It's a fact that more KKK members were Democrat than any other party. I wonder if our President knows this?

2/27/2012 11:30:04 AM

source?

[Edited on February 27, 2012 at 11:37 AM. Reason : as if it means anything anyway.... ]

2/27/2012 11:37:12 AM

its a well known fact. the democrats were the only party in the south. socialists and racists and statists. brilliant!

2/27/2012 11:39:18 AM

did you know that the year is 2012?

2/27/2012 11:40:53 AM

i said WERE

now there are hardly any democrats left in southern states, except blacks with "plantation" mentality

2/27/2012 11:41:36 AM

Both parties fully support policies that are implicitly racist. What's your point?

2/27/2012 11:50:46 AM

as if the democrats and republicans of way back then have anything to do with the same named party now.

this is fucking stupid.

trashbin this shit.

2/27/2012 11:54:26 AM

please explain what racist policies youre talking about

2/27/2012 12:10:24 PM

i know affirmative action but thats only democrats.

2/27/2012 12:11:44 PM

The whole justice system, pretty much. Prohibition. Most of our foreign policy is racist on some level; we could never do what we do to the middle east if it were a population of white Christians.

So-called progressives will have you believe that most of the racism out there originates from business owners, and that's why we needed the civil rights act. In reality, the vast majority of racism is perpetuated and carried out by federal, state, and local governments, with orders coming down from the federal government. None of the laws are explicitly racist, but the enforcement of the laws certainly is.

Reliance on the "savior" state to eliminate the discriminatory policies that it benefits from is naive and senseless. Reform will never come until it's forced by the people. That day may not come because the people have an appetite for this kind of thing. They want drug users in jail, they want Muslims eradicated. If these people were ever forced to actually see these injustices with their own eyes, and to see the ripple effect on surrounding communities, cultures, and societies, perhaps they'd rethink things. They're not forced to see these things because American media shields them from reality.

2/27/2012 12:26:43 PM

Quote :

"as if the democrats and republicans of way back then have anything to do with the same named party now. this is fucking stupid. trashbin this shitentire forum."

2/27/2012 1:19:33 PM

Looks like the soapbox has degenerated to just another polarized bitch fest. To think I used to consider this forum a source of insight and relevant news. It used to be just that not too long ago.

Thanks for ruining it folks.

2/27/2012 1:22:37 PM

You can't judge us by HOOPS MALONE alone.

2/27/2012 1:39:37 PM

Quote :

"its a well known fact. the democrats were the only party in the south. socialists and racists and statists. brilliant!"

One might say: "The South: region of racists"

2/27/2012 1:40:57 PM

Lock this nonsense

2/27/2012 1:48:47 PM

Quote :

"To think I used to consider this forum a source of insight and relevant news. "

Just read d357r0y3r's post.

2/27/2012 2:36:51 PM

Definitely. d357r0y3r's post is a fine example of the first person constraint on doxastic explanation.

2/27/2012 3:32:45 PM

Let's go through the claims in my post. Some are objectively true, others would be hard to prove in the real world because it would require that we have an entirely different set of circumstances. You're pulling the same old Str8foolish/McDanger laziness where you throw out accusations of a priori assumptions ("what, you think violence is wrong? We'll need some data to back that up!") rather than engage in a real discussion.

Quote :

"Prohibition [is an effectively racist institution]"

Loads and loads of data on this. Look at the racial breakdown of drug related crimes. Look at the number of people that go to jail for using crack compared to cocaine. Look at the sentence lengths of crack cocaine versus cocaine. I don't think I have to do the research for you.

Quote :

"Most of our foreign policy is racist on some level; we could never do what we do to the middle east if it were a population of white Christians."

Certainly, if you were to tally up all of the people killed by the U.S. military, you'd find that the vast majority were not white. Most of them have darker skin. Is my claim that the purpose of the wars is to kill non-white people? No. Do I think it's an easier sell to the American people to kill non-white, non-Christian, non-English speaking people? Absolutely.

There are many reasons why the U.S. picks the targets it does. No amount of data is going to give us a full answer on this if we don't consider the psychological and behavioral explanations for how and why large populations will condone and even cheer for mass murder/incarceration. My theory? Some combination of "out of sight, out of mind" and "they're not like us"/"they're subhuman". MSM does facilitate this form of thought control on behalf of the state. You don't see black guys getting pulled over and beaten on the news. You don't see Muslim children getting mutilated by drones on TV. These events are happening in the real world, though, and they get very little attention by the MSM.

To restate what I said in the post:

Quote :

"If these people were ever forced to actually see these injustices with their own eyes, and to see the ripple effect on surrounding communities, cultures, and societies, perhaps they'd rethink things."

Is there really any doubt that this is true? What if every American were forced to watch a full length video of a drug user being hauled off to jail, along with clips of their three children crying as SWAT kicks down the door and shoots their barking dog, with maybe some real prison rape thrown in? What if every American were forced to watch a clip of a toddler having the flesh burned from their face after one of Obama's drones "misfired"? Do you think it would affect their votes? Do you think more people would demand reform?

[Edited on February 27, 2012 at 4:29 PM. Reason : ]

2/27/2012 4:28:40 PM

How about this one

Quote :

"In reality, the vast majority of racism is perpetuated and carried out by federal, state, and local governments, with orders coming down from the federal government. None of the laws are explicitly racist, but the enforcement of the laws certainly is."

Just interested in how you quantitatively compared economic vs. legal discrimination and managed to find a single metric that encompasses both.

2/28/2012 11:11:22 AM

Severity seems like a good thing to compare. The government kills you or puts you in jail. The racist business owner throws away your resume or begrudgingly takes your money.

2/28/2012 11:15:17 AM

Oh so by "vast majority of racism" you mean "most severe consequences of racism"

2/28/2012 11:21:20 AM

Is today opposite day?

2/28/2012 11:25:45 AM

Given that the kind of racism you tend to focus on (institutional racism) is extremely difficult to identify or quantify, you're right, I shouldn't have said "the vast majority". We have concrete measures of how many people are sent to jail or killed by the state. We have no real measures, just studies, of how often someone is denied a job because they're black.

However, if we use "voter fraud" issue logic, the only economic discrimination that exists is that which is proven. In that case, the vast majority of racism is carried out by the state.

My point was that state policies are far more detrimental to minorities than racist hiring policies by business owners. If your resume gets tossed, you keep looking. You're not sentenced to poverty. If you get sent to jail for a few years because of drugs, your life is basically ruined, and your children grow up without a father and become the next victims in a cycle of state-imposed poverty. I'm comfortable in saying that the consequences of legal discrimination are much, much worse than the consequences of economic discrimination.

[Edited on February 28, 2012 at 11:41 AM. Reason : ]

2/28/2012 11:33:38 AM

Quote :

"We have no real measures, just studies, of how often someone is denied a job because they're black."

Quote :

" If your resume gets tossed, you keep looking. You're not sentenced to poverty."

You are if the racism is institutional and widespread, then yeah, you're going to have to invest considerably more time, money, and effort into finding work than the average person. That doesn't mean its impossible to rise above it, but it means you have to fight that many more effective constraints on your liberty and opportunity, and by simple odds more people are going to falter when faced with those constraints. Choice is meaningless if you have no good alternatives to choose from.

Institutional racism also occurs in the loans and housing market, herding minorities into poverty and into poverty-stricken neighborhoods, which thanks to our public school system means they necessarily go to shitty schools too.

How many black children would get into crime if our school system didn't derive funding from local property taxes, but instead were spread out statewide? How many black children would end up in a nicer school if his parents didn't have to choose between a low-income neighborhood and overpaying for a house whites would have gotten cheaper? How easily would cops be able to mass-arrest blacks if they weren't being effectively segregated into enclaves thanks to purely economic forces? How many cops would find themselves becoming racist if they weren't assigned beats in all-black, all-poor neighborhoods? How many other thousands of ways do the economic manifestations feed into the legal ones?

Anyway it's pretty obvious you came into this thread to rag on the government, not because you want black people to enjoy a better life. If you did, you wouldn't discard institutional racism because "we just have studies, not measures," you'd instead be concerned about those studies and what can be gleaned from them despite not being a comprehensive roster. You seem to treat the existence of institutional racism not as a threat to the effective liberty of blacks, but a pesky specter that liberals raise to try and demonize saintly business owners. At least, this is how it comes off in your post, which has the general tone of "Nevermind the institutional, it's inconvenient to consider and a liberal trick anyway, moving on to the REAL problem of GOVERNMENT." I might give you the benefit of a doubt on it, if you weren't...you.

You might say I'm the flipside of the coin, but I'm not. I want the drug war ended, racist cops beaten publicly in the streets, and a prison system that focuses on rehabilitation and not revenge-fantasy punishment. But, at the same time, I recognize that the justice system often just mops up the mess that institutional racism creates when it creates a class of second class citizens who are herded, both economically and geographically, into easily-targeted enclaves. Plus, that economic and geographic segregation feeds back into our culture and the short-sighted associations people draw that turn them into racists. It doesn't help that the for-profit media disproportionately portrays blacks as criminals and drug addicts. It's a feedback system, and it'd be very difficult for one (economic or legal) to exist without the other, so they generate each other if need be. The more blacks you imprison, the more they're regarded as criminal and discriminated against. The more discriminated against they are, the more often they're stuck in poverty where they can be most easily abused by the justice system. Both have to be struck at once.


edit: Put another way, assume there were no sentencing disparities, no racist cops, nothing that would affect black criminals any more than white criminals. You'd still have institutional racism that puts minorities into positions where crime enters the field of alternatives. Given that, the only way to not have disproportionate imprisonment would be if blacks exhibited extraordinary virtue as a race compared to whites in similar economic positions.

[Edited on February 28, 2012 at 12:14 PM. Reason : .]

2/28/2012 11:50:24 AM

Quote :

"Anyway it's pretty obvious you came into this thread to rag on the government, not because you want black people to enjoy a better life. If you did, you wouldn't discard institutional racism because "we just have studies, not measures," you'd instead be concerned about those studies and what can be gleaned from them despite not being a comprehensive roster. You seem to treat the existence of institutional racism not as a threat to the effective liberty of blacks, but a pesky specter that liberals raise to try and demonize saintly business owners. At least, this is how it comes off in your post, which has the general tone of "Nevermind the institutional, it's inconvenient to consider and a liberal trick anyway, moving on to the REAL problem of GOVERNMENT." I might give you the benefit of a doubt on it, if you weren't...you."

I'm not choosing to ignore institutional racism. It exists. I don't know how widespread it actually is, and neither do you.

It's hard to quantify how much these various factors influence each other. Prohibition certainly encourages poverty, which leads to a poor education, and can in fact lead to a culture that is at a comparative disadvantage. Institutional racism, though, is not something that can easily be dealt with. Prohibition can be ended. That's actually a possibility. Eliminating racist people is not a possibility. Those people are going to exist, they will be faced with subjective decisions, and they may let their racism influence those decisions. The trend seems to be moving towards less racial discrimination, though.

When we're talking about politics and racism, yeah, I focus on the government, because that's the topic. I don't see institutional racism as something that could possibly be handled effectively by the government, because it requires that we change people. On the other hand, the war on drugs could be ended quite easily.

[Edited on February 28, 2012 at 12:14 PM. Reason : ]

2/28/2012 12:13:48 PM

Quote :

"I'm not choosing to ignore institutional racism. It exists. I don't know how widespread it actually is, and neither do you."

Fine then, you don't ignore its existence, just the severity and you're committed to doing nothing to combat it.

Quote :

"Those people are going to exist, they will be faced with subjective decisions, and they may let their racism influence those decisions. The trend seems to be moving towards less racial discrimination, though."

There's a reason for that, and AA is likely part of it. It's been shown in many studies that simply being exposed to other races in the workplace, school or other similar settings tends to make people more tolerant and less likely to exhibit prejudice. This goes against the conventional wisdom from anti-CRA folks that, "If you force racists to hire blacks they'll just grow more resentful and thus more racist." Instead, most people tend to drop their prejudices once they interact with the object of their prejudice in a working or learning situation.

Quote :

"When we're talking about politics and racism, yeah, I focus on the government, because that's the topic. I don't see institutional racism as something that could possibly be handled effectively by the government, because it requires that we change people. On the other hand, the war on drugs could be ended quite easily."

As I said above (in an edit), you can eliminate all the legal discrepancies and we'd still see a prison population disparity due to the institutional racism placing blacks in poverty more often. I don't think blacks are especially saintly or anything, I'm personally sure that the (at least slim) majority of imprisoned blacks actually did commit crimes. As you say, it's not the laws that are directly racist (with the exception of drug sentencing disparities), but their enforcement. In other words, the legal system is nominally non-racist but effectively racist. Likewise, you could have totally race-neutral enforcement, thus having a nominally non-racist legal system, but the economic, institutional racism would result in a nonetheless effectively racist environment that disproportionately sends them to prison.


[Edited on February 28, 2012 at 12:23 PM. Reason : .]

2/28/2012 12:19:40 PM

hahahahah HOOPS

3/5/2012 2:33:36 AM