"It's certainly much ado... But I think it is much ado about not very much. It would help if someone could tell me what he said that was false."
Brit Hume Fox News.
Looks the Bennett the Bigot has company with Brit the Bigot. The idea that "aborting all black babies" would lower the crime rate is, quite simply laughable. Instead, what would happen is that another wave of people would fill the lowest slot of society, and they would be the source of the crime rate. Blacks don't drive the crime rate in Europe - instead, it is the bottom of the economic heap whites and imigrant arabs. One of the reasons that Europe has less trouble being generous, is because the faces of the rowdies and lotto louts aren't different from the others in the countryside.
It seems that Katrina was a wind the ripped the top off the Republican Party, exposing the real nature of its leadership - out of touch, bumbling and nasty.
Bill Bennett's argument is that genocide would improve society. It is one of the wedges by which bigots try and push their point of view into the public discourse - by trying to make people confuse the endemic problems that outsiders and the underclass have, and therefore cause - with the intrinsic qualities of those outsiders. Logically it is a vicious circle - because blacks are easily excluded, they therefore must also be intrinsically wicked.
Brit Hume's remarks take a perverse reading of Freakonomics. In it
Steven Levitt argued that abortions marginally reduce the crime rate. But that isn't what Bennett extrapolated. The technical question - and here I am speaking as if a gambler who can write
The Book of Virtues deserves to be taken seriously, so were are speaking at best, in the optative - is whether genocide would produce a marginal improvement over the mere reduction in the population. I wish him luck proving that thesis.
In Edinburgh, for examples, for centuries, had a neighborhood known as "the goibles". Just as Cambridge and Oxford trained the great minds of Great Britain, so did the goibles train the great thugs of the empire. It wasn't black people who were in that neighboorhood, but the descendants of generations of urban poverty. Baghdad is the world's most dangerous city, and it is black people who drive the crime rate. Jakarta is a dangerous city, and it isn't people from Africa who drive the crime rate their either.
In short it is poverty and dispossession that drive whole people's into the underclass, and get rid of one, and another will take its place, unless the entire cycle of dispossession is ended.
In New Orleans the vast sprawling neighboorhoods have been levelled. If the city is not merely rebuilt - but remade - then it will be possible for it to be a better city in the end. But if it is rebuilt merely as it was, then the result will be that it will return to being what it was, with a high crime rate and endemic corruption. The problem with the Brit Humes of this world is that by focusing on skin colour and blaming people for being dispossessed they promote something darker than mere poverty, the promote bigotry and racism.