Elephants at the oceanfront

Uncategorized 1 Minute

The breakdown of the Elephant Family

The importance of maturity in the alpha male spans species.

Published by Don Tabor

I am a former Chairman of the Tidewater Libertarian Party and was the 2007 LP candidate for the 14th district VA Senate. Previously, I was the Volunteer State Director for the FairTax. I am married 50 years with two grown children and 5 grandchildren.

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28 thoughts on “Elephants at the oceanfront”

    1. You have an unbelievable ability to ignore truth that doesn’t fit your narrative. The whole point is that racism IS NOT the cause of the destruction of the Black family and the resulting nihilism and violence so common in young Black men.

      Over the years, I had the honor of treating Bill Thomas, one of the Tuskegee Airmen and Katheryn Johnson, who was featured in the book and movie “Hidden Figures” They came of age in the 30s and 40s. There was certainly more virulent racism then than since, yet they rose on merit, supported by intact families.

      The Black family endured through slavery, Jim Crow and the more subtle racism that followed, only to be destroyed by the Great Society’s do-gooders.

      You cannot learn the lessons of history if you deny them.

      The horrors of violence and abandoned children rests on Progressive heads, your faction has done more to harm American Blacks than the KKK ever dreamed of.

      https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2014/03/the_decline_of_the_africanamerican_family.html

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      1. Leaving your emotional, offensive, and, frankly, ignorant rant for what it is, the lesson from history that YOU want to ignore is that grinding, inescapable poverty greatly exacerbated by systematic racism is destructive of family life. Yes, Progressives have tried again and again to address the economic causes of social dysfunction only to be thwarted at every turn by people like you.

        The fact that a few talented and determined individuals rose above the racism in their paths is a textbook example of a lame dodge. Good for them, but it says very little about what ordinary people of ordinary talents have to deal with.

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        1. Read the damn link.

          The point is that Blacks at all income levels were better off with intact, extended families to support them.

          Black families in the 40s and 50s held family reunions that drew hundreds from all across the country, There was always a relative there to take in children if Dad lost his job, The Black Family was a bulwark against racism and hardship, and something all of us could and should admire,

          Adn do-gooders destroyed in a generation what racism and hate only made stronger.

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        2. “The point is that Blacks at all income levels were better off with intact, extended families to support them”

          That is not in dispute. It is the obvious truth and applies to people of all races.

          What is in dispute is why those family structures have broken down? I say it is the grinding, inescapable poverty exacerbated by relentless racism. You say it is efforts to mitigate grinding inescapable poverty. One of us is full of shit.

          In those good old days of the 40’s and 50’s most black families lived in extreme poverty in the South but they lived on the land and were able to survive and stay together. When they finally had enough of the bigotry, racism and violence they were subjected to daily in places like Louisiana and fled by the millions to northern cities they found surviving far more difficult and a life of inescapable poverty far more stressful and damaging. That is actual history. You should try to learn it before spewing your rants.

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          1. I lived in Louisiana in the 50s and pretty much everyone was poor by today’s standards. There was racism, but not violence. The last lynching in southern Louisiana was 20 years before I was born.

            But Black families survived 100 years of poverty and racism until LBJ destroyed them in a decade.

            Were the poverty and racism the cause the decline of the family should have been steady over the time period, but
            until Teenage girls were presented with Uncle Sam as an alternative to their mother’s rules or a husband, out-of-wedlock births went from a rare scandal to the norm in a decade.

            Competing views of history? I’ll go with Thomas Sowell and Walter E Williams view. They have the numbers. Again, read the link.

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          2. So, the Great Migration never happened?
            Well, actually it did. And it was driven by the racism and violence that you summarily dismiss.

            You can cherry-pick the numbers and the MANY factors involved until you turn blue. History is what it is. Your repeating “conservative” myths of “Welfare queens” does not change it.

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          3. The Great Migration occurred because of the demand for industrial workers in the North, in part due to WW1 and WW2 and the postwar booms.

