Bundy and Sterling, it has been hard to distinguish the reactions of Hannity and O’Reilly from the reactions heard at MSNBC.

In particular, O’Reilly has savaged both men at considerable length. (He's also been scornful of Hannity for his initial reactions to Bundy.) But you will never be told that fact by the hustlers and saints at Salon.

In our next post, we’ll post extended excerpts of what the two Fox hosts have said. Their comments have been fascinating—but saints like Walsh will work quite hard to keep you from hearing about them.

In our view, saints like Walsh are bad for the common good. We would assume that they’re also bad for progressive interests.

(In fairness, saints like Walsh are probably good for the corporate bottom line. Not that she cares about that!)

To judge from appearances, Saint Joan Walsh has hustled us rubes every step of the way. This dates back to the days when she covered for the horrible conduct of her owner, Chris Matthews.

Now, the corporate mission has changed at MSNBC and at Salon. Walsh and Matthews have changed along with it.

Real progressives should spit in the street when Our Own Saint Joan strolls by. Last week, our own emerging saint was keeping us barefoot and clueless.

Walsh was openly playing her readers. At Salon, we fiery liberals swallow this bullshit whole.

Next post: Extended excerpts of the material you’ll never read at Salon

Why not visit Tuscaloosa?

THURSDAY, MAY 1, 2014

We find those photos pleasing: Tomorrow, we plan to resume our series of posts about the Tuscaloosa schools.

In the meantime, why not visit Tuscaloosa itself?

In yesterday's installment, we linked you to photos of black and white kids together in the Tuscaloosa schools (city and surrounding county). We think those photos are pleasing.

We’re glad those Alabama kids are getting that kind of experience. We’re grateful to the many people who are making those schools function. And of course, we believe in those kids.

Do you have some other suggestion? Aside from our tribal hate?

What’s it like to be black and white together in Alabama? Tomorrow, we’ll return to that gloomy report from The Atlantic, a report we think is a bit misleading in several tribe-friendly ways.

For today, why not treat yourself? Click here, then click again.

Look at some of those smiling group photos. They may not look exactly the way you may have imagined.

Natives get restless RE Hillary Clinton!

THURSDAY, MAY 1, 2014

Collins and Chozick start up: We’ll admit it. We can’t quite believe that Hillary Clinton could win in 2016.

We’re not saying she can’t win, since she certainly can. We’re saying we have our nagging doubts.

If you watch MSNBC, you’re being propagandized differently. A few weeks ago, the children filled your heads with sugarplums about how far Clinton is ahead of leading Republicans.

Joy Reid pleasured us rubes while guest hosting at Hardball. We were struck by how small Clinton’s margins were:

REID (4/16/14): We’ve got new polling on possible presidential matchups for 2016. Let’s check the Hardball scoreboard.

According to a new McClatchy/Marist poll, Hillary Clinton leads Paul Ryan nationally by 8 points. It’s Clinton 51, Ryan 44. No other Republican is even within single digits. New Jersey governor Chris Christie trails by 11 points. It’s Clinton 53, Christie 42.

Other GOP hopefuls were farther behind.

Despite the cheerful propaganda, those margins didn’t look huge to us. In the spring of 1999, Gore trailed Bush in national polls by as many as twenty points. He ended up winning the popular vote. Early margins can change.

We’re not saying Clinton can’t win, since she certainly can. On the other hand, the natives may be getting restless. We noticed two examples today.

First, Gail Collins enjoyed some standard snark in the New York Times:

COLLINS (5/1/14): A million dollars will get you Jeb Bush’s advice. Also, it will buy a visit from Hillary Clinton. Four, in fact—she gets around $250,000 per appearance. When someone in the audience threw a shoe at her recently, she was speaking at the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries.

Hillary dodged the stiletto with quite a bit of dexterity and grace. But you had to ask: Why is this woman giving a paid talk to the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries? The Clintons came out of the White House with very little cash, but there’s got to be a point when you stop making up for lost time.

Collins indulged two favorite themes: (1) snobbishness about her lessers, including the déclassé types in the (gasp) scrap recycling trade. (Don't miss her typical closing line about pols who hail from “East Cupcake.”)

(2) She also pushed the pleasing notion that Bill and Hillary are shameless money-grubbers.

