Not only are they all lazy commies but sometimes they eat food that isn’t bland.

A more accurate (by which I mean “at all accurate”) version of this question would be: “Suppose you were going to have open-heart surgery, and you had the best open-heart surgeons in the world to choose from, any of whom can perform your surgery competently, accurately, and better than 98% of other surgeons in the world.  Would you want to be operated on by someone who can empathize with you, understand what you’re going through in the middle of a life-changing surgery, or a total dick who believed that medicine should be pursued based on how it was performed nearly 250 years ago for no particular reason and with no particular realization that we live in a different world?”

very nice.

On that track -

Let’s not forget Tom Tancredo, who called Miami a “third world country” because of the Latinos there and criticized presidential candidates of “pandering” because they engaged in a Spanish language debate and accused immigrants of pushing drugs, raping kids and detroying lives during an immigration debate (saying that the immigration debate is about whether “we” (meaning whites) will survives as a “culture”)....

called Sotomayor a “radical” on TV even though he doesn’t know anything of the cases she’s reviewed.

He then went on to claim - in all his hilarious phony outrage/theatrics-  that if “he said that a white man could judge a case better than ‘a brown women’ is able to judge - would that not disqualify [me]?”
Even though Sotomayor has never said anything like that.
AT ALL.

If you were going to have open-heart surgery, would you want to be operated on by a surgeon who was chosen because he had to struggle to get where he is, or by the best surgeon you could find — even if he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and had every advantage that money and social position could offer?

That really is the conservative worldview in a nutshell:  the rich white guy is always more qualified than anyone else.  The mere idea that a woman or a minority could be equally as good as a rich white guy is ridiculous.  The idea that a woman or a minority could be better than a rich white guy is literally unthinkable.  So, in Sowell’s world, the surgeon whose parents were able to pay for him to attend the best schools is automatically the best surgeon in the world, not the surgeon who studied his/her ass off in between part-time jobs to pay for their schooling.

Of course, the really funny part is that people who are actually rich and have high social position would never dream of letting their child enter a service profession like medicine.  I remember Howard Dean talking about how he had to take his father out for a three-martini lunch to break the news to him that he was going to medical school instead of finance.  It was absolutely horrifying to his family that he would sink so low as to become a mere doctor.

(And then he went and married a nice Jewish girl, but that’s a whole other story ...)

We just had a rich kid born with a silver spoon in his mouth run the country and it was an unmitigated disaster.

Talk about lazy, bigoted, biased and without temperament for office! GW had it all in spades!

Love the last paragraph, Jesse.  Conservatism in a nutshell.

“it’s the way she’s being used to launch a broadside jihad against Hispanics and minorities as a whole.”

Golly…it’s almost like Sotomayor is bait for some sort of trap…..

”...or a total dick who believed that medicine should be pursued based on how it was performed nearly 250 years ago for no particular reason and with no particular realization that we live in a different world?”

...sounds like it’s time to BREAK OUT THE LEECHES!...

If you were going to have open-heart surgery, would you want to be operated on by a surgeon who was chosen because he had to struggle to get where he is, or by the best surgeon you could find — even if he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and had every advantage that money and social position could offer?

Shorter version: It’s simply impossible for a minority to be more qualified than a white guy, so by choosing a minority you are automatically choosing someone who is inferior.

Of course, for that argument to make any sense, you’d have to accept the premise that it’s impossible for a minority to be as qualified or more qualified than a white guy.

Mnemosyne,
I should have read through the comments before I posted.  Your point is exactly right.

Also Renmiri,
Great point about the silver-spoon-in-mouth buffoon who became president because of his last name and seriously messed things up.  If had gone to medical school, I’d rather perform heart surgery on myself than let him do it.

But folks, based on your own (pretty damn accurate, in my opinion) take on their mindset, pointing out Bush’s failures is not going to get any traction - because by definition, he was the best available.

