I'm afraid I really dislike the way Bill O'Reilly conducts himself on television. I find him rude to his guests, opinionated to a fault, and generally an unattractive personality. However, I have to hand it to him for this segment. I don't agree with all his conclusions, but in 80% of them he and I are on the same page.
I don't think he's entirely correct in holding that everything boils down to individual choice. When you've had nothing but bad examples, often with no father-figure or other sound example to counteract them, it's frequently all too easy to make (and keep on making) bad choices, particularly when no-one around you is making good ones! (I'll be addressing that issue, among others, in my memoir of prison chaplaincy, to be published in mid-September.)
That aside, he's basically correct. Address the one-parent-family issue, fix the schools, clean up the ghettoes, and you'll go a very long way to sorting out the 'race problem' in the USA. Unfortunately, to do that will mean dismantling an entire 'ecosystem' that's come into existence to feed off the misery of urban black populations, and makes its living out of pretending to cater to their needs. Therefore, it's unlikely to happen.
Peter
Nope, won't happen because that can't POSSIBLY be the reason... It's all the 'oppression'...
ReplyDeleteYeah, ain't that the truth. If it weren't for people like me, none of this would have ever happened.
ReplyDeleteI get so damned sick and tired of hearing how I oppressed the blacks - I have never oppressed anyone in my entire life. For one thing, I wouldn't know how. For another, it goes against my nature.
While I agree with O'Reilly, he failed to mention how much of blacks' dysfunctional culture is the result of white liberals substituting government payouts to eliminate personal responsibility. As long as government support irresponsibility nothing will change.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of change...Good luck with that. The race warlords, the victimization industry and the government bureaucracy are too heavily invested in keeping the mess going. If we were able to institute such a sea change today there would still be two and maybe three generations living and at least one coming up who will be invested in "the way it's always been."
It won't change because there are too many people who profit, in one way or another, from it not changing.
Guess what kinds of experiences I've had with black males in urban areas that inform MY opinions.
ReplyDeleteOne other thing about O'Reilly: he claims to be Catholic, but mangles Catholic beliefs and teachings to a fare-thee-well.
ReplyDeleteI confess I've wondered what your reflections would be on the people who likened the Trayvon situation to Apartheid. It seemed an outrageous parallel to me.
ReplyDeleteNo, you won't.
ReplyDeleteIt'd help a lot, but there'd still be the genetic differences.
Even in countries that are majority black, don't seem to have a culture of illegitimacy and so on, like say, Barbados, the murder rate is still way higher than average.
It's preposterous to imagine humans evolved so that every concievable ethnic group ended with the same average IQ.
There are two obvious outliers: Ashkenazi Jews, who for not perfectly established reasons have an average IQ of 115, and sub-saharan Africans who while displaying great variance in genetics are noticeably less smart.
www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/004064.html
There's also a book by an American (Eugene Valberg) who by way of teaching philosophy in various African universities ended up in his sixties running a pastry bakery in Johannesburg, I believe.
It claims Africans display notable deficiencies in abstract thinking and that can be seen in their languages.
You're not by any chance a fluent speaker of Xhosa, Zulu or any such languages?
I agree with you about O'Reilly, but like the proverbial blind squirrel he does occasionally find an acorn.
ReplyDeleteI'd add "faux populist" to your description.
Having worked in inner city EMS for over 30 years, your observations are spot on.
As I said to a friend of mine the other day, when Bill Clinton was trying to reform welfare in the mid 1990s, Jesse Jackson said "Mend it, don't end it".
The problem is that you can't mend it, so it has to be ended. There will have to be something to replace it, but that something has to be less generous and have strict limits on duration.