so beststephi pointed this article out to me earlier today. To synopsize, former Education Secretary William Bennett has been criticized by the Democrats in Congress for making what they consider a racist remark, and they have asked that Republicans do the same. Steph wanted to know my take on it. And I want to know yours.
So what did he say exactly?
“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 impossibly ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down.”
So am I outraged?
No, I’m not actually. The thing is, I get his point. He wasn’t saying to go out and kill black babies. He was saying just the opposite. He’s a conservative. He probably doesn’t even believe in abortion. He was specifically refuting the idea as ridiculous. He was using hyperbole. I can’t fault that. I do it all the time.
My biggest problem here, is that by claiming racism anytime anyone says something of an opposing point of view that happens to include a reference to blacks, negros, african americans, niggers, jiggaboos, porchmonkeys or coons, you actually make light of actual racism. My being traded to the Chinese with Wu-Tang clan during the 2003 racial draft not withstanding, I’ve been a negro most of my life. I’ve dealt with plenty of racism. I’ve been followed through department stores by security guards. I’ve been pulled over on DWB charges. I’ve been called racial slurs by The Man for fucking his women. I don’t need to invent incidents to add to it.
Really, I’m sure if you just give it another 24 hours someone in politics will commit another legitimate transgression against the negroes for us to all be in outrage against.
Well, that is until the white man and the black man unite under the common ground of aborting spic babies to cut down on immigration. For only when the black man and the white man are united under the control of the chinaman to annihilate the oppresive mexicans will anyone ever be finally able to deal with the jews. Or you know, we could all just forget about all of this and have a beer.
“Can’t we all just get along(and drunk)?”
I love you. You give me hope for the human race. It’s nice to know that not everyone has their head up their ass.
sadly, the human race won’t really be saved until the accept me as their benevolent but all-powerful dictator.
I’m working on it…
I had two reactions to that comment:
(1) What a stupid thing to say on the radio! I’m not really sure what point he could be making that couldn’t be made in a less-likely-to-cause-knee-jerk-reactions way. Unless he just wanted to provoke people, which is always possible. Or maybe Bennet’s just not that bright.
(2) Interestingly, it’s a riff on the economist Steven Levitt’s observation that the large-scale drop in violent crime in the mid-90s is most plausibly explained by the legalization of abortion in the 70s. That’s an observation that people have been being shocked by for several years now. And, in fact, a quick peek on the web shows that Levitt noticed too:
http://www.freakonomics.com/2005/09/bill-bennett-and-freakonomics.html
Levitt’s longer quote reveals that Bennet mentions the Levitt connection explicitly (which I hadn’t realized until 30 seconds ago when I looked it up). It’s a pretty decent post.
1) well, yeah, granted. But I am quite certain he didn’t mean it that way. But yeah, it was a pretty dumb way to put it, you’d think he’d be more careful. But as far as ignorant things to say go, I don’t think its nearly as insensitive as say Barabara Bush’s comments about Katrina.
2) Yeah, that’s pretty interesting. Seeing the entire exchange like that, I am even more sure that he wasn’t at all trying to be racially malicious.
I, for one, would never like to miss a chance to kick Bill Bennett when he’s down (Any luck at the slots today, Bill?). And Bill’s still managed to give us a unpleasant look into into his psyche even if it’s not the one most people think that he has.
sui66iy’s quite right. Bill’s channeling Freakonomics on this one. Now Freakonomics is a nasty and contrary little book (If anyone really cares, I gan give a long rant on why economist’s are pricks. I know I used to be one.). But I have to give Levitt some credit. He may have brought up the point the abortion has swept all of the undesirables off the street and made America a better place, but he never mentioned anything about the color of the unmentionables of which he spoke. In a rather unsurprising bit of mental gymnastics, Bill came up with the black babies line all by his lonesome.
By the way, I have to give Levitt credit for one more thing, and that is this beautiful line,
“…and we both love to gamble (although it seems I do it for much lower stakes and perhaps with greater success.)”
