"I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout."
….
"For first, as I have already observed, it would greatly lessen the number of papists, with whom we are yearly overrun, being the principal breeders of the nation as well as our most dangerous enemies…"
- Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal
"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." - William Bennett
Does nobody else see the similarity? MSM certainly doesn't.
Funky Dung
Comments 5
Not to mention the fact that Bennett went on to say that would be a ridiculous and "reprehensible" idea. The transcript gives a great deal more context (he apparently was answering a caller's question about a book that proposes something similar).
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Posted 06 Oct 2005 at 4:14 pm ¶To appreciate Bennett's comments would require a sense of humor and perhaps an attention span that let's one take in the whole statement, and not just the most amusing soundbites. I don't think the MSM has much of either of those two commodities.
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Posted 06 Oct 2005 at 8:06 pm ¶The real offense of Bennett's comments is the probable inaccuracy of them. Crime rates aren't usually determined by race as much as by other social factors.
If he truly believes that crime rates are solely driven by race and that his hasty hypothesis is unequivocally true, he may in deed harbor a few racist tendencies that happened to slip out in this statement — regardless of his trailing disclaimer.
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Posted 11 Oct 2005 at 9:00 am ¶Um…I highly doubt that he believes that. In fact, I think he was mocking the idea, which appeared in Freakanomics. My comparison to Jonathan Swift is based on the assumption that he was being sarcastic, not serious.
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Posted 11 Oct 2005 at 1:24 pm ¶A brief essay on the same point that you might find interesting:
http://www.ashbrook.org/publicat/guest/05/lawler/bennett.html
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Posted 15 Oct 2005 at 3:19 pm ¶Post a Comment