U.S. Republican Primary

[Qaanol]

I’d like to take this opportunity to remind everyone that Obama is not a foreign-born, brown-skinned, anti-war socialist who gives away free healthcare. You’re thinking of Jesus.

[Griffin]

Quoting that elsewhere.

[jakovasaur]

I think it's unlikely he was about to say nigger. Sounded to me like an unfortunate slip of the tongue, like this one.

[bentheimmigrant]

Or like this one?

[Jave D]

Oh, I agree he didn't intend to say "nigger." He intended to say "nig" hinting at "nigger" while the "slip of the tongue" provides plausible deniability that he was appealing to the racial fear of Obama that a disturbingly large segment of the population who will vote for him have.

[Роберт]

Oh, I agree he didn't intend to say "nigger." He intended to say "nig" hinting at "nigger" while the "slip of the tongue" provides plausible deniability that he was appealing to the racial fear of Obama that a disturbingly large segment of the population who will vote for him have.

Santorum is that convincing an actor and that devious, huh.

[Jave D]

Oh, I agree he didn't intend to say "nigger." He intended to say "nig" hinting at "nigger" while the "slip of the tongue" provides plausible deniability that he was appealing to the racial fear of Obama that a disturbingly large segment of the population who will vote for him have.

Santorum is that convincing an actor and that devious, huh.

Not that convincing at all, really, but then it doesn't take much in this country.

[Iulus Cofield]

It sounds more like "nik" than "nig" to me. A commentator on Language Log thought likewise and suggested he might have been going for "peacenik" and misread his notes. That would make sense from context, but is pure speculation of course.

[lutzj]

It sounds more like "nik" than "nig" to me. A commentator on Language Log thought likewise and suggested he might have been going for "peacenik" and misread his notes. That would make sense from context, but is pure speculation of course.

Maybe "governmentnik?" Still doesn't explain the quick "uhhs" and hurrying on.

[Qaanol]

Quoting that elsewhere.

I didn’t come up with it, I just paraphrased John Fugelsang.

[Роберт]

It sounds more like "nik" than "nig" to me. A commentator on Language Log thought likewise and suggested he might have been going for "peacenik" and misread his notes. That would make sense from context, but is pure speculation of course.

Or maybe his notes had been tampered with he caught himself before he read them and moved on.

Reminds me a lot of his "blah people" thing... which to me actually sounded like he was stumbling over his own words and may or may not indicate anything about racism in and of itself.

[bentheimmigrant]

You seriously go for the "blah" thing (I posted it earlier)??? Watch the video again. It only makes sense if he's saying black.

[ahammel]

So, Santorum drops the n-word on Obama. He catches himself halfway, and no doubt his team will try to spin it, but I can't see what else he was going to say.

Surprisingly, none of the big media corporations are writing about this. Not sure why.

That syllable, or something that sounds like it, also appears in many words that have nothing to do with being a racist.

Seriously, guys? Santorum spends most of his time saying horrible things all the way through, and you want to jump on this non-incident?

[bentheimmigrant]

Yes. It confirms everything we want to believe.

[Weeks]

It sounds more like "nik" than "nig" to me.

...really? It may be the fact that I'm ESL but that doesn't sound like a "k" to me at all.

Seriously, guys? Santorum spends most of his time saying horrible things all the way through, and you want to jump on this non-incident?

He's just never said the n-word in public.

[Роберт]

You seriously go for the "blah" thing (I posted it earlier)??? Watch the video again. It only makes sense if he's saying black.

If I was on a jury, I wouldn't convict him of saying "black people's money" because the first time I heard the clip, the way he said what he said my brain AUTOMATICALLY ignored the syllable before "people's money" because it parsed it as a non-word that he accidentally said. And this is when it was in the news so I knew he was supposed to say something racist in the short clip. I had to listen again to realize what people were hearing.

And yes, what he said definitely makes sense for "black people" and little else, ASSUMING he wasn't in the middle of changing what he wanted to say mid-sentence.

