137 replies to this topic

[Natureboy]

{Off topic} On the subconscious incestuous feelings:

 

One sister's first husband was an Armenian she met while touring the Soviet Union with a US AID exhibit. Lots of cultural differences there, but I didn't notice the same sort of reaction to his joining the family as with her black second husband. Also felt relatively easy camaraderie with my other sister's Nicaraguan immigrant live-in boyfriend. (Played trombone in a Salsa band, but musicians . . .). When she later married the black drummer she met when he was playing in the same band, I had little trouble relating to him while visiting their home. It was seeing him at a (mostly white & Asian) family gathering for my dad's 70th when I noticed myself having an unexpected aversion to his skin color and features. Similar reaction repeated with the black second husband (T) that my sister didn't marry until the kids from her first marriage were both out-of-the-house living on their own. (T was childless by choice and did not want the issues of helping discipline rebellious teenagers not his own.)

 

I had a buried visceral reaction to male members of another "race", which I didn't discover in many years of casual contact with co-workers, etc. It also took regular warm contact with a person in that 'category' to overcome. I thought I'd long discarded the casual racism of an early childhood in segregated Oklahoma. It took a "Where the hell are these inappropriate feelings coming from?" moment to realize that my nervous system still harbored race-based reactions to black men.

Edited by Natureboy, 12 November 2016 - 01:42 AM.

[udarnel]

I like to think of this as the "gotcha" moment. Not once did I mention any sort of skin color or ethnicity. You made the assumption based on the words "inner-city" and "hoodlum" that I meant only blacks, but surprise surprise, there's a whole bunch of whites who are just as bad and are inner-city. This is what the DNC failed to pick up on the entire campaign run. You're all too busy nit-picking his words and trying to portray him as some kind of white supremacist overlord that you don't even understand the depths of your own racial bias. And, contrary to whatever popular beliefs you have in the EU, it is entirely possible to be racist against whites.

 

 

Being anti-global warming was said in the sense that he was opposed to the concept, but I can see how I may have phrased it weirdly.

You said: Of gangs of inner-city hoodlums rioting because dey boi got capped by the po-po after pulling a gun on the officer?

 

This means you are referring to black people rioting because your shitty trumpster police officers shoot black on sight, and don't tell they "pull a gun", they have often been proven without weapons. That's the only violent riots I can think of from the media

No I don't mean you are patronizing, just flat out racist. You are also patronizing, but not towards me or the racists, you are patronizing towards the people you perceive as victims.

Basically, you react to words like hoodlums only when it's not towards white christian whatever. White christians hetero victims are not on your radar at all. Same rethoric than when you say that handicapped people can't deal with criticism or insults, and say that it's OK if non-handicapped people are fucked for slight reasons. You do not have overarching rules for everybody, but you divide people into categories like white and non-white, handicapped and non-handicapped, heterosexual and non-heterosexual, then apply different rules. One of those categories make you a racist. If you do not see people as individual but as groups, it's easy to be racist/sexist/whateverist.

 

Raping women is not seen as a right of men in India. You don't understand the dynamics. In "patriarchies", men are given more rights but also more obligations, while the women less right and less obligations. Women are treated somehow like children, and "protected". If it wasn't the case, there would be no civilization to begin with. In India, if a man is accused of raping a woman, he will be beaten up to pulp or outright killed summarily, if not by all the people around, by family and friends.

Your comment about marriage tells me you don't understand marriage, unless you consider children as "family heirloom".

 

Being racist is "normal" in the sense everybody is racist to some extent, but we don't call everybody racist. It's those above some norm, and for me you fit the bill. You are basically everything you shout against. You are even sexist by thinking indian men are monster and indian women victims just because genitalia.

Sorry, but you're talking bullshit here. I'm defending minorities because in this election it's them who are at stake in the US: Trump is the president of the white middle-class middle-aged, and if he really does what it promises, it's all the others who'll need help. Actually there's also another category: all the people who risk getting mass shot any moment in schools and malls and so on; Obama was trying to ban weapons, but under Trump there will be no hindrance to them.

