Stupid Pundits Being Stupid

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Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns & Money had nominated this David Brooks column as the dumbest article you’ll read today, but then he found a Richard Cohen column that is even dumber. These columns are self-evidently stupid enough to not need further commentary from me explaining why they are stupid.

If the prize is not yet awarded, I’d also like to nominate this William Saletan column as the dumbest article you’ll read today. Really, Saletan should stick to concern trolling about abortion and stop revealing how oblivious he can be about other issues as well. See Steve M for explanatory snark.

But my real purpose here is to nominate a blog post by Ross Douthat, called “Why French Women Don’t Get Promoted,” as at least a runner-up for the dumbest article you’ll read today. He presents data showing that U.S. career women have a higher glass ceiling than women in other developed countries, which may be true. But he thinks the reason for this is that those other countries have governments that provide more support for families, including working mothers — what Douthat calls “family-friendly socialism” — than in the U.S., where working mothers are on their own to patch together whatever arrangements they can make to balance office and home. He writes that family-friendly socialism . . .

helps explain the persistence of “the glass ceilings, as well as stubbornly large wage gaps in more progressive countries,” because working women tend to be shunted more decisively onto a mommy track than they are in the United States.

… but at no point does he attempt to explain why that would be true. And the sources he cites, the ones available online, don’t really explain why that would be true, either. It’s a correlation-must-be-causation argument.

One of the sources cited explains that women get so much maternity leave in France it makes employers nervous about hiring them. But it’s not like women here don’t get pregnant and choose to cut back hours or leave their jobs altogether. And, anyway, the same source says later that French companies find ways to punish excessive maternity-leave taking.

Basically, though, Douthat blames France for providing women with all these incentives to stay home and have more children, and he says that’s why they are less successful in their careers. The thing is, though, that women who really want to be a success in business are not going to have four or five babies to get more maternity leave and receive a government stipend. I suspect the women who most take advantage of France’s family-friendly socialism to spend more time with their children are the ones who choose to do that, whereas here low-wage service jobs are mostly filled up by women who have to work to earn the money but who would rather be home with their kids.

I’ve got two words for Douthat: Affirmative Action. People forget that Affirmative Action was and is as much about ending gender discrimination as racial discrimination. And early on, probably the biggest beneficiaries of Affirmative Action were younger college-educated women, mostly white, who no longer were being sidetracked into secretarial jobs just because they were girls while young men with exactly the same qualifications started up the career ladder. Now, after 40 years, it has made a huge difference.

Have any of these other developed countries with lower glass ceilings attempted anything as rigorous as Affirmative Action to address gender discrimination? I doubt it. If the glass ceilings are lower in France, I suspect the real culprit is old-fashioned sexism.

Of Race and Riots

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The wingnuts were so certain African Americans would riot after the Zimmerman acquittal that, in the absence of actual riots, someone felt compelled to post a fake riot video that, naturally, went viral. However, the video was not of a post-verdict riot in Miami but of the 2011 Stanley Cup riot in Vancouver, Canada.

Instead of riots, there have been some protest rallies attended by racially mixed crowds. These have either been mostly peaceful but for a few individuals acting out, or they were entirely peaceful but over-policed. It’s hard to know which.

And, of course, it’s the widespread certitude among white racists that blacks are inherently prone to crime and violence that gave George Zimmerman “permission” to stalk Trayvon Martin.

But if we assume, as racists do, that behavioral traits are connected to race, it’s really white rioters we should fear. Historically, in the U.S. whites have been at least as prone as blacks to engage in riots, if not more so.

First, as mentioned in an earlier post, precisely 150 years ago rampaging whites fomented the biggest riot in American history, in New York City. A close rival to that record must be the East St. Louis riot of 1917, in which a white mob set fire to black neighborhoods and shot residents as they tried to escape the flames.

Of the many white race riots in U.S. history, there were some doozies during Reconstruction, such as the New Orleans and Memphis riots of 1866 (36 and 48 dead, respectively, nearly all African American). One interesting detail of the New Orleans riots is that orders (from Washington? I don’t remember) had sent Gen. Phil Sheridan and many occupying troops out of town (Sheridan was military commander of the district) in advance of the riot. There is speculation this was done to get Sheridan out of the way, as he tended to actually keep the peace. This suggests the New Orleans violence was not so much a riot as a premeditated attack.

After the heavyweight boxing defeat of (the white) Jim Jeffries by (the black) Jack Johnson in 1910, riots broke out among whites around the country in which several African Americans were killed, but I don’t know how many. From PBS:

Newspaper editorials warned Johnson and the black community not to be too proud. Congress eventually passed an act banning the interstate transport of fight films for fear that the images of Johnson beating his white opponents would provoke further unrest.

