Donald Trump

Personally, I think sometimes all of you jump too quick to call something racist/bigoted. I mean, gay jew blackfacing is more blatant...although I admit the news title is shit.

Then again, civil rights fights have been fundamentally different here in my country, so I can't really tell how to classify something as racist as accurately (I hardly use the word, if you haven't figured out, I do use xenophobic a lot though).

To my understanding, some laws have fucked up a lot black people (like drug laws applied in a different way because of system biases, or something). Also, there is that slavery/segregation legacy that is quite hard to remove (with obvious effects). So some could argue that restricting felon voting is a way to (indirectly) disenfranchise black people.

Then again, wasn't something like that what Trump said on his speech the other day? (although context may be different, I'd be surprised if he is intelligent enough for this kind of subtlety).

You tell me.

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NeroNoah wrote:

You tell me.

You've researched our past and don't understand our present. That's how it tends to work with cultural issues; things only make history books when they're in the past, and most news in the US gets so much spin you can't take it quite literally.

My take on it is that old-school white racism has been marginalized (not eliminated) in the United States to such an extent that new-school, pro-minority racism is on roughly equal footing. This leads to routine sparring between the two special interest groups, with the vast majority of Americans holding moderate views in between the two extremes.

What's gay jew blackfacing? Are you talking about Fabulous Milo?

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@Scrotie: Not sure, I mean, there is a sizable chunk of people that think Obama is a muslim out there, and it's easy to find conspiracy theorists and white supremacists everywhere on the internet (although they may have more free time, still, a presidential candidate is one of them). For some reason people a lot of people believe stupid shit. My country has its problems, but I haven't seen people so deranged here (they may be hidden, though).

I'm not going to deny there is a lot of crap on the left (I got sick of videogame hipsters, for example).

I wonder if there are statistics on this (to see if you are right). While it may be tempting to say "the two sides are the same!", the right in US aligns a lot with the european far right (that are marginalized for a good reason), while the left is relatively tame by world standards.

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NeroNoah wrote:

You tell me.

The farther back in time you go, the stronger your case is that a given law is out and out racist. Jim Crow laws and poll taxes in the latter half of the 19th century are as racist and disenfranchising as it gets. It's more complicated in modern times. You'll hear people say (and it seems you've already heard people say) this law or that law has, in your words,

"fucked up a lot [of] black people"

A lot of it comes back to socioeconomic conditions and prejudiced application of the laws - it's not that the laws are in and of themselves racist. At this point in time, it's not very useful to think about the issue as a binary racist/not racist laws choice. I'll leave middle class and affluent African Americans out of consideration for now, because that's usually not what people are talking about when they talk about the most serious hardships facing 'the black community' (not sure that's a useful label either, but, eh).

Urban children need many things. Two parent households would be a big plus. Not having gangs roaming the streets, claiming turf, and claiming innocent lives would help. Staying away from addictive substances would both save lost lives, and keep lives on track that are otherwise spiraling out of control. But governments can't solve these problems for the people. They can 'crackdown' on drugs and gangs, but let's be real - we're never going to live in a society (in our lifetimes) where someone isn't selling something illicit on an urban corner.

What are two things that government CAN give these kids? Education and hope.

http://www.theplayerstribune.com/jabari-parker-chicago-gun-violence/

Reading that might give you a decent impression of my position. In some ways, historically, the deck has been absolutely stacked against African Americans. It's real, and it's a perpetual cycle in urban areas between politics, education, crime, wealth, and the creation of hurdles that make it more difficult to break the cycle. There are still so many young black children who would be the first in their families to graduate high school, or go to college.

But anyone who tells you that it's all environment is full of it. You may have heard it asked: "how can African Americans be expected to rise up out of their situation with all these racist laws (and/or cops, and/or government, and/or insert boogeyman here)?" That question is the bigotry of low expectations. It's the position that essentially says 'black people have no agency' to improve their lot in life. That's insulting and dehumanizing to think that they can't. Read what young Mr. Parker has to say. Keep in mind he just turned 21. He as much as anyone is tapped in to the problems that urban black youth face, and how they might be able to overcome.

To tie this back to Trump, I think he's kind of right when he says that Democratic politicians have failed urban black communities. There is still racism, there are still biases and prejudices at work in law enforcement. There is still inequality in job opportunities, inequality in wages, and other systemic factors making it a bit harder for middle class blacks, and much harder for poor urban African Americans. But at the same time it's 2016. We've had a black president for 8 years. You think about the recent racial issues in these cities...the mayor of Baltimore was black. The police chiefs in a lot of these towns are black. The local government is, in a lot of these cases, representative of the communities they serve.

The social justice warriors who want to guilt trip whites are rapidly running out of excuses for why these places are still failing the future generations of all colors, but especially African Americans. As someone involved in and passionate about education, I tend, perhaps more than others, to think of it as a solution. Even if I'm wrong, what's the worst case scenario? Things stay the same, but we have smarter, more educated people? At least that will set us up to have more smart people thinking about the problem in the future.

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innervation wrote:

To tie this back to Trump, I think he's kind of right when he says that Democratic politicians have failed urban black communities. There is still racism, there are still biases and prejudices at work in law enforcement. There is still inequality in job opportunities, inequality in wages, and other systemic factors making it a bit harder for middle class blacks, and much harder for poor urban African Americans. But at the same time it's 2016. We've had a black president for 8 years. You think about the recent racial issues in these cities...the mayor of Baltimore was black. The police chiefs in a lot of these towns are black. The local government is, in a lot of these cases, representative of the communities they serve.

The social justice warriors who want to guilt trip whites are rapidly running out of excuses for why these places are still failing the future generations of all colors, but especially African Americans. As someone involved in and passionate about education, I tend, perhaps more than others, to think of it as a solution. Even if I'm wrong, what's the worst case scenario? Things stay the same, but we have smarter, more educated people? At least that will set us up to have more smart people thinking about the problem in the future.

I've read an article from NYtimes about Chicago shootings in a weekend (something about the culture of distrust of authority), so I get from where you are coming, but even if Trump says democrats have failed (and it's probably true to some extent, I've heard bad stuff about Detroit too) I hardly see the other side as an alternative, and even less Trump.

It seems a very complex problem that is hard to understand (don't you have scientists working on this?). And I do agree you can't just reduce it to muh racism (although some US citizens are very special in that regard).

The trickiest thing I can think about this is how to estimate causality on a complex problem like this when there is so much shit going on at the same time. Endogeneity problems everywhere.

There is a chance that it can't be solved at all in a relatively short time span too.

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Entropic_Fire wrote:

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

Its creator specifically envisioned it as "the Huffington Post of the right." That is a clear political bias. I would have strong doubts regarding the Huffington Post of anything, but that's just me.

That's kind of funny actually since Arianna went on record saying she launched the Post as the Drudge Report of the left.

For fuck's sake. Arms race.

Further complicating things, maybe uniquely so, is that this is a situation where you almost need to solve every problem simultaneously. You could give every poor urban child a two parent household, but with bad schools, gangs on the streets, and the propensity for the child and/or parents to get sucked into drug addiction, what have you really solved? Likewise you could take away the gangs, but the 14 year old black male may still need to drop out of school and work to support his mother and two younger siblings.

Any of these problems are difficult enough on their own. What are the scientist doing? What are the politicians doing? I don't know. I haven't studied specifics, and the last time I lived in a large city I wasn't tuned in to issues like these.

To the extent that it's hard to understand, that's why it's important and annoying that the left not overuse the terms rasict/bigot and reserve them for when they are actually accurate. Politicizing and overly racial-izing every issue makes everything murkier and harder to make progress on.

Oh sure, over racializing is a problem, but you cannot get away with it if there is not some fucked up stuff going on that makes it plausible.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

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Entropic_Fire wrote:

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

Its creator specifically envisioned it as "the Huffington Post of the right." That is a clear political bias. I would have strong doubts regarding the Huffington Post of anything, but that's just me.

That's kind of funny actually since Arianna went on record saying she launched the Post as the Drudge Report of the left.

For fuck's sake. Arms race.

I want to see the left wing answer to Breitbart, specially now that Gawker was suplexed to death *grabs popcorn*