Author Topic: Bizarre Arguments and Behavior  (Read 444 times)

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Offline happyg

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Bizarre Arguments and Behavior
« on: March 26, 2014, 03:52:09 pm »
Walter E. Williams



Some statements and arguments are so asinine that you'd have to be an academic or a leftist to take them seriously. Take the accusation that Republicans and conservatives are conducting a war on women. Does that mean they're waging war on their daughters, wives, mothers and other female members of their families? If so, do they abide by the Geneva Conventions' bans on torture, or do they engage in enhanced interrogation and intimidation methods, such as waterboarding, with female family members? You might say that leftists don't mean actual war. Then why do they say it?

What would you think of a white conservative mayor's trying to defund charter schools where blacks are succeeding? While most of New York's black students could not pass a citywide math proficiency exam, there was a charter school where 82 percent of its students passed. New York's left-wing mayor, Bill de Blasio, is trying to shut it down, and so far, I've heard not one peep from the Big Apple's civil rights hustlers, including Al Sharpton and Charles Rangel. According to columnist Thomas Sowell, the attack on successful charter schools is happening in other cities, too (http://tinyurl.com/nxulxc).

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder recently stated that we must revisit the laws that ban convicted felons from voting. Why? According to a recent study by two professors, Marc Meredith of the University of Pennsylvania and Michael Morse of Stanford, published in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (http://tinyurl.com/pgolu8x), three-fourths of America's convicted murderers, rapists and thieves are Democrats. Many states restrict felons from voting; however, there's a movement afoot to eliminate any restriction on their voting. If successful, we might see Democratic candidates campaigning in prisons, seeking the support of some of America's worst people.

Decades ago, I warned my fellow Americans that the tobacco zealots' agenda was not about the supposed health hazards of secondhand smoke. It was really about control. The fact that tobacco smoke is unpleasant gained them the support of most Americans. By the way, to reach its secondhand smoke conclusions, the Environmental Protection Agency employed statistical techniques that were grossly dishonest. Some years ago, I had the opportunity to ask a Food and Drug Administration official whether his agency would accept pharmaceutical companies using similar statistical techniques in their drug approval procedures. He just looked at me.

More of article at link: http://townhall.com/columnists/walterewilliams/2014/03/26/bizarre-arguments-and-behavior-n1813687?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter



rangerrebew

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Re: Bizarre Arguments and Behavior
« Reply #1 on: March 26, 2014, 07:46:14 pm »


Decades ago, I warned my fellow Americans that the tobacco zealots' agenda was not about the supposed health hazards of secondhand smoke. It was really about control. The fact that tobacco smoke is unpleasant gained them the support of most Americans.

If they were really serious, they would ban cigarettes like they did with various pesticides.  Since they haven't gone to that length one could surmise you are correct about the control issue.
« Last Edit: March 26, 2014, 07:46:35 pm by rangerrebew »

Oceander

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Re: Bizarre Arguments and Behavior
« Reply #2 on: March 26, 2014, 07:51:00 pm »
The referenced paper on felon notification laws can be accessed here:  http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~marcmere/workingpapers/FelonNotification.pdf


The paper's discussion is a little more nuanced and complicated than the author of this statement makes it out to be.  For one thing, the paper notes that the study on which the cited party affiliations is based has been significantly criticized for overstating those numbers.  Also, the study from which that 3/4s figure was drawn actually said that if all disenfranchised felons could vote, that about 35% of them would actually vote, and 3/4s of that 35% would vote democrat.  The study itself actually finds that between 501% to 61% of felons who can vote register as democrats, with the rest registering a variety of other affiliations, but that those felons vote in very low numbers - in NY less than 10% of eligible ex-felons vote, in New Mexico about 7% to 12% of eligible ex-felons vote, and in NC the range goes from about 12% up to about 22%.  In other words, even though democrats have a slight edge among the eligible ex-felon population, they don't get that much of a bang out of it because so few eligible ex-felons actually vote.

But I don't think that the question should be decided on the basis of partisan politics; there's a deeper issue here that springs from some fundamental aspects of America and the principles it was founded on:  if an individual has paid his or her debt to society and been given the opportunity to resume his or her place in society, then shouldn't that also include restoration of that person's voting rights?  If not, then these people haven't really been restored to their place in society and are instead being treated as second-class citizens.  That seems antithetical to the basic principles of liberty and individual freedom that underlie the US.
« Last Edit: March 26, 2014, 08:10:20 pm by Oceander »