Reducing Politically Correct Ad Hominems to Absurdity
[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here. Or by Twitter @AaronWorthing.]
The modern left seems to love a particular breed of ad hominem. You cite to them the words and philosophy of Jefferson, Madison, etc. and they say “oh, those were just dead rich white men,” or better yet, “they were rich, dead, racist white slaveholders” and think that means you should dismiss what these people had to say out of hand. I particularly enjoy it when that argument is deployed in opposition to following the original constitution and in favor of the Supreme Court just making sh-t up, because then you are shifting from being ruled by rich dead white men, to being ruled by a group that is old, rich, mainly white and still mostly male. Progress!
I am not saying that background is completely irrelevant. Indeed, the fact that Jefferson was a slaveholder is sometimes relevant in determining what he meant. There are those who hold to this day that the phrase “all men are created equal” actually meant “all white men are created equal” on the theory that Jefferson clearly didn’t mean his slaves because then he would be a hypocrite. Mind you, I think the most obvious answer given the evidence is, yes, Jefferson was a hypocrite, but that doesn’t make it unfair or wrong to look at the fact he owned slaves and wonder what he really meant. So I am not arguing against that sort of thing. What I am railing against here is the smug belief that this should shallowly and immediately disqualify them from having anything worthwhile to say.
So I had to chuckle when I saw this impulse reduced to absurdity in this New York Times story on the libraries created by the Occupy movement, with this hilarious line:
The librarians have eschewed the Dewey Decimal System, concerned by historical accounts that portray Melvil Dewey, its inventor, as a racist and misogynist.
Right, because Dewey organized his system as follows. First was “History.” Then there was “Irish (Drunken Bastards).” And then there was “Jews (Who Control the World).” And it just got worse from there…
Joking aside, the thing with the Dewey system is that it’s sort of like the issue of which side of the road you drive on. In England they drive on the left; in America, we drive on the right. There is no great moral reason to drive on one side or the other, as long as everyone in a given jurisdiction does the same thing. If there is anything specifically offensive in the Dewey system–the use of racial slurs, for instance–I have no objection to fixing it, but to throw out the whole thing just because you are concerned he was (allegedly) a pig when I see no obvious reason to think is piggishness affected anything is just stupid and close-minded.
And, I might add, it is strategically dumb for a movement that seems to be attracting a lot of anti-Semites.
Update: By the way, what would happen if those Occupy Wall Street types learned that Guy Fawkes was a pro-Catholic theocrat and that Che was just plain racist?
[Posted and authored by Aaron Worthing.]
Actually you are thinking about Time magazine’s brilliant attack on the Constitution:
“Here are a few things the framers did not know about: World War II. DNA. Sexting. Airplanes. The atom. Television. Medicare. Collateralized debt obligations. The germ theory of disease. Miniskirts. The internal combustion engine. Computers. Antibiotics. Lady Gaga.”
This never made sense to me.
AZ Bob (2ca156) — 10/24/2011 @ 7:07 pm“Of course, it’s not a competition.”
happyfeet (3c92a1) — 10/24/2011 @ 7:15 pmAre they really this stupid, Zinn is not in the reference section, not that it would teach them anything,
ian cormac (0fc95f) — 10/24/2011 @ 7:17 pm“Politically Correct” would be the adjective.
koam @wittier (1363e5) — 10/24/2011 @ 7:17 pmA few things to try in polite company:
When someone goes on about how Bush didn’t get a “Declaration of War” [never mind], say something like: “Oh, that’s just one of those rules the slaveholders made up so that they had enough white people to oversee their plantations.”
Or when someone brings up freedom of speech, or the press, or whatever, say “That’s the kind of thinking that kept black people in chains in this country for centuries.” If they challenge you on this, ask them why they defend something written by a “bunch of slaveholders.”
Or, when someone brings up the New York Times, point out that the founders were Conservative and Republican, so nothing they say should be believed. And don’t even start with the Los Angeles Times….
Kevin M (563f77) — 10/24/2011 @ 7:50 pmIf you really get down to it, the OWS folk are the sorry remnants of bad parenting.