Our view? The pundits could return to their Clinton-hating in roughly no seconds flat. And please understand—they’re happy to invent fictional themes around which they build our elections.

We were reminded of this impulse when we read the Times front page, where Amy Chozick was playing the snide about the way Clinton and Clinton are famous tools of big money.

Alas! These people have invented so many silly tales down through the years that they may have trouble keeping them straight. Late in her piece, Chozick offered this recollection:

CHOZICK (5/1/14): If she runs in 2016, Mrs. Clinton would confront the inequality issue from a very different place than her husband did in 1992, when he made $35,000 a year as governor of Arkansas. Back then, Mr. Clinton seemed to have a natural connection to people of modest means while his opponent, the elder President George Bush, struggled to say how much a gallon of milk cost.

Snarking nicely, Chozick remembered the way President Bush was the out-of-touch royal back then, much the way Hillary Clinton might be this time around.

In 1992, President Bush wasn’t even sure how much a gallon of milk cost! Chozick pleasured Times readers with the recollection.

That said, did it actually happen?

Journalists love to torment selected pols with the old price-of-milk-and-eggs question. Candidates Tsongas and Quayle were hit with the question from voters in early 1992. Candidate Clinton handled the question in October 1992.

In 1996, the question and its crazed aftermath may have cost Lamar Alexander the GOP nomination. For a recollection, click here.

It’s just that we can’t remember Candidate Bush being hit with the famous old price-of-milk question in 1992. Nor do the Nexis archives seem to record such an incident.

(We do find this BBC piece saying that Bush was hit with this question during one of that year’s debates. But we find no sign in the transcripts that this actually happened.)

Whatever! The mainstream “press corps” simply loves these utterly silly frameworks. They love to invent and employ such frameworks to advance their own dimwitted views of our election choices.

We know of no election where they misbehaved as much as they did during Campaign 2000, when they spent two years inventing “lies” by Candidate Gore. But if you think these petulant beings couldn’t turn against Hillary Clinton again, we think you’re out of touch with life as it’s lived on this planet.

Lady Collins was snarking today about the Clintons’ love of big bucks. Offering a slightly dark warning, Chozick remembered something which may or may not have occurred.

These hopeless life forms are charter members in the world’s most irresponsible guild. We’re giving Reid and her channel’s propaganda machine this early emergency warning.

The look of a racial pseudo-discussion!

THURSDAY, MAY 1, 2014

When experts pretend to discuss: What do pseudo-discussions look like?

Consider the pseudo-discussion of the term “Uncle Tom” on Don Lemon’s CNN program last night.

Last weekend, Rep. Bennie Thompson dropped the UT-bomb on Clarence Thomas. He then defended his use of the term to CNN’s Dana Bash, who didn't seem to know how to question him about it.

(Basic question: Are such insults OK? As always, opinions may differ.)

Was it OK to drop that bomb? Last night, Professor Ogletree offered this analysis:

OGLETREE (4/30/14): I'm a good friend of Bennie Thompson. I've known him, and he's represented Mississippi very well. And the whole idea is that this is a black-on-black discussion. And I have heard that word, "Uncle Tom," from the time I was growing up as a kid until very recently. And so it's a common use of language to, in a sense, downgrade somebody who's not embracing the race.

And I think that people have to figure out what can you say, what can you not say? And I'm really, really worried that this is going to be a discussion about getting rid of words.

Huh? That was as clear as an unrung bell. Lemon tried it again:

LEMON (continuing directly): Is it OK for the congressman— He said, "I called him Uncle Tom," and he goes, "I'm black." Is that OK?

OGLETREE: I don't think it's because he's black it's OK. But what I'm saying is "Uncle Tom" is a word—Uncle Tom is real, right? And the question is, can people use that word? If they do, they don't use it as openly as they should. But I think that they should make it clear that there's a difference between them and some other people. I think that makes a lot of difference the way we have a discussion about what does Uncle Tom actually mean?

Huh?

We can’t find tape of last night’s program. But that’s pretty much what we heard when we watched the show—and that is an incoherent mess, as anyone can see.

That’s also a pseudo-discussion.

If professors are going to talk that way, why do we even have them? Lemon didn’t fare much better when he turned to Bomani Jones:

LEMON (continuing directly): Let's talk more about the comments from Congressman Thompson, Bomani Jones. I mean, is it ever acceptable for a U.S. congressman to call a black Supreme Court justice an Uncle Tom?