I have actually heard people defend the Bush administration while clearly understanding and recognizing what they did wrong - because the Democrats would have done it worse. Sure, they took a surplus and ran up the biggest deficit in history, but imagine how much MORE the tax and spend liberals would have spent! Sure they screwed up the war, but the liberals would have done even worse, the anti-patriots that they are. Sure, they weren’t ready for Katrina, but a Democratic administration would just have stood around wringing their hands rather than accomplish what the Bushies did. Etc.

As a Republican (male, white, privileged, etc), Bush was by definition better than Gore, therefore it is to be assumed that Gore would have done everything worse.

Not for nothing, but I’d wager you a friendly bet that the surgeon who came up through a hardscrabble existence to rise to the top of his or her field would be better than the son of privilege (it’s obviously a son of privilege; I mean, the idea that a girl could be a good doctor! Really!). But that’s because I’m a stupid, stupid liberal, who thinks people with brown skin or breasts can be as competent as a rich white male. Silly me.

If you were going to have open-heart surgery, would you want to be operated on by a surgeon who was chosen because he had to struggle to get where he is, or by the best surgeon you could find — even if he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and had every advantage that money and social position could offer?

Honestly, I’d rather have the surgeon who had to struggle than one who was born privileged.  Privilege often masks incompetence.  The non-privileged have to fight very hard and be extra good to be taken seriously.

In other words, Sowell subscribes to the myth of the most qualified candidate, which is to say that there’s some white guy in the AAA League of the federal appellate courts just waiting for someone to move on so he can prove himself in the big leagues, and that anyone who gets there ahead of him is doing so via shortcuts.

By this reasoning, the economically priviledged are, as a group, morally inferior to economically disadvantaged individuals who have had to struggle and develop non-economic resources in order to achieve upward social mobility.

I can buy that.  This can be applied to race as well.  I’ve read that people of color often have superior internal coping mechanisms to deal with stress and anxiety compared to white people (specifically white men).  Sort of explains why you don’t see a lot of non-white people go completely batshit and shoot up their workplace or murder their entire family.  Some do, but it’s really rare.

I used to use the surgeon analogy on people who were planning to vote for Bush in 2000 and 2004 when they used the “he seems like a guy you could have a beer with” line on me.  I’d ask them if they’d apply the same criteria to the surgeon who would be operating on their child:  The nerdy brainiac who graduated top in his class at med school or the good time Charlie dumbass who only got into med school because his daddy pulled strings but who seemed like a really fun person to have a beer with. 

Which is why conservatives like Sowell who are suddenly worried about competence can blow it out their asses.

there’s some white guy in the AAA League of the federal appellate courts

@ Incertus:  I wonder who this is supposed to be.  I mean, to view Sotomayor as an “affirmative action” candidate presumes that she’s less qualified than other candidates.  But there’s just no way that’s true.  She has all the conventional markers of strong qualifications, plus more years of experience.  Who’s supposed to be the Bakke-esque victim, the poor wronged white judge with comparable qualifications who’s getting passed over?

What’s sorta funny is that sensible people know that the whole “only got there because of affirmative action” thing is almost precisely backwards. Think of how many marginally competent (starting with 43) rich white guys in high places we’ve all seen, who got where they were because they had money, fathers, uncles, family friends. And not just the patrons who gave them their first break, but the ones who gave them their second, fifth, twenty-third, who overlooked the “high spirits” and “growing pains”. So if you hear some son of privilege is the best damn surgeon around, get the adjusted morbidity and mortality reports first…

“Suppose you were going to have open-heart surgery, and you had the best open-heart surgeons in the world to choose from, any of whom can perform your surgery competently,

Let’s try a bit of realism:

Say you needed open heart surgery.  Would you want to be in a society where anyone with the talent could find a way to get the education and training needed to be an open heart surgeon, or would you want to be in a society where only the rich and privileged could afford it, assuming they wanted to do it, and where you had to pay through the nose for their services because demand outstripped supply?

At a slight tangent - this...

By this reasoning, the economically priviledged are, as a group, morally inferior to economically disadvantaged individuals

I think there’s also a degree of what W.E.B. DuBois called “double consciousness.”  To vastly oversimplify from memory, disadvantaged people need to function in the dominant culture as well as their own.  Privileged people only need to function in the dominant one.