Back in the day, people used to teach their children how to survive. Now they teach them how to get.
Now, leave my lawn.
Ag80 (ec45d6) — 10/24/2011 @ 8:03 pmGuy Fawkes was a pro-catholic theocrat anrchist?
Che was racist indeed and homophobic.
DohBiden (d54602) — 10/24/2011 @ 9:01 pmPlaxico Burress-I’m 100% against people holding guns except if they belong Obamas army gunning down teabagging dissidents.
DohBiden (d54602) — 10/24/2011 @ 9:02 pmid they belong to.*
DohBiden (d54602) — 10/24/2011 @ 9:03 pmLefty OWS compare Jews to communists……………..Che is deeply offended.
DohBiden (d54602) — 10/24/2011 @ 9:05 pmOh wait no she was a far-righty paleocon.
DohBiden (d54602) — 10/24/2011 @ 9:06 pmAnd the only authors the intellectual vanguard of the revolution can name are Chomsky and Zinn. The celebrity wing of Dissidence, Inc. And most of them probably only know of them because talentless billionaire hack Eddie Vedder gave them a shout-out at a Pearl Jam concert. The system quakes beneath the weight of their brilliance.
Crackerjack Klompus (07a5ab) — 10/24/2011 @ 9:10 pmDo you dig the paleocon at OWS compsring all jews to communists.
The only communist jews support the OWS.
DohBiden (d54602) — 10/24/2011 @ 9:26 pmJefferson certainly meant that all men were created equal, but what they did in life separated them from each other:
Chuck Bartowski (e84e27) — 10/24/2011 @ 10:00 pmJefferson did own slaves, that much we know. But we also know two other things; Jefferson never bought or sold slaves, and the law in Virginia at the time was such that if a slave was emacipated, that slave could not remain in Virginia. Considering the transportation of the day, that would have meant that those freed slaves would have probably never seen extended family members again. In the 1700’s, people often lived and died without ever having left the county they were born in.
retire05 (a9f846) — 10/24/2011 @ 10:01 pmJefferson was a great man, and a rebel against the system he was born into. But he could have freed his slaves (he freed Sally Hemming’s children), but he did not. He knew that he would be judged harshly as a result, and he should be.
But that does not mean that the words he wrote in the Declaration should not continue to be heard.
Kevin M (563f77) — 10/24/2011 @ 11:27 pmComment by retire05 — 10/24/2011 @ 10:01 pm
I believe the Census figures show that, up until the advent (widespread usage) of the Model-T, the average person in the United States lived their entire lives, and died, within 25-miles of their place of birth.
Another Drew - Restore the Republic/Obama Sucks! (7391b1) — 10/24/2011 @ 11:35 pm“I believe the Census figures show that, up until the advent (widespread usage) of the Model-T, the average person in the United States lived their entire lives, and died, within 25-miles of their place of birth.”
And now i believe it is within two hours.
davod (8bf616) — 10/24/2011 @ 11:55 pmYou know, those Occupeople sure do use a lot of things like laptops, iPhones, iPods, iPads, boom boxes, etc. I guess they’re really comfortable using the technology pioneered by William Shockley, winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1956. He co-invented the transistor, and was chief among the pioneers of what is now known as Silicon Valley, having begun the Shockley Transistor Company in Mountain View, CA when Steve Jobs was still a toddler. Two people who worked at Shockley’s company went on to co-found Intel. Everyone who enjoys an electronic device that is small and powerful owes a debt of gratitude to William Shockley.
Oh, yeah — one more thing about Shockley; he was a eugenicist. He thought that people whose IQ was under 100 ought to be sterilized for the good of society, and was not shy about suggesting which ethnic groups would be diminished to raise the quality of future generations.
Someone ought to visit the various Occupy shantytowns across the world and let them know. They would be horrified, and being the honest, logical, and consistently idealistic folk that they are, they would gladly set aside all their dirty, racist, backward-thinking electronic miracles that were brought to them thanks to the mind of such an evil person. For their musical pleasure, they will joyfully go back to using wind-up phonographs or clunky plug-in radios with vacuum tubes. To communicate they’ll sacrifice their convenience for their principles and use chalkboards, tin cans and string, or perhaps smoke signals — you know, the way the REAL owners of this country used to do it before the slave-owning, disease-ridden white trash Europeans came and ruined everything.
L.N. Smithee (6f877e) — 10/25/2011 @ 12:00 amRegarding Guy Fawkes and Che; it wouldn’t phase them. These are the same kind of ‘intellectual’ idiots who spent the 20th century agitating for, defending, and writing love letters to Communism, while ignoring that one of the very first things any Communist revolution does is liquidate the intellectual class.
C. S. P. Schofield (09eff5) — 10/25/2011 @ 1:08 amC. S. P. Schofield : I agree with your statement but, please, don’t rely on “Spell Check.” Faze is correct, phase is a spelling error.
Michael M. Keohane (4e0dda) — 10/25/2011 @ 3:36 amActually I did not know this before, Smitheee, but I found out in the ‘Dissapearing Spoon’ that Shockley claimed credit for the work of two other researchers,
ian cormac (0fc95f) — 10/25/2011 @ 4:39 amhttp://www.fi.edu/learn/case-files/bardeenbrattain/shock.html
ian cormac (0fc95f) — 10/25/2011 @ 4:52 amNo, he could not. At least, that is what he explicitly wrote was the reason he continued to hold them. The only legal way he had to get rid of them was to sell them, and that would obviously be exactly the wrong thing to do.
I don’t know what the legal barrier was. Retire05 says it’s that the freed slaves would be banned from the territory of Virginia. Another possibility is that his creditors would have been able to seize them.
Milhouse (ea66e3) — 10/25/2011 @ 5:34 amOh, and Guy Fawkes wasn’t fighting for a Catholic theocracy, he was fighting against a Protestant theocracy and for the political and civil rights of Catholics. Had he succeeded, it may be presumed that the Catholics would simply have turned the tables on the Protestants, as they had under Bloody Mary’s reign; it would take several more turns of the wheel before the idea of religious tolerance would gain currency. But that wasn’t his goal; at that moment Catholics were on the bottom, oppressed and suppressed, and he wanted to change that.
Milhouse (ea66e3) — 10/25/2011 @ 5:42 amMichael,
I don’t rely on spell check. I made that mistake all on my own.
*grumble*
That’s what comes of posting when you have the night wakefuls.
C. S. P. Schofield (09eff5) — 10/25/2011 @ 6:01 amAnother point on Guy Fawkes: he may have only intended to blow up Parliament and the King, but had his gunpowder gone off as planned he would have taken out half of London as well. Not exactly the kind of person I’d be celebrating in the former shadow of the WTC…
Milhouse (ea66e3) — 10/25/2011 @ 6:06 amhttp://www.stoptheaclu.com/2011/10/25/obama-doj-proposes-lying-hiding-information-from-foia-requests/
ian cormac (0fc95f) — 10/25/2011 @ 6:51 amhttp://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/25/us-usa-campaign-obama-fundraising-idUSTRE79O0IV20111025?feedType=RSS&feedName=politicsNews&rpc=22&sp=true
ian cormac (0fc95f) — 10/25/2011 @ 7:01 amNo, he could not. At least, that is what he explicitly wrote was the reason he continued to hold them
And yet..
Even in the early 1800’s, there were a number of states without slavery where freed (and escaped) slaves could (and did) go. By the time of Jefferson’s death, slavery was illegal in most of the north.
Kevin M (563f77) — 10/25/2011 @ 8:02 am> …a particular breed of ad hominem.
mysterian1729 (f109e3) — 10/25/2011 @ 8:39 amNo, it is not an ad hominem, which is directed at the participant, but it is an example of the Genetic Fallacy, which is directed at the origin of the claim.
Are all librarians woman or just misandrist ?
