From this NY Times piece:

According to a July New York Times/CBS News poll, when whites were asked whether they would be willing to vote for a black candidate, 5 percent confessed that they would not. That’s not so bad, right? But wait.

The pollsters then rephrased the question to get a more accurate portrait of the sentiment. They asked the same whites if most of the people they knew would vote for a black candidate. Nineteen percent said that those they knew would not.

This is what causes the Bradley Effect, which is where a minority candidate leads in the polls leading up to an election but loses by a surprising margin when people actually vote. In short, it’s White people saying publicly that they’re going to vote for the minority and then voting for the White guy when protected by anonymity.

It’s why my prediction has been stable for the last several months. Obama will lead by approximately 10% in the polls going into the election, and he will lose by roughly that same amount. That’s a 20% swing, caused by latent racism.

Let’s hope I’m wrong.

Links

[ The Bradley Effect | wikipedia.org ]

I found an article on CNN yesterday that severely bothered me. It’s by a Black professor by the name of Michael Eric Dyson. His article is typical of the 90′s theme of high victimization and low responsibility. Here are a few choice excerpts:

There is a vicious prison system that hungers for young black and brown bodies. The more young black and brown folk are thrown in jail, the more cells are built, and the more money made.

This is sickening. I just threw up in my mouth. “Black and Brown” bodies don’t make any more money than White ones. Nobody gives a shit what color the inmates are. Prison systems get money based on capacity needs. Period.

It has been well documented that we spend far more money on penitentiaries than university education for poor black and brown males.

Well, sure, that’s because if they choose not to go to school (often for free), none of that education money that’s available to them is ever spent. Yet if they choose to commit a crime then the money that’s available to lock them up will get spent. And this is precisely what’s happening all over America.

We would permit no other population of American citizens to be locked away with such callous disregard for the educational opportunity that might help stem the tide of incarceration.

There are legions of studies that show that young Black males who embrace intellectualism and education are shunned by their peers. There is also plenty of research that shows that the Black household — even when accounting for income — doesn’t promote academics the same as White and Asian households.

These are the reasons they aren’t succeeding in high school and going on to college. The system itself doesn’t care who participates; in fact, it’s biased heavily in the favor of Blacks. The problem, and solution, is deeply cultural. The cycle of failure is built into the system.

Try this: go to any city in the United States that is roughly half Black and half White on a Friday night. Go to the local book store. Count the people. Do the math. My anecdotal numbers, taken many times, show approximately 2-5% black. Quite simply, going to the book store on a Friday night, as a hangout, because reading is fun, is a “White” thing.

Until that changes, and intellectualism becomes part of the Black culture, professor Dyson will have plenty more opportunity to completely misdiagnose the problem.:

Summary: White University professor denied tenure at a Black University because he failed too many students that deserved to fail. He was essentially told to pass approximately 70% of his students regardless of what they do. He refused and was punished.

This has been a theme of mine lately: pretending to help people by artificially lowering the standard does NOT help them. All it does is make the person lowering the standard feel better. But the student/child still suffers because they remain equally unable to compete in society.

Sickening.

[ How NOT to Equal the Playing Field | insidehighered.com ]

So, speaking from a general perception standpoint, Indians are considered Asians because they’re on the Asian sub-continent. Well, at least to non-Americans. Most Americans think Indians are from the Middle East, but that’s another post.

The question is, if Indians are considered Asian, why not Russians? Russia has like 4x the land mass in Asia that India has. Hell, it has roughly the same land mass as China, Japan, Korea and India combined.

But “Russians” are European?

Here’s what I’m thinking:

1. Most Russians we see look like Europeans. Maria Sharapova doesn’t strike me as Asian, for example, and neither does Fedor Emelianenko or my dean of CS in college named Boris.

2. Moscow, and other large cities are in the European part.

These make sense, but it just strikes me as weird that the majority of a country’s ¹ mass could be in one continent but the people are considered to be from the small part.

