Posted on 09/30/2005 3:31:28 PM PDT by patriciaruth
From Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
"So, how did Roe v. Wade trigger, a generation later, the greatest crime drop in recorded history?
"As far as crime is concerned, it turns out that not all children are born equal. Not even close.
"Decades of study have show that a child born into an adverse family environment is far more likely than other children to become a criminal. And the millions of women likely to have an abortion in the wake of Roe v. Wade--poor, unmarried and teenage mothers for whom illegal abortions had been too expensive or too hard to get--were often models of adversity. They were the very women whose children, if born, would have been much more likely than average to become criminals. But because of Roe v. Wade these children weren't being born. This powerful cause would have a drastic, distant effect: years later, just as these children would have entered their criminal primes, the rate of crime began to plummet.
"It wasn't gun control or a strong economy or new police strategies that finally blunted the American crime wave. It was, among other factors [including building more prisons and incarcerating criminals with longer sentences], the reality that the pool of potential criminals had dramatically shrunk."
Guess why they didn't. Think real, real hard now.
What Bill Bennet said sounded racist. It sounded like he believed we could reduce crime by aborting all black babies, but he believed this would be the wrong way to reduce crime.
Common! Even if we understand the point he was making about abortion, it's easy to see where people could find it offensive.
As for choosing my words carefully or more appropriately to appease the left...NO Thank you.
Why not?
Everybody has to choose their words carefully in all sorts of situations to avoid offending others.
Especially in my professional life.
There's nothing wrong with controlling your tongue to avoid inflamatory rhetoric when expressing your views.
The blatant hypocrisy from the left and our wimping out and allowing ourselves to be brainwashed is the very reason we are in the disgusting situation we are in today. So if you want to continue appeasing the left then by all means appease them but enough is enough because this double-standard has to be stopped now.
You don't know who you're talking to.
I am a white man who has had most black friends during my adult life.
I've spent much, if not most of my time around blacks, living in all or mostly black neighborhoods more than once.
My views on Jesse Jackson, Farrakhan and other race-baiting leaders, as well as other race issues were not a secret. And I was not afraid of being labeled a racist for speaking out.
Of course I knew it would sound pretty stupid for them to call me a racist when I was usually the only white there, and that I was there by my own choice.
You may not know that Bill Bennet was the beneficiary of just this sort of attack at the beginning of his public career. And I don't recall him complaining about the unfairness of it all back then.
At the beginning of the Reagan Administration a distinguished scholar named Mel Bradford had been nominated to be director of the National Endowment of the Humanities. Unfortunately for Professor Bradford, this position was coveted by Bill Bennett and his comrades, and their slander machine went to work on Bradford. Live by the sword, die by the sword. There's a thread from a few years back that might be interesting in light of all this:
http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3aa5ec9811d2.htm
What percentage of "poor" people in the US are black?
http://blackgenocide.org/sanger.html
For much much more, google Margaret Sanger
the press twists everything around.
If aborting all blacks would cause the crime rate to go down, then aborting some blacks would see a corresponding lesser decrease.
I pose this question. If all black pregnancies in households earning 100k or more were aborted, do you believe there still would be a drop in the crime rate?
Crime rates mostly have to do with poverty. Blacks have a much higher poverty rate than whites (another discussion we don't need to get into now) so logic dictates they will also have a much higher crime rate.
Those of you believing crime has something to do intrinsically with race need to take a hard look at yourself.
---I don't get it - so what? So, label me a racist. What's gonna happen? The Third (4th,5th) World War? Aliens will come to earth? Half of the world will commit suicide? What? What will happen? Geez - the hype and commotion on someone being called a racist. Unbelievable! And, so what!!!---
No latte for you!
Well, Sanger was a devout eugenicist who believed abortion would help "keep the black man down". Are you actually comparing Bennett's statement to hers and coming to the conclusion that his wasn't any worse?
Bennett was stupid to even follow that line one inch down the road. Too easy to misintepret and taken out of context. Instead he should have sad something akin to "Of course blacks committ more crime, crime is largely a function of poverty and a greater % of blacks are in poverty than whites. If you want to reduce crime, reduce poverty."
The smear campaign against Rockford resembled earlier campaigns directed against Old Right figures who had challenged or threatened neo-conservative interests. One of those early campaigns was against the late M.E. Bradford, professor of English at the University of Dallas and a leading exponent of Old Right thought. In 1981, Bradford and his supporters sought his appointment as chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) in the Reagan Administration. As a widely published scholar and thinker, Bradford had eminent credentials for the post, which controls the flow of federal money to scholarship in the humanities, and as a lifelong conservative he had materially assisted the Reagan campaign in Texas.
One of his rivals for the NEH chairmanship was a virtually unknown academic named William J. Bennett, then the director of the National Humanities Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Bennett held a PhD in philosophy from the University of Texas, but was not a distinguished scholar, had published virtually nothing in his field, and had a liberal background in politics. Nevertheless, Bennett won the support of the neo-conservatives for the position at the NEH.
Since Bennett lacked adequate academic and political credentials to win the post, his neo-conservative supporters resorted to a smear campaign against Bradford, falsely claiming that he advocated slavery, had praised Adolf Hitler, and was a virulent racist. An anonymous document repeating these unfounded charges circulated in the White House for the purpose of frightening the Administration into denying Bradford the appointment. Bradford had written several scholarly critiques of Abraham Lincoln, and these were dredged up, quoted out of context, and used to "discredit" him as an "extremist." Eventually, despite the endorsement of Bradford by some 18 U.S. senators, including Senators Jesse Helms and John East from Bennett's own state of North Carolina, Bennett received the NEH nomination and was later confirmed. http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a39260cd307e5.htm
Well, yeah. But that doesn't get those with an abortion fetish anywhere. It's better to act stupid and deny that what someone says in the context of a conversation has no bearing on how it's understood. It's better to focus on few words that can be used to whip everyone into a moral lather and forget everything else.
What Bennett was doing was pointing out how morally corrupt the left's brand of social hedonism and utilitarianism is. But that doesn't matter. Being against throwing black babies in garbage cans is, you know, so *racist*.
Really. Seeing how the book focuses on a utilitarian approach to social issues, it most certainly is liberal. As a matter of fact, social hedonism has been the stock and trade of the Left since Bentham started counting his blades of grass.
They have abortion on demand. Why do they need to throw the babies in garbage cans?
Oh, sure. And those who rather enjoy pontificating about a form of human equality that doesn't exist, need not do so at all.
Oh. So sorry. I meant to say, "hermetically sealed garbage cans in abortion clinics."
Bill Bennett is an idiot. This shows without core principles, and "philosopjy" is bankrupt.
Morning TV maven Diane Sawyer loves this book and interviewed the authors earlier this week. Naturally she'll jump right in to defend Bennett.
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