I did not want to watch the debate.

I watched it.

I remembered why I did not want to watch the debate.

#blacklivesmatterbutonlywhenthey'rekilledbycops

A much bigger "white" privilege is not having to live in a neighborhood where you have to be afraid that the next nighttime walk is going to be your last.

Last edited by Overlord Morgus (09-28-2016 05:15:32 PM)

Black lives matter but only when they're killed by cops.

zevrem wrote:

Black lives matter but only when they're killed by cops.

Daytripper is asking what OM means.  Is this something you believe?  Something you perceive others as believing?...

Riri wrote:

I'll never know what it's like to be anything but white so I won't pretend to understand non-white issues. Even if I educated myself with every book on the planet I wouldn't completely get it. It would be like my male friends trying to completely understand what it's like to be a woman. You just can't.

I tend to agree with this, with the caveat that not being able to know each other completely doesn't excuse us from trying.  The lack of empathy that I perceive in some people who are hostile to Black Lives Matter often doesn't come from what they believe, but in how uninterested they are in seeing things from BLM advocates' point of view.  "Black Lives Matter" is a provocative slogan.  It exists because some people, people whose humanity is the same as mine, believe that others treat their lives as though they don't matter.  It is worth trying to understand the feelings and experiences that lead to that belief, even if I can't understand them completely because I haven't lived them.

However, I think white people agree with non-white people on these three things about the movement:

1. We all want unjust murders to stop.
2. We all want to be safe.
3. We all want to protest peacefully. You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.

This is insightful -- though I'd be careful about saying "white people agree with non-white people" about it.  There is this idea floating around that "BLM protesters vs. the police" is the same thing as "racial minorities vs. white people," which it's not.  There are African-Americans who disagree with BLM's message, and others who agree with BLM's message but disagree with their tactics.  There are white people who agree with BLM, or who are ambivalent about BLM but think that the police's behavior surrounding them is sickening.  I think I'd rather say that most people, regardless of their race or political ideology, think that the police should not murder anyone, that no one should murder the police, that everyone should be reasonably secure from crime, and that everyone should have the right to peacefully protest.  People do disagree about which of these goals are the most important, and how to achieve them.

My question is how are we going to accomplish all of this? Whatever we're doing it's not working so far. Thoughts?

It's an important question.  I wish I had better insight.  To me, it's such a complicated problem.  I think police departments absolutely need to be held more accountable when they murder someone who did little or nothing wrong -- indictments should not be the vanishingly rare events that they are -- and police officers need better training, need to be better able to discern when to pull a gun.  But that won't solve the problem, which goes much deeper than police shootings.  It's about systematically crappy treatment of black and brown people by the police, which happens because of a combination of implicit racism and the fact that some minority-majority neighborhoods actually are dangerous places that put police officers in a defensive frame of mind for good reasons.  But those neighborhoods are dangerous places because of history, because of institutional racism that goes way beyond the police.   I don't know how to solve this systematic mistreatment without solving racism.  I don't think violence is the answer -- I think it only makes things worse -- but wow, is that easy for me to say.

Anyone else?

zevrem wrote:

I guess he's poking fun at a perceived double standard with respect to people's attitudes towards black lives. When they're killed by other black people, that doesn't fit in with the idea that the white man system is the primary cause of the problems of African Americans, and so such incidents are ignored by the people who are so adamant about protecting black people when the killer of a black person happens to be a cop. It hurts efforts to mobilize black people into a unified anti-government force political pressure group.

Two thoughts:

a) Not all cops are white. Not even the ones who kill people. No one protesting police brutality is saying they are.

b) There's no evidence that anyone who is concerned with police brutality or systemic racism isn't also concerned with crimes perpetrated by nonwhite people, police or not-police.

And, I'll stand by that, unless you can actually show that there are a large number of people who only get upset over crimes when they're perpetrated by white police. Since providing evidence to the contrary is fairly easy.

"Nobody cares about black on black crime" is a dodge. It ignores that some of that is still police brutality. It ignores the facts. And, it's as reasonably applicable as saying that people shouldn't get mad about having bombs dropped on them, because well, the water is bad, too, "and nobody cares about the water, because it doesn't fit their bombs-hurt-people rhetoric."

zevrem wrote:

Point is, people never protest slayings by civilians, only by cops, even though such slayings are MUCH more common, because such incidents point to a pathology in the black community that liberals refuse to sincerely acknowledge.

Would you willingly walk alone through a public housing project at night? If not, why not? I'll bet you $5 it's not because of cops.

zevrem, I literally just posted a link to protests of civilian crime and yes, there are literally thousands of charities, gatherings, awareness nights, and other actions taken about civilian crime, regardless of race. The idea that there's never any stink about crime unless it's committed by white cops is absurd.

