Come on, moonbats, let’s make up our minds.

What a difference three days make. 72 little hours.

In that time, a New York Times reporter went from tolling the death knell of real wage growth to reporting a 7-percent wage jump over last year after inflation.

And when you thought Tom Cruise couldn’t get any nuttier, his arteest pals have jumped off the deep end with him.

They had the right idea in the 18th century, when the arteest kept his mouth shut and did what he was told. They’re good for nothing more than that.

Doing everything they can to ensure that public education fails.

In a case entitled Gulino v. New York State Education Department, the federal appeals court earlier this month “reinstated a race discrimination suit against the New York State Education Department based on the theory that a test of ‘basic college-level content’ that asks applicants to get just two-thirds of the questions right is racially discriminatory because it has a ‘disparate impact’ on African-American and Latino teachers.” Dan McLaughlin at Baseball Crank acknowledges that the court relied on existing Supreme Court precedent, but is still rubbed the wrong way by its assumptions (Aug. 31).

Tar and feathers, anyone?

This guy

• is really confused.
• has been to too many of those “why I love my vagina” teaching seminars.
• went to one of these schools.
• is just incredibly stupid.

I guess the moonbats with all those backward-N signs were disenfranchised. Or something. Hat tip: Desultory Thoughts, via Michelle Malkin.

Michelle calls them irony-challenged. I call them control freaks, because that’s what it’s about. They are “authentic voices of disenfranchised communities,” and therefore, they can do all the race baiting they want, but nobody else can, because, well, that would be racist!

A group of New York City officials blasted CBS and its hit series “Survivor” on Thursday, a day after the network announced that the teams on the new season of the reality show will be divided by race.

Saying that the setup will promote divisiveness, the officials called on CBS to reconsider its plans.

“The idea of having a battle of the races is preposterous,” said City Councilman John Liu. “How could anybody be so desperate for ratings?”

…Liu, who is Asian American, said he was launching a campaign urging CBS to pull the show because it could encourage racial division and promote negative typecasts. He and a coalition of officials, including the council’s black, Latino and Asian caucus, planned to rally at City Hall on Friday.

Idiots.

Progressives. Highly educated. Higher-order thinkers. Tolerant. Nuanced. “I hope your wife gets raped and can’t get an abortion.”

Hat tip: Michelle Malkin

Over at American Spectator (emphasis mine):

While engaged in the worship of the most holy weapon of socialists everywhere — labor unions — leading Democrats sometimes give the game away. John Kerry summed this up nicely when he said of some un-insured Wal-Mart workers, “That’s over 700,000 Americans and their families who have been told by their employer they’re on their own.”

They may not come out and say it (yet) but liberals will not rest until no American is “on their own.” Such notions would have shocked the sensibilities of nearly every American only short years ago, but such is the efficiency of liberal propaganda; most folks now think that nanny-statism is actually good for them.

The direction of your children’s education, your retirement, your constitutionally guaranteed freedom of worship, the way you conduct business on your own private property and even your right to that property must all come under the purview of the knowing eyes of the government.

Of course, liberals define socialism as a black-and-white construct, thereby claiming that they’re not socialists. But socialism is not a black-and-white, all-or-nothing construct. Any socialist program — and that would be any program that redistributes wealth — is socialism. You’ll often hear, “We need to strike the right balance,” from liberals. There is no right balance. One socialist program, no matter how innocuous, it one too many.

As an example, at that godawful pitch-in last year, you know, this pitch-in, and the circle of leftists around me had grown from Keesha the brain-dead feminut to about eight, equally brain-dead leftists. We were way past wading-boots deep in utter horseshit that had nothing to do with reality, but I was doing a pretty good job of keeping my mouth shut.

That never lasts as long as it needs to. I. Just. Can’t. Help. Myself.

About the four-hundredth time somebody said, “social justice,” I had had it. I opened my mouth, and said, “Social justice always means socialism.”

I was immediately challenged, with that favorite of left-wing meaningless statements: “I don’t think that’s true.”

So I said, “Okay, you give me an example of ’social justice’ then.”

“Universal healthcare.”

“Socialized medicine. Socialism.”

“But don’t you think everybody has a right to healthcare?”

“That’s not relevant. It’s socialism. Next example?”

“AFDC.”

“Socialism.”

“How is AFDC socialism?”

“Because you’re stealing money from those who earned it so you can give it to those who did not. Redistributing wealth. Stealing money. Socialism.”