            Blacks moved TO better opportunities resulting from industrial expansion,

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          4. Sure, the hope of finding opportunities in more civilized parts of the country must have played a role in summoning the courage to migrate away from oppression.

            But why were all those opportunities for Blacks in the North but not in the South? Living as and being treated as second class citizens in the South had nothing to do with it? No war time production in, say, Louisiana shipyards? Or anywhere else in the South?

            Why do you suppose that the South has always been so economically, culturally and morally backward? Could it be the deleterious effect of a culture of racism? Almost as damaging to white people as it is to black? Here is one take on parts of this question . . .

            https://www.quora.com/Why-is-it-that-the-Southern-states-always-seem-to-be-so-far-behind-in-the-areas-of-education-economic-growth-wages-etc-Reconstruction-has-been-over-for-nearly-a-century-and-a-half-yet-things-dont-seem-to-have

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      2. I am sure you will disagree. The facts are that American Blacks were not really American citizens until 1965. And at that time, the laws changed, but it did not shift the culture. That has been a long, slow slog of gradual improvements.

        Until the laws did change, Black Americans were well segregated in housing, schools, jobs to the point of almost being a nation within a nation. Sundown laws were a horrible enforcement of a White supremacy country that despised the Black community. And just a few decades earlier, we had whole towns of successful black businesses destroyed out of pure racial hatred. Hard to ignore that.

        Yes, Black families and the church were instrumental in surviving the apartheid. But when the Great Migration took place after the situation in the South became intolerable, dangerous and lacked few opportunities, the draw North was strong. But that just shifted the apartheid from legal and extra-legal terrorism to the more subtle work, union, property, banking and schooling de facto segregation. And it broke up families, community and church bonds.

        It took the Irish a century to assimilate, and they were White. So we don’t cotton easily to immigrants. And in the Northeast, the job culture of police, fire fighters, etc. as Irish enclaves still exists. When obvious skin color is a factor, or facial features as with Asians, racism is just extended.

        Your statement that the KKK did less damage than liberal efforts to improve the lot of Blacks is ridiculous. But I will grant that the methods of social welfare were not well run or thought out. But by the time the 1960’s had arrived, we had serious problems and the inequities were shameful.

        Why do we still have problems with race? Because we have never had a reckoning about race and our history. We just keep shoving it in a closet until the door just won’t close anymore.

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        1. Like Paul, you should read the American Thinker Article based on Thomas Sowell’s research. The article as a whole is damning of the Great Society programs, but one line in particular proves the case.

          “• In 1965, 76.4 percent of black children were born to married women.”

          That number has been reversed.

          All the poverty, apartheid, and hatred over 100 years didn’t change that, but a decade of the Great Society destroyed the Black family utterly, leaving behind a matriarchal society in which males are largely superfluous and expendable.

          So, I stand by my claim that the KKK could not touch Democrat do-gooders in bringing violence and nihilism to a generation of Black youth.

          You cannot address the problem until you admit what it is.

          Racism, enforced poverty, and hatred are all terrible wrongs in their own right, but they are not the cause of the violence between young Black men. LBJ did that, and you can’t fix that until you admit it.

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          1. Thomas Sowell is a crackpot. A smart crackpot but a crackpot none the less.

            At least according to this profile . . .

            https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=19950924&slug=2143189

            A crackpot whose ideas do not stand up to the kind of scrutiny given by this reviewer.

            https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/heres-why-poor-people-are-poor-says-a-conservative-black-academic/2015/09/03/df8ff1fc-1ab4-11e5-93b7-5eddc056ad8a_story.html

            He is a diehard Libertarian. It is not surprising that he is peddling a grotesque oversimplification of the impact of the Great Society that you are eager to believe as if it were Holy Writ.

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          2. So, your liberal opinion writers don’t like Sowell. Big sur[rise.

            Where are his numbers or dates in error? They are pretty damning whatever the source.

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          3. You did not read what I wrote.