Ed
as I’ve said elsewhere, I don’t think Bennett is unaware here. He knows that the book doesn’t say that. And he goes on to say that he doesn’t believe the books premise at all. He adds “the racist comment” to the hypothesis to prove that grand sweeping generalizations based on statistics are flawed. Perhaps he should have come up with something even more nonsensical in order to really drive home that he wasn’t serious. “Aborting all male babies would remove sodomy from the world.” But I think his thought pattern was something along the lines that he had to say something that was at least arguably statistically valid with a small grain of truth, in order to show that the idea had some merit. Much like the social security argument. It needs to be defendable, even if he doesn’t believe it. I think if you actually believe that he’s completely serious then you have to assume he’s more than racist, he’s a nazi, and I’m not willing to make that jump on the statement he made.
I have no problem with attacking him for his gambling problems.
Sure, make the economist argument…
I think you give Bill way too much credit for making a clever argument. Yeah, he was reaching for some sort of “modest proposal” type argument, but the problem that I see is that when Bill Bennett reaches for a crime analogy the word that leaps automatically to his mind is black. Coming from a guy that makes a busy sideline defending Charles Murray, this screams, “Hi, I have a problem.”
Call me crazy, but I think that “not a genocidal maniac” might be setting the bar a little low for the guy who wrote “the Book of Virtues.”
Ha, I’ve been waiting for years to have someone actually ask for the economist rant.
Here are my anthropological observations of a bizarre sub-culture.
Rant, Part One
They were right about rent control, and by God, cost-benefit analysis shows that benefits of talking on a cell phone while you drive far exceed the costs of all the dead drivers.
In an economist’s mind, conventional wisdom is all bunk, and clever analysis will show that the truth is much different. Combined with point one above, this leads to some interesting discussions in departmental
meetings
Now, rational means something different to an economist that to a normal human being. In the first week of micro economic theory (graduate school, not that pap that they teach the undergrads), budding economists are taught something like this. Rational means that people have certain goals (which may differ from what they actually tell other people) and that they will act to the best of their knowledge and ability to achieve those goals. Now if your goal is to obsessively assemble and dis-assemble bicycles as you wait for you next crystal meth hit that’s still rational. Economists don’t make normative judgments (Normative is a real popular word in economist circles.).
Now in week two, they teach you to forget all that crap you learned in week one. Rational means people try to grab as much money as possible, work as little as possible and do what they can to minimize any risk. People have perfect information about everything in the world (or at the very least the understand exactly how the world works and can instantly solve world-wide sourcing transportation events in their head, figure out the cheapest cellular plan, etc.).
Economists go with choice two because otherwise the math’s too hard. And easy math is what makes the economic world go round.
End Rant, Part One
Rant, Part Two
I’m talking choice two here. You do this crap long enough, and it rots your brain. Somewhere around your third overlapping generations savings model, you tend to forget that people sometimes kill each other for sexual gratification. The Kool-Aid’s great. Money, leisure good. Risk bad. Whatever else could motivate human behavior?
After having drunk the Kool-Aid, economists believe that they have stumbled on the perfect rational way to view the world. Economists believe that their models are a perfect way to view family life, crime, abortion or what-not.
I once worked with a guy who was dying to publish his article on the economics of prostitution. He had it all figured out, and all he needed was a journal who would take it.
Strangely enough, economists never seem to notice that points one and four might somehow cloud their judgment a bit.
Now might also be the time to mention the unsurprising observation, that Ayn Rand is really, really big in economic circles. I’m not talking starry-eyes freshman big. I’m talking Mein Kampf, Book of Revelations big.
As you can tell by departmental placement, most schools consider economics a social science. This really, really irks economists. They do hard math; they shouldn’t be placed with sociologists. As beststephi might be able to explain to economists, real science tends to have what is called repeatable experiments, controls and the like. It’s kind of hard to tell a country, “That was great. But could you do that recession again, this time with a 7.8 percent interest rate?”
Economists like to put themselves up on a pedestal with physics and real science (Biologists are crushed by the rejection.). The reality of the matter is that most of the time, economics is just well-argued conjectures with integral signs littered about.
Once in primordial times, some politician realized that a crackpot proposal didn’t sound so crackpot when you had a PhD explaining it. Since then every right-wing politician, oil company and oppressor of the masses has gone trawling through economics departments with a hundred dollar bill to find someone to turn tricks.
This doesn’t work quite so well with other types of academics. If you see someone on TV arguing that global warming doesn’t exist, this is almost never an atmospheric scientist. Ditto for epidemiologists and lung cancer. But you never lack for economists arguing that cutting taxes doesn’t increase the deficit. Or economists arguing that global warming doesn’t exist. Or economists arguing that cigarettes don’t cause lung cancer.