A. Weiner (d1c681) — 10/25/2011 @ 8:42 amIssac Newton was an un-loveable, obnoxious know-it-all – but that doesn’t keep me from using his mathematics.
mojo (8096f2) — 10/25/2011 @ 8:53 amComment by davod — 10/24/2011 @ 11:55 pm
Two hours can encompass half the width, or all of the breadth, of the country; or take you to several foreign countries.
Ain’t technology grand?
…now, if I can only remember where my communicator is so I can have Scotty beam me up…
Another Drew - Restore the Republic/Obama Sucks! (d0e7e2) — 10/25/2011 @ 9:04 amIf you don’t support the OWS protesters you will be sodomized.
Lovely bunch./Sarcasm off
DohBiden (d54602) — 10/25/2011 @ 9:07 amWell Doh, that guarantees Sully’s reluctance.
Another Drew - Restore the Republic/Obama Sucks! (d0e7e2) — 10/25/2011 @ 9:14 amhttp://dailycaller.com/2011/10/25/obama-defies-base-hires-wall-street-lobbyist-for-re-election-campaign/
ian cormac (0fc95f) — 10/25/2011 @ 9:27 amian, strictly a fund-raising based measure.
Another Drew - Restore the Republic/Obama Sucks! (d0e7e2) — 10/25/2011 @ 9:29 amWhen you’re putting the arm on people, it helps if it’s coming from someone you know either personally, or professionally.
http://cnsnews.com/news/article/no-one-died-radiation-exposure-fukushima-top-us-regulator-says
ian cormac (0fc95f) — 10/25/2011 @ 9:39 amAw you meanie the left needs to get their anti-nuclear hustle on.
DohBiden (d54602) — 10/25/2011 @ 9:50 amJohn Boehner doesn’t know how to run the country if he did he would not have surrendered to Obama.
DohBiden (d54602) — 10/25/2011 @ 9:56 amBTW it is extremely rich coming from a lefty to tell you y’all don’t know how to run the country.
DohBiden (d54602) — 10/25/2011 @ 9:58 amBTW, to expand on President Millstone’s new campaign advisor (ex-Wall Street lobbiest):
Another Drew - Restore the Republic/Obama Sucks! (d0e7e2) — 10/25/2011 @ 10:12 amI hope that he got a real juicy deal, as he is now the sole breadwinner in that house –
his wife just stepped down from her hosting position at “All Things Considered” (NPR) due to the perceived conflict-of-interest of hubby being on the campaign payroll.
How could a job at NPR be considered a conflict of interest?
Icy (99e0c6) — 10/25/2011 @ 10:15 amI thought they were a non-partisan organization?
‘Chimpy McHitlerBurton’ is an example of an ad hominem attack because issues are irrelevant to the assault which targets an individual with slanderous characterization.
‘Strap-on POTUS’ is, not an ad hominem attack, but rather a distillation of the narcissist, the confidence man, elevated by misrepresentation to a position surpassing the identified’s competence in every capacity.
gary gulrud (d88477) — 10/25/2011 @ 10:33 amI don’t care what race you are if your here illegally you need to be deported.
DohBiden (d54602) — 10/25/2011 @ 10:39 amYou give the Left too much credit by assuming their attacks on the character of anyone who apposes their agenda, alive or dead, has some kind of merit. It doesn’t matter if there is any merit to their attacks. All that matters is if those attacks work.
The Left’s own heroes are the worst examples of the human race from Marx, to Che, to Mao, to Robert Byrd and Ted Kennedy. From mass murderers to Klansman, to drunk drivers. You name a vile human being and chances are some Democrat reveres him. Al Sharpton? He’s a hero to these people.
The next time some liberal brings up the slave owning history of a Founding Father just mention Muhammed and his 6 year old wife. You’ll get a crash course in how great men should not be judged by modern standards but by the standards of the times they lived in. Yeah, right.
Jaynie59 (058ebb) — 10/25/2011 @ 11:13 ama group that is old, rich, mainly white and still mostly male.
Two thirds male anyway.
But look! No Protestants!
Is this proof of discrimination?