On and on it went, and of course, each example was right out of the Stalin playbook. The point? There’s no point in bringing up reality with a leftist. Reality means nothing to them. Only ideology does.

From all indications, liberals will continue to encourage their minority base to remain uneducated, abort their children, deny their religion and wallow in poverty. The more they do, the quicker those good people will assume their rightful place in American society — a classless one.

Gerry Garibaldi has an interesting piece on City Journal, about how schools shortchange boys:

Brandon’s current problem began because Ms. Waverly, his social studies teacher, failed to answer one critical question: What was the point of the lesson she was teaching? One of the first observations I made as a teacher was that boys invariably ask this question, while girls seldom do. When a teacher assigns a paper or a project, girls will obediently flip their notebooks open and jot down the due date. Teachers love them. God loves them. Girls are calm and pleasant. They succeed through cooperation.

In my experience this is true to some extent, but not to the point that you can make a sex-based generalization. I have had girls who were compliant, and girls who challenged me — more of the former than the latter, but enough of the latter that it makes me wonder.

Is it because compliant, cooperative (as opposed to competitive) girls don’t go to business school? Business school self-selects competitive students, so much so that if you’re used to your garden-variety liberal arts student, it’s a shock. Business students will fight for a tenth of a point in a 1000 point-total class.

Boys will pin you to the wall like a moth. They want a rational explanation for everything. If unconvinced by your reasons—or if you don’t bother to offer any—they slouch contemptuously in their chairs, beat their pencils, or watch the squirrels outside the window.

I don’t know about you, but however irritating this can be (and it can be irritating), I’d much rather have students who want to know why they’re being asked to do something than students who just do it. The former indicates some thought, while the latter indicates no thought at all, just compliance.

A female teacher, especially if she has no male children of her own, I’ve noticed, will tend to view boys’ penchant for challenging classroom assignments as disruptive, disrespectful—rude.

This is also true to some extent in my experience, that when colleagues complain about being challenged, it’s usually female colleagues. But they don’t complain about it much. Again, perhaps it’s because PhD programs select for non-compliant students who tend to challenge their professors, and those female colleagues are products of those PhD programs.

However:

The difference between the male and female predilection for hard proof shows up among the teachers, too. In my second year of teaching, I attended a required seminar on “differentiated instruction,” a teaching model that is the current rage in the fickle world of pop education theory. The method addresses the need to teach all students in a classroom where academic abilities vary greatly—where there is “heterogeneous grouping,” to use the ed-school jargon—meaning kids with IQs of 55 sit side by side with the gifted. The theory goes that the “least restrictive environment” is best for helping the intellectually challenged. The teacher’s job is to figure out how to dice up his daily lessons to address every perceived shortcoming and disability in the classroom.

After the lecture, we broke into groups of five, with instructions to work cooperatively to come up with a model lesson plan for just such a classroom situation. My group had two men and three women. The women immediately set to work; my seasoned male cohort and I reclined sullenly in our chairs.

“Are the women going to do all the work?” one of the women inquired brightly after about ten minutes.

“This is baloney,” my friend declared, yawning, as he chucked the seminar handout into a row of empty plastic juice bottles. “We wouldn’t have this problem if we grouped kids by ability, like we used to.”

The women, all dedicated teachers, understood this, too. But that wasn’t the point. Treating people as equals was a social goal well worth pursuing. And we contentious boys were just too dumb to get it.

Absolutely. All those teaching seminars were invariably dominated by women, and feminized, guilt-ridden leftist men. Those few of us who thought it was horseshit were men. Always. I have never been to a teaching seminar where a woman expressed a skeptical attitude about whatever squishy ed-school nonsense we were doing. Never. Instead, they bent to the task at hand, writing down why they loved their vaginas or why they were oppressed by the presence of penises, even the ones that were normally, well, normal, as if it were useful or productive in some way.

Invariably.

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This week Wictory Wednesday is highlighting the candidacy of Michael Steele for the Maryland Senate. It is a closely watched race that is in contention for a GOP and conservative pickup in the Senate. Currently there are two main contenders for the Democratic nomination, Kweisi Mfume and Ben Cardin.

Michael Steele is something of a mythical candidate to the left; he’s a black conservative Republican and there has been a history from the left to use racial attacks against him. Two former staffers of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee were found guilty of stealing Steele’s credit report — a federal crime.

Lt. Gov. Steele supports strong programs to continue to grow the American economy and is particularly focused on expanding home ownership. It is crucial that as many citizens as possible own their own homes as home ownership is one of the major keys to economic independence and success. He understands that low taxes and reduced government grow the economy and increase jobs.

Steele is a supporter of transparency of lobbying expenses and fundraising and seeks to eliminate many of the “perks” of being a Senator, like gifts from lobbyists. He is solidly a supporter of earmark reform, a process that allows legislators to slip in pork barrel projects without executive or legislative review. Surprisingly there is no rule preventing a legislator for putting in an earmark where he stands to personally gain from that earmark. Steele is looking to end that.

Michael Steele understands that legal immigration is essential to a successful nation, however, a nation worthy of its name must enforce its laws. He supports sealing the border that allows such a flagrant area of lawlessness inside American soil. He also supports Social Security reform because he understands the nation’s youth and young adults will have no retirement system if drastic reforms aren’t made.

Please consider donating to or supporting the campaign of Michael Steele.

This has been a production of the Wictory Wednesday blogburst. If you would like to join Wictory Wednesday, please see this post or contact John Bambenek at jcb (dot) blog [at] gmail {dot} com. The following sites are members of the Wictory Wednesday team:

I hate Carl Sagan’s voice! It’s like fingernails on a blackboard!

Today’s (actually, yesterday’s) zinger headline: Still Whining One Year Later. You get three guesses what the topic is, and the first two don’t count.

After an excellent observation about double-standards regarding the use of the word, “fascist,” the Anchoress poses a question:

Now, what word will we use to describe people who are so enthralled with their own “well-reasoned” hate that they would rather see a mission to defeat a deadly and blood-ravenous enemy fail than co-operate with the democratically-elected leadership? No, it’s not “fascism.” It’s another word, entirely. Can you guess it?

Uh, vegan? Did I win?

First published 2/23/06

So I’m back at IU, and nothing much has changed. In yesterday’s campus paper, we had a sterling example of guilt-ridden, hand-wringing leftist groupthink entitled So what can we all do to retain more black students?

So when IU sophomore Sara Alghani and senior Rodney Cobb invited IU’s historically black greek organization members to join fellow students and faculty to discuss and explore the issues preventing nearly half of IU’s black students from graduating, I was more than happy to RSVP.

Note the bolded wording above, because it’s crucial. Students — er, black students, that is disadvantaged, marginalized, disenfranchised students — are prevented from graduating.

Now, in English, this means that somebody or some institution would not allow the students to graduate, but of course, this isn’t English. This is liberalese. The students to which they refer were in no way prevented from graduating; they chose of their own free will to drop out.

But of course, since in the liberal alternate universe, we, er, well not we, but pet minority groups are idiots. They have no free will, nor do they have the intestinal fortitude, intelligence, or motivation to complete a degree unless they are given special perks.

Therefore, it’s the university’s responsibility that these students are dropping out. They’re mindless automatons, victims of a system that doesn’t coddle them enough.

In liberal la-la land, there is no such thing as personal responsibility, except for white, male, heterosexual conservatives. Everyone else is a victim.

I remember when, in February 2003, the Black Student Union sponsored a town hall meeting to discuss the Indiana Daily Student’s publication of a political cartoon satirizing affirmative action. The illustration, chosen from a wire service and printed in the opinion section of the paper, depicted a rather small-headed, large-bodied brother holding a sign that read “Being a minority — 20 points.” The character stood next to another character half his size — a white guy — holding a sign that read “Perfect SAT score — 12 points.” A final sign read, “Feeling entitled to special benefits: pointless.”

The cartoon was published on a Wednesday. On Friday, six letters admonishing the cartoon’s publication appeared in the Jordan River Forum.

See? Evil conservatives — rather, allowing anything but leftist groupthink — is responsible for their dropping out of school.

What bunk. Racist bunk.

The message is that these poor black students are too stupid, too lazy, too fragile to do the work, and this is why they need handholding, why they need to be protected from anything but leftist groupthink, and why they must be passed through.

Education? No. Just crap.

It’s a rich, vibrant, culture!

AN INTERNATIONAL hunt has been launched for a 12-year-old girl after she was allegedly abducted from her home in Stornoway and taken to Pakistan, amid reports she is to be married to a man of 25.

Molly Campbell went missing from school on Friday. It is believed she was taken by her father and elder sister and flew with them to Lahore.

Police say they want to reunite the girl with her mother, Louise Campbell, her legal guardian.

Last night reports quoted Molly’s grandmother as saying she feared the schoolgirl had been taken to become a child bride.

Violet Robertson, 67, said: “It’s just terrible. Molly is only a little girl. It’s an arranged marriage.

“She doesn’t know the man. He’s 25. Molly doesn’t want to go to Pakistan. She wants to stay with her mum.”

Savages.

Progressives: Highly educated. Balanced. Tolerant. Nuanced.

“Why are the Jews so Jew-y?”

Other than their hatred of America, the principles upon which America was founded, and all things Western, liberals cannot be consistent about anything. It drives me nuts. No wonder feminuts are always having to come to a “consensus” about the PC party line on any given issue.

First, we were all going to starve from overpopulation, then we were all going to starve because the evil Rethuglicans were making us all starve, and now, it’s that and alternating days, and on the other days, “Obesity is killing us!”

Remember the “Fat is a feminist issue!” line? Well, apparently the feminuts have come to a different consensus. Oak Park is banning Lane Bryant.

Can’t you leftists make up your minds on anything, other than how much you despise America?

Jonathan R. says everything that needs to be said about Plamegate:

Christopher Hitchens, The Wall Street Journal and National Review all cover the fizzling Fitzgerald “leak” probe.

Suffice it to say that the notion of a power-mad White House on a vendetta against a truth-telling civil servant all turned out to be a big lie propagated by partisan Democrats. Joe Wilson was proven to be a liar years ago, his wife’s identity was not a protected secret and nobody in the Administration launched a smear campaign. Instead, the Administration’s claim that Iraq attempted to acquire uranium from Niger was entirely accurate, Plame’s identity was so open that Wilson listed her in his Who’s Who entry and anti-neocon Richard Armitage was the “leaker” who told reporters that Plame nepotistically sent her inept husband on a trip to Niger. Let’s see how much the MSM covers all this.

Follow the links.

Read this now.

Don Surber does it again (emphasis mine):

The Sydney Morning Herald reported today that “Sukehiro Hasegawa, the top UN official in East Timor, has acknowledged for the first time that the UN system failed to bring anybody to justice for crimes that included sexual abuse of children and bestiality.” Ivory Coast. Congo. Bosnia. I could go on and on. We put panties on some feces-throwing twits and it is a war crime. The UN ignores bestiality by its troops and it is the savior of the world.

Excellent, sir, excellent!

PennPatriot has an interesting article on Lynn Swann’s plan to improve education in the state.

Currently, Pennsylvania’s spending on education ranks in the top ten among the 50 states, but test scores rank in the bottom ten nationally.

Of course, a liberal or an educrat would say the reason is because we don’t spend enough.

Swann’s plan for improving education includes:

• Enacting fundamental reform of educational spending to ensure that more investments are made in the classrooms, not on administrative costs that do not teach children;

Well okay. How about putting every school district on permanent audit, so we know exactly how they spend every penny?

• Improving reading and math achievement by requiring all children to demonstrate grade-level skills in reading and math before they are promoted to the 4th grade;

Why the fourth grade? Why not every grade? Pass the placement exam at the end of each grade or you repeat it. Very simple.

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There is a desperate need for a blog filter plugin, one, say, that today, would not display any blog article with “Katrina” in it. Since there isn’t one that I know of, and since I’m pretty sick, blogging will be light today.

Katrina. I was sick of it before it hit.

Like Ken said, you can’t parody the lefties these days. He was talking about this quiz, but there’s also these baffled liberals, then there are these mysified liberals, as yet more examples. But today’s example comes to us via Misha I, and can be seen in this amazingly idiotic (not to mention clueless) statement:

I’m of the opinion that how to handle Wal-Mart is among the two or three most important issues facing the country.

It’s sad how many pencils could have been made from all that carbon.

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The liberals will really squeal about this:

Dallas police officers could next be on the lookout for little punks and their saggy pants (reg. req.). According to James Ragland, Dallas public schools trustee Ron Price is “tired of seeing ‘buttocks and underwear’ exposed in broad daylight.”

Doesn’t he value diversity? Odds are five to one the ACLU and NEA take him on.

If you needed another reason to love Bolton and his mustache, Regis, this is the best one imaginable:

More proof of the effectiveness of John Bolton, our ambassador to that perpetually dysfuntional organization known as the UN: Iran hates him.

Somebody tell me again why Bolton is not going to run for President …

From Relapsed Catholic:

“A ‘racist’ is a conservative who’s winning an argument with a liberal” — and we need to remember that winning can take a very, very long time. And there will be casualties…

Some 22 years ago Ray Honeyford, the previously obscure headmaster of Drummond middle school in Bradford, suggested, in the low-circulation right-wing periodical The Salisbury Review, that his Asian pupils should really be better integrated into British society. (…)

For these mild contentions, Honeyford was investigated by the government, vilified as a racist by the press, ridiculed every day by leftie demonstrators outside his office and was eventually hounded from his job. He has not worked since.

(…)

“To give you an example of the lunacy that prevailed back in Honeyford’s time: then, the Commission for Racial Equality was happy to instruct Britain’s journalists that Chinese people were henceforth to be described as ‘black’ because that, objectively, was their subjective political experience at the hands of the oppressive white hegemony.

(…)

This is how far we have come in the past year or so. When an ICM poll of Britain’s Muslims in February this year revealed that some 40% (that is, about 800,000 people) wished to see Islamic law introduced in parts of Britain, the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality responded by saying that they should therefore pack their bags and clear off. Sir Trevor Phillips’s exact words were these: ‘If you want to have laws decided in another way, you have to live somewhere else.’

My guess is this: if such a statement had been made by a member of the Tory party’s Monday Club in 1984 - or, for that matter, 1994 - he would have been excoriated and quite probably would have been kicked out of the party.

(…)

The news that the bombers of July 7 last year and those who allegedly plotted to blow up a whole bunch of aeroplanes were British born apparently came as a shock to the government. Well, it did not come as a shock to those of us who viewed multiculturalism as both dangerous and inherently racist.

It seemed, to people like Honeyford, a simple case of cause and effect. In the end, it is not the mad mullahs at whom we should direct our wrath, but the white liberals who enabled them to prosper. That the creed has now been binned should be a cause for celebration; but don’t for a moment expect an admission that they got it wrong in the first place.

is from Rick Moran:

If Jimmy Carter didn’t exist, our enemies would have to invent him.

From Moonbattery, who has a picture:

New York’s answer to Cynthia McKinney is State Senator Ada Smith of Queens, who has recently been found guilty of harassment after pulling off a staffer’s hairpiece and throwing hot coffee in her face. Smith’s prior accomplishments include blowing off a direct order from a police officer after she improperly drove through a security checkpoint at Empire State Plaza in 2004, and biting a Brooklyn cop’s hand in 1998.

As you might have guessed, Smith is a Democrat.

With McKinney on her way home to Atlanta, there is a gap to be filled in Washington. Smith’s talents are being wasted in Albany. She is encouraged to run for Congress, where she can graduate to terrorizing Capitol police.

Racist police! Racist right-wing blogs! Racist staffer! I’m a victim!

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And so do I. I’m as speechless as you are (though of course we haven’t seen it yet). Again, thanks Ace.

Well, you can put it down now.

DURING THE RECENT month-long war between Hezbollah and Israel, U.N. “peacekeeping” forces made a startling contribution: They openly published daily real-time intelligence, of obvious usefulness to Hezbollah, on the location, equipment, and force structure of Israeli troops in Lebanon.

UNIFIL–the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, a nearly 2,000-man blue-helmet contingent that has been present on the Lebanon-Israel border since 1978–is officially neutral. Yet, throughout the recent war, it posted on its website for all to see precise information about the movements of Israeli Defense Forces soldiers and the nature of their weaponry and materiel, even specifying the placement of IDF safety structures within hours of their construction. New information was sometimes only 30 minutes old when it was posted, and never more than 24 hours old.

Meanwhile, UNIFIL posted not a single item of specific intelligence regarding Hezbollah forces. Statements on the order of Hezbollah “fired rockets in large numbers from various locations” and Hezbollah’s rockets “were fired in significantly larger numbers from various locations” are as precise as its coverage of the other side ever got.

Think that’s disgusting? Well, it gets worse:

On October 7, 2000, three IDF soldiers were kidnapped by Hezbollah just yards from a UNIFIL shelter and dragged across the border into Lebanon, where they disappeared. The U.N. was thought to have videotaped the incident or its immediate aftermath. Rather than help Israel rescue its kidnapped soldiers by providing this evidence, however, the U.N. obstructed the Israeli investigation.