Who’s supposed to be the Bakke-esque victim, the poor wronged white judge with comparable qualifications who’s getting passed over?

Short answer—any white guy, I’m guessing.

That really is the conservative worldview in a nutshell:  the rich white guy is always more qualified than anyone else.  The mere idea that a woman or a minority could be equally as good as a rich white guy is ridiculous.

I’d rather have the person who actually qualified for their position, rather than the one who benefited from wealth-based affirmative action.

See Also: W

Although I have to say that I have worked for and with a lot of doctors and surgeons, and some of the kindest and most decent ones I have known were trust fund babies who used their wealth to bankroll their passion for taking care of people.

There are assholes in every group - the incompetents are typically the result of wealth and connection-based (daddy was also a doctor, etc.) “affirmative action”.  Just watch the horror and histrionics that went on when some colleges chose to end that brand of affirmative action known as “legacy admissions”.  Also witness the handwringing now that Harvard has leveled the financial playing field for those who attend.  That sort of affirmative action is what wrecks organizations and society too (eg W).

corwin: Wow.  Metaphor is a whole different country to you, isn’t it>

And you’re missing the point.  Nobody’s arguing against finding the best.  They are arguing against entrenched BS memes that define the default position of “best” as “white dude”.  You’ll notice that when Alito and Roberts were appointed nobody on the right fretted themselves to death that in limiting the choice to yet another pair of Catholic, white males the choices were being limited and that other, more competent people out there weren’t being canvassed.  As the default position they were privileged to receive a bye on being Entitled To Be Chosen and nobody seemed troubled by that.

I’m rather more troubled by the fact that Presidents seem to think that Harvard and Yale are the only two faculties of law in the US of A capable of producing a USSC justice.  Only Stevens (age 89, appointed 1975, Northwestern University School of Law) and Ginsburg (Columbia) aren’t from those schools.  By way of contrast, only two of Canada’s 9 Supreme Court Justices went to the same school: both Binnie J and Abella J got their LL.B.s from U of T[oronto].

I think we should consider Sowell’s comment in terms of the “Wisdom of Crowds” idea: that the Supreme Court needs a diversity of backgrounds to render true justice. I can see room for disagreement, but Sowell thinks the theory is automatically false.

He thinks that the best nominee to sit alongside Tweedledum, Tweedledee, Tweedledumdum, Tweedledeedle, and Tweedledada is Tweedlededeededee.

The question boils down to, if your life were at stake, is competence what matters most to you?

Are you under the impression that competence can be judged by the social class your doctor was born into?  Sowell seems to think that a doctor who was raised by rich parents who were able to pay his/her way through the best schools is automatically more competent than a scholarship student who worked his/her way through school, so therefore it’s ridiculous to even posit two doctors of equal ability who come from different social classes.  Nope, he has to boost the rich doctor up so he’s clearly the better doctor of the two and then ask which one you would choose.

That’s what we call “stacking the deck.”

Privilege often masks incompetence.

This.  Squared.  “Connected” people are often saved by what can call their privilege network.  (Again, Bush is a good example.  Do you think that he would have even had a chance of being a Governor of Texas if he’d just been George Walker, with a string of failed businesses behind him and whose biggest claim to fame was being a leveraged minority owner of a ball team sitting on land stolen by eminent domain?  Not a chance.  If our Mr. George Walker had applied to run a large public corporation with his CV he would have been laughed out.  Yet, somehow…....

Privileged people get chances and look-ins that ordinary (and especially minority) folks don’t.  Privileged people get job offers (often with fewer qualifications) that ordinary (and especially minority) folks don’t.  Privileged people get do-overs that ordinary (and especially minority) folks don’t.  These are fairly obvious and simple facts which anybody with any life experience at all wouldn’t argue with, and that reality should be taken into account in assessing the relative merit of any candidate for any job.

I think we should consider Sowell’s comment in terms of the “Wisdom of Crowds” idea ... [et seq.]

This is worth repeating.  Also to be considered is the fascinating is a Bayesian approach and the ability to use differing views and experiences to create a measure of subjective probability.  Put simply, put more and different brains in the same field to work on the same job and you mathematically increase the likelihood of correctly solving the problem.  And, to be blunt, people who are the same tend to think alike and reduce the likelihood of reaching a correct decision.

I think the error in thinking that the rich white person is better qualified comes from a bygone era when children of wealth who went into medicine did so because they believed in what they were doing.  In the olden days, wealthy people who went into medicine - particularly research and academic medicine - were looked at as though they had taken a vow of poverty.  It didn’t pay that much compared to going into business or investment banking.

That era is, however, long gone.  Nevertheless, medical schools still give you automatic advantage if a parent is a physician - more so if that parent is an alumna or alumnus.  That the medical school admission system still practices “affirmative action” for children of doctors is bafflingly unacceptable, even with the excuse that said persons “understand” the demands of medical practice.

Seeker, you have to understand that the normalization of medical education practices would tend to make that a “censored” baysian experiment.

Well, I just saw Dennis Miller on tv with a stick of celery in his mouth doing a dance with his hands in the air on one side of his head, which was his impression of Sotomayer.

I swear to fucking God, if I was not seeing this shit with my own eyes, I would not believe it.  I am stunned.

Nevertheless, medical schools still give you automatic advantage if a parent is a physician…

Using it as one criterion among many may not necessarily be bad, Ms Kate.  I’m an RN’s son and by the time that I hit the age at which I could have applied to medical school* I had quite a fair degree (for a youth and layman) of medical knowledge and an equally fair amount of knowledge about hospitals worked, how they were managed, how nurses and doctors interracted, how they worked with the non-medical staff, and so on.  Were I an applicant* I would have been vexed if the fact that I knew a very great deal about my workplace would have counted for nothing.

* - You know, except for the fact that I hated and sucked at the hard sciences, I thought!

That era is, however, long gone.  Nevertheless, medical schools still give you automatic advantage if a parent is a physician - more so if that parent is an alumna or alumnus.  That the medical school admission system still practices “affirmative action” for children of doctors is bafflingly unacceptable, even with the excuse that said persons “understand” the demands of medical practice.

Even if a formalized system like this didn’t exist, it would come out in other less formal ways: namely, having parents that know exactly what you should say in med school interviews, encouragement to have specific academic focuses from high school, etc. Those aren’t exactly wrong, but it’s a reality that programs like affirmative action allow the med school admissions process to look beyond.

Still, though, if your parents are in corporate finance or corporate law, becoming a doctor is a comparatively proletarian career choice.

Seeker, you have to understand that the normalization of medical education practices would tend to make that a “censored” baysian experiment.

Fill in the gap in my admitted ignorance, please, and explain that to me.  My own limited familiarity with the concept comes from Dr. Craven’s work for the USN in retrieving the missing nukes.

Ah, sorry - thought you might be a Baysian.

It means that there are limits placed on the variability of the posterior distribution (output of the model).

Artificial, imposed limits?  Or built-in limits created by the very specificity of the sample pool?

damn - it registered before I put that in human speak. 

continuing ...

What it means is that you start with the “prior distribution” - the incoming medical students as input to the system.  After medical school and it’s culture and curriculum are applied to these students, the resulting doctors will be very much more alike than when they came in ... even if the incoming group is highly varied to begin with.

Well, I just saw Dennis Miller on tv with a stick of celery in his mouth doing a dance with his hands in the air on one side of his head, which was his impression of Sotomayer.

I swear to fucking God, if I was not seeing this shit with my own eyes, I would not believe it.  I am stunned.
Caton on 05/28 at 05:58 PM

I cannot begin to fathom what that might even have been meant to convey, no matter how much I dredge the more fetid depths of my mind for any sort of bigoted stereotypes that might call forth.

Are Puerto Ricans traditionally supposed to like celery or something?

I thought celery was about as Midwestern bland pasty white middle American as you can get.

It sounds like the righties have been reduced to just making grimaces and rude noises.

