The Sam Spade Memorial Good Post Gallery

[bagelman]

There was voter fraud going on in both camps in Illinois in 1960.  It is impossible to know who would have won the state in a "fair" election.

And, of course, Kennedy probably would have won states like Mississippi, Florida, and Virginia if African Americans weren't being systematically disenfranchised.  

So, in my opinion, to say that Nixon was the legitimate winner in 1960 is wrong.

You think Southern Democrats kept Blacks from voting for their party's nominee so that Eisenhower's VP could become President?

Did either of us say that?

You certainly implied Southern Blacks would have been a sure vote for Kennedy in those states.  And the ones systematically disenfranchising them were Democrats who would have clearly preferred Kennedy to Nixon in 1960.

Dude, get a clue about 1960.

Both Nixon and Kennedy basically agreed on every issue. The only difference between Nixon and Kennedy was really that Nixon was like, "I'll do exactly what Senator Kennedy is proposing, but I'll do it in such a way that is still pro-business, balances the budget, keeps the dollar strong, and is STRONG ON DEFENSE".

That's literally it. If you do some Google searches of the debates (not just the famous televised one) and newspaper reader commentary reaction, a recurring theme from Republican commenters was "Nixon agrees with Kennedy too much".

In 1960, Blacks were faced with two pro-civil rights candidates, except one was an economic liberal and the other a bit less liberal. Considering the economic hardships black Americans have faced (and still do) for all of American history, they are going to vote for the party of comprehensive social safety nets and widespread government investment and a higher minimum wage, not the guy who keeps going on about a strong dollar, business taking precedence over labor, and balancing the budget.

The Republican Party had become the moderate heroes of civil rights, while the Democrats had a hardcore Dixiecrat wing and a pro-civil rights wing at the same time. Stop viewing things in such black-and-white terms.

Make peace with the fact that the Republican Party stopped gunning for civil rights after Reconstruction, and starting in the 1970s began to actively undermine them. I'm happy there are people like you who want to change the party going forward, but you cannot rewrite the past.

[bagelman]

Natural selection is eugenics. We just need to stop leftist attempts to redefine strong as weak and beautiful as ugly.

Quite ironic given the implicit leftist endorsement of positive eugenics (at least for such valued traits as promiscuity and indolence)

Not leaving people to starve in the streets for being worthless lazy sluts or the children thereof='positive eugenics,' apparently. Slink off back to /pol/ where you belong, fash.

I would think that taxing those that are better able to plan for the future to fund those that cannot (and providing more money for each additional kid) is the very essence of "encouraging reproduction by persons presumed to have inheritable desirable traits"

The purpose of these policies, you vile piece of sh**t, is to ameliorate the situation caused by the fact that these people are already having these children. Sure, you can argue that the effect of the policies is to tacitly encourage poor women to have 'too many' children--if you assume that the working poor of this country are Hugolian mauvais pauvre who value children and their lives based on how much sweet sweet welfare moolah they're 'good for'. However, arguing that says far more about you than it does about them, and the proposed 'solutions' that eventuate from this type of thinking obscure the real issues at play and also lead to endemic pediatric malnutrition in what is otherwise a first-world country.

One of the biggest actual reasons why poor women have 'too many' children too young and by too many men (no scare quotes around too in these cases because these are actual objective problems; I, the Catholic convert, am certainly not going to argue that teen pregnancy and promiscuity are somehow adiaphora) is that they simply see no reason not too, because unlike their f**ked-up neurotic 'betters' most of them still see children as a blessing and as a light to lives that don't really have much else going for them. Why not have a child at sixteen, if your chance of going to college is equally nonexistent whether you do or not? Why not shack up with another man after a while, if the father of your first child won't and can't marry you because he's in prison for a bullsh**t drug offense? Your proposed answer--'because if you do we will let you and your children die in a heap, you abhorrent slut'--certainly is an answer, but so are 'because you have legitimate hopes and dreams' and 'because public universities are actually affordable these days' and 'because you actually have attainable models of stable married love and family in your community who aren't senescent grandparents who got married back in the old days when the working class was still intact'.

I've been compared to Daniel Patrick Moynihan in the past, and I took that as a compliment because while Moynihan may have had some racist presuppositions and was certainly more of an advocate of 'tough love' in welfare policy than I think is appropriate he also did actually have a vision of an America in which working families of all races could form and stay together and live free from want. He identified the problem as that too many children were being raised without fathers—a debatable diagnosis, and obviously one that’s ~problematic~ by a lot of people’s lights, but one that’s a far cry from saying that it somehow constitutes ‘eugenics’ to not let ‘the wrong kind’ of children (or children born to ‘the wrong kind’ of mothers—WHORES WHORES WHORES WHORES WH, amirite?) have intolerably horrible lives and die miserable screaming deaths.

You cannot kill the poor mothers of America or their children. You can starve them and let them die of preventable diseases and kick them out onto the mean streets to your heart’s content, but there will always be more of them as long as people live free from outright murder, relatively free from forced sterilization, and spiritually free from the cancerous idea that children are at worst crushing burdens and at best optional accessories to be looked into (and if necessary made to order, possibly even using one of these disgusting tarts as a surrogate—it’s not like she’s using her womb for anything that would reasonably be more important to her than the precious Chester Peyton Fairweather IV you selected from his dozens of siblings) once you’re sick of your Bichon Frise. You can bitch and moan about having to support these undeserving ‘takers’ or ‘forty-seven-per-centers’ all the livelong day, but it’s useful to reflect, especially this time of year, that the primal image of the mother and child will still be here when all the best-laid plans of the upper and upper-middle classes are one with Nineveh and Tyre. We should by now have all learned the bitter lesson, that none of us in the end are ‘makers’.

P.S. It’s impossible to know the ultimate destiny of all but a select few people, and I’m certainly not one to despair of the mercy of God on even the most inveterate sinner, but it’s a distinct possibility that your namesake is currently burning in hell for his sins against the American reading public. I hope he is not. But if he is, there would be worse places to put him than the second ditch of the Malebolge, reserved for flatterers. Henry Louis Mencken spent his life flattering and fawning and toadying to a pseudo-intellectual pukwudgie aristocracy half of his own invention, insinuating his readers into his little cabal where they could titter about how superior they were to the ‘boobs’ and anybody so uppity as to try to better herself through something like the Chautauqua Movement. To snowclone a devastating but somewhat unfair observation that Christopher Hitchens, the farce to Mencken’s tragedy, made about Mother Teresa, not only did Mencken think it was beneath him to comfort the afflicted, he didn’t even bother to afflict the comfortable. For your sake, I hope you mend your ways and do not follow after him.