By the way, racism is not recognizing there's a physical difference (are you a racist if you notice there are blondes and brunettes?), it's telling: hey, those persons are different, then they are shit.

 

As for India, you didn't read, maybe, about that village whose elders gang raped a woman of the village all night along because she got engaged to a man from a neighboring village... And what about that shittiest costume of burning the wife alive when the husband dies? And it's not only women, but children too.

Edited by udarnel, 12 November 2016 - 10:24 AM.

[Doonge]

By the way, racism is not recognizing there's a physical difference (are you a racist if you notice there are blondes and brunettes?), it's telling: hey, those persons are different, then they are shit.

Which is exactly what you're doing. Which is why you are a racist. Tell me, do you think whites are racists?

 

 

 

As for India, you didn't read, maybe, about that village whose elders gang raped a woman of the village all night along because she got engaged to a man from a neighboring village... And what about that shittiest costume of burning the wife alive when the husband dies? And it's not only women, but children too.

You read what you want to read, and you draw the conclusions you want to draw. Shit happens, but that's not because it does that it is the norm. Rapists, and especially pedophiles, are considered the scum of the earth by everyone, including hard criminal in prison. Pedophiles are killed in prison by their inmates. You just want to believe you're noble because you stand for women and that you're alone in this, but you're wrong. And it makes you sexist.

 

Your comment about gun control and mass shooting in school is so ridiculous I'm now wondering if you're a troll or a brainwashed person. We have gun control in Europe, and we have shootings. In the grand scheme of things, mass shootings in schools are horrifying but account for a negligible amount of victims. There's an obscene amount of victims in the ghettos, but you don't care apparently as you care for the newstories with mass appeal, like an horrific rape in India or a school shooting. Did you fall for the Rolling Stone's Jackie story? It sure was crunchy.

You care when a white cop kills a black person, but I bet you don't care when whites kill each others or black kills each others. And I bet you don't care when a black cop kill a white guy.

Edited by Doonge, 12 November 2016 - 01:29 PM.

[Vicmonananya]

No Trump fan myself (always seem to have to preface with this on the internet) but isn't a little presumptuous to assume he won because of racism and bigotry? Maybe some people considered him a lesser evil than Hillary, just saying there could be more factors involved. Also isn't bigotry an intolerance towards people who hold a different view? Because if that's the case then a lot of people I've heard negatively reacting to this fit that definition as well. My last point is maybe the reaction shouldn't be so knee jerking against someone who is democratically elected when they haven't done anything in office yet, I dunno seems a little immature is all. Peace

[ClothoBuer]

You said: Of gangs of inner-city hoodlums rioting because dey boi got capped by the po-po after pulling a gun on the officer?

 

This means you are referring to black people rioting because your shitty trumpster police officers shoot black on sight, and don't tell they "pull a gun", they have often been proven without weapons. That's the only violent riots I can think of from the media

 

I bolded the important part there, because my god the context denial is fierce. I'm sure the media machine loves having you around, since you apparently lap up whatever vomit they produce. You wouldn't understand liberal bias because, teehee, you're a liberal, so news outlets spinning stories to make the poor, downtrodden minority the victim of the mean, racist, white police officer just seems right to you. Confirmation bias. In every situation a black man was shot by police, it was a warranted scenario. Every. Single. Case. There's an anti-police culture in inner-city residents, especially blacks, that is the result of a bad history, general police neglect, and a lack of proper parental guidance. Most inner-city families do not have fathers, regardless of race, because most fathers either run the moment they find out they have a kid coming, or are doing jail time for whatever nonsense idiocy they indulged in. No father to keep a kid straight often causes children to fall in to bad crowds. But that's all here or there, you don't care about that, you only care that a cop shot a black man. Because you're racist, and can only make baseless and misinformed assumptions.