Which is all they ever do anyway. But this sounds like they filmed Miller through lenses made of the stuff the glasses from They Live were made of—just cut through the facade to the ugly essential reality.

Ah, much clearer.  Thank yew. 

I don’t want to get too in love with the metaphor, though.  We’re still dealing with the discussion of judges,  and that’s worrisome.  We have a problematic prior distribution model of law students; we then narrow that considerably by limiting the choice to law students from, in effect, only two schools, and then we further limit the choices to sitting judges, which is not only a problematically limited pool in and of itself but a distorted limited pool because of the disproportionate number appointed by just one party* and a disproportionate number of those appointed in the eight previous years being of a narrow slice of the ideological spectrum.  There is something to be said for taking judges directly from practice, and even something more from taking them from non-traditional [ie: not corporate] areas of law.

* - I can’t possibly be the only one here who remembers judicial vacancies being deliberately left open during the Clinton presidency by the GOP.  I also remember the chief judge (very GOP) of one federal circuit stating that he didn’t need any more judges even though his circuit’s caseload had increased and the number of judges had dropped due to retirements and deaths.  Apparently no nominations could be made unless the chief judge asked for them, iirc.

BTW, what was wrong with the Estrada pick?  Or was it pure politics?

Oh, come on, there have got to be some rich white dudes who Obama could appoint.  John Ashcroft was a Senator and Attorney General, for example, and even tried his hand as a lounge singer.  You can’t get more varied experience than that!  Rudy Guilliani saved America after 9-11 9-11 9-11 9-11… 9-11 9-11.  He could go from America’s mayor to America’s Next Top Judge!  Newt Gingrich seems to want to be President, but he probably wouldn’t turn down a Supreme Court nod.  And nobody’s even mentioned Fred Phelps, Rush Limbaugh, or a certain Sith Lord/Vice President.

Estrada is considerably younger than Sotomayor and his education was delayed by having to learn English at age 17 (he’s surmounted seriously formidable obstacles, no doubt), and he did not have the requisite experience (he had never been a judge at all) when he was nominated to one of the higher courts.  The republicans also refused to release documents which would have given some insight into his fitness for the job through his writings.

He was only 40 when he was nominated for a judgeship and only a little over a decade out of law school.

Ta.  iirc they were seeking documents that many argued they weren’t entitled to and that there was some bipartisan agreement on the over-wide scope of the search.

As for 40 and 10 years out of law school, there’s something to be said for having people who aren’t thoroughly absorbed by their professions yet.

There’s also something to be said for amending your Constitution TO REMOVE LIFE TENURE.  It’s not 1789 any more.

But there is also something to be said for taking senior positions in your profession once you have some experience with more junior positions.  That’s where Sotomayor really kicks butt - she’s got serious tenure on her side of the bench.  Estrada did not have experience as a judge at all - not at the municipal or state level, not at lower levels of the federal system.  None.

He was yet another appointee of Bush who had no track record - the neocons like those.  Sort of like how they worship virginity.

Oh, and while we’re at it, this whole “best judge” thing is offensively stupid. If we wanted the best judges on the supreme court, we would have impeached the majority on Bush v. Gore just for the transparently crapulent pretense of legal reasoning.  One of the big problems with the current court, imo, is that with Robert, Alito and Scalia, it’s full of smartass lawyers rather than actual judges.

I cannot begin to fathom what that might even have been meant to convey, no matter how much I dredge the more fetid depths of my mind for any sort of bigoted stereotypes that might call forth.

Probably Carmen Miranda.  Because, you know, Portuguese/Brazilian singer, Puerto Rican judge, same thing, amiright?

<i.To vastly oversimplify from memory, disadvantaged people need to function in the dominant culture as well as their own. </i>

One of the larger differences between women and men, IMHO.

The weird bit is the equation of decisionmaking with technical aptitude.  They’re just different things.

And the correct answer isn’t whether the surgeon had to struuggle the most.(Struggle/failure may build character-although “Contrary to what the Methodists tell you , success is good for the soul ).You want the best surgeon. At least I do ,for myself and my patients.

Yes, except, by any objective standard, she is among the best, if not the best.

