Blog Posts

Orion's picture

Endless Wars Are Bad In More Ways Than You Think DONNT PUBLISH THIS

I haven't traveled alot, but I've been to two places (Guam and Washington D.C) - very different from one another but united by the shared factor that there is a high police and military presence.

Libertarians and progressives will point out that raw monetary funding from the state becomes obscenely disproportionate when foreign military adventures become the government's favorite activity. This piece from the Independent Institute made me think of an entirely different drawback of military imperialism that may not be talked about as much:

Orion's picture

Yes, There Really Were More Two-Parent Black Families During Slavery Than Today

There was a really critical article up in the New Republic about the substantial disillusion of the black family over the past century. Here's the portion with the most significant data:

However, as classic work by Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman has shown, despite the horrors of slavery, overall, during the pre-emancipation era, about two-thirds of enslaved families had two parents—far more than today. More recent revisionist work has stressed that, while forced separations were always an important part of the picture, the two-thirds figure remained dominant (Wilma Dunaway is especially handy on this). And this tendency continued into the Jim Crow era, contrary to a false sense one might have of daily life in a black ghetto of the 1930s and ’40s—think Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices or Claude Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land. Namely, it is wrong to suppose that, amid the misery of those neighborhoods, all but a sliver of children grew up without a dad. That is a modern phenomenon, whose current extent—fewer than one in three black children are raised by two parents—would shock even the poorest black folk 100 or even 50 years ago.

A standard reference on the subject by University of Minnesota historian Steven Ruggles in 1994 is most often taken as evidence of the uninteresting—that, gosh, in the old days poor black people didn’t find single parenthood unusual. What is actually more important in its findings is that, from 1880 to 1960, fewer than one in three black children nationwide didn’t grow up with two parents. Another key statistic, from Barbara Agresti in 1978, is that, just past emancipation, in 1870 in Walton County, Florida, about 57 percent of black children lived with two parents; just 15 years later, 89 percent did. Or, as St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton told us in Black Metropolis, in Chicago in the 1920s, it was considered a problem that just one in seven black children were born to single mothers. What’s more, that number went down during the Depression, not up.

Orion's picture

Of Drug Dealers And Bridges

It's strange having Asperger's syndrome. It's even stranger being an Aspie with a penchant for writing and journalism. You end up in situations that damn well may be inscrutable to a neurotypical person. Hell, they're fairly inscrutable to me.

Orion's picture

Guamania!

Staying in Guam has been strange. There is a social dynamic going on here that is very different than anything I'm used to. 

Guam is basically a third world/developing country, incorporated within the United States. It has all the landmark aspects of such an entity: a population that replaces itself with great fertility, substandard roads and infrastructure and poor dietary practices (all of which I mentioned earlier). 

Orion's picture

The Demand For Glenn Beck's Story

When I first arrived on this website, where I've received both a warm and chilling response from differing people, it was through a strong criticism of Glenn Beck. At the height of his Fox News reign, Beck got closer than anyone in the mainstream ever has to really bad nationalism.

Orion's picture

Bad Diets On The Islands

One thing about Guam is really quite striking - the diet. There is numerous livestock, mangos, papayas, bananas and a number of other items that mainlanders often go to grocery stores to purchase. Fresh fruit and free range farming isn't something exotic that costs large sums of money to produce like in the States. Here it's a real fact of life.

Orion's picture

Flashback: Lost in Space cast member TV Commercial

A commercial for a Dick Tracy toy snub nosed .38 features the young actor Bill Mumy, who played Will Robinson on the show Lost in Space.

Orion's picture

On The Island

As I write this, I'm staying in Guam.

Orion's picture

Retraction

Hello all,

I took my last article on institutional support for men down after realizing that the article itself was dubious at best. I'd read similar stuff from other sources and gave it the benefit of the doubt. I hope you give me the benefit of the doubt too, but if not, to channel Tupac Shakur, I ain't mad at ya. Smile

Pages

Orion's picture

History

Member for
13 years 4 months

Latest Comments