Sammy Finkelman (71494b) — 10/25/2011 @ 11:24 amWho made that comment Sammy?
Btw it is not racial profiling to profile muslims.
DohBiden (d54602) — 10/25/2011 @ 11:32 amJefferson wanted to blame George III, or at least England in general, for slavery.
Why were slaves transported to America? People were helpless against the temptation!
well, he says that any attempts to limit the slave trade were vetoed. In the end this whole section was thrown out.
http://www.ushistory.org/declaration/document/rough.htm
he [George III] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it’s most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them to slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportations thither. this piratical warfare,
Sammy Finkelman (71494b) — 10/25/2011 @ 11:35 amthe opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain
determining to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & soldthis excrable commerce ^ and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distiguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms against us, and to purchase that libertyof which he has deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.
New York Times story:
Comment by L.N. Smithee — 10/25/2011 @ 12:00 am:
being the honest, logical, and consistently idealistic folk that they are, they would gladly set aside all their dirty, racist, backward-thinking electronic miracles that were brought to them thanks to the mind of such an evil person. For their musical pleasure, they will joyfully go back to using wind-up phonographs
Wait a second!
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0249379/bio
[Thomas Edison] Invented the phonograph, the incandescent electric lightbulb, the alkaline storage battery among other things…..In his later years, he often committed social faux pas by making racist and anti-Semitic comments before the press.
Also:
http://www.orange-papers.org/orange-rroot540.html
Henry Ford was not the only viciously anti-semitic supporter of the Oxford Groups and Moral Re-Armament, either. Thomas Edison, the famous electrical inventor, and Henry Ford were friends who saw eye to eye on anti-Semitic issues,
Also on the same web page:
During World War I, Ford wrote a series of viciously anti-Semitic articles for The Dearborn Independent, which he then published in book form as a hate-filled diatribe against Jews called “The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem”, which basically blamed Jews for all of the problems of the world. The International Jew is still reprinted and used and much admired by neo-Nazis and White Supremacists even today.
In the early 1920s, this book was published in Germany under the title The Eternal Jew. It reportedly had a major influence on Adolf Hitler, and he almost certainly plagiarized parts of it in Mein Kampf. The admiration was mutual. Following Hitler’s assumption of power, Ford sent Hitler 50,000 Deutsch Marks every year on Hitler’s birthday….
The second paragraph comes from a book which is also a diatribe against Alcoholics Anonymous.
What about cassettes?
The magnetic tape recorder was invented in Nazi Germany!! Well, actually the basic principle was invented before Hitler, but it only became practical in 1933, and Hitler was really the first person to use it for pre-recording speeches and other radio broadcasts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_tape
In 1933, working for AEG, Eduard Schuller developed the ring shaped tape head. Previous head designs were needle shaped and tended to shred the tape. An important discovery made in this period was the technique of AC biasing which improved the fidelity of the recorded audio signal by increasing the effective linearity of the recording medium.
Due to the escalating political tensions, and the outbreak of World War II, these developments were largely kept secret. Although the Allies knew from their monitoring of Nazi radio broadcasts that the Germans had some new form of recording technology, the nature was not discovered until the Allies acquired captured German recording equipment as they invaded Europe in the closing of the war. It was only after the war that Americans, particularly Jack Mullin, John Herbert Orr, and Richard H. Ranger were able to bring this technology out of Germany and develop it into commercially viable formats.
We could call it spoils of war, but maybe you could want to be more strict.
L.N. Smithee: or clunky plug-in radios with vacuum tubes.
Now that’s kosher.
Although Thomas Edison did have a slight role in that, it was somebody else who really developed it.
http://www.pbs.org/transistor/science/events
/vacuumt.html
…the vacuum tube didn’t reach its full maturity until Lee De Forest came along a decade later. De Forest invented something he called the “audion.” Not only did it force current to move in a single direction, but it could be used to increase the current along the way. De Forest put a metal grid in the middle of the vacuum tube. By using a small input current to change the voltage on the grid, De Forest could control the flow of a second, more powerful current, through the tube. The strength of two currents was not necessarily related — a weak current might be applied to the tube’s grid, but a much stronger current could come out the main electrodes of the tube.