And of course, during the Jim Crow years lynch mobs were a common phenomenon, and not just in the South.

I could go on and on. You don’t find large-scale African American riots until relatively recent times, such as Watts, 1965, and the “Rodney King” riots of 1992. But again, if we assume a predisposition to riot is an immutable trait connected to race (which I don’t, to be clear), then whites must be at least as likely to riot as blacks.

Update: See also Electric Ooga-Boogaloo. Drudge et al. are reporting riots that are not happening.

Update: On CNN, Newt called the peaceful verdict protesters a “lynch mob.”

Afterthoughts

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A criminal defense lawyer in Wisconsin wrote to TPM:

I was astounded that the defense would put on a “self-defense” argument without the defendant testifying. In most civilized jurisdictions, the burden is on the defense to prove, at least more likely than not, that the law breaking was done for reasons of self-defense. I couldn’t figure out how they could do this without the defendant’s testimony.

I got curious and read the jury instructions Friday night and, I was wrong. In Florida, if self-defense is even suggested, it’s the states obligation to prove it’s absence beyond a reasonable doubt(!). That’s crazy. But ‘not guilty’ was certainly a reasonable result in this case. As I told in friend in Tampa today though, if you’re ever in a heated argument with anyone, and you’re pretty sure there aren’t any witnesses, it’s always best to kill the other person. They can’t testify, you don’t have to testify, no one else has any idea what happened; how can the state ever prove beyond a doubt is wasn’t self-defense? Holy crap! What kind of system is that?

Seriously. I do hope Martin’s family files a civil suit against Zimmerman. Also, I think Charles Pierce is pissed.

Try to Be of Reasonably Good Cheer

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On this day of bad news, I don’t suppose it helps to remind everyone that 150 years ago today, New York City was in the grips of the largest riot of American history. In four days of violence, white mobs killed at least 100 African Americans. I had always thought most of the rioters were Irish immigrants, but it turns out that wasn’t entirely true. They mostly just got blamed for it.

That said, Irish music doesn’t seem at all appropriate, but it always cheers me up. So let the dickheads and white supremacists celebrate; justice will have its day. Someday.

More Trial Commentary

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Couple o’ things —

Elon James White:

In the Zimmerman Trial yesterday, the defense team noted that if George Zimmerman is, in fact, telling the truth, Trayvon Martin would need three hands.

How did the victim see this gun? Or is it just another lie that [Zimmerman] tells? [Martin]‘s holding one hand over his mouth, one hand over his noise and with that third hand he reaches for the gun?

You see, it’s that third hand that immediately makes young black men suspicious.

Charles Pierce:

The courthouse drones seem to think that the prosecution scored pretty heavily in the late innings, and that things may have gotten a little tighter for George Zimmerman, the wannabe cop who killed an unarmed teenager named Trayvon Martin for the crime of carrying snack food through a neighborhood where Zimmerman thought Martin didn’t belong. One of the reasons to believe that things may be turning just a bit is that Zimmerman’s partisans in the conservative peanut gallery — including his adoptive father, Sean Hannity — have begun to cast about for the hidden (and, of course, very dark) hands behind a possible conviction. …

…Some of them are on the black-savages-will-riot-we-hope-we-hope beat. Some of them are working the White-Man-Can’t-Catch-A-Break side of the street. And nothing good will come of this whole affair. Nothing.

Also, too, the gun testimony reminded me of this:

Predictions in Case of a Conviction

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I see that the closing arguments in the Zimmerman trial have ended, which means the case is about to go to the jury. Before there’s a verdict I want to make some predictions in case Zimmerman is convicted of something.

If George Zimmerman is convicted of a crime —

Within a week of the verdict, someone in the Florida legislature will submit a revised “stand your ground” bill to close the “Zimmerman loophole.” Under this bill, if you shoot someone in Florida you cannot be charged with a crime unless the victim was an unarmed, elderly nun. Well, unless the nun was carrying a crucifix. Those things are dangerous. You could poke somebody’s eye out. The defendant was defending himself, obviously.

The Breitbrats will run an expose claiming that the jury was forced by the U. S. Justice Department to convict Zimmerman, because the government was afraid of widespread rioting in case of an acquittal. Or because Obama is a black socialist Muslim. Whatever.

Some white supremacist organization will release a self-pitying statement claiming that white men are now an endangered species, since they can no longer defend themselves from dangerous nonwhite thugs armed with Skittles.

I doubt there will be riots, however. Riots are too much work. Instead, expect scattered pro-Zimmerman rallies mostly attended by men with Confederate flag decals on their pickups. The men will shout and wave signs awhile, and then they will go home and sulk over their beer.

Seriously.

Update: In closing arguments, Zimmerman’s lawyer said that while Zimmerman was injured, Martin wasn’t injured in the fight except for being shot to death.