[Garm]

So, Santorum drops the n-word on Obama. He catches himself halfway, and no doubt his team will try to spin it, but I can't see what else he was going to say.

Surprisingly, none of the big media corporations are writing about this. Not sure why.

That syllable, or something that sounds like it, also appears in many words that have nothing to do with being a racist.

Seriously, guys? Santorum spends most of his time saying horrible things all the way through, and you want to jump on this non-incident?

Pretty much this. Santorum is already completely unelectable. There's a laundry list of reasons, this is just more gotcha bullshit.

[Роберт]

Pretty much this. Santorum is already completely unelectable. There's a laundry list of reasons, this is just more gotcha bullshit.

Last time I checked intrade, people were betting RON freakin PAUL was at least as likely to win the election as Santorum.

[Garm]

Pretty much this. Santorum is already completely unelectable. There's a laundry list of reasons, this is just more gotcha bullshit.

Last time I checked intrade, people were betting RON freakin PAUL was at least as likely to win the election as Santorum.

Well if there's one thing that we've learned from the Straw Polls, the Ronpaul has a lot of supporters who are willing to spend money to push his message. Point being, despite what InTrade says I don't think either Santorum or Paul has any realistic chance at winning the election. Probably more of chance than they do of winning Mega Millions, but still.

[ahammel]

Well if there's one thing that we've learned from the Straw Polls, the Ronpaul has a lot of supporters who are willing to spend money to push his message. Point being, despite what InTrade says I don't think either Santorum or Paul has any realistic chance at winning the election. Probably more of chance than they do of winning Mega Millions, but still.

I think it was Dave Barry who suggested that "Dark Horse" candidates are so called because they are about as likely to become the President as to win the Preakenss.

[Роберт]

Well if there's one thing that we've learned from the Straw Polls, the Ronpaul has a lot of supporters who are willing to spend money to push his message. Point being, despite what InTrade says I don't think either Santorum or Paul has any realistic chance at winning the election. Probably more of chance than they do of winning Mega Millions, but still.

IIRC, Romney had a predicted 90% or so chance of winning the primary.

Edit: I've listed the current predictions

Romney: 93.1%
the Ronpaul: 1.2%
Santorum: 1%
Newt Gingrich 0.3%

[CorruptUser]

the Ronpaul has a higher chance of winning than Santorum or Gingrich? Statistical errors much?

[Ghostbear]

Those are just the numbers from intrade, which is just a fancy betting market. All those numbers mean is that (1) more people believe Paul can win than people believe Santorum or Gingrich, and (2) those people are willing to put their money where their mouth is. It's not an expert analysis, and cases like this are a great example of why I don't think using intrade to get an idea for the likelihood of something is particularly wise.

[CorruptUser]

...well, intrade and other markets can also be used to hedge against disaster, so the prices don't always perfectly reflect true value/probability. It's incredibly complicated to do market analysis assuming anything other than a strongly efficient market, which is why most people in finance will just handwave everything that could possibly show the market as being inefficient. And why people who base their entire investments on a simplified mathematical model without understanding exactly what the inputs are will never have my sympathy.

Not that I don't trust mathematical models and such, but as a mathematician that specializes in probability/statistics/finance, I am far more hesitant about my models than the people who use them, no matter how much I warn them. It's scary, and I remind people that, being an estimate, the Galton*/Gaussian** distributions should never be used to extrapolate the extreme parts of the tail distributions, especially when you are dealing with probabilities that are so small the empirical distribution doesn't say anything about them. (Basically, if you have X data points for loss amounts, you should never automatically assume you even have a hint at the losses at the 1/X+ probability). Seriously, stock data seems to be composed of, at its simplest, a splice of the Galton and the Pareto*** distributions (or maybe Galton and Cauchy****?) with a weight of like .999 for Galton; doesn't mean you can assume the distribution is entirely Galton.

*AKA Lognormal
**AKA Normal
***The origin of "20% of x accounts for 80% of y"
****Textbook example of distribution with no defined second moment (i.e., no variance)

[Jave D]

So, Santorum drops the n-word on Obama. He catches himself halfway, and no doubt his team will try to spin it, but I can't see what else he was going to say.

