Why don’t you guys try that it wasn’t even Rick Santorum? Just someone who looked a bit like Rick Santorum?
As far as I can tell, every print report on the event reported the word as “black” and it really is plainly pronounced without any ambiguity in the pronunciation of the word. Never mind that others here have shown the only way the sentence makes sense is that the word is “black” as others have pointed out.
I suppose that as some have pointed out, that this statement doesn’t show the true problems with a Santorum candidacy. They have a point. But it does amply demonstrate the utter fictional world that the right wingers live in and insist that the rest of us adopt.
How dishonest are the people who are denying he said “black”? The dishonesty of each advocate would seem to me to be tied in exact proportion to how much they admit that a neutral hearer could possibly have heard the word “black”. Most of these deniers are not even conceding that reasonable people could have heard “black”.
What the flying fuck are you talking about? The sentence doesn’t make sense if he says “I don’t want to make people’s lives better by giving them someone else’s money?” Aside from the fact that it’s dumb, why does it not make sense?
Why are they lying? Let’s see you come up with a theory.
Newt said African American. Yes, it was the same sentiment expressed about the same subject matter, but whether Gingrich and Santorum have this political view, the shocking thing to me is that people are debating whether Santorum’s sentence contained the word “black”. Clear as day, without any ambiguity, there is the word.
You know, I’m going to ask this question again, because it wasn’t answered the first time I asked it - it was just ignored completely. So here goes. You claim that he unambiguously spoke the word “black”. Yet the word “black” ends with a hard consonant sound. Do you hear a hard consonant sound in the word spoken by Santorum?
Is there a name for this psychological phenomenon? Like what happened at the Rodney King trial, where the jurors looked at the same piece of video for so long, they got confused about what they saw. Its similar to the unreliability of eye-witness testimony, two people can view exactly the same thing and see two entirely different things, no necessarily based on any preconceived prejudice.
I heard it, and heard it as “black”, and cannot erase that. Other people here heard something entirely different. Objective fact, it would seem, takes place only in test tubes, in the world of people and their perceptions, there is no such thing. A mighty sobering thought.
Yes. Yes, I do, I hear the word “black”. Can’t do anything about that, Argent. As Eugene V. Debs is my witness, I hear “black”. Plainly, clearly, unambiguously. Maybe it isn’t a “fact” that this is what he said, but it’s a fact that this is what I hear.
Would I have heard it if I didn’t already know what I was listening for, and didn’t already loathe him with every fiber of my being? Dunno. Never will.
There might be a more technical term, but most of this is people’s perceptions coloring what they see and hear. It happens all the time: you see and hear what you expect to see and hear, and it can happen in much more clear-cut situations than this. The rest of it is suggestion. I understand you can hear “black” without suggestion, but most of it is because people know they’re hearing a Republican and to make matters worse he uses the word welfare shortly before uttering the fragment in question.
I asked the same thing on page one and didn’t get much of an answer either. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to put on James Brown’s classic “Say It Loud- I’m Bly and I’m Proud.” Then I’ll put on “Paint it Bly” by The Rolling Stones, and after that I think I’ll listen to some Bly Sabbath.
I would imagine that most people, when speaking the phrase “black people” in conversation would probably omit the harsh consonant. I do that all the time. It’s a natural tendency, as hitting every consonant makes one’s speech sound extremely stilted. In other words, he used a glottal stop.
This was just after it was first reported, and i assumed that the reports were correct, so when i listened to the audio i wasn’t even paying too much attention to the enunciation of the specific word. I heard the “bl…” and just sort of filled in the rest of the word subconsciously. We do this a lot, both for spoken and written elisions. Our brains are good at filling in what they think is missing information.
But once i began reading articles suggesting that there was some doubt about whether he said “black,” i went back and listened again, and when i listened specifically for that word, it became clear to me that he doesn’t actually say “black” at all.
As i said earlier, i’m perfectly willing to believe that maybe was about to say “black” and caught himself, but the sound he utters is not the same as the word “black” IMO.
Guy’s a douchebag no matter what, and that’s the bottom line for me. I know it’s not going to happen but i’d love to see him get the Republican nomination just so he could be crushed in November.
I’m not right wing. I’m far, far left. I’d like nothing better than to have Rick Santorum say something so monumentally stupid that it instantly ruins his chances of ever holding public office again. It’d warm my heart to see him shamed and humiliated because he’s a rotten piece of shit. But I’m not going to heap scorn on him for something that I don’t think he actually did.
I had to listen to the clip a bunch of times before I figured out what he was saying, I can easily see how somebody might think he said ‘black.’ You, however, are calling people who disagree with you ‘fucking liars.’ I like how you expect the other side to behave reasonably while you’re being as much of an asshole as possible.
I can see you’re typing in English, but I have to ask: what freaking language do you speak? What language is spoken by the people around you? Who turns “black people” into “bla’ people?” Dick Van Dyke as Bert the Chimney Sweep with half his tongue cut out? I’m dumbfounded. Even if you don’t fully pronounce the “ck” to speed up your speech, you still don’t get what Santorum said. You get something more like “blag,” and that’s pretty far off the “bly” or “ply” that came out of Santorum’s mouth.
So suppose he didn’t say “black” he said something resembling, “bly” which isn’t a word so he meant to say something else before catching himself. What was it? Blind? Blitzed?
You realize that’s been asked and answered a couple of times, right? The best guess is that he stumbled over the words “people’s lives,” which could give you “ply.” I know that’s not quite “bly,” but they’re both plosives, at least.
I hate Rick Santorum as much as anyone, but it’s pretty obvious to me that he was catching himself saying something before saying “people’s” in the HuffPo clip. He may well have meant to say “blacks’ lives”, but I wouldn’t say that’s a cinch.
In other words, I believe that **mhendo **and his quote of Sam Sommers have it right.
And, bluntly, it’s not as if Santorum has any chance of being elected President anyway.
This is ridiculous. He was saying blonde. He doesn’t want to make blonde people’s lives better (because we all know that blondes are too stupid to earn money by actually working and the bleach rots their brains or something like that).
No, he doesn’t. Which is why it will really suck if a lot of people believe he only lost because of this. It’ll do a great job of reinforcing that far-right nutjob view that liberals will call anyone who disagrees with them a racist. As it is, Ron Paul has gotten a pass from almost all of the other Republicans on the newsletter thing (which means he’s also getting a pass from many commentators) because some of his supporters don’t care if he’s a racist, and because a bigger portion of the Republican base believes that if you accuse someone of racism, you’re automatically a liberal.
I don’t deny being an asshole. If that helps folks, so be it. If it helps to think I’m stupid, I don’t mind that either. I’ve listened to the sentence and he says black. Anyone who tells me that they listened to that sentence and does not hear black is untrustworthy in my opinion. Right or left. This isn’t about Santorum, it is not about race, it is about distorting what has plainly happened. This is as clear as the video of Rodney King being beaten by the cops.
Given the paucity of people hereabouts who think Santorum is a swell guy and would make a great President, its kind of a hard theory to test. But I’m thinking that the perception of what he said is not even connected to our preconceived notions of who he is.
Just guessing here, but I think its Darwin City. In the world in which we evolved, we had to rely and act upon our perceptions, and often right quickly, too. If you hear a leopard’s “cough”, its no time to stop and reflect whether or not your wife just cut one. And if you find out later that it may have been her, you don’t change your behavior.