But…
Lee De Forest was born in Alabama in 1873. But his father was a minister, and ministers were never really bad. Or maybe not: Woodrow Wilson’s father was a minister. Let’s not examine his life too closely, or else we wouldn’t be able to use anything to play sound.
Sammy Finkelman (71494b) — 10/25/2011 @ 12:10 pma group that is old, rich, mainly white and still mostly male.
Comment by DohBiden — 10/25/2011 @ 11:32 am
Who made that comment Sammy?
Aaron Worthing right at the top in the main post
Sammy Finkelman (71494b) — 10/25/2011 @ 12:16 pm@ 6:57 pm
Sammy
Actually there are 7 men on the S.C.
Wait, what about Kagan, you say?
(Channels Austin Powers) She’s a MAN baby!
(I apologize to everyone for that)
Aaron Worthing (e232a6) — 10/25/2011 @ 12:38 pmElena Kagan says she has learned to like hunting.
http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/kagan_fulfills_a_promise_and_goes_hunting_with_justice_scalia/
During a courtesy call before her confirmation, Justice Elena Kagan responded to a remark by Sen. James Risch, R-Idaho, about gun rights.
Risch told Kagan she may not realize how important the issue was to most Americans, Kagan recalled in a speech Tuesday to the Beth Tfiloh Congregation in Baltimore.
Kagan said she had never owned or fired a gun, CNN reports. “But I told the senator if I was fortunate enough to be confirmed, I would go hunting with Justice Scalia,” she told the congregation.
Kagan lived up to her word. She has accompanied Scalia to a shooting range and on several hunting trips, she said. “It turns out, it’s kind of fun,” she added.
Bit there are women who like hunting.
Sammy Finkelman (d3daeb) — 10/25/2011 @ 1:29 pmHey we’re talking about democrats amirite?
DohBiden (d54602) — 10/25/2011 @ 1:36 pmKevin M — 10/25/2011 @ 8:02 am
Look, I’m not an expert on early-19th-century Virginia law, and I doubt you are either. But Jefferson was, so I must presume that he knew what he was talking about. You seem to be comfortable calling him a liar, with little basis; I’m not. What’s more, if he had lied, surely his correspondent would have known it immediately, and so would anyone else who read the letter; so even if he were morally predisposed to lying he wouldn’t have done so. If he wrote that he had no lawful way of freeing his slaves then I trust that that was the case. Perhaps he could secretly let one or two “escape”, but that would hardly work for the lot of them! And creditors might not make a fuss over two symbolic manumissions in someone’s will, but one could hardly expect them to remain silent if a debtor flagrantly reneged on his obligations by destroying his main asset.
Milhouse (ea66e3) — 10/25/2011 @ 3:57 pmAlso a major crackpot on some subjects.
Milhouse (ea66e3) — 10/25/2011 @ 3:58 pmA: Not one damned thing.
These facts obstruct the narrative, violate Officially Accepted Liberal Positions®, and hence are subject to purging by the Liberal Midnight Reset Button.
What will happen is this: You will tell them. They will call you a liar. You will show them proof.
They will surrender the point, generally with a dismissive “it doesn’t matter”, and, two days later, when you mention the fact once again, they will have no — repeat N-O — clue what you are talking about.
The LMRB will have done its job and cleared out any of those pesky FACTS that might interfere with a cherished and well-beloved OALP.
This is the primary reason that, if you crafted a “Wisdom Quotient” test to match the IQ test, to show how well people learn from experience as opposed to books, then you would discover a remarkably deep-seated inability to learn from experience in liberals.
They are almost uniformly “Widiots”.
IgotBupkis, President, United Anarchist Society (c9dcd8) — 10/25/2011 @ 6:56 pmMMK: Please rely on grammar check. ‘Phase’ is a real word, and a spell-checker would not see any problem with it being there.
Ergo, your assertion is inherently defective: He made a grammar error which involved the use of the wrong homophone, not a spelling error.