Your "pathology" doesn't exist. Just like your lack of attention on non-police, non-white crimes does not actually exist.

And, seeing as I grew up partly in housing and partly on reservations tougher than 80% of housing projects in America, and still have a lot of friends and cousins who live in public housing, that my brother and his kids lived in public housing as well, for a good stretch... yeah, I could walk through the projects. Because I might have a good shot of being able to ask the right people when and where to go to generally avoid trouble, the same as I would in affluent neighborhoods I couldn't walk through because private security would probably kick me out whether I belonged there or not.

People don't scare me because they can't afford exorbitant rent prices. Nor does the existence of poor people mean that cops are not, by and large, scary and over-indulged in career-related violence and brutality.

A lot of people think it's a race war, some other people don't. The question of who's right basically comes down to a numbers game.

As for the public housing project "bet," the explicit stipulation was that you'd be alone, and the implicit stipulation was that it would be a housing project, not your housing project. So you wouldn't have the network. And the trouble you can get into in a rich neighborhood just doesn't seem even remotely like the trouble you'd get into in a public housing project. You'd MAYBE get beaten up in a rich neighborhood, in public housing you could get SHOT.

And the protests against "civilian" crime are no where near as heated (or I suspect as populated) as the protests against police violence. The "generations of movies about crime" are no where near as acrimonious as the hate directed towards cops. When it comes to crime inside the "community" the narrative is that they should basically "talk it out" and that harsh sentencing should be eschewed in favor of "social programs." When it comes to police misconduct it's "no justice no peace." This isn't conjecture, the Slate article says

Despite high victimization rates, black Americans are consistently opposed to harsh punishments and greater incarceration. Instead, they support more education and job training.

A man who can not turn against himself is little more than a beast, something to be slaughtered out of fear, greed or contempt.

I get not wanting this to be a race war, but saying "fuck your 'ghetto bet'" is basically saying that you have no real counterpoint, it was a very simple litmus test that you dodged very clumsily.

And like I said, I'm not the one who decides if it's a race war, it's basically a choice made by the rioters. It's a numbers game, and I'm just one person.

You are demonizing races

Skip to 0:45.

"They’re not afraid anymore of us . . . They do anything they want to do now . . . You see a little white girl running down the street at 11 o’clock with her puppy, running by herself! In our community!" OMG WORSE THAN HITLER

She's probably not even a criminal, and yet she has this attitude. It's not hard to imagine that at least a significant minority of the rioters are worse than her.

I'm fortunate in that ~99% of the black people I've met were decent, non-threatening people, but almost all of them were at a boarding school or in college. None of that changes the fact that black homicide rates are 8 times higher than anyone else's, making their neighborhoods into something very close to DMZ's. Most of their victims are black, meaning their homicide rate is more their problem than mine, but I shouldn't have to be open to their self-inflicted misery, and I shouldn't have to walk on eggshells when expressing anxieties about crime and social decay. Not wanting to get mugged isn't "racist." Not wanting public housing to move into your neighborhood out of fear of a spike in crime isn't "racist." If those things are "racist," then the antonym of "racism" isn't "tolerance," it's "suicidal ideation."

Last edited by zevrem (09-29-2016 09:13:22 PM)

Who said anything about drugs? You keep veering off point.

As for whether or not black criminality is a matter of gestalt, drug policing, or biology, I could not care less. There is a strong correlation, and for matters of selection, correlation is almost all one needs.

Also, I keep trying to understand this:

Not wanting to be the victim of violent crime "because black people"?  Racist.

and I keep failing. But I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and make an honest attempt at turning this into something syntactically valid. Maybe...

Not wanting to be the victim of violent crime because of its association with black people? Racist.

Which, in spite of its newfound intelligibility, is still stupid beyond belief. I hope you're proud of yourself.

Last edited by zevrem (09-29-2016 11:27:55 PM)

So nice to see you still can't parse conversational diction when you don't want to.

If you can make sense of it for me then I am all ears.

zevrem wrote:

I shouldn't have to be open to their self-inflicted misery, and I shouldn't have to walk on eggshells when expressing anxieties about crime and social decay. Not wanting to get mugged isn't "racist." Not wanting public housing to move into your neighborhood out of fear of a spike in crime isn't "racist." If those things are "racist," then the antonym of "racism" isn't "tolerance," it's "suicidal ideation."

Zevrem, let me remind you that deliberately and extensively derailing threads and conversations with misinformation, hate speech, or unrelated but agitating tangents is against the forum rules. While generally overlooked, it is also generally not leading up towards "and this entire group of people are animals... something something... slaughter."