JONES: Well, the thing about Uncle Tom that I find interesting is we have a discussion about whether or not it's an appropriate term. And it seems as though to me, and I could be mistaken, I don't hear the outcry about calling someone an Uncle Tom coming primarily from black people. I find it seems a lot of white people find it to be offensive. And if you were being called an Uncle Tom, it is offensive, but I don't think that that's a racist term that you happen to use.

I do think if you call somebody an Uncle Tom, you better absolutely be correct, because if you're not, well, you know how that goes.

According to Jones, a lot of white people find the term offensive. And it actually is offensive! It just isn’t racist!

Mark O’Mara then offered this thought: If calling someone an Uncle Tom generates a discussion of race on TV, then “I think that’s what’s most important. I really do.”

After that, Lemon made a final try with Michaela Angela Davis:

LEMON: I understand what you're saying. But those words, words like “Uncle Tom” and the N-word, end the conversation. Those are words as weapons, and it's hard to move beyond those words, Michaela Davis, once someone has called you that—

DAVIS: Yes, but—but this is a messy situation, and we have to be brave enough to make mistakes and say the wrong words.

LEMON: Right.

DAVIS: How long have we been hearing the other narrative? We're having all these counter narratives, and we have to be brave to make the mistake, hear the words, dissect them, put them in context and then move on.

But I think we have to be really clear where we are in history, right? So this is the first time for a lot of time—for a long time that people are actually able to speak publicly, and then there's this big public discourse around it.

Democracy is messy. Slavery was messy. Civil rights was messy and complicated and diabolical. So how are we supposed to have polite conversations about crimes against humanity that have colored our entire civilization? Right?

So I think we need to give ourselves some room to make mistakes and say the things that are touch points so we can unpack them and give each other some education. If we're tip-toeing around words, we're not going to get through the mess. Democracy is a messy process. And we just have to not be cowards around whether a word is going to hurt someone. And we need to educate what that word feels like when you yield it like a weapon, or do you just not know?

LEMON: Uh-huh. All right. Stay with me, everyone. We're answering your questions when we come right back.

Stay with that? Why bother?

Davis at least seemed to answer the question—or something. She seemed to say that it was OK to make mistakes in difficult discussions. We shouldn’t be cowards about hurting people!

Except for Lemon himself, no one was willing to say or suggest that a discussion almost surely can’t be built around insults. Nor was Lemon willing to push. For example, he wasn’t willing to tell Ogletree that his second jumble of words made no apparent sense.

For ourselves, we often think that Ogletree is a complete waste of time. Where do we get these professors?

Can we explain what happened here? Thompson called Thomas an Uncle Tom. For tribal reasons, none of these experts was willing to say that this might have been unwise, imperfect, perhaps unhelpful or even potentially wrong.

Such possibilities aren’t permitted! As a result, the various experts floundered about, serving giant bowls of word salad. When our experts stage such discussions, why do we bother to have them?

Other discussions were equally useless. At one point, Davis mockingly said that she hasn’t heard the term “inner city” since 1976.

That’s strange! According to Nexis, the term appeared in the New York Times 166 times last year alone (in calendar year 2013).

Maybe Lemon should go back to searching for that missing airplane. Unless they’re beating up on the nation’s most clownish men, this guild is essentially useless.

Go ahead—read those statements again. You’re sampling a pseudo-discussion!

EYES OFF THE PRIZE: Where in the world was the so-called press?

THURSDAY, MAY 1, 2014

Part 3—Ostracizing the blowhard: In this morning’s Washington Post, E. J. Dionne—a very careful person—offers some pleasing pabulum.

Dionne offers some pleasing pap about the recent conduct of NBA players. As he closes, he ladles this spoonload of porridge:

DIONNE (5/1/14): The NBA players showed how possessing real power can bring about change within a few media cycles. Their voices would be welcomed by those trying to stop efforts to rob rank-and-file African Americans and others with low incomes of democracy’s most fundamental right.

It’s nice that Obama, Cruz and almost all of the rest of us want to ostracize an 80-year-old racist blowhard. But how do we act when the playoffs are over and the people who are protesting are not the heroes whose numbers we proudly wear on our backs?