Any input from my European or Asian friends?

Notes

¹ Yes, I know Russia isn’t a country.

The public agrees that immigrants work harder than most blacks at low-paying jobs, but the margin is not as wide as when the comparison is made with white workers; 56% of adults agree that most immigrants work harder than most blacks; 30% disagree and 14% say they don’t know.

Analyzing the responses to both sets of questions by the race of the respondent yields some interesting patterns. Blacks are even more likely than whites to say that their fellow blacks are out-worked by immigrants at low-wage jobs. Some 64% of blacks hold this view, compared with just 55% of whites.

There’s a simple explanation for whites not agreeing with the statement as much as blacks: they’re simply afraid to say what they believe for fear of feeling like, or being labeled, a racist. Blacks have immunity in this regard due to the fact that they’re talking about themselves, thus they are more free to say what they really think.

[ Immigrants Work Harder Than Blacks | Pew Research ]

Yeah, big shock here. It’s already been documented that the less education one has the more likely they are to vote for Clinton. And West Virginia votes for Clinton. Wow.

They’d never vote for a Muslim anyway.

In a Nightline interview Obama recently talked about the O.J. incident, and how it was polarizing along racial lines. But he was on the side that thought/knew he was guilty.

You remember when, during the O.J. trial … black and white culture just had these completely opposite reactions and nobody understood it. I’m somebody who was pretty clear that O.J. was guilty.

He goes on to say that he thought it was pretty sad that the black community took the position they did, but then gave an explanation:

And I was ashamed for my own community to respond in that way, but I also understood what was taking place, which was that reaction had more to do with a sense that somehow the criminal justice system historically had been biased so profoundly that a defeat of that justice system was somehow a victory.

I totally love this guy. He’s exactly what America needs. He stands with his people when it’s right, and he breaks when them when it’s right as well. That’s integrity. And he does it because he knows “his people” is really America in general, not one subset.

That’s what the speech was about — telling us that we all have work to do, and that it can happen if we realize it’s to our mutual benefit. This guy is patently awesome.:

The people commonly called “gypsies” are the Romani people. They’re originally from India.

<

p style=”text-align: center”>

New York is rolling out a new program where they pay poor people to take care of their children.

The experimental program, called Opportunity NYC, is modeled on a 10-year-old Mexican program called Oportunidades, which has been so successful in reducing poverty in rural areas that it has been adopted by more than 20 countries, including Argentina and Turkey. International studies have found that these programs raise school enrollment and vaccination rates and lower the number of sick days students take. Bringing this idea to Harlem and the South Bronx may not make a radical difference, concedes Linda Gibbs, the deputy mayor for Health and Human Services. But, she adds, “It makes these activities matter in a new way.” Gibbs thinks that the money could also make parents more active in asking for services that might not exist in their neighborhoods.” A mother might demand an early-intervention evaluation [to look for developmental or learning disabilities] for a child” to get the $150 payment, Gibbs says. “If she can’t find a doctor to do it, the cash incentive might make Mom more likely to ask why those services aren’t available in her community.“

So here’s the basic idea: bribe poor, ignorant parents into taking care of their children by paying them to do what they should be doing already. I find this horribly depressing. All it says to me is that these people should not be parents at all.

If there are utterly simple things you could be doing that would drastically help your children, but you’re not doing them, then you’re a burden to society. The fact that a financial incentive would inspire them to do these simple tasks is utterly sickening.

Let’s be clear here — this isn’t money to help them pay for these services; it’s to encourage them to simply take actions that they should be taking already as parents.

I still support the program because it increases the chances that children will succeed, but I think the real answer is for society as a whole to apply social pressure on poor parents — as peers. Society must police itself, and that starts with demanding that people are capable of supporting themselves successfully before they start bringing additional life into the world.

The first step to reducing the world’s suffering is finding a way to stop increasing it. And that means bringing less people into the world that are likely to suffer.: