The Trump Presidency

Discussion in 'Politics' started by joepistole, Jan 17, 2017.

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  1. CptBork Valued Senior Member

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    As I already pointed out, you're referring to statistics based on arrest rates and not on reliable, unbiased estimates of actual underlying crime rates. I believe I previously referred you to a source which estimates comparable illegal drug possession rates between white and black people, with black people 3x more likely to be caught and convicted for it. And for the record, this is you justifying that people should be stopped and searched by the police more often if they're black, regardless of how they're dressed.

    No, it's granting each human being equal treatment as individuals judged purely on the merits of their own individual actions. We don't condemn German children just because their tribe recently massacred tens of millions in the name of greed and pride.

    You can't justify treating a black person like a "bad child" until they've actually done something bad. You're only a few steps away from justifying outright slavery or deprivation of civil rights, so I can't see why you don't just come out of the closet and go for the full 100 yard dash, no one will think any worse of you for it. In any case, refraining from keeping a bad child tied to a tree out in the backyard won't encourage bad behaviour in the good child, because they will see that sometimes the bad child gets caught when misbehaving, and the punishment they receive when they're caught is a sufficient deterrent for the other.

    You have my condolences for your tragic misfortune.

    No, because then you'd get caught acting like an idiot and searched under reasonable grounds accordingly, broken tail light notwithstanding.
     
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  3. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    Those are arrest records, not commission of crime records. They display one of the manifestations of racism, one of the ways white racism injures black people in the US. Also, via that manifestation, they provide strong evidence that the disproportionate abuse of American black people by their local police is not a product of a few bad apples.

    The disproportionate rate of arrest of black people by the police significantly contributes to the damage done to black people's lives by racist police and racist courts and racist legislatures and racist governance generally.

    Trump, like all Republican presidents since Nixon, has been actively encouraging and enabling racist policing and law enforcement. In his case the encouragement and enabling of racist abuse and expressions of racial bigotry by the police and other government employees characterizes his entire adult life and his father's as well - he didn't become a racist pos in order to run for President, but rather continued to be one. That's one reason he ran as a Republican - he was what the Republican voting base wanted, a staunch defender of white supremacy, and he knew it. As Trump himself said, those - the shitpile of bigots, fundies, and imbeciles that Nixon and then Reagan collected into the Republican base - are his people. He doesn't respect them, but he knows them.
     
    Last edited: Jul 15, 2020
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  5. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    It seems to me that the Know-Nothings of the nineteenth century had at least a shred of something that counted as pride.

    †​

    Sidebar: I was thinking, not long ago, about the old discussion about punching Nazis. The one who went down trying to bomb a hospital in Missouri is what set me to wondering. Because, you know, maybe not you or me, but did that guy ever have a friend, or a sibling, or someone who actually could have smacked him once upon a time, because I really do wonder what it would have taken for him to be alive today, and not have tried to bomb a hospital for a covid conspiracy theory.

    But, also, as the Doxxy Wars play out in my twitfeed, American Nazis and associated hardline rightists seem to be raging through a flatspin, a downward spiral; it's not just that nobody is fighting back on their behalves against some spectre of cancelation, but, rather, the nexus of wondering what they expect is going to happen when, open-faced, they fly darksun banners and salute sowilo, to the one, and the general thought of driving them underground, to the other. It starts to feel like Emilio in the bathtub movie with Demi, except, y'know, the super happy fun Nazi version, screaming as they weep and gnash and bawl, hellbound without a basket, bitterly determined to convince everyone else that at least they're enjoying the ride. Like a mgtow cooking thread, only incalculably more dangerous.

    There is a certain surrender beneath the cynicism. The flatspin froggers aren't quite the basket case Nazis without a basket, but the only functional difference really does range of application. Perhaps the Know-Nothings really do have some sense of pride to lose: When organized white supremacists and Nazis identify, they cannot evade the record of what they have done. Know-Nothings still want to evade. And while there is plenty of cowardice to wonder about, this seems more a question of nihil. That is, the one is derived from the other. Neither Nazi nor Know-Nothing hopes for societal redemption. Straight pride, traditionalist pride, white pride, white Ishtar ....

    (Actually, you wouldn't believe the rabbit hole I just fell down checking up on a "free speech"—i.e., fascist—organization out of an east-coast city, and, yeah, the antifa impersonator handing out anti-heterosexual propaganda turns out to be a mgtow with connections to various supremacist groups.)​

    The cynical surrender stands out, a giving over to antisociality. Nor can I describe the particular escalation or, rather, pathology of the flying leap into the Abyss. But the Know-Nothings haven't yet given over to nihilism, though what they actually want, aside from cheap satisfaction of petty infliction, remains a mystery. Then again, they're Know-Nothings, and thus don't really know what they want.

    †​

    One of the things about contemporary Know-Nothingism that really bugs me is the term, sealioning. The source of the term literally illustrates the problem, as a sea lion harasses a man who just wants to eat his breakfast despite having offended the sea lion. Sealioning does not describe behavior reflective of a sea lion, who would, instead, simply steal your breakfast and then smack you in the face with his ass on the way out. Also, sea lions are only problematic if we go out of our way to make them so. They're actually really easy to get along with.

    Oh, right.

    The actual functional problem is that the term sealioning allows a particular pretense of politeness that just doesn't work. There is no polite way to be a Nazi. Nor is there a polite way to be a white supremacist. There just isn't really any polite supremacism at all.

    And, sure, there are differences 'twixt Know-Nothings and American Nazis that go beyond stupid pretenses of courage, but they really do seem matters of degree. Know-Nothings inherently have nothing to say, thus seek to disrupt.

    Toward that end, I wonder if we could ever get an actual, active assertion from one or another of these knockoff white supremacists about when they actually think history begins.
     
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  7. CptBork Valued Senior Member

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    It's easy to get Nazis to fight with each other when they don't have a vulnerable and obvious common enemy to distract them. Like get them into an argument about whether Slavs and Irish people count as Aryans, or whether banks should be banned altogether and not just the Jewish ones, or whether baseball is better than football, Mormon or Presbyterian, Relativity (as stolen from some unnamed Aryan of course) vs. crackpot ether theory with no Jews involved etc. etc. Literally the only thing they have in common is that they're insecure white-skinned people who need identifiably different groups to look down on and blame for stealing their opportunities and women.
     
  8. Quantum Quack Life's a tease... Valued Senior Member

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    "Science should not stand in the way of opening schools" - White House
     
  9. CptBork Valued Senior Member

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  10. Vociferous Valued Senior Member

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    Ah, more demonstrable ignorance from you. Those statistics don't come from arrests. They come from the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), which is a survey of victims of crime taken from "a nationally representative sample of about 240,000 interviews on criminal victimization, involving 160,000 unique persons in about 95,000 households". Now, I presume you're not actually trying to blame these victims for systemic racism. But are you trying to tell them they didn't know the race of their own assailants? Even when they report their assailant is of the same race? Why on earth would black victims lie to incriminate more blacks? Try using just a skosh of reason, instead of your ignorant lefty talking points.

    Drug possession is often a victimless crime, but again, evidence has shown that cracking down on smaller crimes does help fight worse, victimizing ones. You wanting to ignore these victims, by refusing to target policing to objectively worse communities, is callous, ignorant, and directly leads to orders of magnitude more black deaths than police ever do. I know if my chances of being killed by a white guy were that bad, I'd be happy to be profiled and occasionally inconvenienced in the hopes of making myself safer. Again, consistent if the circumstances were reversed and regardless of race. Whereas you seem intent on excusing black deaths, because they're black and you feel they need white people excusing them killing each other.
    Egregious, grotesque, absurd, crazy, ridiculous.

    These are a handful of the words that some local African American leaders are using to rebuke the Minneapolis City Council’s moves toward dismantling the Police Department, even as they demand an overhaul of law enforcement.
    https://www.startribune.com/some-mi...y-council-s-moves-to-defund-police/571594012/


    Protesters call for more policing amid rise in gun violence across NYC
    The Black Lives Matter movement is getting all the attention, but on the ground - in the neighborhoods plagued with gun violence, there are many who want more police officers on the streets - not less. They say yes to reform, and no to defunding police.

    After endless bloodshed, that message is now starting to break through - and some say City Hall isn't listening.

    "First of all, he's in La La Land, he's living in a fantasy world right now," said Community Activist Tony Herbert, "Today the gloves come off. To this mayor, and I'll say it again - what's happening in New York City, the blood is on your hands."

    Retired NYPD officer Cleveland Bannister said the inner-city communities want the police there.

    "But they want them there policing their communities like they police every other community. We have to get the anti-crime and the street-crime units back," Bannister said.
    https://abc7ny.com/shootings-nyc-black-lives-matter-police/6317066/

    But I guess you'd deny them the equal protection the police would provide any other neighborhood in similar straits, just like you want to deny victims identifying their assailants. Lots of denial and dismissal of black deaths involved in your skewed view of things. Again, substitute a little reason in lieu of your nakedly partisan bias.

    Yours is idealism that's privileged enough to ignore the unintended consequences (deaths) of what it advocates. No one, much less a cop, can trust/treat everyone equally, without any regard for statistics or past experience. In the case of cops, that's a sure way to get yourself killed. But go ahead, take a stroll through any US inner city late at night. Treat it just as you would your own or any other more gentrified neighborhood. Put your own safety where your mouth is, and wait to judge anyone in the inner city on anything but "the merits of their own individual actions". And I won't be expecting to hear from you again if you do.
    German children, in Germany, still aren't allowed a standing army, because the international community is not yet willing to ignore that they started two world wars. See how that works?

    Really? So you would make bad children slaves and deprive them of civil rights? That's on you. Don't project your own sick thoughts on others. Refusing to stop one child from harming another is criminally negligent, and doesn't require anything even approaching your child-hating straw man of "keeping a bad child tied to a tree". Letting the bad child get away with victimizing a good one will encourage the bad behavior in both, as the good one learns that might equals right. If there were sufficient deterrence you wouldn't have 13% of the population committing 52% of the murders.

    You need to pull your idealistic head out of the hole you've buried it in.

    Yeah, that's called probable cause, which you previously claimed couldn't lead to charges in Canada. You don't even seem to be clear about Canadian law, much less US law.
     
  11. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    Or beaten at random on the public streets, jailed despite innocence, refused credit and other normal banking services, and rendered unemployable by having been targeted for abuse by the police?

    btw: This is the link you originally claimed showed black people committing more crimes for no reason except that they were black: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/crime-in-the-u.s.-2013/tables/table-43
    It is an arrest record, not a crime record.
    No, it doesn't.

    It depends on how one "cracks down" - some ways of "cracking down" (i.e. abusing some people and wrecking their lives for stuff other people do all the time in relative safety) make worse crimes not only more prevalent and/or influential but harder to prevent or prosecute.
    That's a lesson Americans were supposed to have learned from Prohibition.

    Reagan's way of launching the "drug war", for example, not only disproportionately wrecked the lives of black people in the US, not only disproportionately wrecked the communities of black people in the US, but institutionalized and solidified violent racism in the police forces charged with carrying it out (a rehabilitation, in some cases, but influential regardless).

    That was not an accident, or coincidence, of course (Reagan, like Trump et al, campaigned on the promise of representing racial bigots and defending racism ) - but continuing:

    That in turn solidified the organizational structures of crime in black communities - it handed them the role of defending their communities against injustice and arbitrary violence, a role which should be played by the government by way of the police and courts, a role that lies at the foundation of legitimate government. That does not "help fight worse, victimizing" crime - even if the murder rate goes down as a result.

    And then of course there is the fact that the police themselves are committing crimes - victimizing ones - in the process of abusing the black people they have decided to focus on. Those don't show up in the victim surveys or arrest records - either one. ICE is probably the single largest committer of violent crimes in the US, but its crimes are not counted as such in any official record.
     
    Last edited: Jul 20, 2020
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  12. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    That's not the problem.

    The problem is that cops are treating people unequally because of their race, motivated by racial bigotry - the same factor that corrupted their "statistics" and biased their memories of "past experience" etc.

    The only "statistics" or "past experience" that could have informed the decision to spend eight minutes choking the handcuffed Floyd to death on a public street in broad daylight were those of having done similar things many times in the past without suffering any consequences.