Trust us! NBA players will not be discussing voter ID laws, the issue to which Dionne refers. They won’t be discussing “efforts to rob rank-and-file African Americans and others with low incomes of democracy’s most fundamental right.”

Dionne himself will not likely discuss the larger issue involved in the recent Wisconsin court decision—the fact that a federal judge found that 9 percent of Wisconsin residents don’t possess a photo ID because they are too poor to drive a car, to use a bank or to think about buying plane tickets. (For background, just click here.)

NBA players will not be discussing the lives of the children who are growing up in those households (nor is it really their job to). Dionne won’t fight to force that discussion, or to look for ways to explain this matter in a way centrist voters will buy.

NBA players won’t be discussing the lives of the children who grow up that way. But then, neither will the useless experts Don Lemon featured last night.

Is it “nice” that our ranking elites are “ostracizing an 80-year-old racist blowhard” this week? On balance, we would suggest that it isn’t all that great—that this is another way in which we’re all helped to keep our eyes off the prize.

To his credit, Dionne was rather plainly suggesting that it’s very easy to ostracize someone like Sterling. In our view, Lemon and his panel of experts helped prove that point last night.

At the start of the hour, Lemon got some sound commentary from Bomani Jones, an engaging ESPN analyst/host who was writing about Donald Sterling before writing about Sterling was cool. (At 5 PM, we often watch Jones on ESPN’s Around the Horn.)

In 2006, Jones wrote this column about Sterling’s apparent housing practices. Last night, Lemon asked him what he thought about the Sterling audiotape:

LEMON (4/30/14): Bomani, you have been writing about this and speaking about this very passionately. Donald Sterling has been on your radar for some time now for a very long time and you have been covering him for years. Tell us what you thought when you heard these tapes this weekend.

JONES: Well, the tape itself, I think a lot of people were outraged by it, but if you were aware of the stuff that was in the court paperwork on the housing discrimination suits, the tape was just like, “Oh, what do you know, Donald Sterling is still the same person even though his basketball team is good?” Because I think a lot of people ignored that stuff because the team got good and they wanted to enjoy the fact that the team was good.

The tape itself was just really kind of bizarre. I thought it was actually fairly insightful to give you an idea of what somebody at that level thinks and how he's embarrassed by the idea that his arm piece could be with black people and then his friends would then pick on him about that.

It was almost like high school stuff. But I wasn’t outraged by it in the way that a lot of other people were because there was a lot more outrageous stuff in his past.

For the full transcript, click this.

In one way, Jones’ statement didn’t exactly make sense. In fact, “a lot of people ignored that stuff” long before Sterling’s team got good.

That said, we’re glad that Jones “wasn’t outraged by the tape in the way that a lot of other people were.” On balance, we think it’s a waste of time for journalists to be outraged by the tape, or to pretend to be.

(Make no mistake—most of them are pretending. They are reciting the latest script, something they constantly do.)

Outrage about that audiotape is easy to state or to feign. At its heart, we think it’s an easy way for journalists to hide the fact that they don’t care a whit about larger issues of justice.

It’s an easy way for journalists and other “intellectual leaders” to hide the fact that they have been keeping their eyes off the prize for a very long time now.

Jones noted the fact that nobody cared about Sterling’s record of apparent housing discrimination. But uh-oh! As Lemon continued, he and Jones each buried the key question here.

In the past, why didn’t mainstream journalists, including sports journalists, seem to care about Sterling’s behavior? You’ll note that Lemon and Jones kept this rather obvious question on a more general plane.

The obvious question involves the silence of journalists, our supposed eyes and ears. Note who Lemon and Jones end up discussing instead:

LEMON (continuing directly): Yes. Back in 2006, you wrote about Donald Sterling and you called him out on charges of housing discrimination which we’re learning about now. Why didn't that get more attention at the time, do you think?

JONES: That's a good question. I think part of it is that housing discrimination lawsuits, you see the numbers within the millions of dollars. That doesn't really resonate and splash with people.

What happened with the TMZ thing, that got people instantly. It was pretty overt language. It was clear and it didn't require any interpretation or a deeper understand of any sort of system.

People could hear that and they could jump on it and say, “Oh, my gosh, Donald Sterling is such an awful man.” When you're talking about housing discrimination, you're talking about something that has step after step after step and is such a big problem that I think a lot of people don't realize that they saw that lawsuit and I think a lot of people just kind of charged it up to, “Hey, what's the big deal,” even though that's one of the biggest deals in the country.