I suspect that there is a rationality argument here. Money good, and all of that. And if atmospheric scientists aren’t going to be rational, somebody’s got to do it.
A while back, a survey was performed ranking professions by their amounts of charitable giving. Economists finished dead last. This is one of those stories that would have been dead a long time ago except for one thing. Economists keep bringing it up. It’s one of those things that they like to bring up as light conversational fodder. And they really don’t see it as a bad thing.
I see the invisible hand of Ayn Rand in this one.
Enough rant. Maybe sometime, I’ll tell ya what I really think.
Ed
PS Feel free to take any of the above with a grain of salt. And don’t forget that I’ve checked into the Hotel California myself.
Mav, I really enjoyed this post. I think you’re right in your way of thinking, and it is refreshing. Everyone jumps at these opportunities to play the race card and sometimes it just creates more issues.
Miss you!
van
Thanx, glad you enjoyed it. Yeah, I was totally serious about that. There is quite enough racism in the world without having to go out looking for it.
miss you too… hope everything is going well out there.
The set-up
Bennett’s comment was set up by a caller’s insinuation that if abortion had never been legalized, income taxes from the people who would never have been aborted would have kept Social Security afloat and not “in crisis” like it is now.
Ask a ridiculous question, get a ridiculous answer.
Re: The set-up
Good god, that is a stupid insinuation.
Re: The set-up
yep… see, like I said… I blame freedom. Once I’m king, none of this will be a problem anymore. I’ll also be lowering unemployment by providing positions for royal harem girls. I have all kinds of good ideas.
Re: The set-up
yep. See the link that provided above. So if anything he was defending the liberal viewpoint by saying the conservative argument of “no abortion to save social security” is as bad as the racist argument “kill the blacks to stop crime.”
I’m still totally with him.
Well, that is until the white man and the black man unite under the common ground of aborting spic babies to cut down on immigration. For only when the black man and the white man are united under the control of the chinaman to annihilate the oppresive mexicans will anyone ever be finally able to deal with the jews.
I knew this was a danger when you changed races.
Our Zionist masters want us to keep a low profile, but once you became a Chinaman you were able to piece togather the clues and see that we were using the Mexicans to keep you guys down.
But please, dig deeper into your newfound race. You will see that you are really a Jew at heart.
Why try to rebuild a working infrastructure?
Just a little snip snip and you too can control the world.
Think of it as like being back in college when you knew buggy secrets of three teams.
<LUKE>NO! I’ll never join you!!!</LUKE>
Who’s yo daddy? /Vader
What are you talking about. My mother carved me full grown from a block of stone.
political loser
Trying to defend himself on this issue is a political loser, but he keeps doing it- that’s why everyone (even the President!) is piling on. It’s a Sister Souljah moment for the White House.
Bennett’s trying to defend his statement by saying it’s literally true, but who cares. No one is attacking him for lying; they’re attacking him for entertaining sick racist fantasies and telling the world about them.
It’s what the hypothetical says about the mind of the hypothesizer that’s got everyone riled up. Almost no one is willing to be an unreconstructed racist in public anymore, so these rare glimpses in to the thought process of influential conservative ideologues are about all we have to go on when we try to figure out why inequality persists.
Re: political loser
My favorite situation in recent years was the furor and everybody piling on another politician for correctly using the term “niggardly”, which has nothing to do with race whatsoever. God bless America.
Re: political loser
Yes. I remember comming across that word in studying for the GRE a bit ago. The book I have declared, “Please note that niggard and niggardly are very old words of Scandinavian origin; other than an unfortunate resemblance in sound, they have nothing whatsoever to do with the offensive and derogatory term used by racists to insult African-Americans.”
Re: political loser
heh… that’s great. I love that they felt the need to explain it away. And I love the subtle hint of disdain that the explanation shows.
Re: political loser
You trying to start something here, white boy?
Actually, that’s the thing I was getting at. The world we live in is always ready to call shennanigans at something, and to be a successful politician, one needs to expect that, and not only be ready to deal with it, but know how to avoid it. A smart politician would have said “miserly” and avoided the issue. People are ignorant. That is true, but offended is offended. Whether he did it on purpose or not, the end result is the same. Loss of votes.
