Baltimore will no longer prosecute drug possession, prostitution, low-level crimes
A year ago, as the coronavirus began to spread across Maryland, Baltimore State's Attorney Marilyn Mosby stopped prosecuting drug possession, prostitution, minor traffic violations and other low-level offenses, a move aimed at curbing Covid-19's spread behind bars.
That shift — repeated by prosecutors in many other cities — didn't just reduce jail populations. In Baltimore, nearly all categories of crime have since declined, confirming to Mosby what she and criminal justice experts have argued for years: Crackdowns on quality-of-life crimes are not necessary for stopping more serious crime.
On Friday, Mosby announced that she was making her pandemic experiment permanent, saying Baltimore — for decades notorious for runaway violence and rough policing — had become a case study in criminal justice reform.
Also at WBAL-TV.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Tokolosh on Saturday March 27 2021, @03:14PM (84 children)
Stop making every damn thing a crime, and stop the spiral of (militarized, SWAT) policing, civil forfeiture, prosecutions (plea bargains, grandstanding DA's, zero tolerance), massive incarceration (private prisons), impossible parole, broken families - all leading to recidivism and rinse-repeat.
By all means go after property crime and bodily harm.
Read "Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent" by Harvey Silverglate and understand that nobody is safe.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 27 2021, @03:32PM (15 children)
What you just said is exactly why I believe BLM, from the advent, was never intended to be an actual positive movement but instead part of the ongoing effort to divide Americans for political power. The main problem BLM claims to fight is not about race, but about everything you just mentioned - which is a broken and increasingly militarized system of law enforcement. For instance this [youtube.com] is, by far, the most egregious example of police brutality I have ever seen. Drunk tourist in Vegas (who acted like a complete idiot, waving a BB gun out the window) is on the ground on all fours, unarmed, crying, begging for his life, cop randomly kills him because he reached back with his right arm, probably to pull up his pants.
If people actually focused on this, BLM would have been a successful movement. Because absolutely nobody agrees with this sort of crap. But because they turned it into a racial movement, it deeply divided people. And on top of turning it into a racial movement, they constantly adopted genuine criminals as their martyrs, which makes even less sense. I couldn't really care less if some guy charging at a cop with a weapon gets killed, but there have been countless shootings (of all races) where you have people shot, like this guy, when they were showing absolutely 0 aggression or threat. Even George Floyd is turning into a cluster fuck. He didn't die of asphyxiation, his neck was literally not even bruised. He died because his heart stopped, probably from a mixture of exertion complicated by an enlarged + damaged heart, and him being high out of his mind on horse tranqs with traces of meth.
Such a shame we can't have genuine movements. I guess nobody really cares enough. So we just get these dumb astroturfed organizations designed to just divide people.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 27 2021, @04:48PM (2 children)
While not entirely off base, you're way off on George Floyd. Regardless of what was in his system, I don't think the proper course of treatment is "Apply boot to neck until unconscious. Repeat if necessary". Even if he deliberately passed a counterfeit bill to get drugs, the penalty for that is not summary public execution without a trial.
Nobody is a saint. If you go looking for a perfect poster child for victims of police brutality, you're going to have a hard time finding.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 27 2021, @07:19PM (1 child)
I'm not suggesting we find "saints", but merely people who don't have histories of violent felonies, or who aren't currently attacking police when killed.
A good example, if you want a black man, is Charles Kinsey [youtube.com]. Behavioral therapist who was returning an autistic man who'd run away from a group home. Upstanding guy and literally was laying on his back with his hands in the air yelling out exactly what was happening and informing the police that the autistic man did not have a gun, but some sort of a toy. And he got shot anyhow.
Of course somehow you never hear of Charles Kinsey, but instead of Mike Brown and all of these other violent felons. In my opinion it's intentional because it's obviously going to divide people. While, again, somebody like Charles Kinsey would unite people because that was just seriously screwed up.
(Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Sunday March 28 2021, @07:12PM
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Saturday March 27 2021, @05:21PM
I watched the video, and I read a lot of witness accounts and narratives. In my estimation, the cops did well, or well enough, up until the point that they had him in the back seat of the car. Some dummy left the door open on the opposite side. Ehhh, can't crucify a guy for that, everyone screws up.
So George is out of the car again. Cop kneels on his neck, and a couple assistants help restrain him. We're still kinda OK - I don't like the knee in the neck, but to all appearances, this is protocol, and the protocol seems to work most of the time.
Time passes, George stops any sign of resistance, and in fact, seems to be completely unresponsive. One of the people assisting to restrain George requests that someone check George's pulse. The on-scene commander denies permission.
That is precisely where I take sides with BLM and those who want to prosecute that cop. At the least, George died of negligent homicide. That commander didn't care enough about George's life to even permit a fellow officer to check pulse, respiration, etc. George died because that commander was observing protocol.
We might say that George died because there wasn't a peace officer present. Instead, there was an enforcement officer on scene.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 28 2021, @12:33PM (9 children)
Did anyone in the BLM movement proclaim, "We completely support police brutality and executions when they involve white people! That's awesome. Fire away, gentlemen!" "Everyone should receive shitty medical care!" "Everyone should have their loan applications denied!"
BLM is exactly about the issues Tokolosh highlighted. In the US, all other things being equal the cops are more likely to abuse or kill black people for minor infractions, suspicion (not even evidence) of petty theft or drug possession, and so forth. There are research studies indicating that black men and women with heart problems in hospital emergency rooms are less likely to be admitted to cardiac wards than white people with the same symptoms and insurance. There are research studies that black people with a specific income, criminal record, and credit history get denied loan applications or receive higher interest rates than white people with the same circumstances. And there are research studies that federal judges tend to give longer sentences to black people than white people when they have the same kind of record and are convicted of the same crime. No BLM supporter anywhere, ever, is asking for non-blacks to be fucked by the system the same way blacks are.
Meanwhile, a white criminal can quite literally commit fraud for millions of dollars and have zero chance of execution by law enforcement. There is video footage of cops pointing guns at black preschoolers for stealing a $1 toy from the Dollar Store.
The mainstream media calls BLM divisive because the same people that control most of the media want militarized police, the prison industrial complex and mass incarceration, civil forfeiture, and suppression of blacks in general and the black vote in particular.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 28 2021, @04:15PM (2 children)
These are most (if not all) examples of lying by statistics. For instance the studies on police shootings use an intentionally misleading statistic. They take two datums, the number of whites shot, the number of blacks shot, and then compare that to the rate of the overall population. E.g. to keep the number's simple let's say there are 70% whites and 10% blacks. So the you should have 7x more whites shot by police than blacks, yet they don't see that number so they claim it's a racial bias.
That's just intentionally bad science. Obviously blacks and whites do not encounter police at the same rate, blacks tend to be extremely over represented in various forms of crime so they're going to encounter the police far more regularly. The interesting thing is when you actually make some effort to accurately measure violence, it suggests that a moderate bias against [bloomberg.com] whites ( could link the papers, but this article gives an overview of various different articles in plain language ). But that's probably not especially surprising. Now a days when you watch police cams cops are increasingly nervous about using force against blacks even when the scenario obviously 100% justifies it. Stuff gets taken out of context, you get riots, and then department political types need scape goats. Shit scenario to be in. By contrast when you're encountering a non-black, you know there's never going to be any riots or federal inquiries or whatever, nobody will care if you kill a white guy getting violent with the cops. Hell even in the January 6th riots, cops shot an unarmed woman, posting absolutely zero threat whatsoever, in the throat, and the nation just kind of collectively shrugged.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Sunday March 28 2021, @08:01PM
I beg to differ with you on the "absolutely zero threat". You must put yourself in the shoes of those people still inside. There is a riot. You've evacuated most, but not all, of the officials on the house floor. For whatever reason there are still officials on the house floor. There is some indication (however credible or not credible) that rioters want to kill congress critters. That door which was being battered down was the final perimeter before the rioting crowd was face-to-face with those officials you are supposed to protect. Some crazy woman is at the door, climbing over it, and coming in.
I'm not certain that I would have taken the shot, but I can justify it. She was breaching that final barrier. Take her down, and maybe the barrier stands. Let her continue, and the barrier falls.
In a more military situation, there is no doubt that I would have taken that shot. In this particular situation, I kinda think I might have - but I'm something of a sexist. I'd hate to be the guy who shot a woman in front of dozens of video cameras. Maybe I'd have found a different solution. And, maybe half a dozen congress people would have been murdered because I didn't take the shot.
Long story short: You don't have grounds to claim that she was no threat. You're just adding to the hype with that claim.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 29 2021, @12:03PM
You have no evidence to discredit my points about substandard medical care, financial treatment, prison sentencing, and educational treatment because they are proven.
Your points about police violence hold up somewhat - the police are most likely to abuse and shoot poor people. A higher percentage of blacks are poor than whites, but much higher number of whites means more white Americans are in poverty than black Americans and they all suffer. However, police are still dramatically more likely to send attack dogs after black people and shoot unarmed black teenagers and even unarmed black pre-teens, compared to unarmed white teens and preteens. ( https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/17/us/black-children-police-brutality-trnd/index.html [cnn.com] ) - I know CNN is a liberal stronghold, but I can't fault the statistics in the article.
In the January 6 riots the white woman was invading the main room of the Capitol building after being repeatedly warned off, and she was in the front of a crowd of armed people. She could have wrestled with an armed cop and then let others in the crowd assault him, just like the cop in the same fucking riot that was bludgeoned to death by people using a fire extinguisher as a weapon.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday March 28 2021, @07:52PM (4 children)
In effect, yes, they did. "Black lives matter!" Well, yes they do, but "All lives matter!" is more true, and includes black lives. But, instead of a coming together to get police under control, BLM outright rejected "All lives matter". The effective message is, "No, all lives don't matter, only OUR BLACK LIVES!"
BLM missed a golden opportunity. They didn't want some tearful coming together of 3 black mothers, 4 white mothers, an Asian mother, and a Native American mother, all of whom lost kids to police brutality. People might have learned that all those women have more in common, than they differ. People might have got the message that the cops need to be brought under control, and made accountable.
BLM rejected any such possibility, instead, continuing to drive a wedge between the black community, and everyone else.
It's almost like some evil mastermind is guiding them.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 29 2021, @12:06PM (3 children)
The point is that right now in the US, white lives matter, Asian lives matter, and black lives don't. So someone saying "All lives matter" is saying, "There is no unfair treatment. Everything is fine. Shut up and go home, you people protesting police treatment of blacks, Latinos, etc..." "BLM" has always meant "Black Lives Should Matter Just As Much As Other Lives But Most Of America Rejects That Idea".
And this has been their rallying cry from the beginning, and you're willfully blind to it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 30 2021, @12:16AM
no, you useful idiot, BLM is named that way as a tactic so that no one can complain about the Cultural Marxist, Neo Bolshevik operation to destabilize and take over the US because if they did it must mean they think black lives don't matter. Are you really so gullible you can't see waht;'s happening? You think these ape hybrids are going to let you live in peace once they have all the power? They don't let whites live in peace even while their aggression is suppressed. Non whites don't belong in white countries. period.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 30 2021, @04:28AM (1 child)
Asian Lives Matter, but we have to Stop Asian Hate and dismantle white supremacy [time.com].
Asians are pretty smart. They might realize they are being conned by the BLM movement.
(Score: 1) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday March 30 2021, @05:24AM
Asians are white now or hadn't you heard?
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 29 2021, @01:43PM
Not explicitly, but by misleading the public it gives the impression that the only cases are of people of color being murdered by police. The truth is that the majority of those killed by the police are white and that many of these cases that they point to as evidence are clearly legitimate uses of force based on what the officers presented at the scene have to work with. In many cases, even with more information, it's still a lawful killing.
The implication of all this is that it's never OK to kill people of color, but they're A-OK when it's a white person as in virtually all of those cases there was a white person killed under similar circumstances during a similar time frame that nobody gives a crap about.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Sunday March 28 2021, @05:27PM
The problem with grass-roots movement is they tend to embrace slogans and imagery that emotionally resonate with the current members, rather than what would build solidarity with a larger group.
Even the name, "Black Lives Matter", reflects that shortcoming. For them, who are suffering the worst under the heel of a jackbooted thug police system, it speaks directly to their pain and energizes them as a movement. But the same slogan serves to steer them away from the less frequent instance of white folk suffering the same indignities that could be used to attract more support from the larger population. If you look at much of what they're actually asking for though, it's police and justice reforms that would in fact help everyone.
So, maybe it's contingent on those of us coming from a position of racial privilege to actually listen to what they're really saying and make common cause. Maybe we could even get some clever slogan-designed to come up with some race-agnostic slogans that would help rouse white people with similar concerns. Maybe even start our own movement making common cause with BLM over the many complaints and solutions that we have in common, since so many white people apparently can't see past color to realize that BLM is already 80% exactly the movement that they've been wishing for. I mean, I know several people that have been leveling the exact same complaints against abusive policing for decades, sans the racial aspect, but they hear BLM through the lens of their right-wing filter bubble, and react with nothing but derision.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 27 2021, @03:41PM (63 children)
Traffic violations should still carry weight. If you're constantly driving like shit, you should not be operating 3000 pound machinery.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 27 2021, @04:18PM (62 children)
Same goes for theft. The police around here basically won't show up unless they've stolen a lot and everybody else gets to pay more because of that. Likewise, they stopped enforcing jaywalking laws and have focused on ticketing motorists and lowering speed limits in order to keep traffic fatalities down rather than enforcing the laws we have. And bicyclists can do whatever they want ad nobody fines them,
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 27 2021, @04:58PM (3 children)
And don't even TALK to me about lawns not being mowed to the correct height. And the white picket fences MUST be kept clean. It's like a fucking ZOO out there.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Saturday March 27 2021, @05:50PM (2 children)
Mowing is a crime against the environment, and should be punished by confiscation of the mower and related equipment!
