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The Fourth of July

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Re: The Fourth of July

#161

Post by tathougies »

ncallaway wrote: post #142
tathougies wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No sorry, people setting up autonomous zones proclaiming Americanism has failed is hatred of country, not an attempt at reform.

Funny enough, I was part of the protests in Seattle that led up to the autonomous zones. Proclaiming Americanism failed to live up to its ideals isn't hatred. It's a simple factual statement that's painfully obvious. Harsh criticism is necessary to reform. You can't move towards that more perfect union if we don't open our eyes to the problems of the systems. If you reject all criticism out of hand as unpatriotic, th…

Signs saying 'now leaving the USA' are not saying america has failed to live up to its ideals. It's saying... we don't want to be part of America anymore. That's fine, I'm not knocking you, but this is just revisionism.

I don't reject criticism as unpatriotic. I was made aware of no-knock warrants from Ms Taylor's unfortunate death, and I am against them. I am in favor of most police reform.

I am not in favor of the riots, CHOP, knocking down statues, or continued protests drawing thousands of individuals during a time of pandemic.

Re: The Fourth of July

#162

Post by tathougies »

tptacek wrote: post #156
rayiner wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We cancelled the melting pot: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...

Where by "we" you appear to mean "The University of California" and by "cancel" you mean "didn't cancel". From the same article, in its update: Contrary to what has been reported, no one at the University of California is prohibited from making statements such as “America is a melting pot,”

> Contrary to what has been reported, no one at the University of California is prohibited from making statements such as “America is a melting pot,”

Simply being discouraged from saying something is scary enough. Look at the UCLA professor who didn't give his students extra time on the tests and received death threats. The silencing is deafening. Maybe you should try to hear it.

This is what I refer to: https://nypost.com/2020/06/10/ucla-suspends-professor-for-re...

Re: The Fourth of July

#163

Post by sdenton4 »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #150
yongjik wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Focusing on the "cancel culture" is, IMHO, putting the cart in front of the horse. It is a by-product of a society where a cop can murder an African American in broad daylight and (in most cases) suffer no consequences. If you can't trust the society to not murder you , why would you refrain from tearing down anything you don't like? When the society doesn't serve justice, people will implement "justice" with their o…

The probability for a black person of being killed by the police in the US is approximately 0.0005%. That's the probability of being killed (most commonly because you pulled a weapon on a cop), not the probability of being murdered, which is at least an order of magnitude lower than that. There shouldn't be anybody getting murdered by the police. It's totally unreasonable. But it is in actual fact extremely uncommon.

The police murders are the most visible, egregious, tip of the iceberg. All the rest is all too common.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Jim_Crow

Re: The Fourth of July

#164

Post by darawk »

cookie_monsta wrote: post #159
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The probability for a black person of being killed by the police in the US is approximately 0.0005%. That's the probability of being killed (most commonly because you pulled a weapon on a cop), not the probability of being murdered, which is at least an order of magnitude lower than that. There shouldn't be anybody getting murdered by the police. It's totally unreasonable. But it is in actual fact extremely uncommon.

It might be worth considering that murdered-on-tape-in-broad-daylight is at the extreme end of the spectrum of violence - both direct and indirect - that minorities experience throughout their lives. Otherwise you might end up with the belief that a black person's experience of the USA is only 0.0005% different to that of a white one's.

I think the point is that, though police violence is terrible and should absolutely be corrected, trying to summarize the United States with it is incredibly reductionist.

Re: The Fourth of July

#165

Post by AnthonyMouse »

geofft wrote: post #139
hintymad wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are, right? Every book I read says so, and I don’t see a reason to dispute the claim. Are you saying they are not?

Yes, they are (or at least I think they are). I think we have other policies today that are similar in effect - gerrymandered election districts and intentional poor placement / management of polling stations being the most obvious examples in my eyes. There's also stuff like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigford_v._Glickman .

> gerrymandered election districts

It's hard to call gerrymandering "racist" when there isn't inherently any right way to draw district lines and then you consider the implications of what the opponents of existing districts call the "wrong" way.

The way gerrymandering works is that you start off with a town with 1000 black Democrats, 1000 white Democrats and 2000 white Republicans, and you have to draw four districts of a thousand people each.

If you put a random sampling of voters into each district then you get four districts evenly split between the parties but which are all white-majority. If the Republicans gerrymander the districts then they make one district which is 100% Democrats so that it creates three safe seats for the Republicans. If the Democrats gerrymander the districts then they do the opposite.

But which seems better for black people to you? The random sampling which causes the black votes to be spread across enough districts that they don't have a majority anywhere, or the gerrymandering that puts them all together and allows them to elect a representative which by the numbers they should have one of?

> intentional poor placement / management of polling stations

Black voter turnout was the highest of any racial group in one of the last three Presidential elections and was the second highest in the other two, so this doesn't appear to be having a major impact.

Re: The Fourth of July

#166

Post by MagnumOpus »

rayiner wrote: post #107
vore wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even from just examining the present, it's hard to find much to like about how the US is handling a pandemic.

We have fewer Covid deaths per capita than four of the five biggest countries in the EU. Do you think people in France or Spain are “ashamed” of their country’s handling of the outbreak?

That is incorrect (Belgium is not one of the biggest EU countries nor is Sweden). But even if it were true, wouldn't you want to aspire to something greater than being 7th going on 6th in the world out of 200 countries in terms of deaths per capita?

This thread seems to have too many examples of effusivelt lauding the US for being marginally better than whichever repulsive place that is worst in the world at a particular metric - rather than trying to be the shining "city upon a hill" and taking up best practices.

Re: The Fourth of July

#167

Post by darawk »

geofft wrote: post #139
hintymad wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are, right? Every book I read says so, and I don’t see a reason to dispute the claim. Are you saying they are not?

Yes, they are (or at least I think they are). I think we have other policies today that are similar in effect - gerrymandered election districts and intentional poor placement / management of polling stations being the most obvious examples in my eyes. There's also stuff like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigford_v._Glickman .

Gerry-mandering is pretty race neutral, though. That isn't to say that districts are never carved along racial lines - they absolutely are. But plenty of districts are drawn to disenfranchise white voters, too.

Re: The Fourth of July

#168

Post by indigo945 »

pjungwir wrote: post #89
radley wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The defaced statue was a conservative media misunderstanding: We traced the photo back to the conservative website the Daily Wire, where “The Michael Knowles Show”... - https://www.factcheck.org/2020/06/statue-in-lincoln-memorial...

I don't know any Lincoln examples but here in Portland they have pulled down statues of Washington and Jefferson: - https://twitter.com/hungrybowtie/status/1273859657447006208 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4V29opdHt-M

Well, Jefferson owned hundreds of slaves and Washington raped his daughters, so there's that.

Re: The Fourth of July

#169

Post by vinay427 »

tathougies wrote: post #118
rayiner wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We cancelled the melting pot: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...

Yeah I'm familiar. Was told i was white by my history professor because I believed in american ideals. Academia is the source of the worst ideas

This seems like a rather extreme conclusion to draw from your anecdote. Academia is not a single entity, and it is far from "the" source of bad ideas.

Re: The Fourth of July

#170

Post by Godel_unicode »

flipactual wrote: post #158

This is a horrific example of perseverance porn These people were exploited which is terrible. That the nation that exploited them was still more desirable to them than their former home is also terrible. That all they got in return for being exploited was what they were initially promised but decades later is terrible Everything presented here is terrible

"Everything" is a bit uncharitable. There are people in that story who, when they found out about a historic wrong, did something about it. That's not terrible. There are people who are inspired by that act of doing the right thing, and have gone on to be partisans for righting similar wrongs. That's not terrible.

That it happened is terrible. Ignoring the good that was done so that we can wallow in the bad is also terrible.

More than one thing can be true.

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