Re: political loser
At some point though we have to hope that people won’t get offended over stuff for completely incorrect reasons. I should be able to order a black angus and you should be able to eat at Cracker Barrel without having to look over our shoulders for fear of some hypersensitive person misinterpreting.
Re: political loser
You calling someone a Barrel?
Re: political loser
yes… of monkeys…
Re: political loser
And what could be more fun than that?
Re: political loser
sex
Re: political loser
Ah yes.
That would be a bit more than just “all of us just getting along.”
You are a visionary.
Re: political loser
What can I say? I have a dream…
Re: political loser
oh certainly we have to hope. But the job of the politician isn’t about hope. I mean, I’m like the world’s biggest supporter of free speech. I think its pretty clear that I almost go out of my way trying to offend people here in a vain attempt at humor. I routinely stand in front of 400 wrestling fans and tell them they’re fat and that the night before I fucked their sister. I have no problem with offensive speech, intentional or accidental, real or imagined. But I’m working to amuse people, and maybe sometimes to make them think. Bennett not only isn’t as clever as me (*patting my own back*) but he’s in a different position than me. He is trying to win public support. He is trying to seriously affect people’s way of thinking. He didn’t do himself any favors there. I think he has the right to say what he said. I even kind of agree with him. But that doesn’t mean that saying it was very smart of him.
Re: political loser
See, I agree that its a losing battle, but I don’t think he has a choice but to defend himself. I honestly don’t believe that he was being racist there at all. He was using a racist argument as obviously wrong, and trying to point out that the caller’s social security argument was just as wrong.
He can’t not defend it, because doing so would be implicitly accepting the claims that he is racist. But you’re right defending himself just makes him look guilty as well. But I think its far better to fight and lose than to accept the fate.
Re: political loser
I agree.
It seems to me WB’s entire point of saying this was to provide a clear-cut example of a cause-and-effect relationship (aborting Black babies -> reduce crime) that counters the more complex association between abortion and revenue, brought up by the caller.
It’s interesting to me that he doesn’t agree with the Freakonomics claim that abortion in general resulted in reduced crime, but he does think that aborting just Black babies would. So being unwanted doesn’t make you more likely to be a criminal, but being Black does. So, there’s something innately wrong with being Black. According to WB.
Re: political loser
Again, I think you are ignoring direct evidence. That’s simply not what he said. I won’t even go so far as to say he isn’t (or is) racist. However his exact quote is states:
He wasn’t making the claim out of racism. He was specifically making the claim because it was ridiculous. Or at least that’s what he says. Sure, he could be lying, but he could just as easily be telling the truthl. Unlike questionable comments made by say, Barbara Bush or Trent Lott or Louis Farrakhan, where you can simply take what they said on one occasion in its entirity and use it as evidence of racism, in order to claim that Bennett is racist from his comment, you have to dissect it. You have to take some of his claim as truth while completely ignoring something else that he said in the same breath. It would be like if I said “I don’t believe that Jews are the Devil” and you quoted me as Mav says “Jews are the Devil”, which again, is true, I said it, but its unfair as that was clearly not the intent of my statement.
Re: political loser
He was not making the claim because he thought it was ridiculous, he said that actually ABORTING all Black babies is a ridiculous ACTION. He said that it’s TRUE that aborting Black babies would result in less crime:
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.
I don’t think he was trying to be racist, but I do think that what he said shows that he is.
But I agree with you that in the grand scheme of things, there are far, far worse assaults on Blacks than this. But I also think that thoughts lead to actions, and so ignoring things like this does not help anyone.
Re: political loser
and he’s right. Statistically speaking, blacks do commit a disproportionate amount of crime. Or at the very least they are convicted for a disproportionate amount of crime. So if you removed them from the equation, your crime statistic would go down. Let me rebold the quote that you are referencing:
That means that he believes, or at the very least, he is stating, that doing so might not really provide the desired effect. Not to mention that it would be impossible, ridiculous and morally reprehensible.
Again, I’m not even saying he is or isn’t racist. All I’m saying is that his statement specifically includes the premise it is flawed. And therefore as flawed as the idea of making abortion illegal to save Social Security. He even says earlier that you can’t assume that all the babies you save through illegalizing abortion would be productive tax payers. Similarly, you can’t assume that all the black babies you’d abort would be criminals. Technically he only has to be right once. Technically, killing even one would be criminal would lower the crime rate. Can you go back in time and kill baby Hitler and stop the Holocaust? Can you go back in time and kill every german baby to make sure you kill Hitler? These are the “tricky extrapolatons” he is referring to.
