It's Just Racism, That's All...

The Warrior points to an essay which epitomizes the Moonbattery School, by somebody named Bill Washabaugh who teaches at UW-Milwaukee.

I want you to note carefully the substance of the following, and if you find it, please let me know:

....There are few preferences that deserve to be called simple and natural. Most human choices are driven by unseen forces. Scholars in a number of relevant fields (neuroscience, psychology, aesthetics) concur. Barbara Stafford, for example, has offered a powerful argument about visual preferences -- why one likes one painting more than another. She contends that the conscious activity of determining likes and dislikes really amounts to little more 10% of brain’s functioning. She further argues that, when it comes to understanding such preferences, it would be naive to ignore the larger 90% of the brain’s silent operations.

"Unseen"......"silent operations".....

Sounds like "emanations and penumbras" to me. But "voodoo" is another adequate descriptor.

Well, what do these 'unseen' and 'silent' brain-thingamajiggies lead to?

Studies of such submerged forces are numerous and helpful (see works by Pierre Bourdieu). They provide the ground for supposing that much suburban “dissatisfaction” has been shaped by longstanding social practices and institutional constraints, and especially by racism (see Paul Gilroy) and classism (see Walter Benn Michaels).

Uh huh.

It's no small irony that such babble was immortalized in somewhat more concise language:

Oh, we've got trouble,
Right here in River City,
It begins with "T" and that rhymes with "P"
And that stands for pool!!

....sung by another Professor-Huckster, in The Music Man.