 

Sorry, but you're talking bullshit here. I'm defending minorities because in this election it's them who are at stake in the US: Trump is the president of the white middle-class middle-aged, and if he really does what it promises, it's all the others who'll need help. Actually there's also another category: all the people who risk getting mass shot any moment in schools and malls and so on; Obama was trying to ban weapons, but under Trump there will be no hindrance to them.

By the way, racism is not recognizing there's a physical difference (are you a racist if you notice there are blondes and brunettes?), it's telling: hey, those persons are different, then they are shit.

 

As for India, you didn't read, maybe, about that village whose elders gang raped a woman of the village all night along because she got engaged to a man from a neighboring village... And what about that shittiest costume of burning the wife alive when the husband dies? And it's not only women, but children too.

 

The only minorities at stake are the ones who are here illegally. How many times does this need to be said before you grow a fucking brain and read? 

 

Yea, Obama was trying to ban weapons. In a country that was born and built on revolution. Where the right to keep and bear was fundamental and so fucking important to the people who founded the country that they made it the second thing on their list of rights. How many times can you think of that the US was invaded by a foreign power? See if you can use a whole hand. That's what an armed populace provides. But I can't expect a hypocritical EU to understand that. By the way, how are those no-go areas treating you? Must be nice to have entire sections of cities taken over by refugees who then proceed to shit the place up, because you don't care to vet them, or even integrate them into your culture.

 

I hope you keep this going for a while, because all you're doing now is just proving how hypocritical and retarded the progressives are.

[Natureboy]

Confirmation bias. In every situation a black man was shot by police, it was a warranted scenario. Every. Single. Case. There's an anti-police culture in inner-city residents, especially blacks, that is the result of a bad history, general police neglect, and a lack of proper parental guidance.

...

 

The only minorities at stake are the ones who are here illegally. How many times does this need to be said before you grow a fucking brain and read? 

 

Yea, Obama was trying to ban weapons.

Too much disinformation to respond to all of it.

 

There are lots of nightly news stories that "suspect in robbery was shot when police responded . . ."  End of story. No protests, no riots. It's the cases of "shot after being stopped for a broken taillight" or "for having no front license plate" or "brandishing a knife while mentally ill" that are the tragedies that don't happen often in countries with a less militarized police culture. Most police forces here don't get adequate training in de-escalation of situations where the citizen is very frightened or confused.

 

My niece's husband is a man of Italian descent who drives an old pick-up truck. He's a lawyer who works for the U.S. Coast Guard. He gets stopped quite frequently for "driving while brown".  Each time he has to de-escalate the situation to make sure he doesn't get shot for responding too slowly to barked orders or making some unexpected movement. In contrast, I drive an even older truck but never get stopped because I look white. That said, I used to get stopped in the 1970s because police then were profiling men with long hair as potentially dangerous druggies. Cops weren't as trigger-happy then, so the risks I feared were getting beat up and dumped in a jail cell without medical treatment. (I knew people who had that done to them for no apparent reason.)  It's not "anti-police" to recognize that there's a problem with police training in many departments and a culture of racial profiling.

 

Minorities:  Muslim American citizens are afraid that they're only one major terrorist incident away from being rounded up like the Japanese-American citizens were during WWII. (Trump has spoken approvingly of that travesty against the Constitution.) Latino citizens are afraid that they'll be swept up and deported any time they leave the house without iron-clad photo ID. Plus they are afraid of being shot for no reason if something is misinterpreted during a racial profiling stop. As recently as the 1980s, Texas policemen wore boots they called "Mexican stompers". I was living in Houston in the early 1990s when the police department finally changed their footwear regs. for uniformed officers--to something that gave them more mobility but less ability to inflict injury on a suspect already on the ground and subdued. (Yes there were well-known cases of U.S. citizens of Latino descent being beat to death in police custody.)

 

Black Americans have generations of experience with being abused by biased law enforcement. Local cops were complicit in murders of civil rights workers and "uppity blacks" for most of the 20th century. You don't enforce something as oppressive as Jim Crow without aggressive police forces. A phone video of an unarmed black man being shot in the back for running away from a potentially dangerous encounter with armed local cops (incident in South Carolina this year) just reinforces their fear and gets the older generation telling stories about how much worse in used to be. Stop-and-frisk policies of the 1990s were overwhelmingly directed against blacks and latinos. (See relevant federal court rulings for New York's program.) Things have gotten marginally better in the past decade, even though a black man still can't hail a cab after dark in most major cities. The black community has seen how bad things for them can get under the cover of U.S. law. They don't want to go back. "Make America Great Again" sounds, for them, like going back to recent times when they didn't have voting rights and black lynchings weren't prosecuted.

 

You can say that I'm patronizing ethnic groups as "victims". My answer is that my own law-abiding, middle class relatives have experienced the down-sides of current levels of racial profiling. Trump promised to make it worse for them. Having experienced firsthand "hippie profiling" in my own life, I know something of their fear of interactions with hostile law enforcement.

 

Calling bullshit on Obama banning weapons:  There used to be a ban on military style assault weapons. Thanks to NRA pressure it expired. Now police in a lots of places are effectively out-gunned by the criminal gangs. It resembles Prohibition, when WWI vets with automatic machine guns regularly out-gunned local law enforcement. The Second Amendment doesn't protect personal ownership of grenades, mortars or tanks. Why do you think it protects ownership of semi-automatic assault rifles that let you kill 50 people in 2 minutes? Sensible restrictions would either limit the size of magazines or types of military-style weapons, and would plug current holes in the background check system. What does it mean when potential terrorists assume they easily can get sufficient arms for an attack in the U.S.? No need to smuggle anything in. The restrictions that were under consideration would still protect private ownership of guns for personal protection and hunting.

 

As for claims about indifference to inner city gun deaths: Thanks to the same laws protecting rapid firing assault weapons, my sister who lived in Oakland, CA had to teach her children to get in the bathtub whenever they heard gunfire. My nephew still has PTSD from getting shot in the chest. (The guy who shot him went to jail, but the gang members still on the outside threaten my nephew when they see him.) One New Year's Day, my nieces filled a paper shopping bag with spent cartridges walking around the neighborhood after "celebrations" using rapid firing guns. Things have gotten better there, thanks to community policing and better community-police relations. Still the current gun laws make it a dicey situation. It could easily tip back to being the kind of hell-hole Trump demagogued--and his policies would make more likely. They have a lot to lose.

Edited by Natureboy, 12 November 2016 - 03:47 PM.

[Doonge]

I don't see what you're talking about patronizing victims, if you refer to my previous comment it was not adressed to you.

 

I think police work is made more stressing with citizen having weapons, and it has consequences. The trigger-happy things you talk about. I think that police force has a good training. Of course I have seen police brutality (even hideous police set ups of honest black american, thankfully there are camrecorder on police cars, in russia there's camrecorder on most cars even citizens'). I also have seen great restraint and professionalism from policemen. Where there are high social tensions and dangerous criminality, well you will find the police being tense. I don't think for instance that police is trigger happy in rural towns with armed citizen yet low crime.

 

Military style assault weapon is meaningless. You have plenty of guns that you can customize to be really deadly. Either you ban almost everything for your argument to make sense, or you don't. Your sister's children have to get in the bathtub whether what they hear is an automatic weapon or not. And if your sister lives in such a shithole, I guess you're not middle class, but more like a temporarily embarassed millionaire.

 

I agree that there is profiling done by the police. Staying away from police, why do you think black men can't get a cab in some places when it's dark (if that's true)? Do you believe cab drivers need training? Would it make economic sense?

Edited by Doonge, 12 November 2016 - 05:19 PM.

[Natureboy]

I've answered most of this in previous comments. We have to learn how not to be afraid of 'the other'. It takes work, but it is also one of the obligations of citizenship in a paticipatory democracy. As a citizen, I'm alarmed when a politician succeeds by demonizing 'the other'--it makes it much harder for everyone to maintain a civil society. As my Jewish and black friends are want to say, "We've seen this movie before, and we know how it ends."

 

Your assumptions about my social/economic class are just foolish assumptions. If you want to know, on my father's side I come from a long line of Presbyterian ministers. His parents were missionaries in Thailand. My mother's father had an modest electrical appliance store/business that he built himself in a small town in Oklahoma. My father was a doctor and my mother a clinical psychologist. I'm a retired scientist and my wife is a retired doctor. Since the 2009 crash, our assets (house equity plus retirement accounts) are less than a $million.

 

My eldest sister chose to live in California and that neighborhood you call a "shithole" was one of the only places in the San Francisco Bay area where a musician/carpenter and psychiatric tech. could afford to own their own home. Since she died of lung cancer, her kids have been arguing about whether to sell the house. I've heard numbers in the half-million USD range--for a fairly rundown 3-bedroom house in a moderately dangerous neighborhood. She and her husband couldn't afford to live someplace more upscale. Over the years her neighborhood fluctuated between middle-class "safe" and dangerous, with the ebb and flow of social policy, policing policies, state budget crises, economic cycles, and things like the crack epidemic. Better armed gangs make it harder for the police to keep a lid on things and stay in contact with the law-abiding community. Life there was better during the assault weapons ban than before or after.

Edited by Natureboy, 12 November 2016 - 06:15 PM.

[udarnel]

Which is exactly what you're doing. Which is why you are a racist. Tell me, do you think whites are racists?

 

 

 

You read what you want to read, and you draw the conclusions you want to draw. Shit happens, but that's not because it does that it is the norm. Rapists, and especially pedophiles, are considered the scum of the earth by everyone, including hard criminal in prison. Pedophiles are killed in prison by their inmates. You just want to believe you're noble because you stand for women and that you're alone in this, but you're wrong. And it makes you sexist.

 

Your comment about gun control and mass shooting in school is so ridiculous I'm now wondering if you're a troll or a brainwashed person. We have gun control in Europe, and we have shootings. In the grand scheme of things, mass shootings in schools are horrifying but account for a negligible amount of victims. There's an obscene amount of victims in the ghettos, but you don't care apparently as you care for the newstories with mass appeal, like an horrific rape in India or a school shooting. Did you fall for the Rolling Stone's Jackie story? It sure was crunchy.

You care when a white cop kills a black person, but I bet you don't care when whites kill each others or black kills each others. And I bet you don't care when a black cop kill a white guy.

I still can't understand why what I wrote makes me a racist, but whatever. Also I don't think I ever wrote something that shows I "want to believe i'm noble because you stand for women and that you're alone in this": I'm not alone, I hope; there's millions of US citizens that voted against shit, there's millions of volunteers around the world risking their lives for free against this shit... Why should I feel I'm alone in this?

[Doonge]

We evolved as a paranoid species (as most species) - fear can be life-saving. Especially on the long time. Being fearless means being out of the gene pool.

 

A mammal hear some noise out of some bush, he will flee. Perhaps it's the wind, perhaps it's a predator.

 

You look at the cost of fear-induced actions (not getting money for driving a black client for instance), and the gain (not being mugged and losing your car for instance), and their respective probabilities.

 

Also, we are very visual creatures. We are very good at stereotyping (stereotyping is not 100% accurate, but generally quite accurate, for instance we have a quite efficient "gaydar").

 

We have to learn not to be afraid of "the other" only if it's worth it. If you look at the stats, blacks suffer from stereotyping and frisk policies, but they also commit a disproportionate amount of crimes. Now, a random citizen hasn't much reason to be afraid most of the time, as he's diving in a social network that he knows and that is hopefully already filtering thugs (of all colors). But taxi drivers and cops do not know who they are dealing with. Stereotyping is not perfect, but it's heavily useful when you know nothing about who you deal with. As soon as you are getting acquainted with individuals, stereotype lose their interest and people naturally do not rely on them.

Bottom line is: in the absence of information, people will be racist or whatever (they will rely on their stereotype, that generally prove to be accurate), and believing stereotypes and fear are always counterproductive is stupid.

 

 

If you live next to thugs, you're no middle class. Unless California has thugs everywhere. But if you live in the shittiest neighborhood, you're at the bottom of the city.

A lowerclass american might earn more than a middleclass from a third world country for instance, in term of raw money, but that doesn't make him upper class.

 

Lastly, I would say that you suffer from the same problem (in my view) than udarnel. By being oversensitive to something, you begin to become it. You'd be afraid of Jews and Black demonization for instance, but you'd not be below demonizing those you perceive as demonizator, or at least blind to those who commit it (thus giving them undue influence over you).

http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/(it's a blog of a democrat/libertarian jewish psychiatrist)

 

@udarnel

We have discussed a lot already. And I think I've written a lot in your thread overall. Convincing you that you are racist doesn't sound appealing to me.

Edited by Doonge, 12 November 2016 - 08:06 PM.

[PItiful Boar]

No Trump fan myself (always seem to have to preface with this on the internet) but isn't a little presumptuous to assume he won because of racism and bigotry?

 

Correct. I have mentioned previously that the issue was never race, but class. White men of the CEO class backstabbing their white brothers of the working class by shipping their jobs to Mexico is not racial discrimination; it's class discrimination. The class issue is presented in media as a race issue. Why the corporate media, who survives by selling advertisements to CEO's of major corporations, turn class issues into race issues is fairly easy to understand. What is more difficult to understand is why people readily accept this lie. Everyone knows Pedro Hernandez flipping burgers at McDonalds has nothing to do with NAFTA. Why do people readily look for scapegoats and want to build another wall (in addition to the one we already built)? 

 

I think what happened in Germany under the Nazi's is not the exception but the norm. There are plenty of studies that show a correlation between economic uncertainty and racism. For example, sociologists studied the number of lynchings of blacks in the South and show a way to predict how many blacks would be lynched based on the price of cotton. In California, when the Asian migrants first came during the gold rush they were labeled as vagrants, thieves, parasites of society, etc.. When the railroads were being built, and they took on the dangerous jobs of railroad construction that Anglo-Saxons avoided, they were labeled as diligent, courageous, "almost as good as a white man", as one railroad tycoon puts it. After the railroads have been constructed and jobs became scarce again, the Asians went back becoming vagrants, thieves, and parasites of society again. This phenomenon happened in Britain, with Brexit, to the Polish migrants in the poor areas. It happened in Greece, with the rise of neonazist parties in Golden Dawn. So racism reappearing in bad economic times is almost a given. Most people aren't racist not because they inherently aren't, but because the economic times are good enough so they don't have to be. That's all. 

[ClothoBuer]

Too much disinformation to respond to all of it.

 

There are lots of nightly news stories that "suspect in robbery was shot when police responded . . ."  End of story. No protests, no riots. It's the cases of "shot after being stopped for a broken taillight" or "for having no front license plate" or "brandishing a knife while mentally ill" that are the tragedies that don't happen often in countries with a less militarized police culture. Most police forces here don't get adequate training in de-escalation of situations where the citizen is very frightened or confused.

 

My niece's husband is a man of Italian descent who drives an old pick-up truck. He's a lawyer who works for the U.S. Coast Guard. He gets stopped quite frequently for "driving while brown".  Each time he has to de-escalate the situation to make sure he doesn't get shot for responding too slowly to barked orders or making some unexpected movement. In contrast, I drive an even older truck but never get stopped because I look white. That said, I used to get stopped in the 1970s because police then were profiling men with long hair as potentially dangerous druggies. Cops weren't as trigger-happy then, so the risks I feared were getting beat up and dumped in a jail cell without medical treatment. (I knew people who had that done to them for no apparent reason.)  It's not "anti-police" to recognize that there's a problem with police training in many departments and a culture of racial profiling.