My real point is that even what you’ve done here. Bolding certain passages, implies that you mean to ignore the non-bolded ones. “I don’t believe Jews are the devil.” You and Bryon make a possibly valid point. It is interesting that his mind was able to even construct the argument in the first place. But that’s not evidence that he believes it. I can construct several evil terrorist plots, but I don’t intend to carry them out.
“I do know that assassinating every person in the middle east would open up large reserves of oil and make gasoline cheaper in the states. If that were your sole purpose, gas prices would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do , but your gas prices would go down. So these far-out, these far-reaching, extensive extrapolations are, I think, tricky.”
Do you see my point? I’m saying that my premise is as unreasonable as his premise. He is saying his premise is as unreasonable as the caller’s.
Re: political loser
and he’s right. Statistically speaking, blacks do commit a disproportionate amount of crime. Or at the very least they are convicted for a disproportionate amount of crime. So if you removed them from the equation, your crime statistic would go down.
Right. But why did he specifically pick Blacks as the group? The disparity between males and females in crime is probably greater than the Black/White one (since White males commit more crimes than Black females). And poor people commit more crimes. Etc. This particular comparison shows me how he thinks.
Let me rebold the quote that you are referencing:
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.
That means that he believes, or at the very least, he is stating, that doing so might not really provide the desired effect. Not to mention that it would be impossible, ridiculous and morally reprehensible.
OK, I do agree that this is the tricky part, deciphering what he’s referring to by “these …”. But it seems much more reasonable to me to assume that he’s referring to the caller’s initial claim, given that he states the Black abortion/crime reduction as a truth and that he’s already made the point that the abortion, revenue relationship isn’t straight-forward. Listening to the broadcast might help…
Re: political loser
1) he couldn’t pick men. See the argument I made to Ed (in his response to me responding to above). I think he felt he needed to feel to present an argument that while ridiculous is at least something someone would logically make. Arguing the death of all males would mean the death of the human race. No one would ever say that. Instead he argues the death of all blacks so as to point out that that would obviously lead to a nazi regime. If it were me, I probably would have argued for the death of all of the middle east to lower gas prices, but maybe that’s not ridiculous enough. Too many people would probably agree.
2) I think he’s refuting his own claim with the “this is tricky” and transitively he is refuting the callers claim. Otherwise there would be no point to him telling his story at all. You’d be right. He’d basically be saying “statistics don’t necessarilly predict the way you want them to about social security. Its too tricky. You can’t make predictions like that. And by the way, the niggers commit a lot of crime.” That’s what you’d have to argue he’s saying, and even if he really believed it, it just doesn’t make sense for him to say it in that context.
Man, I had no idea black babies were so dangerous. Criminals! Pre-school and kindergarten, just full of delinquents! Honestly though, I can see where people would be upset. Its a fine line, and it’s easy enough to read that as saying that blacks are responsible for the majority of crime.
It would be like saying that if you aborted every Hungarian baby there would be less good cooking out there. Hey, wait a minute. Thats just crazy enough to be true… Fear the Hungarian! We oppress people with goulash, sour cherry soup, and stuffed cabbage! Eat it! 😉
Nuke em from orbit. its the only way to be sure. You know if we annihilate the entire human race, we will solve quite a few problems.
There’s no world hunger if there is no one left to eat.
I know I rarely comment Mav, but I also rarely skip over any of your entries without giving them a dedicated glance. Sometimes even, I find myself reading your posts in their entirety! And when I do, I usually feel englightened. And sometimes entertained!
I’m just sayin. You write some of what my mother would call ‘the good mothafuckin shit’. Just had to say it. I smell syndication.
thanx, glad you enjoy. You know, I often wish that I could become a syndicated columnist. Its kind of a dream of mine. I write these things because in a way, I feel like I have to. Curious thing about writers. We’re the kinds of self-important assholes who somehow feel the need to be heard. I need the validation of knowing that th cockamanie bullshit that goes through my head is paid attention to by other people. And so I display it for all to see.
I only wish that I could make a living at it. I don’t get how professional bloggers do it. If you ever run into someone who you think would pay me to spew my vanity, send them my way.