Subject:
|
Re: The Guardian unworthy of toilet paper?
|
Newsgroups:
|
lugnet.off-topic.debate
|
Date:
|
Tue, 4 Oct 2005 04:26:44 GMT
|
Viewed:
|
1234 times
|
| |
|
|
| |
Here’s the audio
And the transcript:
CALLER: I noticed the national media, you know, they talk a lot about the
loss of revenue, or the inability of the government to fund Social Security,
and I was curious, and I’ve read articles in recent months here, that the
abortions that have happened since Roe v. Wade, the lost revenue from the
people who have been aborted in the last 30-something years, could fund
Social Security as we know it today. And the media just doesn’t -- never
touches this at all.
BENNETT: Assuming they’re all productive citizens?
CALLER: Assuming that they are. Even if only a portion of them were, it would
be an enormous amount of revenue.
BENNETT: Maybe, maybe, but we don’t know what the costs would be, too. I
think as -- abortion disproportionately occur among single women? No.
CALLER: I don’t know the exact statistics, but quite a bit are, yeah.
BENNETT: All right, well, I mean, I just don’t know. I would not argue for
the pro-life position based on this, because you don’t know. I mean, it cuts
both -- you know, one of the arguments in this book Freakonomics that they
make is that the declining crime rate, you know, they deal with this
hypothesis, that one of the reasons crime is down is that abortion is up.
Well --
CALLER: Well, I don’t think that statistic is accurate.
BENNETT: Well, I don’t think it is either, I don’t think it is either,
because first of all, there is just too much that you don’t know. But I do
know that it’s true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could -- if that
were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and
your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and
morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down. So
these far-out, these far-reaching, extensive extrapolations are, I think,
tricky.
So the caller is arguing against abortion based on economics. Bennett
refutes him by citing the book Freakonomics, in which the authors observe a
drop in crime along with the advent of legalized abortion, speculating that
unwanted children who were aborted would have been tomorrow’s criminals.
Bennett states how basing an argument on such grounds is unwise, and he
continues to argue reductio ad absurdum that arguing against abortion on
any other grounds besides moral ones isn’t wise. He never advocates
aborting black children; as I mentioned above-- he is staunchly pro-life!
So, for this, the headline reads, “Abort all black babies and cut crime, says
Republican”. That is a complete distortion designed to smear and mislead.
It’s simply outrageous, if not outright libel.
JOHN
|
Am I correct in seeing another fallacy here, not necessarily one on Bennett’s
behalf, but more of one in general?
That being that it is instead economics that drives or motivates crime, not race
as Freakonomics seems to put forth and that then Bennett and others then
discuss. It just so happens that the majority of the lower economic echelons are
black in the Eastern U.S. and thus for these economic reasons the majority of
crime derives out of the black population -- if the poor were another population
then the crime would be predominantly another racial group like it is in the
Western U.S.
Or is that indeed exactly what IS being said, and I am not seeing it at the
moment?
This all sounds a little too much like culling the herd. All we need now is to
use phrenology to map which people
will be poor or criminals, then clean the gene pool. I am soooo totally being
facetious (sp) with that statement. In truth, it all seems nightmarish to have
these thoughts, and similar ones, dancing on the peripheral edge of our society.
I have studied Biological Anthropolgy enough to know that the brain pan, nor its
bumps that can be altered through life, determine the person. Same with race and
economics -- they do not define a person unless the person allows them to do so.
In which case, a person becomes vulnerable to the whims of uncontrolled forces
outside of him/herself. (Not speaking of concrete things like disasters, death,
etc. but of abstract ideas like freedom, hate, fear, civility, etc.)
I guess what I am trying to say is that culling one racial group, or political
group, will not affect that blemish of society (crime). If the entire lower
class is wiped, then the middle class becomes the bottom peg and the social
value of wealth=worth then becomes the heavy burden upon that social layer that
drives them to burnout and thus to crime and despair. I do not see how abortion
got into this subject in the first place aside from Scrooges’ (character from
Charles Dicken’s novel Christmas Carol) original comment about decreasing the
surplus population. Is crime being associated as a characteristic of
overpopulation versus too few resources? I would see it instead as a
characteristic of dis-satisfaction bred about by some sort of negative
programmed mentality brought on by social pressures either on the macro or micro
level, or both levels. After all, even the rich commit crimes.
-Avery
|
|
Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: The Guardian unworthy of toilet paper?
|
| (...) Freakonomics puts forth the idea that most crime is caused by the poverty-stricken segment of society (excluding massive corporate fraud, which is pervasive and carried out by the wealthiest segment) and further postulates that most of the (...) (19 years ago, 4-Oct-05, to lugnet.off-topic.debate, FTX)
|
Message is in Reply To:
| | Re: The Guardian unworthy of toilet paper?
|
| (...) Here's (URL) the audio> And the transcript: CALLER: I noticed the national media, you know, they talk a lot about the loss of revenue, or the inability of the government to fund Social Security, and I was curious, and I've read articles in (...) (19 years ago, 4-Oct-05, to lugnet.off-topic.debate, FTX)
|
31 Messages in This Thread:
  
 
- Entire Thread on One Page:
- Nested:
All | Brief | Compact | Dots
Linear:
All | Brief | Compact
This Message and its Replies on One Page:
- Nested:
All | Brief | Compact | Dots
Linear:
All | Brief | Compact
|
|
|
|