You have, in my experience, never participated in a thread without indulging in this kind of derailment. Actively and readily.

Trying to derail the definition of racism so that you can further demonize entire groups of people and avoid culpability in past statements, trying turn things back into a life or death struggle, especially in light of your "slaughter" and "race war" comments is more than just line-treading. It would be, in many situations, easily classified as hate speech, in and of itself, and a clear and present danger along the lines of shouting "Fire! Fire!" in a crowded room.

Alarmist rhetoric with conclusions of war and slaughter is, under many systems, both hate speech and abusive to the general populace.

Please engage fairly, and directly with other posters, their statements or links, without shifting the conversation or using hot button terminology to agitate past culpability.

We have rules about derailment, abuse, and hate speech. While laxly enforced, they are constantly open to mod and board interpretation, and exist to promote a general pleasant and engaging atmosphere. They don't exist in such loose form solely to allow you to shout "Fire!" or explain why black people are either the few you know or the millions of "beasts" you don't, but explicitly fear.

zevrem wrote:

Trying to derail the definition of racism so that you can further demonize entire groups of people and avoid culpability in past statements, trying turn things back into a life or death struggle, especially in light of your "slaughter" and "race war" comments is more than just line-treading. It would be, in many situations, easily classified as hate speech, in and of itself, and a clear and present danger along the lines of shouting "Fire! Fire!" in a crowded room.

Read my comments on "racism" more closely. I'm saying that accusing me of racism due solely to my fears of crime  was a means of derailing the definition of that term. "I'm not 'racist' for not wanting a public housing project to move into my neighborhood." etc.

No one accused you of racism solely for your fear of crime. You introduced that to avoid what I and others have said about your theories and accusations and your false propositions, these imaginary scenarios and false equivalencies you repeatedly fall back on.

You accused me of saying you were being racist solely because of your "fears of crime."

That's you derailing a conversation to avoid the consequences of what you said being called out. It's a habit with you and it is not in the spirit of this thread or IRG as a whole.

The Atlantic or whether clear and present danger is covered by specific laws in a specific country is immaterial to this thread, or to the mods of this board. I am not a US Government representative. I am not enforcing American law.

I won't impinge on the rights accorded you by your local law, either. But, when they don't apply here... they don't apply here.

I don't like the black lives matter slogan. Not because it's it's false, but because I feel it's so obnoxiously self-evidently true.

What needs to be addressed is police actions. Not the concept that people think black lives don't matter. I'm fairly sure 95%+ of people agree that black lives do, in fact, matter. Probably including (most) of the officers who took part in fatal shootings, harassment, or other (il)legal (or at the very least immoral) actions. It (might) be a case of implicit bias, where people don't want to believe that they hold the values they do. I mean, I'm sure not many people want to believe they're racist, whether they are or not. And it's hard to parse the degree to which people are, one way or another, because there's probably some implicit bias going on with everyone of every ethnicity.

I don't think implicit bias is an inherently evil thing though. Although there's clearly degrees, and at some point that's hard to define I think it changes from being "part of who we are" to "part of a broad social problem". But I believe that we mainly just need to make sure this sort of implicit bias doesn't lead to unwarranted abuse or fatalities. (And, of course, people who're overtly racist need to be screened and dealt with, but I find it impossible to believe that's a majority or even a large minority of people). In other words, I strongly believe we should be arguing that "police actions matter", not that "black lives matter". Saying that police actions matter might be just as obviously true, but that's where the accountability needs to start being placed more firmly. And, while blacks certainly disproportionately suffer, I don't think they're the exclusive victims of police brutality either. Police policy and actions need to be dealt with period, regardless of who the victim is.

It's like rape. Yeah, it's often women who are the victims. But men can be too. And it needs to be dealt with - seriously - either way when it does occur. The problem's not that women are getting raped (although that's certainly /a/ problem). The problem is that anyone's getting raped. It can't happen. And there need to be consequences.

But yeah. That's what (desperately) needs to get stopped. Not some claim that black lives matter. No one anywhere close to being remotely mainstream is arguing that they don't. So the whole thing screams straw man at me, and just irks me.
*****

In other news, Giulianni saying that Trump is a genius at creating wealth, and has brought life to more things more than a female candidate like Hillary ever could, outside of her e-mail scandal.
I laughed, and laughed, and laughed. .... until I realized he hadn't meant it as a joke.
Then I paused a minute, cried for the state of my country, and resumed laughing in short order. Good call Rudy.... because women never gave birth to anything.

I miss Sarah Palin. She was funny-awful (warning: statement of personal opinion there). Trump and friends are just.... awful. In so many ways.

Wow. Sigh. I don't even know.

Last edited by Valeli (10-03-2016 01:36:28 PM)