News Roundup – Comcast, Paul Ryan, Russia
For the next couple of days, I going to post my comcast internet speeds. Yep, I know …boring, but I’m paying for “speeds up to 50 mbps.” That’s not what I’m getting. It isn’t even close. 🙁
Without spending too much time in the weeds, I will circle back around to Paul Ryan, Charles Murray and Paul Ryan’s comments on Bill Bennett’s show last week. First, let’s go over what Paul Ryan actually said. He said, “We’ve got this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work, and so there’s a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with.” Later in the conversation, Paul Ryan mentions Charles Murray by name. So what? Well, I think this says something about Paul Ryan, conservatives, their view on social programs and their view of race. Charles Murray has published a number of works in which he continually points out that blacks and other minorities are simply inferior to their white counterparts. For simplicity’s sake, let’s just say that it’s clear that Charles Murray’s background is mired in racism. In his relatively famous book, The Bell Curve, he argues “that blacks and Latinos have lower IQs than Asians and whites” (whites are inferior to Asians, by the way); that IQ is largely (though not exclusively) hereditary; that lower IQ means these groups are more likely to commit crime and drop out of school and have illegitimate (and lower IQ) babies and live in poverty, and that there’s not much to do to help those groups rise. In fact, Murray and Herrnstein argued, American welfare policies that provide aid to women with children “inadvertently social-engineer who has babies, and it is encouraging the wrong women. When you’ve spent an entire book arguing that blacks and Latinos have lower IQs, more out-of-wedlock babies and higher reliance on welfare, it’s clear who “the wrong women” are. Oh, and the book also argued for limiting immigration, because unlike earlier waves of immigrants, today’s are coming from countries with a lower national IQ. In what world are those arguments not racist? To me, it is clear that Paul Ryan knew what he was doing. He went on the Bill Bennett Show. Remember that Bill Bennett is the guy who said – “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, what do I think? I think that Paul Ryan went to the familiar confines of the Bill Bennett Show. I think that he intentionally quoted Charles Murray because it is acceptable in conservative ranks to talk about race in code. Not for a second do I believe that Paul Ryan wasn’t pushing the standard conservative agenda, which says that all we need to do is kick these “lazy inner-city people” (also known as takers in conservative vernacular) off of welfare and force them into some extremely low-paying jobs and that would somehow fix our economy, our problems with inner-city youth and we would reach nirvana. This is the same philosophy that has been pushed by conservatives since Ronald Reagan. No, I do not believe that Paul Ryan’s comments were “inarticulate.” I think he said exactly what he meant. (more reading here, here, here, here, here and here) (more…)