(Score: 1) by why_percent on Sunday March 28 2021, @04:22AM (1 child)
Oversized grass is easily a home to rats and other pests. Which leads can lead to spread of disease. India had a bubonic plague outbreak in the 90s. Be careful what you wish for.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Sunday March 28 2021, @02:19PM
Who said anything about letting the grass grow? Send in the cows and goats!
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 27 2021, @05:06PM (46 children)
Theft is not a victimless crime. Hobbes posited that our natural state is violence and this is why the social contract requires the prosecution of minor crimes.
The underlying problem is criminologists clinging to blank slate theory, despite the evidence. [sciencedirect.com] We even observe aggressive and dominant traits in pre-socialized infants so the notion that socioeconomic factors are to blame for criminality is in and of itself a form of sociopathic victim blaming.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Saturday March 27 2021, @09:56PM (32 children)
So we start out as criminals. Why aren't we all criminals then?
I suggest that rather than the idea that poor economic conditions turn good people into criminals, good economic conditions turn criminals into good citizens.
Consider that most behavioral patterns are learned in early childhood. If a child's parents are often gone due to work or other factors associated with poverty, who will be around to punish them for the "minor crimes" in early childhood? And what about when the father is in jail for the kinds of crimes that Mosby is no longer prosecuting? The kinds of crimes that we know are enforced unfairly? The kinds of crimes that most of this comment section has committed, but gotten away with because of their skin color?
Compare that to the family that had the resources to wait 10 years before having kids, and who has the resources for one parent to be a full-time caregiver. That has both parents, regardless of whether either of them smokes a joint now and then. If Alice takes Bob's toy, Alice gets put in time-out. Alice learns that stealing is wrong, through repeated testing of boundaries. But if that full-time caregiver weren't there, Alice might instead learn that those boundaries are inconsistent at best, and non-existent much of the time. Alice might learn to take what she needs when nobody is paying attention, instead of learning that if she's patient and asks nicely, her caregiver will give her what she wants.
And consider Bob, too. Kids are very sensitive to injustice. If Bob gets his toy taken away, Bob will try to take it back with escalating violence. It's basic human instinct. It takes a well-rested and educated caregiver to de-escalate that situation and show Bob that if bad things happen to him, he will get justice.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 28 2021, @02:22PM (1 child)
> So we start out as criminals. Why aren't we all criminals then?
How do I know you are not? [crimetraveller.org]
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Monday March 29 2021, @12:53PM
What I'm talking about is a normal stage of childhood development that all children aged 2-7 go through. What your linked article is describing is what happens when adults are unable to teach children the boundaries of acceptable activity during that time.
While I use the term "we" to assert a collective culpability for this kind of behavior, I do not mean to say that I currently engage in it. My observations are mostly of children in my care and in the care of my friends and family.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 29 2021, @05:15AM (29 children)
Most of us aren't fucked up like you. We really aren't doing crime. I don't have a White Privilege card that lets me cause mayhem. To avoid getting your ass beat by the police, don't do that shit.
No, I don't posses drugs. I have never possessed drugs. I truly wouldn't know where to get drugs. I have no desire to fuck up my brain. I wouldn't even associate with anybody who does that... and I don't actually know anybody that I would suspect of doing that shit. Picture me trying to buy illegal drugs. I go to the worst neighborhood, wander around asking people for drugs, and hope I don't just get mugged or worse...? I literally don't know how that works. I'm 46 years old, and nobody has ever offered me drugs. Bonus: I've never been drunk. I've never used tobacco.
No, I am not involved with prostitution in any role. I strictly follow the Star Trek policy on women, going "Where No Man Has Gone Before". I am thus free of herpes, genital warts, and all the other horrors that promiscuous people deserve. I do however have a large family.
The misconception might arise because of your environment and the friends you keep. You're a leftist. You probably live in a city with the other degenerates. You are somehow attracted to that which is dirty, forbidden, nasty, gross, unlawful, and taboo. You think you understand those words, but you don't feel disgust in the same way that I would. The sense of disgust has been shown to be underdeveloped in leftists.
It may also be that you feel that white people simply must be doing much more crime than they get arrested for. You start with the unproven assumption that people commit crime equally, notice that blacks are arrested more often for crimes, and conclude that white people are getting away with lots of crime. You can't allow yourself to consider the possibility that there actually is a difference in the amount of crime committed, because that would be wrongthink. That type of wrongthink is unquestionably racist, and being racist is impossible for a good leftist like you, so you grasp at the most unjustified speculation as your alternative facts.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Monday March 29 2021, @01:38PM (28 children)
I wasn't really talking about the crimes in TFA. I was talking more about anti-social behavior in general.
I can't picture you doing anything because you are an anonymous coward. I find it ironic that you say you are a model citizen with nothing to hide, and yet you won't even adopt a pseudonym so you can build a recognizable identity on this website.
I'm going to go ahead and assume from your statements though that you are Mormon. That's fine, if it works for you. Please understand though that many people find your culture stifling. Many people leave it because it doesn't have a place for them, and it has nothing to do with drugs or adultery. They do unfortunately get thrust into a world of drugs and adultery, however, when they escape the confines of a world that tells them they are branded as less than, as unsaveable, for who they are, which they cannot change no matter how many years they spend trying.
But drugs and adultery isn't really what I'm talking about. I mean, drugs is a part of it. I don't think you realize how many people on this website use pot, which by the way is legal in many places now. I've seen posts that reference cocaine and shrooms, which I personally have never used. There are a lot of conservatives and libertarians here, but one thing you have to realize is they are not all Mormons. Regardless of whether you personally are a hypocrite, many of the people who agree with you are hypocrites.
Same with sex, actually. Some men around here seem to think women exist solely to titillate them, and have no compunctions about pursuing titillation in all its forms. Personally, I'm lifelong monogamous. From what you have said, it sounds like you may have had multiple sexual partners. I will point out that it's still adultery before God for you even if it isn't for her.
What I'm really talking about, though, are even smaller things. Speeding. Parking violations. Trespassing. Jaywalking. Being late paying a bill. Failing to pay a bill. Congregating in public spaces without a permit. Digital piracy. Violating terms of service. Violating dress code. Eating on public transportation.
It is virtually impossible that you have never done any of these things. Maybe you don't anymore. Maybe you didn't know the rules when you broke them. Maybe you thought speed limits weren't real because everybody else seems to speed. I know I used to.
My point is that you had to learn those boundaries. Someone had to teach you. It sounds like you had the benefit of a strong family upbringing, where wrongdoing was consistently punished and good behavior was consistently rewarded. I'm asking you to imagine how your life might have turned out if you didn't have those things. I'm asking you to have compassion for the people that did grow up without that kind of supportive environment.
I'm going to go out on a limb here on the Mormon thing and ask, do you think Jesus was filled with compassion or disgust? When he healed the sick, laid hands on the leper, cured the unclean woman, broke bread with the tax collector...was he disgusted? Or did he, perhaps, feel a sense of distant understanding, of empathy for their suffering? That same sense felt by elder leftists like myself, who are not personally interested in the "city lifestyle" you speak of, but know that under different circumstances we may have found ourselves with nothing better to live for?
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 29 2021, @05:33PM (27 children)
Many people find your culture stifling. You'll try to get me fired if I use traditional pronouns, if I don't support illegals, if I think Trump was great, etc.
No, I'm not Mormon, or even religious. I haven't met many Mormons. (just a small group of contractors from Utah a few years ago) I adore most non-religious aspects of Mormon culture though. I wish it weren't awkward to send non-Mormon kids to BYU, because that university has good people behaving decently.
I know that some people, somehow, manage to obtain drugs. The is obvious, because the cops have something to do. I really don't think it is normal. Only the dregs of society do that shit.
Oh wait, I do know somebody who admitted to trying pot long ago. He hated how it made him stupid. So there's that. He took an extra year to get a security clearance because of that idiot move.
So far, I just have one sex partner, my wife. It's a bit hard to follow the Star Trek policy and still get around to lots of ladies. I'm also going to keep my promise to her, and I'm not about to fuck up my family. Chasing a wide variety of ladies will have to remain a fantasy unless she dies before me.
Speeding: Sure. I didn't get shot by a cop because I didn't refuse to stop, then crash and jump out running. I also didn't mouth off to the cop or do anything to make him nervous.
Parking violations: I have never done this. FWIW though, It's kind of hard to get hauled off to jail for a parking violation. Nobody would even know the person's race.
Trespassing: No...? Like how, and why?
Jaywalking: Sure. I wouldn't try it in Seattle. That's a city thing, not a race thing.
Being late paying a bill. Failing to pay a bill: On rare occasions I goofed, then I paid the late fee. Nobody knew my race because nobody visited me.
Congregating in public spaces without a permit: As a white guy, I couldn't get away with the shit that BLM did when they were congregating in public spaces. You might have that racism backwards.
Digital piracy: Nobody would know the race of the perpetrator. It's all coldly impersonal.
Violating terms of service: Big corporations are equal-opportunity abusers.
Violating dress code: I have never felt the urge to be obscene in public. I do not wish to display my underwear. WTF. FYI, black people can also be decent human beings.
Eating on public transportation: No. It's not a place to eat because it is filthy and terrifying.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Monday March 29 2021, @10:29PM (26 children)
I feel the need to point out more explicitly that I am somewhat off-topic here. I wasn't talking about racism, I was talking about how a person's background and upbringing sets them up to expect different things from society. I was not meaning to imply that those minor crimes are all affected by race. I meant to imply that most people on this web site have done many of those things. Like, lots of teenagers of all races have gone trespassing, especially in rural areas.
But if you want to talk about race, then let's talk about your comment that you "didn't mouth off to the cop or do anything to make him nervous". I don't know about you, but as a white person, black people make me "nervous" sometimes. It's not that I think they are legitimately up to no good. It's that I'm not used to seeing black people in certain places, or much at all. There is also something about typical African American facial features that I think my poor brain interprets as a scowl. I try not to let it affect my judgement, but the feeling still hits me before I can fight it off, most times I see an unfamiliar black face.
Rookie cops feel this same sense of nervousness. In a better world, they would get over that before starting the job. But in the world we live in, cops are instead encouraged to take that feeling and let it grow. To let it make black people seem different, less than human. To take every call they respond to where a black person is involved and blame the crime on race, usually implicitly, sometimes very explicitly.
Cops in this country come from a long line of enforcers of white supremacy. Take it all the way back to the cops that tracked runaway slaves. That culture, and that mindset, has influenced their actions for centuries.
Similarly, the fact that a black person can't get justice from the police has influenced African American actions for centuries. They simply expect that if white Alice steals from black Bob, and Bob goes to the police, Bob is the one who will probably end up in jail.
Alice (or, if you prefer, Karen) has learned that she doesn't have to follow the rules when her victim is black. Bob has learned that if he wants justice, he had better figure out how to do it himself.
And that is exactly how it is. Some white people are just criminals, but they only steal from black people because they know the cops will look the other way. And some black people are gang vigilantes, enforcing the laws of the street because they know the cops won't protect them. They know the cops will attack them either way.
-
Now for some more direct responses.
You can be fired for repeatedly calling someone by pronouns they have already told you are hurtful to them, because that's called being disrespectful. The people that get fired for what pronouns they speak are generally Ben Shapiro level assholes. People who deliberately use pronouns as a weapon, as political speech, not just because that's what they're used to.
"don't support illegals" and "think Trump was great" are just political opinions. Like all political opinions, it doesn't really matter what yours are if you keep them to yourself. If you don't, well what matters is A) does your employer explicitly oppose that position (probably not because corporations generally like to lobby both sides), and B) are you being belligerent or threatening in your expression of that political opinion. Along those lines, you could get fired for complaining about "illegals" whenever you see dark-skinned people in the office, or demanding to see their papers, because that's aggressively rude. You could get fired for putting up Trump campaign posters...but then again, you could get fired for putting up any campaign posters at most businesses, because corporations generally don't like alienating anybody. So you could get fired for putting up AOC posters, too.
And for what it's worth, I don't "support illegals", at least not the way I assume you assume I do. I support the right of human beings to exist, and I support their dignity. But it upsets me a lot the way that some businesses in this country advertise in places like Guatemala for them to come to the US and take meat packing jobs. It upsets me that employers will steal a fake SSN, a whole fake identity for that person, so the employer can lie to the feds and gain employees who can't bargain for better wages (while incidentally still paying taxes for the non-citizens). It upsets me that Republicans, who so often complain about illegal immigration, look the other way when it comes to actual immigration enforcement in the workplace. It upsets me that they have taken working class anger toward scheming managers cutting their pay and laying off whole communities, and redirected it at some asinine poorly-considered attempt to build a wall. An attempt which, by the way, only Trump was actually stupid enough to put into motion. An attempt which has completely failed to do anything beyond wasting taxpayer money.
As for all of your ways that you've broken the rules, but there's no way you got special treatment because they couldn't possibly know your race? I don't know if you've noticed, but white people and black people don't always go to the same businesses, express the same styles, or live in the same parts of town. De facto segregation makes it stupidly easy to tell someone's race a lot of the time.
A couple of specific examples for racist dress codes in schools [edweek.org] and in restaurants [eater.com]. It's not about underwear. It's about hair styles and what kind of shoe you wear. And most of the time, dress codes aren't enforced. I don't know about you, but I read my high school rulebook back in the day and I read its dress code. Of course, I had no sense of style, so it didn't really matter to me. But there was some pretty ridiculous stuff in there, stuff I saw white girls violate every day.
Anyway, I'm not sure what you think is "filthy and terrifying" about eating on public transportation. The old Carl's Jr ads with the weirdly-sexualized dripping burger, absolutely. What about a candy bar though? A cup of coffee? Or is it the public transportation itself that you find filthy and terrifying?
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 29 2021, @11:44PM (25 children)
Background and upbringing can make bad people. Society can't really make an exception for that; it would permit mayhem to grow and ultimately collapse society. All must follow the rules.
Like you, I can get nervous around black people, but that isn't the main thing. A memorable incident might clarify. I was at a gas station seeking help with directions. I spotted a black customer that I could ask. I became less nervous when I realized that this was an older couple, then started to panic when I saw her tattoo. The tattoo was, for me, a far more serious indicator of risk. The tattoo was a choice.
There are black cops you know. I hope you don't see that as "internalized white supremacy".
Yes, a black person can get justice from the police. Many don't try. If something (culture? guilt? stupidity? whatever, it doesn't matter) makes you uncooperative with cops, you're going to have a bad day. If that is more physical than asking for a lawyer, you're going to have a really bad day. It might be your very last bad day. They "know" the cops will attack, so they provoke an attack by showing weapons and running? That's not a real bright move.
Why not fire the people demanding weird pronouns? It's disrespectful of normal culture all across the entire world. It's disrespectful of nearly 100% of all religions. It's disrespectful to all the people who have trouble memorizing insane exceptions.
Why is it that I have to keep my political opinions to myself, while you don't? Why does the left get a free pass to be belligerent or threatening in the workplace? For example, there was a BLM wall at Facebook, and extreme hostility to the small amount of All Lives Matter dissent.
The border wall actually makes a lot of sense. Half of the illegals come via that route. These are the people who couldn't manage even the trivial matter of legal entry as a tourist. In other words, they have criminal records. The job of the border patrol is now much safer and easier. The wall pays for itself twice every year. We could reconstruct it every 6 months and still save money over not having a wall. Of course we should have a wall. Most people in the country have been wanting a wall for many decades.
Suppose what you are saying about special treatment due to race is true. Companies guess race (based on business, style, part of town) in order to discriminate against race. That is quite a conspiracy. Wouldn't a lot of people need to be cooperating to keep that secret? Also, wouldn't it hurt the business to refuse money from black people? Such a business doesn't seem viable in a competitive market. If the competitors are all discriminating too, then that requires an even bigger conspiracy.
In your De’Andre example, he has a hair style that is both gay and unkempt. He could be hiding a gerbil in there. There is nothing in black DNA that requires that hairstyle. If the rule required that hair be perfectly straight, you might have a point. His hair is unavoidably curly, but he can still keep it respectable. BTW, there is also something wrong with the spelling of his name. This is the USA. The name should be Deandre, or maybe Ander or Anderson.
In your restaurant example, of course it is unacceptable to wear Nike Air Force 1s. This is among the many reasons I wouldn't attempt to enter that kind of restaurant. If you want to join that silly dress-up crowd, you need to dress up. Pointing out the lady is unhelpful for two reasons. First, when you are supposed to leave, you don't get to argue like that. Second, this probably is an example of discrimination that has nothing to do with race. Ladies get away with everything. Every restaurant wants more ladies. Oh, she also has a defective name. If Kaylan's husband is William Johnson, then her name must be Kaylan Johnson. WTF.
It is public transportation itself that I find filthy and terrifying. (and my hands would thus be too dirty to deal with food) I don't want to sit near a bum. (of any race) I don't like panhandlers. I don't want to be near people who might be high or otherwise insane. I don't want to touch poo, vomit, or urine. I don't wish to be mugged. I don't want to have to worry about my stuff being grabbed. I don't want to catch a disease. I don't want to be shoved off a train platform.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Tuesday March 30 2021, @04:19PM (24 children)
I'm not asking for exceptions. I'm suggesting that the way we handle crime now, by locking up scores of people, is counterproductive. Taking a petty thief and throwing them in jail with professional burglars is a great way for the petty thief to hone his skills. Taking a drug-dealing father away from his children is a great way to leave those children without enough supervision.
Which is not to say these behaviors shouldn't be addressed at all. The thief should have a non-lethal encounter with police. He should be roughed up and forced to give back what he stole. This should happen consistently. He should have a social worker assigned to him to help him find more productive employment. The drug dealer should get similar career counseling, and if he's also a user, should have access to rehab. They should all be connected with community organizations like black churches, so they can build relationships with people they will trust and respect, people that will be motivated to give them the resources to succeed rather than simply to lock them up.
All of this is considerably cheaper than the prison system we have now. A prison system which, by the way, is largely run by for-profit corporations that actively lobby all levels of government for stricter punishments for lesser crimes. The people advocating the loudest for more jail time have a huge profit incentive to do so. They aren't lobbying for it out of a concern for public safety.
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"Yes, a black person can get justice from the police. Many don't try."
I've already described why many don't try. When there is any uncertainty as to who is the guilty party, cops tend to side with the white people. It doesn't even seem to matter why the police are there. They could be responding to a non-emergency call about an open front door, and shoot the woman who lives there [time.com]. They could be responding to a call about an intruder, and shoot the homeowner who made the call [mises.org].
These are the cases we hear about. African Americans have many more stories they tell each other, of a family member who was presumed guilty in a complicated situation, of a friend who went to jail after being assaulted. These stories have history. They go back 10, 20, 50 years. Grandparents warn their grandchildren about what it was like to interact with the police in their day. Of what happened to people they cared for. Stories we may never hear.
My point here is not that African Americans always do the right thing when talking to police. Emotions tend to run high, and they make mistakes. My point here is that those emotions come from generations of stories of police brutality, of systemic racism. African American communities simply don't trust the police, and it is not their sole responsibility to heal that distrust. It is incumbent upon police to earn the trust they need to do their jobs. To show black people that there will be justice.
And frankly, that work is happening. BLM is a big reason why. Police departments are starting to create real accountability for the actions of "bad apples" who undermine the trust that must exist between police and the communities they serve. This movement needs to continue. More police departments need to take this issue seriously, need to clean house. More state governments need to repeal policies like qualified immunity that prevent accountability, thereby preventing justice, and further undermining trust in the criminal justice system to treat black people fairly.
Even then, it will take time. There is generational memory. Even with the best changes, we can expect that it will take decades for the "black guy gets shot while fleeing the cops" stories to stop happening.
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I'm not going to bother defending Facebook, because I don't work there, I don't want to work there, I hate what they represent, I would like them to be purged from the face of the Earth.
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When it comes to illegal immigration, I think we are clearly getting our information from very different sources. From what I've heard, the vast majority of illegal immigration happens in the back of a smuggler's truck at regular border crossings. I've also heard that Trump's wall has been essentially completely ineffective at preventing border crossings. People just bend the bars.
I've also heard the border patrol doesn't really like the wall. They would like more high-tech measures, like increased drone surveillance. When it comes down to it, a wall will only ever slow someone down. Many places Trump wanted to build a wall would have been a bad idea, because border crossers could then use the infrastructure needed to build and maintain the wall to more easily and quickly flee deeper into the US.
And of course there's the problem of all the ranchers living on the border who didn't want a wall built on their land, and didn't want a wall built further into the country leaving them on the Mexico side of the wall. Then again, many of those ranchers are still Trump supporters, leading me to question whether there is anything Trump could do to hurt his own supporters that would make them actually vote against him.
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It doesn't take a conspiracy to create systemic racism. It just takes stereotyping. That said, there were a few specific conspiracies to create that stereotyping and enshrine racist policies.
One of those conspiracies was "redlining", wherein the US government and banks conspired to define certain communities as "negro" communities. Redlined areas would then be labelled as such to white people who would rather not live in neighborhoods with black people. Redlined areas also didn't qualify for the lowest interest rates. In many cases, the excessive interest rates charged on redlined neighborhoods made it impossible for communities in those areas to invest in their own communities and build generational wealth. As a result, redlined areas today experience significantly higher poverty rates than other areas. Even though the practice of redlining ended over 40 years ago, its effects are still felt today.
Another conspiracy was the way the FBI systematically targeted black leaders and black communities in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. They wasted resources trying to prove MLK was a communist, and targeted anyone in his network for extra scrutiny. They assassinated the leaders of the Black Panther at a time when the organization was focused on community organizing, food distribution, and job training, removing the forces that were keeping the scattered remnants from turning into paramilitary organizations. They turned drug use, previously a petty crime, into an excuse to raid communities, lock up local leaders, and create whole generations of fatherless children. They may even have facilitated the distribution of crack cocaine in black communities as a pretense for their military tactics.
Nowadays, all it takes is a person's association with poverty, with mental illness, to get individuals at all levels of an organization to just "feel" like this person deserves more scrutiny. To feel like they are more of a risk, and therefore need higher interest rates.
It isn't exactly a conspiracy, and it isn't exactly a secret. The statistics are very clear about hiring and interest rates. Black people face a prejudice we can't quite explain by their poverty alone. It's also been shown that people with ethnic names on résumés are less likely to be called for an interview than people with less "defective" names but the same exact qualifications and experience.
Silicon Valley companies, like Google and Facebook, have in fact been trying to fight this discrimination directly, and they are not immune. Even when a "woke" business tries very hard to fight against prejudice in its own hiring managers, that prejudice is still there. It's not a conspiracy. It's just stereotyping.
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"It's disrespectful of nearly 100% of all religions."
I challenge you, the self-identified non-religious person, to point me to a single instance of a religious text proclaiming the correct pronouns for such and such people. A single instance of a religious text defining who is a "he" and who is a "she". A single instance of a religious text declaring that calling a person by the singular "they", a grammatical device which Shakespeare used over 500 years ago, is in any way disrespectful.
I am confident making this challenge because I myself am Christian. I've been studying the Bible for many years. One thing that strikes me about the Bible, and what I've seen of the texts of other religions, is that very little of it consists of rules for how to conduct yourself. The majority of the Bible is polemic against religious practitioners who are violating the spirit of the faith. And the vast majority of the time, the people who are violating the spirit of the faith like to hide behind their strict adherence to the letter of the law. Isaiah 29 :13-14 (NRSV) says:
The letter of the law does not define gender, because it is a given. People at the time "knew" what gender is. They "knew" that there were men and women. And also eunuchs. Eunuchs, i.e. castrated males, were considered throughout the ancient world to be a third gender. I can't say what pronouns they had, because I'm not an expert in ancient languages. But they were recognized enough that Isaiah 56:3-8 (NRSV) says:
You say a pronoun is an "insane exception". I say that a pronoun is like a name. We do not call all people "that guy". We call people by their names, meustrus, or Anonymous Coward. If I were to tell you, my pronouns are they/them/theirs, it is no more "insane" for you to remember to call me "they" than it is for you to remember call me "meustrus" (I'm a "she", btw). If you were to tell me your pronouns are he/him/his, however, it would be insane for me to insist upon calling you "she".
Again, the people that get fired for pronoun use are being assholes. They are looking at someone who looks like a "she", talks like a "she", is recognized as a "she" by everyone else in the room, and stubbornly insisting on calling them "he". The people who get fired are the ones who are creating the "insane exception", because by the point when they are fired, literally everyone else is using the person's preferred pronouns.
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This is getting a bit exhausting, but I do like getting out my Bible so that was nice. I would like to ask you something, however.
Media outlets tend to have a hard time figuring out why some people think Trump did a good job. I've never gotten a satisfactory answer. I know that there is a sizeable number of them that believe it because they are actually white supremacists, but that cannot possibly account for them all. There is something else going on.
You seem to believe that Trump did a good job, and you don't seem to be a white supremacist. Your persistent characterization of black people as aggressive and stupid is problematic, but as far as I know you are one of the people that believes those tendencies are self-destructive and all you really care about is not being around them. You don't seem interested in actively suppressing them.
So I want to ask you: why do you think Trump did a good job? Are you materially better off after 4 years of him, pandemic notwithstanding? When it comes to the pandemic, do you really believe he did the best job he could, despite having dismantled existing policies and preparations for exactly this scenario? When it comes to the economy, do you believe the standard gains in the stock market are reflected in your local economy? Do you believe that the increased concentration of wealth among tech billionaires, oil magnates, and finance bros creates more job opportunities for people like you? In what ways do you believe that America after Trump is a better place for your children than America before Trump?
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 30 2021, @07:59PM (8 children)
Having him teach them to deal drugs isn't clearly better.
Unlike the normal left, I tend to be strongly against the idea that government workers should interfere in family relationships. Outcomes tend to be worse, with lots of abuse and trauma occurring in the foster system. Lots of times this happens for absurd "neglect", in some cases even just letting kids walk to the neighborhood park alone. (thankfully Utah passed a law to stop that nonsense, but elsewhere the social workers eagerly engage in meddling with families, after the egregious case in Maryland)
If there ever is a time to interfere though, it's when parents have only criminality to teach their children.
BTW, I have such mixed feelings about black churches. It's kind of racist for them to exist, but they do bring decent values.
The prison system is not largely run by for-profit corporations. Most prisoners are held in government-operated prisons. If anybody with a profit motive should be blamed, it is the unions that represent the guards. In any case, for-profit corporations have no power to make individuals perform criminal actions.
You can thank the lying media for that. In a country of 332,410,303 people, all the unlikely 1-in-a-million situations will happen nearly every day. You can tell a story with that. The stories will keep happening no matter what. If you want to make the story that police abuse black people severely and disproportionately, you can do that. Never mind that on a per-encounter basis, a white person is more likely to be shot by cops than a black person is.
BLM is toxic, divisive, literally Marxist, and largely a fraud that diverts funding to the DNC. BLM does nothing to diffuse racial tensions; it amplifies them. It even destroys black-owned businesses. The legal and administrative support is run by a person that Bill Clinton pardoned for bombing the Capitol building in an attempt to kill republican senators.
I do partly agree with you about the qualified immunity. I've faced it myself, with dishonest social workers at my door. In the one case I might have crushed qualified immunity, I'd have had to take a court case to the state capitol for roughly the price of a nice house. That said, only the dumbest idiot would take a job as a cop without at least some level of qualified immunity. It's a job where sometimes there will be a reasonable and unfortunate judgement error that hurts an innocent person. Everybody makes mistakes.
I'm sure of it.
Ideally we'd shut down the regular border crossings. In any case, we do have tech there to scan for people, along with the traditional dog. Technically it's too late at that point; we can punish the smuggler but the people are already here.
But anyway, about half of the illegals sneak across. The wall works well. People do not just bend the bars. It's possible to do that after spending all day there with a power saw. Of course, spending all day there with a power saw gives the border patrol plenty of warning, and then they can patch the damage.
Right after the wall was put up, it was obvious that somebody would go to extreme effort to breach it and that this would be touted as a failure of the wall. It's the same thing with people claiming that stealth aircraft don't work, or that vaccines don't work, or that condoms don't work. I hope you would agree that condoms, stealth, and vaccines are all effective, despite the fact that sometimes they fail. The wall is like that. The lying news would have you believe that people just wander right through, bending the bars like it's no big deal. Also, would you bother to lock your car or house? People can break in anyway.
They got both. The wall came with sensors embedded in it, including underground. I've heard border patrol people really happy with the wall. I'm sure there are some who disagree, either because they fear job loss (less need for border patrol people with a wall) or because they are just traitors who should never have been hired.
Yeah, so that border patrol people have time to drive over there. That's exactly why we need the wall. It slows down the criminal invasion. Some might even give up.
It's a wall. The infrastructure is the preexisting road, preexisting guard stations, and portable heavy equipment.
That isn't a real problem. There are numerous property owners along the border. Of course the lying news can find some fool willing to say something that can be turned into an anti-Trump sound bite.
Trump was the best president in over a century, which is sad considering how imperfect he was. Of course everybody should have voted for him.
About voting: Previously, when I was poor and without healthcare, I voted republican. I did it because I'm not short-term selfish. I voted for the good of the country, despite knowing that my personal situation might have been helped by socialized medicine and raising income taxes.
Ahem. That ended in 1968. A decade later, in 1978 and 1979, was the peak migration of the Vietnamese boat people. They showed up with nothing. They had no generational wealth. They are doing quite well today. It should be clear that redlining can not be blamed for black poverty.
Sure. If you reject the mainstream culture, the mainstream culture will rightly reject you back. It's cruel child abuse to stick a kid with a name like DeShawn or Mohammed, but fortunately this country allows a change of legal name. Somebody who keeps the defective name into adulthood is making a choice and sending a message. They are loudly saying "fuck you" to America. I wouldn't expect anybody like that to be a reasonable employee. I'd expect violence, theft, sloth, and corruption.
The pronoun issue is settled by the idea that God created man and woman. Xir was not created.
There was a tranny at my workplace. He grew tits and long hair, but remained obviously male. Extremely painful and expensive surgery would be required to even begin to put a small dent in the problem. The face bones and hip bones would need to be modified. Even the shoulders and hands would need adjustment. His attempt to talk like a woman was ridiculous. Perhaps he somehow imagined that he passed as female, but that would be just the result of people bending over backwards to help him indulge in his fantasy and delusions. Nobody had the courage to tell him that he isn't passing as a woman.
Imagine if we treated other delusions this way. Consider anorexia. You'd have to affirm that a starving lady is fat. Doctors would prescribe weight loss medication and perform weight-loss surgery. Doctors that disagree would be at risk of losing their medical license.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Wednesday March 31 2021, @04:35PM (6 children)
The question is how to interfere. I argue that locking up the father is not an improvement at all. Which is why BLM advocates for more social services to rehabilitate people in place, giving them opportunities to earn a living without crime and providing more consistent, but less damaging, accountability.
Yeah, it is racist for them to exist. It would have been nice if southern churches would have done the Christian thing and embraced black people into their congregations. Unfortunately, that was a direct threat to white supremacy, and southern churches were apparently more interested in maintaining the local power structure than in doing God's work. So they had to make their own churches.
Which is kind of the story behind a lot of African American subculture. They were treated as subhuman in American culture for so long that they had to make their own alternative. It's only been in the last ~30 years I'd say that mainstream culture was even willing to accept them as equals. By that time, there was over a century of cultural heritage. Do you really expect them to just throw that all away and assimilate into the culture that lynched their ancestors?
I think at this point, we have to treat African American culture similar to any other culture that has gone into the melting pot. Coexist for a few generations. Get everyone comfortable with each other. Let white people adopt some of the food, some of the language, some of the stories, as their own, as black people do the same. Water down the differences until we call all celebrate Juneteenth just like we celebrate St. Patrick's Day. Make it an American holiday that celebrates the cultural heritage of one of America's distinct cultural ancestors.
Eventually, black churches will just be another denomination, and its ethnic history will fade away as has the ethnic history of Catholic, Presbyterian, and Anglican churches. But that will require white people being comfortable going to black churches, just as many African Americans are already comfortable going to non-black churches.
No, I really can't. Maybe it seems like this stuff is talked about way too much now. But it's only been the last ~30 years that mainstream media talks about violence against black people at all.
The generational memory I'm talking about goes way, way back. Back before any of this stuff was talked about in the press. I'm talking 1950s, 1920s, 1900s, 1880s, those times. There were some black publications starting in the 1960s that started picking this stuff up, but only revolutionaries read those, and contrary to what white reactionaries would have you believe, not all black people are revolutionaries. I think the way black South Carolinians anointed Biden should speak to that.
Two points:
1. You have to be the dumbest idiot to be a cop anyway. They don't let smart people take the job [cbsnews.com].
2. Plenty of cops got along just fine before qualified immunity became a thing in the 1960s.
If that's really the case, that's good. When I heard complaints about the wall, it was coming from people pretty high up in the border patrol. People who were worried they were going to get some ridiculous stone barricade instead of the sensors you describe.
Anyway, contrary to most leftists, I don't have a problem with building a wall as an abstract concept. I think it's a waste of money, mostly. But it's a waste of money a lot of people want, and in the grand scheme of things, we waste a lot more money on much less popular projects (F-35, anyone?).
Personally, I hope that now that Trump built a wall, we can move past that particular talking point and figure out how to actually fix the immigration system in this country. Because everyone agrees that it is broken, even if we disagree on what's broken about it.
What about all of the other people who might have been helped by socialized medicine and raising income taxes? Extreme health care costs from a profit-driven medical establishment hit the vast majority of people in this country, even middle class people. You may be willing to sacrifice your own self-interest for the good of all, but there are a lot more people in this country that share that self-interest than people who don't.
I find it remarkable that you think "the good of the country" apparently means the good of rich people. You must have assumed that you would be rich yourself some day. Are you? Has health care really become a non-issue in your life? Are you really wealthy enough that tax hikes on income over $250k, capital gains, and estates over $2 million would actually affect you?
That actually proves my point. "Vietnamese boat people" didn't have to contend with redlining. They were able to build their families and communities in places that were integrated with the rest of America. As a result, they have prospered.
Redlining wasn't just a thing that hurt people while it happened. It shunted black people into segregated communities that still exist to this day. Moving your family is hard. Most people, after they've bought their first house, tend to stay in that house. Doubly so if the value of that property investment isn't rising, so they can't afford to move into a nicer place on the other side of town.
I'm not aware of any instance in history where previously segregated communities became desegregated without outside intervention. The best that African American kids can hope for is to escape, to build a whole new life somewhere else. A possibility which their grandparents are probably telling them is a pipe dream, because they may have tried when they were young and were denied that opportunity.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 31 2021, @07:12PM (5 children)
It is, but the bigger problem is that the message is dishonest. Police do not hunt black people for sport. (aside from the fact that you can find absolutely anything in a country of 332,410,303 people)
Actual correct fact: a white person interacting with police is more likely to be shot than a black person interacting with police
So, if you dislike being shot, don't get arrested while white. It's safer to be black.
The news would have you believe the opposite.
Is that a reference to Biden being a racist? In case not, and you are unaware, enjoy Reziac's comment and my follow-up.
https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=42232&page=1&cid=1114606#commentwrap [soylentnews.org]
I'm not rich, but I'm decently well-off now and health care really become a non-issue in my life. My employer provides it without salary deduction, plus pre-tax funds to cover the deductible, leaving me with just a small percentage of the bill to pay. With a large family, I hit the out-of-pocket maximum each year, which caps my costs at $11,000. That's less than 7% of salary.
I didn't know I'd do so well. I was contemplating a career change, even stopping by the police department table at a career fair. That would have been low pay, assuming they didn't just reject smart people. I talked with a military recruiter too, who turned me away for having an unacceptably large family.
I don't think "the good of the country" means "the good of rich people". Mostly we shouldn't care about rich people, since they can take care of themselves, but it is unjust to treat them like piggybanks. That thinking is envy, jealousy, and spite. It's not a good thing when you obsessively covet the goods of another person. (fine to think "oh that would be nice to have" but not fine to harbor hatred for the rich) The good of the country includes respect for the belongings of others.
The good of the country includes incentives for economic value generation. Back in prior recessions, we've seen that unemployment drops rapidly when the benefits run out. Extending the benefits always makes people less likely to work. It even keeps them poorer, because working would provide better pay than the unemployment benefits. It's harsh, I know, but I like the capitalist incentives (bums sleep on the street) more than the communist incentives (bums go to slave camps or get shot). Every economic system finds a way to make people work. I prefer the passive non-violent approach of capitalism.
It's even personal: my job seeking efforts intensified as funds ran out. I became less fussy. I am now employed, helping the economy. Perhaps I'd still be non-working if the benefits had been better.
Oh, too hard for black people?
Vietnamese boat people didn't just move. They could never go back to visit. They had to switch language. They lost all contact with portions of their families. They started with literally nothing.
Suppose it is 1978, and you are a black person in the USA. You have so many advantages over the Vietnamese boat people, but you can throw most of it away. Put your belongings in a dumpster, cut off contact with most of your family, and spend your last dollar on a bus ticket to a random location in the USA. You still have advantages: language fluency (mostly) and no troubles with citizenship. You even have a birth certificate.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Wednesday March 31 2021, @09:01PM (4 children)
So let's fix the police, together. All lives matter. And I don't mean that the way BLM hears it, which is to say "let's weigh your worry about dying in your own home against how a cop's worry he'll die in the line of duty". I mean that killing is bad, and state-sponsored violence is something that should be reduced to the absolute minimum rather than relished like it is today.
So you make over $150k/year. Nice. That puts you in the top 18% of earners in this country.
The median income is less than half that, closer to $68k. Would $11k really be no big deal if that was your income?
It's fine to have nice things, and I don't begrudge your income. But don't make the mistake of thinking that just because you can afford something, that means it's affordable.
Really, it's selfish to let all those less well-off than yourself suffer just because you aren't suffering with them. If you haven't already, you should consider giving some of that money to charity. Help give people the means to raise themselves to your level. And no, it's not envious for me to suggest you give some of your money to someone else that has nothing to do with me.
At the very least, you don't need a tax cut.
The benefits don't need to be better. They just need to cover basic expenses.
Of course, the economics of that has become much, much harder. Housing is incredibly expensive, so much so that if you can afford rent, you can probably afford the latest iPhone. Seems batty to me, but that's how it is.
I think a lot of that has to do with rising property values. Some more of it has to do with local building regulations. Neither is something the feds can really do anything about. I encourage everyone to ignore political party in local elections.
One thing we can do about this problem is to make it less important where you live. Rural broadband should help, but we've spent the last 4 years with Ajit F*cking Pai capturing the FCC and spouting the sad sob story of how the ISPs just aren't making enough money to spend the taxpayer money they got for rural broadband on actual rural broadband. We'll see if Biden's appointee actually fixes the problem or just stops the bleeding. I'm not even sure they will stop the bleeding. Maybe it will become a non-issue with Starlink.
They had to. They were fleeing a bloody war where one side couldn't tell the difference between local civilians and the enemy.
When they got here, they got a lot of assistance from the locals. A lot of compassion. A lot of resources.
If you want to compare what happened to Vietnamese immigrants, then really we'd be talking about paying reparations. That's the level of assistance that Vietnamese immigrants to this country received, and they did very well with it.
I should know, in my state of Iowa the Republican government at the time organized the acceptance of many of these "boat people". We have a great state and I really wish the Republican Party would stop infecting our politicians with their east coast bullshit. Things were a lot better under Governor Ray.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 31 2021, @10:46PM (3 children)
I voted just the same when I was poor. My wife was visiting church groups to get food donations. We got very close to failing to pay rent, which would have quickly made us homeless.
If I could have had my basic expenses covered, I would not have urgently sought employment. Aside from being homeless and starving, I really like not having a job. Lots of people feel this way. Why work if you don't have to work? Even a "good" job, doing interesting tasks in a comfortable office, is a misery I'd rather avoid.
So I can see where things go if the benefits are good. Most of us just stop working. That reduces the taxes collected, so the rates need to rise, making even more people decide that going to work is just not worth the bother. Continuing down that path, soon every non-masochist is unemployed and the economy comes to a halt. The promised benefits can only be supplied by printing money... but that leads to hyperinflation.
For the good of the country, the benefits can't be good. Non-workers must be allowed to suffer. (or the communist way: non-workers are forced to suffer)
I should get a tax cut. Rich people should get a bigger one because they pay more.
Oh, BTW, I'm not really much above being poor. My family is huge. There are 14 people living here. (wife is more Catholic than the Pope) I'm not far above qualifying for various welfare programs like WIC.
There are two causes.
The first is having women enter the workforce. When you double the labor, the wages go down. That counteracted what would have been rising wages. When house buyers (and renters) have double the money to spend, they bid up the prices of homes. Double the money available, and you double the prices, more or less. So this is a lot of extra labor for nothing. Opting out, as my family has done, is difficult because families are in competition. Then there is the problem of job availability for two-income families. With one income, it is not a big problem to move to a different location for the new job. With two incomes, moving would cause the other person to lose a job. (and then move for that person to get a job, making the original person lose a job, and so on) So the two-income people refuse to live in places without plentiful jobs. The one-income families can live in low-cost small towns, but that just isn't viable for the two-income couples. This just shoves more people into an urban high-cost bidding war. Being unable to move, and needing a home that isn't far from multiple workplaces, means that the home can't reliably be near work. Commute times increase and the roads are clogged. Well, what are we supposed to do, take away the right for women to work outside the home?
The second is "local" building regulations. They aren't really local. Nearly every local location just adopts a nation-wide set of regulations that is produced by an industry consortium. The industry loves to drive up costs and keep out competitors. One of my coworkers has a great example that he complains about. It used to be that roof-mount solar panels would all be wired together using direct current, then connected to one device that would convert to AC for the house. Somebody patented a per-panel way to convert to AC, found the excuse that it might please fire departments, and lobbied to get that into the so-called "National" electrical code. So now costs are much higher. About the same happened with arc-fault suppressors. Besides the issue of regulatory capture, what we have here is a case of well-off people taking offense at those who live with less. You have to have the fancy modern stuff! The hatred for the poor is disguised as help. You can claim to be helping the poor by making unsafe things (affordable things that everybody used to use without complaint) illegal to use.
We did reparations of many types, including affirmative action. Leftist places like Harvard still, today in 2021, engage in racial discrimination. They favor black people over Asians. When is it going to be enough? Vietnamese immigrants are still fighting an uphill battle against systemic racism. Employers bend over backwards to hire black people, and in the process actually generate racial animosity.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Wednesday March 31 2021, @11:26PM (2 children)
We have a large excess of bullshit jobs in this country. Meaningless office work that serves no purpose. Marketing departments that exist to pump money from one consumer to another in an endless chain. No real value.
How many people really need to be employed full time to keep this country moving? Vastly fewer than actually are, I'll tell you that much. The world doesn't need Social Media Specialists. It doesn't need Business Data Analysts. It doesn't need Insurance Claims Adjustors.
What we need is farmers - a dying profession because of land consolidation of Biblical proportions. What we need is civic engineers and laborers - a dying profession because of neo-liberal austerity policies. What we need is doctors - an overstressed profession because of a national obsession with debt.
The people who actually run this country, they are not the ones who get wealthy off of it. They do it out of civic duty. Someone will deliver the mail. Somebody already does, despite it not paying well.
The rest of us, who neither make society work nor suck up the fruits of it, might as well not work. Might as well sit around on universal basic income and spend their time making friends and raising their children.
This obsession with work is killing us. We don't need more incentives to go into bullshit offices to push paper around. We don't need more reasons to psychologically manipulate people into buying goods and services they don't want or need, just to support more and more jobs.
What we need is freedom.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 01 2021, @04:23AM (1 child)
A lot of those bullshit jobs originate in regulation.
If the government agency demands that you file a TPS report every 90 days, you do it. You hire a team of people to create TPS reports that nobody will ever read.
Getting rid of 2.5 regulations for every 1 regulation added was one the the most meaningful Trump achievements. It helped shift people from bullshit jobs into manufacturing.
I think that fits well with your comment that "What we need is freedom." The regulations take our freedom. Trump gave us freedom.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Thursday April 01 2021, @02:31PM
Government is run by people. Like you said elsewhere about housing regulations, the industries involved like to make them to make us spend more money and waste our time. They don't need the feds to do it.
This is something that really bothers me about conservatives. The idea seems to be that if we cut regulations, we won't be controlled by larger powers. That somehow the government is the only big power there is.
The fact is that big business is getting bigger. Microsoft is practically a government entity now. They sure act like it, the way they're always messing with my computer like it's their property to mess with.
Is government the solution? Not on its own. I certainly don't trust Biden any more than Trump to actually solve the problem. I had my hopes for Obama, but I was young and idealistic then.
It sure doesn't help though to cripple the government in its power struggle against big business. At least with the government, we can vote people out of office. What are you gonna do about Satya Nadella's plans to conquer the world? About Mark Zuckerberg? About Warren Buffet?
It seems that because of the conspiracy to turn the Republican party into the party of deregulation, into a writhing mass of fearmongering, we don't really have that choice. I want the old Republican party back. The one that was capable of using the government to implement simple, pragmatic solutions. The one that was an effective check on Democrat idealism, rather than just a constant naysayer.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Wednesday March 31 2021, @06:11PM
God created the land and the sea, but we do not say God did not create marshes and estuaries. Likewise, God created all people, not just the people specifically described in a story that is about human tendency toward curiosity and disobedience, not about the right place for all things.
Remember that we all fall short of God's perfection. No imperfection in one is greater or lesser than the imperfection in another. There is only mortal and divine. Do not seek to place yourself above other mortals.
If you truly care about God, then you should do what God commands. Take up the cross. Do not seek to be served, but serve others. Make yourself humble. Do not boast of your own righteousness, but make yourself an offering to God. " 'You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all our mind.' This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' On these two commandments hand all the law and the prophets." (Matthew 22:37-40, NRSV)
Women come in all shapes and sizes, even cis women. If you think a narrow-hipped, broad-shouldered, large handed, thick-browed person could never be a woman, you haven't seen many women athletes.
I understand your disgust. It's hard to look at someone you thought you knew as one of your own, and be asked to see them as something different. As something that you would expect to find attractive.
It's important to recognize that just because you are straight, doesn't mean you will find all women attractive. It's not actually controversial to say that you don't find X body type attractive. The important thing is to recognize that person is still a person. That a woman has more to offer you than looking pretty. That it is possible to relate to them as one of the guys and still recognize her womanhood.
It's not widely understood outside of trans and medical communities, but trans people did not invent modern trans medicine. Doctors did. Western medicine recognized first that trans people exist, and then decided that medical intervention was the correct treatment.
In many ways, it had to do with medical ideas about homosexuality. Back when it was still widely considered a mental illness, doctors latched onto men who were attracted exclusively to men and behaved in very feminine ways. Doctors invented the concept of a "woman trapped in a man's body" to explain it.
Other cultures throughout history have had different ways of explaining trans people that I think are ultimately closer to the truth. The Hijra in India present themselves as women, but have a unique community with a long history that does not integrate with cis women (and also has a history of terrible oppression that has more to do with misogyny and the caste system than anything else). Various Native American tribes have different concepts of a third gender, described in modern times as Two Spirit, often with spiritual significance, and which often occupies something closer to a middle space than either male or female. Eunuchs of the ancient world, though often created forcibly rather than voluntarily, occupied a middle space that could pass freely between male and female spaces, relating to anyone of any gender.
Many modern trans people, who have access to modern medicine, would prefer to "stealth" as either entirely male or entirely female. But this is not a desire that comes from their personal identity. This is a desire for safety, a desire to not have to explain oneself.
However, when it comes to body modification, doctors are not merely giving trans people what they want. Trans medicine is based on evidence that hormone replacement therapy and gender affirmation surgeries, as well as social transition (i.e. having their preferred identity recognized, including having their pronouns respected), leads to better medical outcomes for people suffering from gender dysphoria. They reduce a trans person's daily stress and improve their mental state. They make that person more stable. Less likely to suffer from mental illness like depression and anxiety, or to develop trauma-associated disorders like DID or PTSD.
The truth is that the standards of transgender medicine are set by cis doctors, over decades of research and experience. It is a modern reality made difficult by cultures which promote the strict division of the sexes in ways that don't even respect cis identities.
Consider anorexia. We know that many women hold themselves to unrealistic body standards. We know that this causes them to harm themselves in order to reach for those standards. And yet, we still culturally value supermodels with bodies that are impossible for most women to achieve. We still give our daughters Barbie dolls that show physically impossible body proportions. We still draw cartoons that show girls what they should look like, half the size of the hulking men near them, despite there being less than 10% average size difference between the sexes.
You may think you understand anorexia, but you clearly don't. It is not a desire to be a certain body shape. It is ultimately a disorder about shame. The anorexic person believes they are not good enough, and that losing weight will make them better. They don't actually want to be rail-thin. They just think that's what society expects of them, and they don't want to be in conflict with that.
The best solution for anorexia, and for gender dysphoria, is to remove the shame. To tell you that it is OK to be what you are. For the anorexic, that means addressing the root cause of why they feel they are not good enough, and helping them to understand that society doesn't expect them to be a supermodel. That it's OK for them to be the normal-sized person that they are happy to be. For the transgender person, that means allowing that person to express their innermost self. To wear their clothes and their hair how they would like, not how society expects them to. To ask to be recognized for who they are, not who others would like them to be.
To a trans woman, living as a man is like an anorexic person trying to be thin. It is destructive to their health. And it will never solve the underlying problem of shame.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 30 2021, @08:10PM (1 child)
I happen to be materially better off, and my local economy did very well.
After 3 years of Trump, we were hitting best-in-history numbers for unemployment. This was particularly true of the people who commonly have trouble, such as black people. Income inequality started to go down, breaking a decades-long trend. For the first time in decades, inflation-adjusted income started to creep upward. None of those numbers regularly made the news. As soon as the economy looked good, the news started avoiding the topic. On the rare occasion you heard anything, it was employers whining about a labor shortage.
The increased concentration of wealth among tech billionaires, oil magnates, and finance bros is mostly about corporations getting bigger. Neither democrats nor republicans oppose this; nobody is breaking up large corporations. There is also the problem of outsourcing, and on that matter Trump actually dared to do something. He deserves credit for that. China ended up paying over 80% of the tariffs according to a European study of the matter, with factories cutting prices to avoid going idle. (the technical reason: "elasticity of demand" and "elasticity of supply" caused the price signal to change when a transaction cost was added)
I think increased concentration of wealth is of concern, but I want to point out that I really don't like anything that smells of envy. We should not jealously covet what others have. Being rich doesn't make a person evil, inhuman, or undeserving. In any case, Trump's first 3 years featured a highly unusual reduction in income inequality. That was nice.
Trump did a fine job dealing with the Wuhan lab virus.
Trump did not dismantle existing policies and preparations. Shuffling around job titles to fit the available employees is not dismantling an agency. Pulling people out of China was perfectly sane; they would only have the access permitted by China. Having the USA do disease control for China is as absurd as having China do disease control for the USA. China is an independent country. The spare masks had been used up during the Obama years.
Roosevelt took massive action to create multiple different working atomic bombs, then Truman used them. We credit Roosevelt for making that possible. Trump took massive action to create multiple different working Wuhan lab virus vaccines, then Biden used them. We should likewise credit Trump for making that possible.
Remember that Trump was called racist when he took early action to block China travel. Democrats wanted to spread the disease faster.
I reject the idea that Trump had primary responsibility. Democrats like to pin that on him because completely avoiding trouble was impossible. The mask issue is a particularly good example. Trump isn't there to be a dictator making you wear a mask. He isn't your mom. You don't need an order from Trump to make you wear a mask, brush your teeth, or wipe your ass.
I think that Trump delayed the collapse of the American civilization by 4 years. He did a wonderful job, but much has been undone by the corrupt senile puppet who unjustly seized power. Our civilization is doomed. I like to resist the destructive forces of useful idiots.
Quoting a previous comment I made about Trump:
An error in the above is that it was actually 4 peace treaties. There were 3 just involving Israel, and then one more over in the still-smouldering remains of Yugoslavia.
The tariffs are still there, probably because the bribe is still being negotiated. The wall is still there. Regulations are piling up to choke the life out of our economy again. Unemployment and inequality will remain higher, with the virus as a convenient excuse for the democrat-caused problems. Due process is gone. We're back to using the military to fund tranny operations. We're back to stirring up trouble in Syria. We have several times more kids in cages than Trump ever had... oh but we replaced the cages built by Joe's brother with clear plastic. It's kids in bags now. North Korea isn't talking to us anymore, and is back to launching ballistic missiles. We undiplomatically pissed off the Chinese delegation in Alaska a couple weeks ago.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Wednesday March 31 2021, @08:27PM
Trump should have. Granted, I said the same thing about Obama, and was very disappointed in how he allowed Facebook to hoover up its competition. But Trump did nothing to stop that train, and now look what happened? We're all debating how to regulate a private platform that operates as a public space.
It's too bad Democrats and Republicans have such a hard-on for monopolies. The solution of breaking up Facebook is so obvious. But instead we have Democrats that want to force Facebook to censor everything, and we have Republicans that want to force Facebook to harbor hate speech.
But then, I knew Trump wasn't interested in doing anything as soon as he put top industry cronies in charge of all the regulatory agencies. He couldn't just abolish them, so regulatory capture is the next best thing, right? No, please God no. Regulatory capture is the reason why over-regulation is bad. We can debate all day whether business should be regulated or not, but the last thing either of us should want is foxes guarding the hen house.
It's not envious to roll back tax cuts for the rich. They're the ones with the money to fix our roads and bridges.
In the abstract, having money doesn't necessarily make a person evil. It's possible to have inherited that wealth innocently. It's possible to have truly innovated an honest business. There are wealthy people out there like this. Those wealthy people keep telling the government to stop giving them so many tax cuts, because they don't need them.
Most wealthy people, however, got that wealth by seeking it out. They had the ambition to be wealthy. And that ambition is what makes a person evil, because that ambition means that anyone who gets in the way of their wealth is an enemy to be squashed. A person like "Bo" Pilgrim, who amassed his wealth by ramping up industrial chicken production in complete disregard for the health and safety of line workers. Who lobbied to make standard health and safety inspections virtually impossible, because he knew that keeping equipment clean and protecting his workers from injuries would cut profits. Who bribed state officials in support of a law that gutted worker's compensation protections, because he knew that it would be cheaper to buy off politicians than it would be to just pay his workers for injuries caused by his own willful negligence.
Those are the people who want tax cuts. It's not envy to fight back. It's merely self defense.
A pandemic plan was in place. Trump abandoned it — and science — in the face of Covid-19 [statnews.com]
Trump administration cut pandemic early warning program in September [2019] [theguardian.com]
He took an agency dedicated to pandemic response, messed with its leadership, and dispersed everyone else into other departments. He took an early warning program designed to protect the entire world - not just each country it was in - and dismantled it. Pandemics are global. Closing the border with China didn't stop America from having one of the highest Covid-19 fatality rates in the world. And if the reserves were depleted under Obama as you say, he had 3 years to fix it.
No, we should credit the labs that made them, and the many scientists that built the preliminary research over the past 10 years that made this kind of vaccine possible at all. The claim that Trump had a Manhattan Project level government project for these vaccines is ludicrous. If he did, they would be named after the government project instead of the nation-sized corporations that developed them.
Nobody credits Roosevelt with inventing the atomic bomb, by the way. We credit Einstein and Oppenheimer.
5 ways the Trump administration fell short of its own pandemic goals [politico.com]
No, but if your mom tells you it's OK not to wipe your ass, that's all the excuse some people will need. Trump refused to wear a mask himself and invented this idea that wearing a mask somehow challenged a person's manhood. A lot of deeply insecure men went on to prove they were too manly for mask wearing. Were they stupid and wrong? Absolutely. Could Trump have prevented that from happening? Easily.
We've come a lot closer to neo-nazis being an existential threat in the last 4 years, but I'm hopeful that threat will fade quickly. Those losers rallying at state capitols in the days after the insurrection, they looked sad and lonely.
I think there's scarcely anything one person can do do destroy America in such a time. We face some existential threats when it comes to China and when it comes to climate change. It will take a stronger leader than Biden to lead us through those crises, that's for sure. But if you think the American system is going to collapse because of one bad president, you can join the fools who said the same about Trump.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 30 2021, @10:33PM (12 children)
I realize that I want to address this specific paragraph carefully, because it is more interesting than I first noticed.
There might really be some clueless journalists who are unable to figure out why Trump did a good job. It's possible. Journalists do tend to be surrounded by other leftists.
In general though, I'm certain that they know exactly why Trump did a fantastic job. They just can't say it or write about it. That would be a career-ending move. To merely say the reasons would be to remind the audience of the reasons.
So consider the situation. We have a man of once-in-a-century greatness or better who really upsets the powerful insiders. All the things he does for the American worker, like tariffs and the wall, are anathema to the businesses looking to avoid paying American wages. The powerful insiders want him out, so anything that might help Trump is verboten. It is simply not permitted to say anything positive about Trump on the nightly news.
There are some people, like myself, who think Trump is great. How can that possibly be explained without admitting anything good about Trump? None of my actual reasons can be given airtime. Some other reason, with negative connotation, must be created from thin air. What might be used to fill the gaping hole in the explanation for Trump after the legitimate explanation is ripped out? The answer, clearly, is -ism and -ist. (racism, sexism, fascism, white supremacist, nazi, etc.) As a bonus, this makes normal Trump supporters fearful of speaking out. Nobody wants to admit to -ism or being -ist.
In a country of 332,410,303 people, finding a Trump supporter for every possible -ism and -ist should not be hard. Uh, evidently it was, because they had to manufacture one out of an innocent schoolboy (Covington Catholic High School student Nick Sandmann) and then settle huge slander/libel lawsuits.
So yes, there is something else going on. It simply can't be said, because publicly admitting the reasons for Trump support would have helped him greatly. You were purposely kept in the dark.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Wednesday March 31 2021, @07:39PM (11 children)
I am well aware of the media blindness around Trump. Obviously, from the way I asked the question.
It would be disingenuous, however, to claim that racism isn't a significant part of Trump's appeal. He used white nationalist memes and dog whistles. He explicitly called out white nationalist organizations, actively worked to paint them as good guys and promote them. Neo-nazis definitely felt that he was their guy, because they said as much. Trump did nothing to dissuade them. He promoted racism and white nationalism more than any other national politician within my lifetime.
However, I think based on the data that white nationalists comprise no more than 30% of Trump voters. That's why, even though his courting of literal nazis cannot be ignored, I think it's important to understand who the other 70% are.
To be clear, yes this means I believe you support a white nationalist, and I consider that to be reprehensible. But I also believe that you yourself are not a white nationalist. Simply one of the many white people in this country whose surroundings allow them to continue to pretend that America was built by something other than slave labor. Someone who is the Republican version of the Democrats who thought Hillary couldn't lose because she was just so great.
It is my sincere hope that you through our conversation, you will have learned something about the deep roots of white supremacy. That African Americans are not 100% responsible for the mess they are in, because the "powerful insiders" who are upset about tariffs, are the same people that created segregation. The same people that threw black fathers in prison. The same people that put so many guns in the hands of black teenagers. The same people that militarized the police. The same people that went to Guatemala to smuggle cheap labor into American factories. The same people that have taken the journalism that is so essential to Democracy and bought it all up, erased local voices, and replaced every TV news show, every newspaper, every radio news outlet, with more and more hyper-partisan copies of the New York version of Democrats and Republicans.
For my part, if another Trump comes along who doesn't court the white nationalists, I will vote for them. But you're right about one thing. He was a rare bird. One can hope for more people to completely disrupt the status quo.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 31 2021, @09:00PM (10 children)
Trump dated Kara Young, who is black. She doesn't think he is a white supremacist. She "never heard him say a disparaging comment towards any race".
Picture of them: https://twitter.com/nytpolitics/status/898270757012160512 [twitter.com]
Trump sued the city of Palm Beach in order to lift a restriction that prohibited Jews and blacks from being member's of Trumps Mar-a-Lago club. None of the other property owners in the area would do it. Trump took action against the racism that came with the property he had just purchased. Does that sound like a white supremacist to you?
The claim of "dog whistles" is an admission that you have no evidence. It's always a "dog whistle" when you want to put words in somebody's mouth, making that person out to be a monster without having even a shred of evidence. Nobody outside the left is hearing any dog whistles.
We don't need to invent any fictional dog whistles with Biden. He just comes out and says racist shit:
In 2019, Biden reveals more about how he sees black people. "We should challenge students in these schools. We have this notion that somehow if you’re poor, you cannot do it. Poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids."
On the other hand, for Trump, we have decades of evidence that he is not at all a white supremacist:
https://www.truthandaction.org/trumps-30-year-record-of-rejecting-racism-and-promoting-equality/2/ [truthandaction.org]
https://theblacksphere.net/2017/08/list-times-donald-trump-racist-bigot/ [theblacksphere.net]
As one of those says:
And indeed, that happened. The lie, that Trump is a white supremacist, was repeated enough times for you to believe it. Well, now you know the truth, whether you choose to ignore it or not.
If I were in your shoes, waking up to the fact that I'd been manipulated for years, I'd be really angry.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Wednesday March 31 2021, @09:04PM (9 children)
Maybe he wasn't a white nationalist before, but he sure looks like one now. I think what happened is he watched too much Fox News. It's a sad fate that happens to far too many people his age. Lots of perfectly reasonable people get infected with fear and hatred and suddenly turn racist.
It's possible he didn't even know what he was saying was dog whistles. Regardless, his presidency still empowered some truly awful people.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 31 2021, @09:37PM (8 children)
I focused on older stuff, to emphasize that his anti-racism isn't just an act that he put on while president.
More recently though, he got record levels of funding for historically black colleges and universities. I suppose maybe that is actually racist, but in the opposite direction of "white nationalist". It's the same sort of racism as affirmative action. It's definitely the opposite of white supremacist.
Trump got the First Step Act passed. Remember how you complained about black fathers getting decades in prison for minor things? Trump fixed that. Incidentally, the original law that put all those black fathers in prison was the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which was introduced by Biden and signed by Clinton. That's the law that Kamala Harris used to literally get black slaves when she was a California prosecutor. She fought against leniency, saying that the state needed the prisoners to fight wildfires.
So even as president, he continued to fight racism. Why is that not enough? How can Biden's racism be so easily excused?
Yes, of course Trump didn't even know what he was saying was dog whistles. That's the whole idea. The news takes an innocent comment (they get **lots** of comments to choose from) and invents a reprehensible meaning that was never intended. Trump, and all the non-left people listening, had no awareness of any dog whistles.
BTW, how am I supposed to interpret Biden's objection to a "racial jungle"? Was that a dog whistle, or was it more of a train horn?
I could show that the Biden presidency is empowered some truly awful people. You think there are no awful people who voted for Biden? I don't think that matters. I won't hold it against Biden, even though I hate Biden. You shouldn't hold that against Trump, especially since your news media is actively searching for the very most deplorable straw-men to serve as "typical" Trump supporters.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Wednesday March 31 2021, @11:13PM (7 children)
I'm not here to defend Biden. I'm sure plenty of racists and misogynists voted for him, because I know that's who he is.
My comment earlier about black South Carolinians was to say that they aren't socialists. They aren't radicals. They don't believe Bernie could have won even if that's what they really wanted. What they really want, I think, is to join the ranks of American conservatives. Arrive at the American Dream, finally, and pull up the ladder like every ethnic group before them. Like you, from what I can tell.
I'm willing to believe that deep down, Trump isn't actually racist. But he still puts on the show. He still parrots the Fox News lines. And 30% of his support, some of his most enthusiastic support, still comes from fascists.
I considered voting for him, you know. I was never bothered by the wall, and I like his foreign policy to an extent. Certainly more than Obama's, or Hillary's. Definitely more than Bush's. I like his anti-establishment vibe. I didn't vote for him, though, because I knew it would empower racists - regardless of his personal ideology - and I knew his administration would be the most pro-big-business, hypercapitalist, regulatory capture happy administration since Reagan. And I was right on both counts.
It's a crying shame. If it wasn't for the Fox News media influence, he could have been a 21st century Teddy Roosevelt. That version of Trump, that isn't so influenced by the corruption gnawing at the roots of conservatism, would have been the greatest president in a century. What we got instead was a sad shadow of that promise.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 01 2021, @12:22AM (6 children)
Bernie had his honeymoon in the USSR. Bernie used to admire the policy of Venezuela. That got awkward. Bernie had **positive** things to say about bread lines. Meanwhile, he has been collecting houses. It's fine to do so, but it sure looks hypocritical for his politics. It's as bad as Al Gore flying around the world in a private jet to tell us about climate change. Bernie is effectively blackmailed by his wife's criminal financial dealings with the college: if he goes too far out of line she would get prosecuted.
Tossing around the word "fascist" is dirty. It's become merely an insult. The closest we have to fascism today in modern America is the SJW left, who are the primary culprits behind cancel culture. They are extremely authoritarian. There is not a notable population of anybody legitimately fascist among the Trump supporters.
I would say it is neither good nor bad to be "pro-big-business, hypercapitalist". It certainly beats the opposite. Putting ordinary Americans first is usually pretty good for business, and I think Trump did that. Business would rather have more outsourcing and immigration, to avoid paying ordinary Americans. The left would crush business under the boot of regulations, taxes, and unions. Crushing business is not good for ordinary Americans.
I didn't see a lot of regulatory capture. There couldn't be, since the nation-choking regulations were being rapidly thrown away. When I think of regulatory capture, I think of adding regulations that end up requiring things that can only be provided by large existing corporations. For example, Amazon actually wants internet sellers to pay sales tax because Amazon is big enough to handle the complexity. There just wasn't room for much regulatory capture with so many regulations being thrown away. Trump did great, far better than expected. This may have been the single most wonderful part of his presidency.
Reagan was an OK president. He was dumb enough to accept a deal with the democrats, granting amnesty to illegals in exchange for building the wall. He granted the amnesty, and democrats showed how foolish it was to trust democrats. Reagan also signed the Firearm Owners Protection Act, which should be considered (Clarence Thomas would say so) to violate the US constitution.
Teddy Roosevelt is the most recent president with a possible (not definite) claim to being as good as Trump. The huge span of time makes comparison difficult.
Fox News is not very conservative, despite being the most conservative of the mainstream TV news sources. It's near the median for the US population. The right prefers OANN, RSBN, Breitbart, NY Post, and sometimes (if you can stand the antics) InfoWars.
I really don't see "corruption gnawing at the roots of conservatism", but I can imagine why the left might see it. On the right, ordinary humans (not just corporations) hate regulations. The left loves to have the government meddle in things, supposedly for our own good. When a conservative deregulates, the left can't imagine that it was done for ideological reasons. The left just assumes that there was a bribe, because after all, who wouldn't love more regulation? I assure you, I was cheering every time a regulation got tossed out.
I think that corruption was unusually low under Trump. It was crazy high under Obama, and I was always frustrated how it never made the news. It just got brushed under the carpet. The idea that the Obama administration was "scandal free" was a particularly cruel lie. He never did apologize to Mexico for the gun running done as part of Operation Fast And Furious. We're back to massive corruption again. An astonishing amount of corruption got brushed under the carpet to put Biden in power. The first attempt at impeaching Trump was even for a crime that was actually committed by Joe Biden. The fact that that could happen is truly horrifying. Biden actually threatened to withhold aid from Ukraine in order to fire a prosecutor who was catching on to Biden's corruption (with Hunter Biden as the middleman and Joe Biden getting a 50% cut) and Trump had to fight against impeachment. That right there is a stunning level of democrat corruption.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Thursday April 01 2021, @01:59AM (5 children)
You're beginning to sound more like Trump himself. Talking in circles, praising things for their own sake. Saying how everything he did was the best anyone ever did. Brandishing potential conspiracies so fast it would take an encyclopedia to even address them all, let alone find the truth in any of them. It honestly reminds me of evangelical preachers, and if there is one thing you're never supposed to do in any religion, it's worshipping false idols.
Regulatory capture is accomplished merely by putting lobbyists in charge of federal agencies. They got rid of a lot of regulations, but did they get rid of all of them? Did they avoid creating any new ones? What remains?
The corruption I'm talking about is Fox News itself. They have made a mockery of conservative values. They have very effectively taken the place of God as the center of the lives of many conservatives, especially older ones. They openly advocate for hyperbole, for things that would never work but will throw a spanner in the gears for being suggested.
Of course you would prefer other right-wing news sources. Fox rode the bear for a while, but they never really wanted what you want. They just wanted to trick you into thinking they represented your interests. Trick people like you, trick Trump himself into thinking they represented the median. As soon as Trump lost they were done with him. He was never their guy to begin with. They represent exactly the same mainstream that reduced Trump to the racist president. If it's true that Trump didn't know he was repeating dog whistles, guess where he heard them first?
But I wouldn't trust any of those other news sources any better. They're all run by shadow corporations. They all go back to the same money in the end. You can't run a conservative platform without it being subordinated to the Grand Old Party in some way or another.
Then again, I can't offer a real alternative. I have my left-leaning sources, but I'm not paying much attention to those these days. I'd love to find journalists with an ideology that doesn't coincidentally line up perfectly with either party's platform, even when that platform changes from year to year, but those journalists become harder and harder to find every year. It doesn't help that the revenue model selects heavily for content that stokes fear and anger, rather than content that is accurate and thought-provoking.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 01 2021, @03:10AM (4 children)
Trump really was the best, so yeah... we need to admit that.