    It wasn't "statistics" or "past experience" that motivated the decision to open fire on Philando Castile as he sat in the driver's seat of a car with a woman and a four year old child. His behavior when pulled over was by all accounts impeccable, his circumstances innocent, and the neighborhood a quiet and peaceful inner suburb of Saint Paul (one of the cities people sometimes refer to as "the biggest small town in America"). Even the kid in the back seat was well behaved - and luckily escaped physical injury from all the bullets flying around in the car.

    The people paying careful attention and showing due regard for experience and statistics are the ones pointing out the statistically obvious and experience verified fact that black people in the Twin Cities are being abused by a police force exhibiting significant racism. (As are red and brown people, of course, but no need to overkill the point).
     
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  13. Quantum Quack Life's a tease... Valued Senior Member

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    uhm... justifying systemic and indidvidual bigotry/racism again I see...
    Of course you can't see the point or how that impinges on justice. You condone prejudicial police actions instead of the right to be treated equally in the eyes of the law.
    and consider that to be a better path towards a better future for all.
    But of course you are correct in assessing the fear the police have.
    Sad really sad ....
    What you are describing is the police taking the law into their own hands and acting in an extrajudicial manner, a manner based on media, gossip, hearsay, and selective use of statistics but mostly fear of retaliation due to gross abuse of police power demonstrated in the past. A manner that automatically accuses all of a type to be guilty of crimes of an individual. A paranoia based approach where generalizing and profiling leads to ongoing injustice and the destruction of any future improvement.
    Most of the most dreadful crimes committed in the the USA are perpetrated by a certain racial type. Does that mean the same for them as it does for the racial type you imply?
     
    Last edited: Jul 21, 2020
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  14. (Q) Encephaloid Martini Valued Senior Member

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    This isn't even remotely true, you'll say anything that makes you look the fool.
     
  15. Vociferous Valued Senior Member

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    I'll bite. Which Democrats are advocating gun rights and religious freedom? Go ahead, list them.
     
  16. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    As is apparently most of the world at this time, I see Trump as a self interested liar and a fool and damn anyone or anything else.

    But let's get back to the nitty gritty....
    Before and during your elections, many accusations, claims, videos surfaced that showed Trump to be a chauvinistic womaniser pig...some of those videos had him remarking on where and when to grab an attractive woman.....yet he still got into power.
    Since being in power, he has obviously lied, many times, made silly outrageous comments, and claimed he may not necessarilly go along with the next election results....so how and why has he not been impeached, or just voted out?
    How will other extreme right red neck Americans take the next election results, if it [as it looks likely] go against them?
    Those facts and incidents are just off the top of my head, and barely touch the surface. His Modus operandi seems to be divide and conquer.
    Is there a fault in the American system?
     
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  17. Beer w/Straw Transcendental Ignorance! Valued Senior Member

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    Last edited: Jul 29, 2020
  18. (Q) Encephaloid Martini Valued Senior Member

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    Your conflating gun rights with gun violence. Many Dems own guns, some do not, but they all advocate the right to them. There are no Dems who don't advocate religious freedoms.
     
  19. Quantum Quack Life's a tease... Valued Senior Member

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    It's a strange argument when the right to live with out the fear of guns is relegated to being non-existent.
    Sure there may be a right to own a gun but there is also a right to live with out guns...
     
  20. Beer w/Straw Transcendental Ignorance! Valued Senior Member

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    This ain't exactly fitting but meh.



    There's already too many guns.
     
  21. sculptor Valued Senior Member

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    from the army
    (one hand holding the m14 and the other the penis)
    "This is my rifle, this is my gun, this one's for shooting and this one's for fun".
    Too many guns?
    considering that there are more women than men
    Is that accurate?
    .........................................
    meanwhile, TRump tweeted
    "With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???"
    .....................
    wow
    3 question marks
     
  22. Beer w/Straw Transcendental Ignorance! Valued Senior Member

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    I'm pretty dumb.

    So, if you can tell me what you meant in simpler, less cryptic words, it'd be cool.
     
  23. sculptor Valued Senior Member

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    An M14 is a gas operated select fire rifle which uses a 7.62x51mm full metal jacket nato round.
    Generally, a rifle has a rifled(grooved) barrel vs the smooth bore of a gun. The grooves are twisted down the length of the barrel to give the bullet some spin thereby making it more accurate.
     
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