These are much, much more difficult to spot for some people. Like you, for instance.
Also — if you’re gonna correct people, it’s a good idea to be right on what you’re correcting them about, Hmmm?
IgotBupkis, President, United Anarchist Society (c9dcd8) — 10/25/2011 @ 7:06 pmThey strongly tend to be female, but even the male librarians have a strong tendency to be liberals, so the net effect is that they’ve all swallowed the feminist Kool-Aid, every drop of it.
IgotBupkis, President, United Anarchist Society (c9dcd8) — 10/25/2011 @ 7:11 pmSince Islam is a creed, not a race, you would have to be rather exceptionally stupid to refer to profiling Muslims as “racist”.
Oh, wait…
IgotBupkis, President, United Anarchist Society (c9dcd8) — 10/25/2011 @ 7:16 pmIt isn’t racial profiling to profile muslims.
Didn’t I just say that?
DohBiden (d54602) — 10/25/2011 @ 7:18 pmRomneybots are butthurt that Rush Limbaugh spoke the truth about Romney.
DohBiden (d54602) — 10/25/2011 @ 8:15 pmSo today’s politicians are an admirable bunch?
DN (322684) — 10/25/2011 @ 10:55 pmNo.
And you leftys must understand Hispanics are considered white not brown skinned………….I made that mistake.
DohBiden (d54602) — 10/25/2011 @ 11:09 pmIts the mestizos which are brown people.
DohBiden (d54602) — 10/25/2011 @ 11:18 pmIgot, DohBiden is speaking to those leftist lurkers in the audience. The rest of us cannot see them, but we know they’re there.
[DB sees red (communist) people!]
Icy (222796) — 10/25/2011 @ 11:22 pmJon Huntsman has entered the media market. Just sayin’ {:o)
tifosa (3f3133) — 10/26/2011 @ 2:23 amDon’t you all love it when someone posts to contribute to discussion, instead of trying to irritate or obscure? Makes you wonder about about the motivation. Then you realize, why care about that kind of person?
Simon Jester (55bf68) — 10/26/2011 @ 6:19 amThe thing that I find odd about the Dewey Decimal System is that its use is not consistent. Most academic libraries use the Library of Congress cataloging system. So, from what I can tell, does the NYPL (which is the largest non-academic library system in the country).
I would be very interested to read a history of the adoption of these different systems which might could explain to me what the arguments between their proponents were and why DDS succeeded in some venues but failed utterly in others.
aphrael (a0f788) — 10/26/2011 @ 6:38 amAphrael, the Dewey Decimal System begins to fail at about 100,000 books. When you have more books than that in your general library, you (for example) go to the WW2 history section and there’s two hallway lengths of floor to ceiling shelves with everything with the same number. And you can’t find anything in that pile.
People learn the Dewey Decimal System in grade school and high school because the Dewey Decimal System works very well for grade school and high school libraries, as well as small local public libraries.
Once you get big enough, you have to go Library of Congress.
luagha (5cbe06) — 10/26/2011 @ 8:59 amMaybe the minimum wage is too high?
It is possible to have a low minimum wage without rachetting down all wages.
There ought to a differential minimum wage based on frequency of pay, e.g. none at all if paid daily at the end of the shift, $7.50 an hour if paid after a day, $10 an hour if paid after a week, $15 an hour if paid after two weeks or bimonthly, $3,500 a month if paid monthly or less often. And some other exceptions.
Sammy Finkelman (3a0ae4) — 11/11/2011 @ 10:48 amSorry, this belongs somewhere else
A Fire Alarm in the Night: Darino v. Morgan Hill Unified School District
Post dated Novebmer 11, 2011 9:38 am Patterico time.
Sammy Finkelman (3a0ae4) — 11/11/2011 @ 10:53 amI’ll take a modification of a Brit system where debts were paid annually, among “Gentlemen” – in Guineas.
AD-RtR/OS! (556f44) — 11/11/2011 @ 11:13 amYou can pay me annually, in Guineas;
I think that 50K should suffice.