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Patterns of Death in the South Still Show the Outlines of Slavery

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Re: Patterns of Death in the South Still Show the Outlines of Slavery

#81

Post by occultist_throw »

dEnigma wrote: post #57
occultist_throw wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waitsec. So, because I didn't write a dissertation on this topic, nor did I write a longform article, it's invalid? Hardly. It's not hard to look up that google maps census dot map. And then go find prisons in Google Maps and find it on the census map. Might be pretty surprising what you see... then again, might not. Hint: https://demographics.virginia.edu/DotMap/ Turn overlays. Go to Indianapolis, then look to the W…

Insulting the community won't help against the downvotes. The healthy path is to just ignore the votes and freely discuss your opinions, whether they resonate with other people or not. By that I don't mean "ignore other people", only their effect on your comment score/karma. You should listen to their arguments nonetheless.

> Insulting the community won't help against the downvotes. The healthy path is to just ignore the votes and freely discuss your opinions, whether they resonate with other people or not.

That's the problem with "Downvotes" in the way they're done here. Legitimate discourse, albeit unpopular will attract downvotes. And so will unrelated offtopic garbage (Spam, 1 word replies, crazy rantings ala TempleOS).

The end result to both "unpopular" material and "spam" is the same - hidden. Simply put, -1s = losing right to talk and be seen. So yeah, I am pretty disappointed in the community, and I have a justifiable right to be.

Re: Patterns of Death in the South Still Show the Outlines of Slavery

#82

Post by ashark »

Tyrek wrote: post #72
ashark wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can confirm that from the perspective of a Midwesterner who grew up largely in smaller towns, one grows up feeling that moving to a major coastal city is nearly impossible. Even as a software developer I have to remind myself that no, really, I could move to one of those places. It's a hard mindset to get out of, and for most, it's also kind of true . Smaller non-coastal cities retain, in the mind of the typical rura…

While I am sympathetic to the cultural forces at play, it seems that most of the anti-city sentiment is from a position of...pickiness? you might call it? If it was literally a choice between starving and moving to a City, I suspect the choice would be much easier. But for most of rural America, the choice is between the misery that you know, and the alien world of 'the city'.

The City seems incredibly risky to rural folks, economically speaking. The housing prices seem absolutely insane, and earning enough money to cover it seems impossible.

So maybe you land a job first, then move, and it turns out you can (barely) scrape by renting in some place with a roommate in an area where you hear at least one gunshot a week. Great. I mean you heard at least one gunshot a week back home, right? Granted the targets were of another sort, but hey, different strokes. Then something goes wrong, and you don't know anyone (your family and friends are all back in the trailer parks and falling-down family farmhouses back where you came from), and you're a couple weeks away from being out on your ass and trying to decide between spending your remaining time looking for a job so you can keep scraping by, and digging in the couch cushions for money to buy a sandwich and a bus ticket home.

That's what low-(valued)-skill rural folks expect from an attempt to move to the city—and it's not the high-(valued)-skill ones who need help. Renting a crappy trailer for a couple hundred a month or living in cousin Eddie's broken RV parked in his A-frame's front yard next to his spare-parts truck, collecting food stamps, and working part-time when you can doesn't seem so bad by comparison.

Re: Patterns of Death in the South Still Show the Outlines of Slavery

#83

Post by ajross »

tomjen3 wrote: post #41
ajross wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The question is, how do we get rural economic development going again? That's like asking how to revive the blacksmith industry in the aftermath of the industrial revolution. These regions aren't declining because of inattention, they're declining because their native industries are shrinking. Surely there are regulatory treatments that can be applied here to relieve some of the suffering, but "return to the good o…

I might agree with you if gp had said how to get the coal industries going again - but is there really _nothing_ which can usefully be made in community with lots of space and (compared to the bay area) insanely cheap housing?

It's cheap housing in the sense of price seen by the consumer due to scarcity. Housing in rural areas actually costs significantly more to produce and maintain in real economic terms.

The solution to high San Francisco housing costs is high density development in exurbs and other cities, and very much not "let's all move to Nebraska".

Re: Patterns of Death in the South Still Show the Outlines of Slavery

#84

Post by mod »

TheAdamAndChe wrote: post #2

Almost the only people doing well in rural America are those with generational wealth. I know plenty of people from my small hometown that have been doing okay with their farms. One of them has a gravel business. Those without such luck are either moving to a bigger city or experiencing a declining quality of life, and they're coping with drugs, meth mostly. I can't imagine what that would be like in areas that haven…

I wonder, how "well" did previous generations do?

The bar has been moved so far, so quickly, that it's hard (for me) to say. I would venture that folks in rural America are living better than they ever have. I see truly destitute people, too...I live in one of the poorer counties of one of the poorer states in the USA. But people aren't starving, and depending how far back you go, that was a reality people would have to face.

Point is, we're now comparing rural incomes to city incomes, and thinking "well the farmer is busting his ass with a lot of risk to make 45k, and the baby-faced web dev in the city can make 90k twiddling his fingers." Sure, but they're both...okay. I'm not sure we have to make them equal. I'm not sure we can.

Re: Patterns of Death in the South Still Show the Outlines of Slavery

#85

Post by BearGoesChirp »

occultist_throw wrote: post #18

Ive always taken an unpopular view about slavery. "We never quit doing slavery." It is true the Constitution was amended after the Civil war to include banning of slavery in most circumstances. However, slavery is explicitly still allowed as a "punishment for a crime". Instead of "Black = Slave", it's "Black = criminal , criminal = slave". After all, it only takes only 6-12 angry white men to find you guilty. I would…

>Instead of "Black = Slave", it's "Black = criminal , criminal = slave".

Except data shows this isn't the case. A closer match is male = criminal, criminal = slave. The legal system is far harsher on a white male than a black female. And even closer is poor = criminal, criminal = slave.

The legal system discriminates first on SES, then on gender, and finally on race. So what reasoning is behind there being a disproportionate focus on race over SES and gender?

Re: Patterns of Death in the South Still Show the Outlines of Slavery

#86

Post by grzm »

occultist_throw wrote: post #81
dEnigma wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Insulting the community won't help against the downvotes. The healthy path is to just ignore the votes and freely discuss your opinions, whether they resonate with other people or not. By that I don't mean "ignore other people", only their effect on your comment score/karma. You should listen to their arguments nonetheless.

> Insulting the community won't help against the downvotes. The healthy path is to just ignore the votes and freely discuss your opinions, whether they resonate with other people or not. That's the problem with "Downvotes" in the way they're done here. Legitimate discourse, albeit unpopular will attract downvotes. And so will unrelated offtopic garbage (Spam, 1 word replies, crazy rantings ala TempleOS). The end resu…

I think there's space on HN for what one might consider unpopular views when they're presented in a more diplomatic way. Starting off with a chip on one's shoulder ("I've always taken an unpopular view about slavery") isn't a great way to start out. If you're looking for productive discussion, I can think of better ways to go about it. If you think something you want to share might be unpopular, why not take some effort to couch it in terms you think might have a better chance of being listened to?

The HN community is what it is. It has certain norms and behaviors. By participating, you're part of it. If it doesn't operate in a way you prefer and you'd like to continue to contribute, be the change you want. Behave in the ways you want. I encourage you to do so! That said, if you want to be confrontational and argumentative rather than looking for points of agreement and teasing out more nuanced differences, I think you're likely to continue to see pushback on HN. In some sense, such behavior can be as corrosive as spam.

Re: Patterns of Death in the South Still Show the Outlines of Slavery

#87

Post by mikeash »

aaron-lebo wrote: post #53
mikeash wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Constitution explicitly permits slavery for criminals, and many prisons take advantage of this. How is that simplistic?

It is simplistic exactly because that is not equivalent to slavery circa 1860 which is what is suggested through "we never quit doing slavery".

Slavery has changed but it hasn't ended. The post discusses the changes, so again, what's simplistic?

Re: Patterns of Death in the South Still Show the Outlines of Slavery

#88

Post by occultist_throw »

RingwormOne wrote: post #50
ffxtian wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However I disagree that slavery still exists in the form of incarceration. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labor_in_the_United_Stat...

Yes, making a criminal - who has committed a crime, been convicted and sentenced to jail time - do work is not equivalent - morally or otherwise - to racialized slavery.

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

--Lee Atwater, 54th Chairman of the Republican National Committee (Source: https://www.thenation.com/article/exclusive-lee-atwaters-inf...)

"You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities," Ehrlichman said. "We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

-- John Ehrlichman, Nixon domestic policy chief (Source: http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-richa...)

What if the policies can be shown that a distinct criminalization was made to expressly target a specific demographic? Or what if we can show that health and infant mortality trends mirrors that of the 18060's map of slave county census? We have more than a smoking gun - we have the blood spatter and the bullet, and the gun in the person's hands still smoking. 150 years later, and it's still going strong.

BTW, how's that water upgrade going on in Flint, MI? I'll give you a hint: they're a bunch of black people who live there. It's already out of the news.

Re: Patterns of Death in the South Still Show the Outlines of Slavery

#89

Post by BearGoesChirp »

chimeracoder wrote: post #33
TheAdamAndChe wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's being downvoted because it's pushing a false narrative that it's only black people that are being incarcerated, and they're being incarcerated explicitly for cheap labor. There are major issues with regards to race in America, but real life is more nuanced than "it's happening because racism."

> It's being downvoted because it's pushing a false narrative that it's only black people that are being incarcerated, Nobody is saying "only" black people are being incarcerated. They're saying that incarceration is used as a tool to perpetuate many of the same outcomes as slavery. Which is trivially verifiable, if you look at the respective incarceration rates by race. > they're being incarcerated explicitly for ch…

>if you look at the respective incarceration rates by race.

Yet the theory breaks down once you look at a breakdown of race, gender, and SES.

Re: Patterns of Death in the South Still Show the Outlines of Slavery

#90

Post by Clubber »

KGIII wrote: post #69
macrael wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And before that it was the thesis of the book The New Jim Crow. Arguing that the modern incarceration system came into being as a system of control to replace the Jim Crow laws that arose as a system of control to replace slavery. The most 'aha' connection there was that a shocking percentage of black men have felony convictions of some sort or another, and we deny felons the right to vote in most states. Jim Crow in…

> we deny felons the right to vote in most states. Only while incarcerated. http://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/felon-v...

Depends on the state. I'm on one of the states in the "Restoration by Governor's Action or Court Action" category, and I can tell you thought it is possible, voting rates are rarely, if ever reinstated in my state.
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