            “ You cannot address the problem until you admit what it is.”

            And that is what I outlined.

            The assumption is that had we done nothing about minority poverty in 1965 it would have all self-corrected in time.

            Perhaps another few decades or centuries?

            You and Sowell and all the others are highlighting the symptoms but not the causes. That is the “reckoning” I am referring to.

            Why did we have so much poverty in the Black community before 1965?

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          4. No, that is not what I said.

            What I said was the Great Society programs destroyed the Black family which had supported them through the poverty and oppression.

            And I have been pushing a better solution to poverty for every race for a very long time. That was lower taxes and espcialy lower corporate taxes, to lure production into the US. There is no better solution to poverty than a labor shortage.

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          6. Ah, the simplistic, one size fits all, economics of the liberal.

            It’s not about trickle down, it’s about competitiveness in the world market.

            Corporate tax is just another business expense for a global company. A high corporate tax makes production elsewhere more competitive.

            So, is the poor man better off getting a job washing cars or making them?

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          7. The two articles I linked to explained pretty clearly why his work is suspect. The book review in particular offered point by point refutations of his various Libertarian claims. Where are those refutations in error?

            The statistics about African-American economic life are, indeed, very damning. They just do not prove what you are so eager to believe. Your explanation is far too simple and far too convenient. As always, reality is far more complex than the stereotypes that are the hallmarks of “conservative” thinking.

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          8. “And I have been pushing a better solution to poverty for every race for a very long time. That was lower taxes and especially lower corporate taxes . . .”

            Your “better solution” has been tried over and over again for the last forty years. It has not worked. It has had the opposite effect. In fact, it is not a stretch to say that these misguided and failed trickle down economic policies have done more to destroy the family structures of ALL races than any other single factor.

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          9. “Ah, the simplistic, one size fits all, economics of the liberal.”

            Your condescension is doubly laughable since you have no idea what you are talking about.

            For starters this gem . . .
            “Corporate tax is just another business expense for a global company”
            is simply not true. It is not true from an accounting point of view and corporate income tax rates is way, way down a long list of factors involved in where to site production. For an American corporation, it is completely irrelevant because earnings from any and all sources are subject to U.S. Income Tax. If you pay less tax for earnings you make in Mexico to Mexico, then you pay the difference to Uncle Sam. There is zero incentive to move work to Mexico to save on income tax.

            But even if you think there is some magic to be had, why has it not worked? Corporate income taxes have done nothing but go down even as jobs moved overseas. They were set at 46% in 1980 with a 28% Capital gains rate for investors. Those rates have decreased several times since then. Today that corporate rate is 21% and Capital gains are at taxed at 0% on the first $81K for a couple and 15% thereafter. But still no jobs miracle – just deficits. Why? Because income tax rates have next to zero importance in these job creating or job moving decisions. At least in the real world.

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      3. “You have an unbelievable ability to ignore truth that doesn’t fit your narrative.”

        So do you and Mr. Roberts. Which begs the question “So what?”

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  3. The elephant story is an excellent analogy. It is notable that it inspires talk of racism, reminiscent of the story of the blind men and the elephant.

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  4. So the go to phrase for the left is this unprovable elusive myth called “systemic racism”. There is no such thing. It is a made up progressive ideal that can’t even reach the hypothesis stage but because they claim it exists, by golly it must. The sadder part is it is used as the basis for even more left wing victimhood pandering.

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    1. “Systemic racism” is a “go to phrase” for people who live in the reality that is the United States of America. It is the “go to phrase” for reality-based people because it accurately summarizes that reality as it actually exists. Systemic racism is not a “myth.” It exists in virtually every part of society, the law, education and the economy. It’s existence is undeniable because it is supported by evidence that is indisputable.

      For what it is worth, referring to “victimhood pandering” is beyond laughable coming from an adherent of a party – the GQP – that has virtually nothing else to offer. No sellable ideas. No coherent philosophy. No useful programs. Just whining about how unfairly “real Americans” are treated.

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