Vaccines are thankfully not a liberal or conservative issue. Most pols are in favor of them. You get crazies on the right like Michelle Bachman and crazies on the left like RFK Jr. But that’s about it.
As for adaher all I have add is that his name reminds me of the lovely Hebrew song Adir Hu.
There are no big conservative policies that worked, nor have they been tried by actual conservatives in the last 30 years. Either the policy has failed or they were liberal ones. The only one that is even remotely conservative is Obamacare, and that was simply to have something in response to Hillary’s health care reform in the 90’s
Wait…whut??
Lead…like the element? Heavy, greyish?
Does anyone know what he’s talking about?
Is this related to fluoridation in the water polluting our precious bodily fluids?
Eh, I hate to say it, but there is some truth to this point that adaher makes. He’s way oversimplifying, but it’s quite believable that lead is a factor.
And now I try to destroy the space-time continuum by using Mother Jones to defend a point adaher made… link to artice.
The theory is that with the elimination of leaded gas, paint and such, lead levels in people are less than before and lead was the cause of violent behavior. Thus explaining the decrease in the overall crime rate over the past few decades.
Frankly, I don’t see the point in waiting for someone else to come along. All you gotta do is add some thinly-veiled racism on top of the aspects you’ve already mastered (perpetual wrongness, inability to distinguish opinions from facts, delusions of adequacy) and you can be a perfect representative of the Tea Party.
The funny part is that to many Republicans and self-professed Libertarians, the regulations banning Lead are an injustice perpetrated on society and are themselves the greater evil.
Not only do I know about what he’s talking about, I’ve known for close to a decade. Cite.. Sadly, the links are no longer available, but lead exposure is pretty much proven to be a factor in homicide and other crimes of violence.
He’s still an idiot, but happens to be a correct idiot in this regard.
To conservatives–the less you understand about a person, the more likely you are to make incorrect assumptions about them. for instance, assuming that someone is evil, instead of just ignorant, is much easier if you know very little about them.
This has implications for criminal justice.
Actually, no – it’s actually a demonstration of how Adaher can, at the same time, seem plausible and yet be hilariously wrong at the same time. Look at his original argument – he’s claiming that poverty does not cause crime. Really, that’s his claim.
Then, he points to the lead study as * proof of this assertion *. Now even the most ardent supporters of the “lead increases violence in populations” school are not going to claim that this is the only motivator for urban crime. But Adaher takes one factor and, ignoring nuance, makes a sweeping and absolute statement about a completely different issue.
So it’s an interesting and quite annoying rhetorical technique. Find a study that sort of tangentially supports your theory, seize upon it like a fiscal conservative discovering the Laffer curve, and make broad-reaching and absolutist statements that aren’t actually supported by the pro-offered evidence.
Still, he’s obviously a bright kid, and maybe once he goes off to college he’ll find the capacity to set down the Ayn Rand books and learn the world is a little more complicated than he thought.
I LOL’d.
Why, just recently we had a thread pointing out the injustice of blacks getting to call each other the “N-word” when whites aren’t accorded the same freedom!
“Loogied On Laffer”? Was it not ever so helpful of Arthur to do his magnum opus on a cocktail napkin, providing us with something handy to wipe up the fluids of derision he evoked?
In the Minimum Wage thread, he has tried to claim that minimum wage is sufficient for a single person to live on :rolleyes:, and that the USA* has twice as many immigrants as Norway or Sweden**. I’m sure he’ll be along to claim that numerically we have twice as many, and we all can show him that is wrong too.
Goddamn this guy is an ignorant fucker. It doesn’t take a lot to verify shit before you make claims like that, but obviously that’s too much work for him.
There is zero correlation between poverty rates and crime. While it’s true that most criminals are poor, you don’t get more criminals when you get more poor people, which would imply that it’s not the poverty that’s causing the criminal behavior. And thugs don’t stop being thugs when they get money. In fact, they often become more thuggish and even more likely to end up in prison.
I was looking at migration rates. and “foreign born” in Scandinavia is very likely to be more Scandinavians. Scandinavian nations are essentially gated communities.
Being wrong is not a crime and it doesn’t reflect badly on a person. what does reflect badly on a person is rushing to proclaim him wrong, and further an idiot or ignorant, when you’ve actually proved nothing of the sort. A tendency which I see a lot around here.
News flash: being associated with a true ignorance-fighter like Cecil by posting on his board does not make you an ignorance-fighter. Many of you set the cause back by your shitty behavior and moral and intellectual arrogance which Chimera so aptly demonstrated.
Btw, couldn’t help but notice that Chimera happened to completely miss the fact that I cited my claim. Now that’s some remarkable stupidity.
http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2010/10/19/property-crime-rates-by-income-level
http://www.stanford.edu/group/scspi/slides/ViolentCrime.pdf
Your cites don’t say anything to contradict my argument. Poor people are more likely to be criminals, but if poverty was the CAUSE of crime, then you’d get more crime as you got more poverty, and less crime as you got less poverty.
The correlation between crime rates and the poverty rate is non-existent. Thus, poverty is not a cause of crime. More likely, criminal behavior is a cause of poverty.
there was just an intersting op-ed about how David Dinkins, the worst mayor in NYC’s history, resisted police recommendations for getting crime under control because he thought there was no police solution to crime, that the key to solving crime was to solve poverty and other social maladies. He wasn’t alone. Most liberals, armed with the latest in sociology studies, were sure the science was settled. It wasn’t.