Freakonomics and Race: A Rant
Added 2024-11-27 11:37:35 +0000 UTCMe losing my shit xoxo
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1:51 😁
Tee
2024-12-22 04:24:50 +0000 UTCThe first episode of the podcast If Books Could Kill was about how awful Freakonomics was. It touches on some of the points you mention here. You might enjoy, if for no other reason than hearing other people express similar frustrations.
hill
2024-12-02 19:31:32 +0000 UTCThis might be a bit off-topic, but, focusing on the KKK, John Dolan/Gary Brecher had a great piece ("The Confederates Who Should Have Been Hanged") that touches on its creation and growth. Some motivating paras below, but encourage anyone interested in the subject to read about Wade Hampton and the Red Shirts, latter quite unknown to me until reading this article. ' [No Confederate guerrillas], or even more effective postwar irregulars/bandits like the James Brothers, ever represented a real threat to the Union victory. That threat came from ex-Confederate officers who were cold-blooded and intelligent enough to bide their time, take advantage of the North’s ridiculous leniency, and form quasi-legal organizations to negate every gain for which those 300,000 soldiers died. These were the men who needed to hang in April 1865. It’s easy to identify the two ex-Confederate leaders who did the most to ruin the lives of the African-American and poor-white Southerners after the war: Nathan Bedford Forrest in the West, and Wade Hampton in the East. If those two had been hanged in 1865, American history might have gone in a different direction, and frankly, almost any outcome would have been better than the debacle that actually followed the war. Nathan Bedford Forrest, un-hanged, went on to front for a little group you may have heard of, called the KKK. Wade Hampton, who gets less press but was probably the worse of these two monsters (admittedly, it’s a tough competition) created America’s first homegrown fascist group, the Red Shirts, and used them to terrorize black voters, ensuring his election as South Carolina’s first postwar racist senator in 1876. And these guys didn’t suddenly turn bad after the war. Both of them were born bad, and had done enough during the war to deserve death by any moral or legal criteria you care to name, from the Code of Hammurabi to Buzzfeed’s “Nine Things You Shouldn’t Do on A First Date.” ' https://web.archive.org/web/20211023022801/https://pando.com/2015/04/10/war-nerd-the-confederates-who-shouldve-been-hanged/
Gabriel Uriarte
2024-12-01 12:40:54 +0000 UTC