Surprisingly, none of the big media corporations are writing about this. Not sure why.

That syllable, or something that sounds like it, also appears in many words that have nothing to do with being a racist.

Let's do a quick brainstorm on all words that start with "nig" that have nothing to do with being a racist.


Bonus points if it makes any sense when coupled with what Santorum was actually saying.







...

[ahammel]

Let's do a quick brainstorm on all words that start with "nig" that have nothing to do with being a racist.


Bonus points if it makes any sense when coupled with what Santorum was actually saying.

Stand back! I'm going to try regular expressions!

A quick grep of a word list I keep on my computer for such occasions yields a number of suggestions including "enigma", "denigrate", "nigardly", "renigs", "pfennig" (rather unlikely), "singger" and "wannigan" (I had to look it up). If we also allow "nik", there are more possibilities. I like to think that he was about to call the president a "nudnik" and follow it up with an "oy vey iz mir!" before he realized that his handlers told him to go easy on the Yiddish. Whether any of those make sense is immaterial, because when people are speaking aloud, they sometimes use incorrect or nonsensical words. Particularly if they're in stressful situations, like speaking in public for example.

Seriously: Santorum is a bad man. We don't need to pretend that he said something horrible, because he says horrible things all the time.

[Iulus Cofield]

That's not necessarily how a language error works. That is not necessarily relevant to your post.

Edit: This was directed at Jave D. I seem to have been ninjad.

[Jave D]

Let's do a quick brainstorm on all words that start with "nig" that have nothing to do with being a racist.


Bonus points if it makes any sense when coupled with what Santorum was actually saying.

Stand back! I'm going to try regular expressions!

A quick grep of a word list I keep on my computer for such occasions yields a number of suggestions including "enigma", "denigrate", "nigardly", "renigs", "pfennig" (rather unlikely), "singger" and "wannigan" (I had to look it up). If we also allow "nik", there are more possibilities. I like to think that he was about to call the president a "nudnik" and follow it up with an "oy vey iz mir!" before he realized that his handlers told him to go easy on the Yiddish. Whether any of those make sense is immaterial, because when people are speaking aloud, they sometimes use incorrect or nonsensical words. Particularly if they're in stressful situations, like speaking in public for example.

Sometimes when they are speaking aloud, they sometimes use words they mean to say but realize they should not say. It's called a Freudian slip. Particularly if they are in stressful situations! And I like to analyze what people say based on something more than "He was under stress so the words don't matter or make sense" guideline. Makes the world more interesting to me. I like that whole "meaning" thing. There's more meaning in that he was trying to appeal to the idea, held by many of his constituents, that Obama is a nigger, than that he was just spouting nonsense words and speaking in tongues or appealing to the idea that people think "Obama is an enigma" and he forgot the "e" and left out the "ma" before running off to an unrelated subject entirely.

Seriously: Santorum is a bad man. We don't need to pretend that he said something horrible, because he says horrible things all the time.

Who's pretending?

And I'm not limited to criticizing a man for saying just one thing, you know. I am large. I contain multitudes!

[CorruptUser]

Wait, does anyone have evidence that Santorum used 'nigger' to refer to people in the past? Because people that use that word never do it once.

[Nordic Einar]

I honestly can't figure out what Santorum was trying to say. Anti-war, government Negro doesn't really make sense.

The statement, no matter which word you put at the end, is not uncommonly hear in certain areas of the South to my understanding.

For those of you who aren't from south of the Mason-Dixie, "Government Nigger" is an extremely common term used to describe low-income blacks on welfare. It's the much more overtly racist "welfare queen".

It's an incredibly common phrase, and knowing the folks I know it's exactly what they heard. Maybe this is a cultural thing, but if you know the south (or The-South-In-The-North like parts of Michigan and Wisconsin...) it's really, really obvious what he went to say.

[bentheimmigrant]

Wait, does anyone have evidence that Santorum used 'nigger' to refer to people in the past? Because people that use that word never do it once.