For months the Israeli government pleaded with the U.N. to turn over any videotape that might shed light on the location and condition of its missing men. And for nine months the U.N. stonewalled, insisting first that no such tape existed, then that just one tape existed, and eventually conceding that there were two more tapes. During those nine months, clips from the videotapes were shown on Syrian and Lebanese television.

Explaining their eventual about-face, U.N. officials said the decision had been made by the on-site commanders that it was not their responsibility to provide the material to Israel; indeed, that to do so would violate the peacekeeping mandate, which required “full impartiality and objectivity.” The U.N. report on the incident was adamant that its force had “to ensure that military and other sensitive information remains in their domain and is not passed to parties to a conflict.”

Hat tip to Jeff Goldstein for the link. I think he sums it up perfectly: “Astounding. Frightening. Despicable.”

since we have an FDR kool-aid drinker lurking.

Why the New Deal Failed:
Speech given by Burt Folsom at Conservative University 2002

The following are remarks excerpted from Dr. Burt Folsom’s lecture at AIA’s Conservative University on why Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal failed.

How many of you in your history courses have talked about Franklin Roosevelt, the New Deal, the Great Depression, and the 1930s? How many of you had your professor speak about Roosevelt in a very positive sense, that he was a good president?

Well, I have thirty minutes to try to change your minds.

During the summer between my junior and senior years in high school, I attended an archaeology field school at one of the state universities. Every morning, we left the dorm before the sun came up, and got to the site around sunrise. The work was grueling and lasted all day. We got home in the early evening, ate supper, and worked several hours in the lab. There was nothing romantic about it, but it was fascinating. And that’s how I decided my major, before I even got to college.

As I stated before, the department was rather a rude awakening. The problem was that I was never a compliant student. I was that kid in class who wanted you to defend your statements, if I didn’t see how you got there. It makes for a good PhD student, but it’s not the best plan for an undergraduate, as I found.

I worked in the archaeology lab, and that’s where I first got myself into trouble. For the hundredth time, this pompous ass grad student who led the tours brought everybody past the stone axe in the case and said, “Here we have a ceremonial axe.” I’d heard it many times, and kept my mouth shut, but this time I couldn’t.

Here’s the problem. If it neighs, whinnies, shies, and gallops, you assume it’s a horse, unless you have some good reason to assume it’s a zebra. It neighed. It whinnied. It shied. It galloped. So I wanted to know why this pompous ass with the poofy hairdo was calling it a zebra.

“Why ceremonial?”

“What?”

“You keep saying it’s a ceremonial axe. What evidence do you have that it was a ceremonial axe, instead of, you know, an axe.”

“Er, that’s really not relevant.”

Of course, I could have shut my mouth, but I never do. I kept pushing.

“The identity and function of the object in the collection isn’t relevant?”

Anyway, my job at the lab was not to last long. I ended up working in the bioanthropology lab, working with teeny tiny bone fragments. Measuring them, identifying marks and pathologies, sexing them where possible, cataloguing them.

My point, of course, is that these people assume it’s a zebra because that fits their agenda, their pre-conceived notion of the way things were at the time, a notion they often assume with little (if any) real evidence. To their credit, when confronted with unassailable evidence to the contrary that they cannot ignore, most will grudgingly accept it (though there are still people who insist that the Tasaday were not a hoax). So the Austrian and German archaeologists were forced to admit that Ötzi was actually murdered (not violence, not in the in touch with nature neolithic!) when they found that arrowhead in his back.

Yet, they are not capable of learning from their mistakes. The agenda has not changed. They only shift the details to fit whatever inconvenient evidence may have popped up. The new explanation of the neolithic, now that we know at least one person at the time was murdered, is that because people were developing agriculture for the first time, we had the first private property, and poor starving people just had to kill other people for their food. The same Marxist tripe, and the same lack of evidence.

1. We have no evidence that pre-agricultural societies did not have the concept of private property. This is an assumption, based on nothing whatsoever, that anthropologists have cooked up again to further an agenda.
2. We have no evidence that murders did not happen in pre-agricultural societies, or that the frequency of murder increased from then to agricultural societies.
3. Even if we did have evidence that the frequency of murder increased as societies became agricultural (and it likely did, given the difference between violent crime rates in areas of different population densities today), there is no reason to assume that private property was the cause, particularly when the rise of agriculture was accompanied by larger communities and the rise of urban centers, specialized trades, massive building projects, and so forth.

So we have one more “fact” that is nothing more than pure speculation, one that isn’t even based