Step after step after step, Jones discussed the way “a lot of people” reacted, or failed to react, to Sterling’s past conduct.

He stayed away from the more salient question: Why did journalists respond, or fail to respond, in the ways they did?

According to Jones, “a lot of people” really don’t understand the resonance of a housing discrimination suit. That is probably true.

But in theory, journalists are paid to understand such things better than “a lot of people.” According to our civics textbooks, that is a journalist’s job.

That said, Lemon and Jones kept this discussion on the more general level. They discussed the way “a lot of people” responded. They moved the spotlight away from their own lazy, uncaring guild—away from the people who have failed us time after time after time.

We’re not suggesting that Jones did this on purpose. But it’s second nature for people like these to work this familiar sleight of hand—to keep us from wondering why the press corps failed to act.

Speaking somewhat ironically, Dionne says this in his column: “It’s nice that Obama, Cruz and almost all of the rest of us want to ostracize an 80-year-old racist blowhard.”

Can we talk? On balance, we’d have to say it isn’t real nice. On balance, it’s the simplest thing in the world for journalists and other elites to do. On balance, it’s a case of upper-class hacks reciting an easy script.

As the hour proceeded, Lemon conducted a string of pseudo-discussions with a largely worthless panel. We’ll isolate a few of those pseudo-discussions in our next post.

For now, we can tell you this:

NBA players will not be leading the fight on voter ID. More problematically, journalists won’t be trying to force a discussion of the fact that nine percent of Wisconsin residents are too poor to use a bank or to need a driver’s license.

Your press corps won’t be talking about the children growing up in those homes. Your press corps won’t be conducting a sane or factual discussion about our nation’s low-income schools and the deserving children within them.

Your press corps doesn’t care about that! Nothing on earth could be more clear. And we include Our Own Joan Walshes when we offer that judgment.

What will the press do in the weeks ahead? The press corps will continue to do what Jones discusses here:

LEMON (continuing directly): What do you think is worse, though? Was it the housing discrimination charges or was it the comments that were caught on tape?

JONES: Well, I think if we're talking effectively about what happens in the world, the housing discrimination. The tape itself, the tape stuff is candy. Some of that stuff you heard was a bit strange. And the way he talked about giving players stuff as opposed to paying them wages was I guess a bit disturbing.

But ultimately, that was a crazy conversation between a crazy man and his mistress and their bizarre interactions. The stuff with the housing suit and saying that blacks stink and attract vermin, saying that Mexicans just want to sit around and drink all day, and oh, by the way, inhibiting the livelihoods of people in this country— What happened on that tape is what it was. It was a TMZ story.

Again and again, your press corps will be looking for candy to discuss—candy and TMZ stories. The Sterling tape provides one form of that candy.

Your press corps will be seeking out the craziest people in the society. Staging the safest discussion on earth, your press corps will continue to ostracize our 80-year-old blowhards.

No one will ask them to explain their own endless sins in the past. No one will ask them to discuss their ongoing sloth and disinterest.

Last night, Lemon spent the bulk of the hour pretending to discuss race, a leading form of ratings candy. But over the past seven weeks, he has spent night after night pretending to be leading a search for a missing airplane.

CNN’s moronic search for Flight 370 has been a parody of news. As people like Lemon suck that sweet, real discussion disappears.

Last night’s pseudo-discussion was candy. That’s what your press corps has long been about. That’s why Jones’ column in 2006 produced no further journalistic discussion.

We like to see Jones state this fact, right there on our screen.

Tomorrow: More of the same

From this morning’s New York Times: On balance, we agree with this letter:

LETTER TO THE NEW YORK TIMES (5/1/14): As the cases of Donald Sterling and the Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy illustrate, it is very easy for ostensibly “enlightened” and “progressive” privileged people to pile on in ritual condemnation of reprehensible, superannuated racists, and then to congratulate themselves on their virtue. But these cheap, easy and smug displays of righteousness do nothing to eliminate or even reduce the systemic injustice, inequality and discrimination that continue to characterize American society—and from which those same elites benefit.

JOHN S. KOPPEL
Bethesda, Md., April 30, 2014

Is John S. Koppel allowed to say that? On balance, we think he’s right.