The word "conspiracy" does not mean "nonsense". Actual conspiracies exist and are decently common. The very term "conspiracy theory" was part of a conspiracy to discredit the reporting of an actual conspiracy that was later proven to be true.
Putting lobbyists in charge of federal agencies is a bipartisan tradition. Sometimes it works out nicely. Being a lobbyist is a job, not a cult membership. Some experts are happy to work for whoever happens to be paying their salary.
I really liked the people Trump put in charge of federal agencies, particularly Scott Pruitt (who should have kept his job) and Betsy DeVos. Ben Carson was good. Rick Perry was harmless fun. Herman Cain was a particularly excellent appointment for the Federal Reserve Board, but was blocked by the evils of DC insiders. He had already been chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, so he was unquestionably well-qualified for the job.
According to Forbes, Trump got rid of 2.5 regulations for every 1 that he added. That beats his promise of 2 for 1.
Fox News is pretty corrupt, yes. This is why many conservatives prefer OANN and others. We're well aware that Fox hated Trump from the very first republican primary debate. Fox then hired Donna Brazile! She slipped debate questions to Hillary before the debate with Bernie, then took a job running the DNC, and now she works for Fox. That alone makes Fox a clear enemy of conservatives. Fox also hired Paul Ryan after he spent two years as a traitor blocking Trump in congress. FYI, there was a change of control at Fox some years ago, causing them to veer left.
I wouldn't say so, but does it matter? As long as I'm getting the news I want, I'm happy. I don't care who funds it. I got to see video of Hunter Biden, and you didn't.
A few leftist journalists that are still respectable: Tim Pool, Glenn Greenwald, Andy Ngo. Unlike practically all journalists on the left, those ones are honest. You'll note that the honesty makes it difficult for them to maintain normal employment in the news industry. Oh, and the ctrl-left attacks that honesty by claiming that those 3 leftists are conservative or alt-right. Those 3 journalists refused to color within the lines, so they get slandered. Ngo even lost the Wikipedia battle. Tim Pool's visit to Sweden is worth watching. People are clearly afraid to openly speak their mind.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Thursday April 01 2021, @02:25PM (3 children)
Fox News didn't change. The political parties did. Both Republicans and Democrats have been sliding to the right for 40 years. The fact that Republicans like yourself have lost faith in Fox News should tell you more about the movement you are part of than it does about Fox.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 01 2021, @05:52PM (2 children)
Rupert Murdoch left his post as CEO of 21st Century Fox in 2015, letting his leftist sons Lachlan Murdoch and James Murdoch take control.
Roger Ailes got kicked out in July 2016.
So yes, Fox did change, due to a change in management at the top. Even a neutral set of executives would quickly turn Fox far-left, because Fox employees are journalists and actors that mostly work in New York. Imagine trying to find conservative/right/Trump supporting journalists and actors in New York. Without an intense active effort to find them, all employees will be leftist. There are maybe 2 decent people on Fox now, running wildly popular news commentary interview shows: Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity. The rest of the organization wants them gone, but it's not so easy to fire the moneymakers.
It's perfectly reasonable to say that both Republicans and Democrats have been sliding to the left for 40 years. Remember that Trump was the first president to accept gay marriage during the initial campaign for office. Even in her years as Secretary of State, Hillary rejected it.
Studies of the matter however, have shown that the left is moving rapidly further left, while the right isn't moving much. Look, we have something like a quarter of the country expressing positive views on socialism. Socialism! That simply wasn't acceptable 40 years ago, and now it is mainstream.
I suppose I am a republican, grrrr. I have never voted democrat, but I did vote 3rd party twice, once for Perot and once for a candidate listed as "tea party". I hate most republicans, but I hate the democrats more. I used to carefully evaluate candidates, sort of hoping that I could find a democrat worthy of my vote. I really didn't want to be a party-line voter. Every time I looked, I found the democrat to be worse. I've given up looking, partly because I never found a tolerable democrat in 25 years and partly because even an otherwise-tolerable one would tip the balance of power toward evil. I can't support having my country ruined.
Oh, and to address your other comment which relates to that:
Despite leftist media fearmongering, there are no neo-nazis in the USA. Well, not really. (in a country of 332,410,303 people we can find everything)
I never said that anybody would destroy America in such a time. I said that our civilization is doomed. We're in a long slide. Suppose the big failure, whatever it might be, was going to happen in the year 2051. Trump might have delayed that to 2055 with his 4 years of good government. The typical republican causes damage that will destroy the USA, and the typical democrat causes several times as much damage. Trump undid a bit of damage, but outraged haters caused plenty of damage while he was fighting to fix it. The USA is clearly doomed, but we probably have decades remaining. With a bit of luck, the USA might last most of a century. The direction is clear though. People are losing the values that built this nation, and they are being replaced by people who never held those values. Nations are not just land and physical infrastructure. The culture matters. You can't transplant millions upon millions of people to the USA and expect the USA to remain a superior place to live. The USA does not have magic dirt that cures foreigners of horrible culture when they set foot upon the land.
China is... difficult. Access to China, as a market and for news gathering, is conditional upon playing nice with China. This warps corporate behavior (including media corporations) toward being pro-China. The fact that people with obvious ties to China are allowed to work in sensitive security positions at Google/Facebook/Apple/Microsoft/Amazon is absurd. We're such a naive country. We even have a law that prohibits discrimination by national origin for anybody permitted to work in the USA. Chinese citizens can come to the USA, get greencards, and work with sensitive data. Corporations are prohibited from discriminating against those Chinese citizens. It's a spying dream come true for China. As a country, we are incredibly stupid on the matter of security. It's simply hard for me to believe the level of stupidity here.
Then we elected a person who was collecting millions of dollars in bribes from China, but they called it an "investment" and left Joe's shares in the care of Hunter so that Joe's name wouldn't show up on the legal records: https://nypost.com/2020/12/16/best-wishes-from-the-entire-biden-family-hunter-emailed-in-10m-chinese-request/ [nypost.com]
Climate change is inevitable, and we'll do fine. Maybe you can grow some kiwis or mangoes. Alaska is much larger than Hawaii. The one thing that would be a huge mistake would be to halt our economy in a futile attempt to save the world. That just makes fossil fuels cheaper for China and the cargo ships, giving China an even bigger advantage. We'll need a working economy if we decide to build seawalls.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Monday April 05 2021, @04:10PM (1 child)
It's been a few days, and I never responded to this, so on the off chance you're still watching I'd like to cap off the conversation.
It's been pleasant talking to you. Granted, I've ignored some pretty base stuff you've said, but I know enough about conservatives to know those words and those memes are kind of handed down to you. It's hard to avoid being influenced by people who have a vested interest in making it hard to talk to the opposition.
But compared to what I expect out of conservatives on the internet, I'd say I'm pleased you haven't been a delicate snowflake. When I say something you disagree with, you come back with as solid of information you can. You don't take offense, you don't react emotionally. I like that, and I think it's remarkably lacking in the conservative movement these days.
I say that fully expecting you to find it ironic that a leftist is complaining about conservatives being snowflakes. But it's true. From my perspective, conservatives, especially white conservatives, tend to turn into whiny crybabies when they are told they are wrong. Then, because they're not allowed to be whiny crybabies, the situation gets tense as those raw emotions are converted to anger and violence.
I like that you seem to have more self-control than that. But I fear that your choice of media personalities will inevitably degrade that cool-headedness.
You may like Tucker Carlson, but do you think he's actually good for you? We're talking about a wealthy New Yorker here. He may project this image that he's just like you, he may lower himself to seem to share your struggles, but he is just as much a part of the powerful establishment as Mitch McConnell, as Nancy Pelosi, as George Soros, as the Koch family. They may spit fire at each other, but they are many heads of the same beast.
You have mentioned that your wife is "more catholic than the pope". I hope you will consider joining her sometime. I think it's important to put your faith not in small, corruptible, flawed human beings with shifting motives, but in something bigger, something incorruptible, something emblematic and pure.
The worst thing I think someone can do is place their faith in human institutions. I may like the work of the EFF, the SPLC, the ACLU, but I take what they do and say with a grain of salt. I do the same with my media personalities. It's why I don't pay any attention to MSNBC. Yes, I like what they have to say. But does it make me a more informed and thoughtful person? No, no it doesn't. Similarly, I don't think seeking out the hardest-right news sources makes you more informed or thoughtful person.
I'll be continuing to look out for news sources that don't just speak to the issues I care about, but speak to them in ways that educate me and improve me. I'd like to share them with you if I can find them, but I don't have any way to reach you.
If you find any news sources however that you think would educate me and improve me, I would ask you to send me an email. Just add "@gmail.com" to my username. I won't promise to start reading them, but I will promise to take a look. I'm always looking to broaden my perspectives.
I hope that your days will be filled with joy, truly. Peace be with you.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 06 2021, @04:52AM
The prime example of this is the bigoted slurs that the left uses to dehumanize the right. Any kind of underhanded action is acceptable once you have determined that your opponent is nazi, fascist, racist, kkk, deplorable, a Russian bot, or something like that. The hate and dehumanization going back the other direction is much milder; the right tends to see the left as clueless well-intentioned fools leading us to disaster. The worst is probably NPC, which is uncommon. That's nothing compared to those things the left uses. You even used "neo-nazis" above.
For both left and right, most people aren't thinking. They use emotions. They are essentially cheering for sports teams. They want to fit in with a particular crowd of peers. On the left there is real fear of being found to be a heretic, because heterodox beliefs are punished viciously by the left. In any case, on most subjects most people don't really think. You won't notice the stupid emotional reactions on your own side because you don't have reason to argue with your own side... at least until you dare express a heterodox thought.
Trump was a wealthy New Yorker, and he was really good for me. :-) My viewing of Tucker Carlson is limited to video clips that people refer me to; I keep TV out of my house.
I strongly suspect that Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi are heads of the same beast. The hostility between them appears to be kayfabe. I blame Mitch McConnell for Herman Cain being kept off the federal reserve. I think Mitch McConnell was the person who really got to pick the Trump appointees.
George Soros is the personification of evil. He's like a comic book villain, with his superpower being that he just won't die. In an interview he revealed that the best time in his life was had when he was helping the nazis round up Jews in his native Hungary. More recently he has enjoyed funding a huge migration from Africa to Europe in order to destabilize western civilization. I think he just likes to cause chaos and misery. He must get some sort of thrill from doing that.
The Koch situation isn't so deliberately evil. They are just big-business libertarian. (one of the 3 main chunks of the republican party, along with pro-America and protestant) Half the time I like what the Koch family does, and half of the time I hate it.
I tried. (hence married to her) I badly wanted to believe, but it wouldn't stick. My mind can't take that. I like most of the values very much. Exceptions: some of the Jesuit stuff veers into socialism a bit, and I can't help but notice that abortion preferentially kills babies of leftist mothers, and Catholics are often weak on border enforcement. Thankfully the Catholic church isn't hostile to evolution, because that would have created a big conflict over educating children.
EFF hasn't been supportive of Richard Stallman. They denounced his return to the FSF board. If I can support Richard Stallman, an admitted communist, the EFF surely ought to. It's shameful that they've joined the cancel culture mob against him.
SPLC turned evil long ago. Internally, they themselves are racist. They meet their own definition of a hate group. They defame organizations that merely promote traditional Christian behavior, lumping Christians in with the KKK. Fortunately they've been getting sued over it. Mostly they settle the suits, costing them money but avoiding more serious damage to the scam.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/08/17/southern-poverty-law-center-hate-groups-scam-column/2022301001/ [usatoday.com]
https://thenewamerican.com/splc-sued-again-for-defamation/ [thenewamerican.com]
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tyler-o-neil/2019/09/19/groundbreaking-4-8m-lawsuit-threatens-to-unearth-splcs-secrets-n68990 [pjmedia.com]
ACLU seems to have taken a turn for the worse. They used to defend everybody, without political bias, but that changed a few years ago. They also don't count properly: 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10... (skipping the 2nd amendment)
Perhaps I will reach out. I need to make a new email account for other reasons too, I think.
Those "hardest-right news sources" are necessary for being more informed and thoughtful. Look, I've been known to read leftist stuff. I don't refuse to read Huffington Post, Slate, Vox, The Root, and The Atlantic. They need to be balanced with Breitbart and Alex Jones. If you only have time for one thing, OANN is a reliable source in the middle. Some people can get it on cable, there is a phone app for it, and the web site is decent.
(Score: 2, Flamebait) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday March 28 2021, @01:09AM (7 children)
Why is it your kind is always too cowardly to post what you really mean ("black people are inherently criminal and violent!") and under a registered account? If you are truly telling the truth, or at least think you are, you should have nothing to fear from 1) saying it explicitly and in simple terms and 2) saying it under an account, which will also get your posts started higher and more likely to be seen by the general readership.
We can argue nature vs. nurture all day but that misses a significant point: the two interact over the course of a lifetime. Nature (DNA, and to a lesser extent epigenetic imprinting) is not a 3D-printer recipe for "how to make a human." At most we can say "the presence of these alleles in these combinations raises the risk of X behavior by Y1 to Y2 percent given Z environmental variables."
In simple English, you can make criminal behavior less likely to trigger even in someone you'd genetically consider a high risk by NOT PUTTING THEM IN AN ENVIRONMENT WHERE THEY'RE EXPOSED TO CRIME AND WHERE CRIME IS ANYWHERE FROM NECESSARY TO REWARDING.
And remember again that "crime" is a legal definition more than a moral one. Ideally, legal and moral would line up, but it never has been and likely never will be the case. The emergent interactions of everything from poverty to unjust laws to frankly barbaric law enforcement with high-risk genotypes and epigenomes leads to crime, yes...and of the things on that list, *peoples' [epi]genetic makeup is the one we can do least about.*
If you really gave a shit about people and crime, instead of just wanting to drop the N-bomb over and over again without actually saying it, you'd be all for figuring out how to perform harm reduction. But you don't, it's clear as day you don't, and the only reason I spent so long typing this out is for the fence-sitters who might step in your bullshit and decide they like the smell if not taught otherwise.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1, Touché) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday March 28 2021, @01:25AM (4 children)
Him: *Says something dumb about all humanity. Completely and utterly not relating to race in any way.*
You: Das racis!