You’re fundamentally assuming she can’t be the best by virtue of not being a rich white guy.

Yeah, I think it was supposed to be a Carmen Miranda type thing, like a Flamingo Dancer, or Charo, or something.  I don’t know.  You watch this stuff you sit there with your mouth hanging open.  I’m often not sure exactly what they are up to, because I am not expert in the code, but I know that it’s really fucked up, that’s what I know.

Probably Carmen Miranda.  Because, you know, Portuguese/Brazilian singer, Puerto Rican judge, same thing, amiright?
Mnemosyne on 05/28 at 08:38 PM

Yeah, I think it was supposed to be a Carmen Miranda type thing, like a Flamingo Dancer, or Charo, or something.  I don’t know.  You watch this stuff you sit there with your mouth hanging open.  I’m often not sure exactly what they are up to, because I am not expert in the code, but I know that it’s really fucked up, that’s what I know.
Caton on 05/29 at 01:53 AM

Yeah, I guess that sort of makes some kind of sense.

The key to the code is then, as I suspected, being mean. In the most stupid, lowly, middle-school bully sort of sense. Grimacing and making nasty sounds. Really more of a preschool approach, except meaner. And stupider.

Which brings us right back to empathy as a virtue in a Justice. On this thread there’s been a lot of discussion of the virtue of having to struggle, to work harder, to a achieve a given level of professional competence. Sotomayor has clearly demonstrated technical competence. It seems to me though that while jurisprudence has a major dimension of sheer technicality, it also, as a form of governance, involves or should involve a deep understanding of the humane implications of the rules they interpret. Judges need to see the potential ramifications of their rulings in the society we actually have.

I’ve made little progress in examining her record so far, but the first case that Hilzoy mentions, Pappas v Giuliani, is all about the question of balancing the desire, even need, of an institution (in this case the NYPD) to maintain a certain image and indeed moral standards, versus the freedom of an individual in their employ to have dissenting opinions (no matter how offensive). I gather Sotomayor dissented in favor of Pappas despite the fact that his views were of the most offensive and dangerous kind, since he took care to express them privately and anonymously and the NYPD had to investigate aggressively to even confirm that he was the one holding them—so their institutional image was only endangered to the extent they spilled the beans themselves.

In other words, empathy and even basic human decency are indeed secondary qualities in an auto mechanic, an MD (though clearly there it could be more relevant) or an IT guy (like Pappas). Not so if Pappas were a beat cop, or presumably a school principal.

Or a judge.

There are two simple responses to somebody who whines about “empathy”.  Pick the one that you prefer:

*  “Empathy is just a fancy word for understanding the `why’ part of a person’s views and situation.  Why don’t you want a judge that can understand things?”

or

* - “Being without empathy is one of the marker points for being a psychopath.  Are you telling me that your ideal judge is a psychopath?”

(Of course, for many conservatives the honest answer to the second question is a resounding YES! but they won’t admit that in public.)

I’m rather more troubled by the fact that Presidents seem to think that Harvard and Yale are the only two faculties of law in the US of A capable of producing a USSC justice.

I think that the legal system in general has taken a turn in this direction. Law seems to be the most prestige-conscious profession I’m aware of. The lawyers who went to the top schools get the top clerkships, who are the ones who get the choice government or firm positions who are the ones who attract the attention of presidents for federal bench appointments, and so on. By the time this filters itself out, you’re left with candidates who only went to a few top schools.

Meanwhile, I’ve never heard of a patient or a referring doctor basing their choice of physician on which medical school they attended.

corwin, you’d probably get a lot more interest in your comments if you were capable of writing coherently or actually engaging in the topic. As it is, all we see from you is a bunch of illiterate hit-and-run scratches out of you.

LACK of empathy is the mark of a psychopath.

The Psychopath Antisocial: Devoid of Empathy | Suite101.com
Like narcissists, psychopaths lack empathy and regard other people as mere instruments of gratification and utility or as objects to be manipulated. ...
personalitydisorders.suite101.com/article.cfm/psychopathantisocial