That's kinda the point. If he slips and it comes out, it's a sign of the things he's willing to say in private.

[Jonesthe Spy]

I was at first inclined to assume it was just some sort of verbal hiccup, by my wife who spent close to ten years in Texas and has been exposed to a lot more folks who thought it was okay to use racial epithets is sure he meant the n-word. And yes "government n*****" is a common phrase in certain circles.

[CorruptUser]

Wait, does anyone have evidence that Santorum used 'nigger' to refer to people in the past? Because people that use that word never do it once.

That's kinda the point. If he slips and it comes out, it's a sign of the things he's willing to say in private.

Yes I know, but that would also mean if he really was saying what we think he was saying, he would've used it at other times. Other times which may have been recorded.

I'm trying my damnedest to give everyone the benefit of reasonable doubt, but I'm having trouble coming up with a reasonable explanation other than "homophobic ass is also racist". Maybe Santorum thinks that Obama's real birth certificate shows he's Nicaraguan, but he realized that now is not the time to reveal that?

[Cathy]

Maybe Santorum thinks that Obama's real birth certificate shows he's Nicaraguan, but he realized that now is not the time to reveal that?

This made me giggle so much. Thank you!

[Diadem]

I honestly can't figure out what Santorum was trying to say. Anti-war, government Negro doesn't really make sense.

The statement, no matter which word you put at the end, is not uncommonly hear in certain areas of the South to my understanding.

For those of you who aren't from south of the Mason-Dixie, "Government Nigger" is an extremely common term used to describe low-income blacks on welfare. It's the much more overtly racist "welfare queen".

It's an incredibly common phrase, and knowing the folks I know it's exactly what they heard. Maybe this is a cultural thing, but if you know the south (or The-South-In-The-North like parts of Michigan and Wisconsin...) it's really, really obvious what he went to say.

This, exactly. Thank you.

Sure we can speculate endlessly about all other possible words he may have wanted to say. But if you look at his speech, he's in the middle of a sentence, speaking clearly and passionately. Then he says half a word, stumbles, stops, and goes on about something completely different. Even people who are bad at public speaking do not do that for no reason at all. Bad speakers put in umhs and ahs, but not like that. He clearly was saying a real word, not just making a sound.

Not many other words fit, and those that fit wouldn't have made him stumble like that.

[jakovasaur]

For those of you who aren't from south of the Mason-Dixie, "Government Nigger" is an extremely common term used to describe low-income blacks on welfare. It's the much more overtly racist "welfare queen".

...So do you think Santorum thinks Obama is a low-income black on welfare?

[Qaanol]

I think we should start using “government-nik” as a disparaging term for politicians who want to use the power of government to reduce freedom and tell other people how to live their private lives. You know, the anti-liberty type.

[lutzj]

For those of you who aren't from south of the Mason-Dixie, "Government Nigger" is an extremely common term used to describe low-income blacks on welfare. It's the much more overtly racist "welfare queen".

...So do you think Santorum thinks Obama is a low-income black on welfare?

He probably thinks that Obama's father was, and that Obama panders to low-income blacks on welfare. Between those two pieces of damning evidence, Obama must secretly be one himself.

[Tirian]

...So do you think Santorum thinks Obama is a low-income black on welfare?

Obama's not making a million dollars a year (any more), he has dark skin, and he lives on government checks in federally subsidized housing. You figure it out.

[Nordic Einar]

For those of you who aren't from south of the Mason-Dixie, "Government Nigger" is an extremely common term used to describe low-income blacks on welfare. It's the much more overtly racist "welfare queen".

...So do you think Santorum thinks Obama is a low-income black on welfare?

He probably thinks that Obama's father was, and that Obama panders to low-income blacks on welfare. Between those two pieces of damning evidence, Obama must secretly be one himself.

This. Look at the rhetoric surrounding blacks Santorum has been using in the last year, and the rhetoric Republicans use about "socialism" and Obama's "redistribution of wealth." Look at the way they talk about "entitlements", or welfare in general.

The disparaging commentary around Obama's community organizing in his youth is kind of telling, too.