Me: *facepalm*
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 28 2021, @02:36PM
> Him: *Says something dumb about all humanity.
bellum omnium contra omnes [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 29 2021, @05:12AM (2 children)
Does buzzy secretly agree with such *subtle* racism, or is he as dumb as we always thought?
(Score: 1) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday March 29 2021, @05:02PM (1 child)
If you say something about everyone, you're by definition not saying it about anyone in particular. Thus, logically impossible it's racist.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 31 2021, @01:44AM
Logic befalls the new wokes, they don't operate with logic.
Instead the new wokes operate in a world where anything they disagree with, or anything they don't like, is painted as "racist" because doing so has worked well to this point to shutdown any debate or counter argument, protecting their delicate sensitive brains from having to consider the possibility that they just might be wrong.
This is what you get when you raise a whole generation of children under the mindset that "everyone gets a participation trophy, and there were no winners in the big game". A bunch of fragile snowflakes that can't comprehend that the real world is a harsh master that cares not a bit about you, and that you only get what you make for yourself out of it. Instead they've been so protected and coddled by mommy and daddy all their lives that now that they are, supposedly, out on their own, they can't handle the truth.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 28 2021, @02:04PM (1 child)
> "black people are inherently criminal and violent!"
I didn't say that - you did!
> And remember again that "crime" is a legal definition more than a moral one
Then enlighten us with your moral defenses for robbery, rape and homicide. I will raise you Ur-Nammu [wikipedia.org]
> perform harm reduction.
Reduce this! [twitter.com] If only there were some way... [medium.com]
(Score: 2) by Eratosthenes on Monday March 29 2021, @07:11AM
Actually, it is the Celts, the Irish, the Scots, the Welsh buggers! All natural born criminals, fit to be sent off to Van Daimen's Land. Only the Angles, of pure Teutonic stock, should rule in the Isles, which is why they all had to Brexit, which was much more of an Anglo-Saxit, to avoid having all those Slavs mucking about doing jobs no Brit would do. Strange how genetic tendencies to crime seem to map onto cultural prejudices, almost exactly.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 28 2021, @12:39PM (4 children)
A white collar criminal can steal millions and their chance of being killed by police is zero. A poor person - usually a black poor person, but other demographics too, suspected of shoplifting $20 in goods from a convenience store in a neighborhood where such thefts are common will be beaten or killed by police.
When the cops pound the Bernie Madoffs and the Goldman Sach executives of the world into a pulp, set dogs on them, and gun them down - then your point stands. When people who commit tax evasion to the tune of millions get pulled over in their limos and then shot in the head when they reach for their wallet, then your point stands. Until that time, cops are the enforcers of class warfare and theft is only a crime for poor people.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 28 2021, @02:09PM (2 children)
> A white collar criminal can steal millions and their chance of being killed by police is zero.
The "Jeffery Epstein killed himself" hypothesis. In complaining about the politicization of criminal justice you commit that very sin.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 29 2021, @07:24AM
Epstein was about to turn state's witness against other, even richer people. That is why he was silenced. The same rule applies: It is only a crime if it hurts (or inconveniences) someone richer than yourself.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 29 2021, @01:46PM
Epstein killed himself after having been finally held accountable for crimes that people knew about him committing over the course of years and chose not to do anything about.
(Score: 1) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday March 29 2021, @05:03PM
You think all or even most white people are also white collar? Put down the crack pipe.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday March 27 2021, @05:25PM (5 children)
Jay walking? You're worried about jaywalking?
It just blew my mind in 1975 when I was ticketed for jaywalking. It blows my mind to this day. I need to cross a street, I look both ways, nothing is coming, so I cross. I'm not going to walk ten feet, or ten yards, or 100 yards to some place that it is "legal" to cross the street. Screw the nanny state.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 27 2021, @05:35PM (1 child)
Your white privilege is showing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 29 2021, @07:15AM
Runaway, running away across a street, jaywalking, violating the law, in violation of his Oath, as a hot-bodied Seaman, to uphold the Constitution of the United states, and all state and municipal laws regarding crossing streets. Seems he always was a traitor, a rebel, and was just waiting for Donald Trump to really let it all out.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Saturday March 27 2021, @05:47PM
Once, I got a warning for jaywalking-- on a college campus. Had walked that route dozens of times with no fuss, and then one day, a cop stops me and gives me a warning.
I did not know that campus was the only one in the whole state where pedestrians did not have right-of-way. There'd been an accident the day before, and that's why the campus police were suddenly enforcing jaywalking laws. They soon fixed the rules on that campus to bring it into conformance with the rest of the state.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 28 2021, @02:32AM
This I can believe.
That's unpossible, you don't have one.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 29 2021, @01:50PM
Having nearly run over a jaywalker who was wearing all black in a dark patch of road and having been in the car when my mother nearly ran over one that decided to dart out in front of her car as the light turned green, yes, I am concerned with jaywalking. The city council is obsessed with that asinine vision zero bullshit and we've got speed limits being lowered and lanes of traffic being taken away from motorists because jaywalkers can't figure out how to not step into oncoming traffic. What's worse, is that it's mostly people of color doing it. The relatively few white people I see doing it, at least decide to do it at intersections against the crosswalk signal when traffic is stopped, which is mostly just a technicality because many of the lights won't give pedestrians a signal.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Saturday March 27 2021, @06:35PM (2 children)
They should certainly pay attention to theft, but as an offense, "jaywalking" has always been questionable.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 27 2021, @08:47PM
Agreed. The offence and charge should be 'obstructing or disrupting traffic'. No traffic? No offence. Step out in front of a moving vehicle? Law and physics say you lose. The only exception I'd allow is to ban pedestrian traffic on limited access roads, but those need to have pedestrian safe means of crossing them anyway.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 27 2021, @10:38PM
"Jaywalking" actually has an interesting history. Much of it is revealed the name itself, "walking like a jay." When you have so many fatal pedestrian accidents with the relatively new cars, you have to do something to blame it on the pedestrians.
(Score: 2) by number11 on Saturday March 27 2021, @07:32PM (1 child)
Those are laws we have, so that's "enforcing the laws". And if you're going to bitch about bicyclists, yeah there are bicyclists who do stupid things and should be ticketed. But there are far more motorists who exceed the speed limit, fail to come to a complete stop, or take a yellow light as a signal to stomp on the gas. On most highways 10 mph over the limit is common. Cops should try to "keep fataliities down", that's actually desirable. And most places have never enforced jaywalking laws unless the cop was looking for an excuse to hassle you.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 29 2021, @02:02PM
It's got nothing to do with safety around here. They lowered the speed limits to 25mph because that allowed them to reduce the fatality rate of crashes that they caused by incompetent engineering of the roads. We've got sheltered left turn lanes where drivers have only 2-3 car lengths to get out of when they appear out of nowhere. We've got these weird combinations of 3 and 4 way stops with one car length of space from the traffic coming in. We've got areas with poor lighting and people of color jaywalking wearing dark clothing and cannot be seen other than to notice the twinkling of the reflectors on the street.
This isn't being done to make people safe, the enforcement is incredibly selective and mostly aimed at going after people with more money without regard for how safe or unsafe what they're really doing is. Much of it wasn't even illegal until the last few years. Cars are generally safer than they were and rather than making the streets more efficient and safer, they're doing things like not fixing crosswalk signals. I remember one spot where you have to jaywalk across half the street in one direction in order to hit the button to cross the other street before jaywalking back where you came from to get the signal you triggered.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by crafoo on Saturday March 27 2021, @04:07PM (1 child)
100% agree. Police and prosecute violent crimes and property crimes. Stop prosecuting moral codes. We do not all subscribe to the same morals codes and shoving it down our throats is not the path to a peaceful, successful society. This applies to the Progressive Egalitarians and the Evangelicals alike.
(Score: 3, Funny) by legont on Sunday March 28 2021, @12:01PM
It's not so much moral codes, but economic interests.
Marijuana producers are already demanding protection from other similar unregulated drugs https://www.politico.com/news/2021/03/27/rise-of-delta-8-thc-478215 [politico.com]
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 27 2021, @08:29PM
i agree, but these cultural marxists will not simply stick to allowing the non-crimes, but will also allow the negroids of Baltimore to prey on people.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 28 2021, @04:15PM
You think there are no victims of prostitution and drugs than you are as stupid as day is long.
Also, they have LONG AGO stopped going after property crime in Baltimore. This is a city where passing 1 class in 3 years of high school puts your GPA in the top half of the class, and the corrupt school administrators will fire you if you try to do something about it. This is a city that has decades of "give people what they want" policies with predictable results.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 27 2021, @03:26PM (3 children)
Excess capacities are certain to be reallocated to arresting maskless people and busting businesses trying to stay open.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 27 2021, @04:49PM
(Score: 5, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 27 2021, @05:01PM (1 child)
We had 50 years of busting black kids for smoking a joint. Just 6 months of mask wearing and half the white population wants to reelect a fascist and nuke Canada. Chill the fuck out, crackers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 27 2021, @05:12PM
(Score: 3, Touché) by Corelli's A on Saturday March 27 2021, @03:37PM (6 children)
First, I favor the decision to back off heavy-handed enforcement of drug possession and prostitution matters. However, the information given in TFA does not prove the conclusion. Was the reduction of enforcement against those crimes the cause of the reduction (or lack of increase) of larger crimes? The pandemic is a giant confound.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Socrastotle on Saturday March 27 2021, @04:06PM (3 children)
Those my exact first thoughts as well. But the more I think about this, the more I kind of wish politicians would just stop even trying to claim causality. It seems like 90% of the time they invoke statistics, it's using them to lie. It's all so pretentious, fake, and stuffy.
"We stopped enforcing the law on petty crime. We've seen declines in rates of other crime at the same time. That's some cool shit, huh?"
Not sure if I'm proposing we embrace Idiocracy head on, but when "studies" are invariably geared towards showing a predetermined conclusion it makes the pseudo-scientific statistical posturing just so pointless. See, for instance, studies on rehabilitation vs punitive social contracts. And you'll be able to prove beyond a doubt that whatever you want to prove is obviously right.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Saturday March 27 2021, @10:02PM
It does go both ways.
Statistics about violent crime are routinely used to make political points. What is useful here is that this proves they didn't experience a leap in violent crime. But still, how can you tease that apart from the effects of the pandemic?
The answer is, you can't. Just like you can't tease it apart from the effects of inflation, of changing cultural trends, of political undercurrents, of all kinds of other outside influences. There are too many variables.
I guess the question really is, what do you want to do? Punish people? Or help people?
WWJD
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Sunday March 28 2021, @02:38AM (1 child)
My favourite: the more you test for covid, the more people die of it.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Eratosthenes on Monday March 29 2021, @07:19AM
But that is quite truth, our insightful c0lo! Unfortunately, the correlation does not operate equally in the opposite direction: not true that the less you test, the less people die. That is just magical crazy Trumpish Republican wishful Public Relations thinking. Though, calling it thinking rather than lying, is a stretch.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 27 2021, @04:51PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 27 2021, @09:07PM
How are they measuring "crimes"? Is it "someone called the police to report a crime" or is it "the police detained/arrested someone"? I can see where both of these categories would be reduced by a lack of enforcement of drug and prostitution crimes: cops realize their bosses want the crime rates down so they stop actively trying to find criminals, and people stop calling in because they know the cops won't do anything about it anyway. Besides, if the dealers and pimps can now operate openly, there will be even less incentive to take the risk of "snitching" on them.
After all, the easiest way to reduce crime numbers is to stop counting. Sure the numbers will then have no connection to what's happening, but the politicians look good and that's the important thing.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by VLM on Saturday March 27 2021, @03:47PM (11 children)
That's white culture / white privilege type of thing. A non white city should not be culturally appropriating an Anglo-Saxon criminal justice system for Anglo-Saxon norms of behavior. They should be sticking to their own identity and turning the place into Western Somalia complete with everything Somalia is famous for. The only reason Baltimore Harbor does not have a diverse and vibrant piracy industry, just like Somalia, is white supremacy.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 27 2021, @05:04PM (9 children)
Somalia is famous for its successful implementation of libertarian ideals.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Saturday March 27 2021, @06:06PM (8 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 28 2021, @12:30AM (2 children)
So then it's not funny. Why isn't Rand Paul on board with the messaging to Make America Like Somalia Again.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 28 2021, @12:50AM
(Ayn) Rand Paul is an opthamologist, not a libertarian, that is why.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday March 28 2021, @04:45AM
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Sunday March 28 2021, @04:26AM
Independent pirates are better than unionized pirates??
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 29 2021, @05:20AM (1 child)
There is the blathered reply likely part of a rhetorical agenda.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday March 29 2021, @06:15AM
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 29 2021, @02:15PM (1 child)
Only idiots like you think that this proves that libertarianism is viable. There've been numerous national governments that are terrible over the millennia, but that's hardly justification for further loosening the rules that are pushing us towards fascism. It's mostly the ignorant rubes that think that living in an anarchostate is a step in the right direction. And most of the problems we do have are the direct result of libertarian philosophy screwing things up. A lack of regulation is why it is that a handful of elites can own most things as there were regulations in place to limit it before the libertarians came in and decided that the invisible hand of the market can solve it efficiently. Apparently, the it was freedom and the solve was to remove as much as possible.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday April 10 2021, @09:27PM
Fascism isn't merely relatively strong businesses. It's supremacy of the state with the business world existing, but complete subordinate to that. And sorry, I'm not taking the blame for many decades of stupid decisions by people who are more concerned by businesses having a little power than having a functioning economy, or the fact that the US (and the rest of the developed world) has to compete with the entire world now.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday March 28 2021, @01:12AM
Somalia is a libertarian paradise. You should go there and be among people who think like you. Like, right now. Go on, git.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...