But he didn’t take it out–he *led *with it, setting the tone for what followed.
Mmmm… okay then.
But it’s not fair to characterize the whole post as a bunch of conservative nonsense (as Evil Captor did) when the conservative talk is only in the first sentence, and the rest is decidedly atypical of stereotypical conservative talk.
I love the smell of semantic ascent in the afternoon.
It most certainly is not. It’s more subtle, but still definitely reminiscent of the critiques you’ll hear from “conservative intellectuals” about the “moral decline” of “Black America”.
Frylock, allow me, one more time, to emphasize the problem:
“Roel models for practical tasks such as hard work as well as moral examples of religiosity”
These are the exact examples I assert still exist, and will always exist, in every neighborhood. Blake just didn’t count them. Television has them (e.g. Carl Sagan), he just didn’t count either. Parents—but Blake only wants to think of unemployed parents, so he can discount them, too. In short, my problem is one of accounting, not definition.
FWIW, my first sentence was thrown in therw as a parody of Der Trihs’ strident leftist response in the preceding post. Compare the sentence structure folks.
Anyway, carry on telling us how those well-known hotbeds of Radial Conservatism, University Social Science Faculties, have got it all wrong. 
yes, the very first sentence is DEFINITELY a conservative laundry list of complaints:
If you bullet pointed each item, especially. Here’s more:
Equating religiousity with morality, honesty and so forth, standard conservative gibberish.
[quote=Blake]
Now that is a trivial example, but it applies to every aspect of human life, from the way children are raised to work ethic to percieved potential occupations to lawfulness.
[quote]
Equating lawn mowing work ethics, and lawfulness with general goodness. Basically, if you aren’t living in a tidy white house with a neat green lawn and a steady job, you are probably a Democrat and a child molester.
Although Blake is careful to make the point that an atheist could be lawful and so forth, the notion that church attendance is associated with a higher level of morality is an old conservative meme, espeically beloved by the religious. Makes you wonder why Europe is not a squalid mess.
I do have to give Blake full credit for not promoting the line that blacks are lower in intelligence, etc. The overwhelming thrust of his post is renouncing that line, but there is a lot of standard conservative gibberish buried throughout it. That’s what I was responding to.
What are you talking about when you refer to lawn mowing?
I don’t mean to simply ignore the rest of your post, but that one line threw me off so badly I need to get clear about it before I can say anything about anything else.
Turns out Blake intended that as a parody.
I don’t see any “equating” here–it’s a list, not an equation. But he does say that role models for religiosity are examples of the “moral” type of role model. This doesn’t strike me as particularly conservatives. You know there are fervently religious people who think of religion and morality as being closely intertwined on both sides, right?
He didn’t say church attendance is associated with a higher level of morality. He said it’s associated with a higher level of social cohesion. Again: Not even close to stereotypical conservative gibberish. “Social cohesion,” to my mind, sounds closer to commie talk than to tea party talk. (“Closer,” not “all the way there.”)
I am pretty sure Blake’s parodic first line threw off your reading of the rest of his post.
I don’t know if Blake is liberal or conservative or something else. I do know he thinks there’s nothing immoral about copying intellectual works, even if they are copyrighted. Is that something that conservatives tend to think?
Frylock, your apologia strikes me as tortured and unconvincing. Do you really believe it, or are you just being stubborn and lawyerly?
One thing I noticed that no one has stubbornly persisted in is insisting there’s no evidence for wealthy people being (on average) innately more intelligent than the poor, once I provided some evidence. Glad we’ve settled that at least!
It’s very strange: I think your interpretation is tortured and unconvincing. I kind of thought you and Evil Captor were only persisting out of some kind of cussedness… But I guess not.
Here’s one possibility: Both Blake and I are academics in the humanities, so he may be tapping into a kind of language I have been trained to interpret for its literal meaning, and this may blind me sometimes to political implications others see easily. (OR it may allow me sometimes to see what people really mean instead of what non-academics merely think they mean.)
I’m still trying to figure out how the Chinese went from being the dumbest people on the planet to some of the smartest.
There was much they could learn from us.
flees
When were they (seen as) the dumbest?
It’s interesting that you describe them as some of the smartest - you’ve told us in other threads that their educational system is rote memorization. Does memorizing books make people smart? You’ve also told us that they have trouble with simple logistical problems, like exchanging phone numbers and arranging a time for a group to meet. How do you reconcile your statement in this thread with other things you’ve told us?
I meant the following section of the same post by Blake: