Bachman said:
Slavery had a disastrous impact on African-American families, yet sadly a child born in to slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African- American baby born after the election of the USA's first African-American President.Myers commented:
I don't understand the message she's trying to get across here. "Slavery: Not So Bad As Freedom?" Or is she making a pledge to re-enslave all the black folk and force Mommy and Daddy to live together and raise their children?Here's the message she's "trying to get across", P.Z.:
Even in the throes of slavery, in the worst of Jim Crow and the KKK, the black family remained intact. Historically, black families in the U.S. were more stable than white families. That's despite enslavement, lynching, the KKK, Jim Crow, poverty, 'separate but equal', etc.
Then, beginning in the 1960's, things changed, and within a decade or two, the black family was demolished.
What happened?
Liberalism happened. The Great Society happened. Welfare happened. Liberal social policy, beside leaving blacks in cities vulnerable to the astronomical crime rates of the 70's and 80's because of catch-and-release pinhead liberal crime policies, made the black father financially superfluous. Liberal democrats paid poor black families to break up. If the father stayed home, the family was ineligible for welfare. If the father left, the government stepped in and sent the checks. Liberal jerks ignored the most basic rule of ecomonics: you get more of what you pay people to do, and less of what you tax people to do. Idiot liberals did what the slave owners and the KKK couldn't do: they broke up black families, wholesale.
Why? Obviously, one need not assume intent on the part of liberals. Mere stupidity accounts for much of liberal policy. But I believe there was venality here as well. Wards of the government vote for the government. By making millions of black families utterly dependent on government largesse, Democrats secured the votes of these families in perpetuity.
So, P.Z., this what Bachman meant: the fundamental cause of the disintegration of the black family in America is liberal Democrat jerks. They pose as open-minded compassionate enlightened progressives, but they don't give a damn about the people in the communities they destroy. It's all narcissism.
Recognize yourself, P.Z.?
Here is a joke that fits PZ very nicely.
ReplyDeletePZ was queued at a rail road crossing in his shinny new Porsche sportscar.
The cars before him had stopped as the light just turned amber, but PZ, being a Porsche driver, had to overtake and get across before the lights went red. He had done the route several times and knew that not until around 3 seconds after the light goes red does the safety barrier starts to fall.
However, as you might have guessed, given Murphy's Law, PZ didn't make the second safety barrier. So he was left their sitting in his shiny new porsche, listening to the kling kling kling warning of the oncoming train.
Apparently, it took PZ awhile to realize he was stuck. But finally he jumped from the car and started to run… STRAIGHT TOWARDS THE ONCOMING TRAIN, waving his arms in an attempt to stop the train and save his sportscar!
The car is in better shape than him.
The fact that Myers is, politically speaking, a completely unreflective leftist tool tells you all you need to know about his intellect.
ReplyDeleteMichael,
ReplyDeleteYou're just telling a story which fits your beliefs.
Duncan Watts in his book 'Everything is Obvious Once You Know the Answer. How Common Sense Fails Us' published this year puts this very clearly.
Being able to tell stories, putting together series of events together in sequence, allows us to make sense of situations without actually understanding them.
Without too much effort, I can invent stories that make sense of what is being attempted to explain, the breakup of black American families in American ghettos in the '70s and '80s (assuming that it actually happened of course).
How about, conscription of young males to fight in Vietnam, biased towards blacks because of a relative lack of exemptions, lead to brutalization of young male blacks and subsequent breakup of families. So it was the result of fighting ill-advised wars.
Or another story might be; the oil price shock due to the Arab oil embargo in 1975 led to increased unemployment in poorer predominantly black families, leading to family breakups. So it was the result of America's support of Israel.
That's actually assuming that the rate of family breakup in blacks is actually greater than that in whites ...
@bachfiend:
ReplyDelete"Being able to tell stories, putting together series of events together in sequence, allows us to make sense of situations without actually understanding them."
Isn't that what Darwin's theory does?
Michael,
ReplyDeleteIt certainly does, if your comprehension of evolutionary biology is still stuck with Darwin's 1859 theory of natural selection. You're just making a straw man argument.
Your naive belief in intelligent design is equally silly. ID is just a story too, one for which there isn't the shred of any evidence.
In a previous thread, you'd argued that morality had been implanted into all humans by God, and was therefore proof of God's existence, deriding my claim that evolutionary psychology's theory that morality is naturally selected for in human social groups as being just a 'story'.
Divinely implanted morality is just as much a story, and one that isn't particularly plausible, because it isn't particularly well embedded in most people.
Michael Jones, in his book 'Leningrad', detailing the 872 day siege of Leningrad during WWII, gives lots of cases where the atheist Russians acted with extreme morality and empathy, and the theistic Germans acted with extreme inhuman brutality.
I'm not entering into arguments whether Hitler was a Catholic or not. I concede that if he had won the war, then almost certainly no religion besides National Socialism and worship of Hitler would be allowed. But all his generals and his troops were believing Christians. The troops had chaplains in the front lines for pastoral duties. But the Germans had as their policy to destroy Leningrad and its population by siege and starvation. Artillery units had as their targets marked on maps such military targets as schools and hospitals.
Evolutionary psychology has no problems explaining how Hitler managed to manipulate the German people to behave with such inhuman brutality in Russia. Through years of propaganda and indoctrination, the German people were taught to regard the Soviets as being outside the group of humans, not deserving of humane or moral treatment.
Evolutionary psychology has no problem whatsoever explaining absolutely anything. And its opposite.
ReplyDeleteEvolutionary psychology is pseudoscientific claptrap.
ReplyDeleteMatteo,
ReplyDeleteSo does theology too have no problem whatsoever explaining absolutely anything. And its opposite. Except science has to use evidence to decide what's true or not, whereas theology just sucks answers out of its fingers and argues by logic how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
Robert,
ReplyDeleteWhereas religion is just nonscientific claptrap...
Science has to use evidence to decide what's true or not, whereas theology just sucks answers out of its fingers and argues by logic how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
ReplyDeletePlease cite some evidence for this assertion.
Matteo,
ReplyDeleteProvide some evidence that religion isn't making things up as it goes along.
At best, religion uses deductive reasoning. If the initial premise is true, and each defective step is correct, then the conclusion is true. But only if the initial premise is true, which has to be assumed.
Science uses inductive reasoning. At some point there has to be solid objective evidence. This month's 'Scientific American' has an article on the Multiverse, questioning whether it's science. Itscworth reading as to what's science or philosophy.