 

Minorities:  Muslim American citizens are afraid that they're only one major terrorist incident away from being rounded up like the Japanese-American citizens were during WWII. (Trump has spoken approvingly of that travesty against the Constitution.) Latino citizens are afraid that they'll be swept up and deported any time they leave the house without iron-clad photo ID. Plus they are afraid of being shot for no reason if something is misinterpreted during a racial profiling stop. As recently as the 1980s, Texas policemen wore boots they called "Mexican stompers". I was living in Houston in the early 1990s when the police department finally changed their footwear regs. for uniformed officers--to something that gave them more mobility but less ability to inflict injury on a suspect already on the ground and subdued. (Yes there were well-known cases of U.S. citizens of Latino descent being beat to death in police custody.)

 

Black Americans have generations of experience with being abused by biased law enforcement. Local cops were complicit in murders of civil rights workers and "uppity blacks" for most of the 20th century. You don't enforce something as oppressive as Jim Crow without aggressive police forces. A phone video of an unarmed black man being shot in the back for running away from a potentially dangerous encounter with armed local cops (incident in South Carolina this year) just reinforces their fear and gets the older generation telling stories about how much worse in used to be. Stop-and-frisk policies of the 1990s were overwhelmingly directed against blacks and latinos. (See relevant federal court rulings for New York's program.) Things have gotten marginally better in the past decade, even though a black man still can't hail a cab after dark in most major cities. The black community has seen how bad things for them can get under the cover of U.S. law. They don't want to go back. "Make America Great Again" sounds, for them, like going back to recent times when they didn't have voting rights and black lynchings weren't prosecuted.

 

You can say that I'm patronizing ethnic groups as "victims". My answer is that my own law-abiding, middle class relatives have experienced the down-sides of current levels of racial profiling. Trump promised to make it worse for them. Having experienced firsthand "hippie profiling" in my own life, I know something of their fear of interactions with hostile law enforcement.

 

Calling bullshit on Obama banning weapons:  There used to be a ban on military style assault weapons. Thanks to NRA pressure it expired. Now police in a lots of places are effectively out-gunned by the criminal gangs. It resembles Prohibition, when WWI vets with automatic machine guns regularly out-gunned local law enforcement. The Second Amendment doesn't protect personal ownership of grenades, mortars or tanks. Why do you think it protects ownership of semi-automatic assault rifles that let you kill 50 people in 2 minutes? Sensible restrictions would either limit the size of magazines or types of military-style weapons, and would plug current holes in the background check system. What does it mean when potential terrorists assume they easily can get sufficient arms for an attack in the U.S.? No need to smuggle anything in. The restrictions that were under consideration would still protect private ownership of guns for personal protection and hunting.

 

As for claims about indifference to inner city gun deaths: Thanks to the same laws protecting rapid firing assault weapons, my sister who lived in Oakland, CA had to teach her children to get in the bathtub whenever they heard gunfire. My nephew still has PTSD from getting shot in the chest. (The guy who shot him went to jail, but the gang members still on the outside threaten my nephew when they see him.) One New Year's Day, my nieces filled a paper shopping bag with spent cartridges walking around the neighborhood after "celebrations" using rapid firing guns. Things have gotten better there, thanks to community policing and better community-police relations. Still the current gun laws make it a dicey situation. It could easily tip back to being the kind of hell-hole Trump demagogued--and his policies would make more likely. They have a lot to lose.

 

1. "Suspect in robbery was shot", because more often than not, they either pulled a weapon, were brandishing a weapon, or were running. Cops have to patrol neighborhoods where they get shot at simply for driving by, and there's a lot of fucked up shit that happens that they have to deal with that is often never publicized, or put way back on page 42 next to the dangers of eating too much parsley. 
2. Profiling is an issue, I'm not even going to try to argue that. That's a problem both police and citizens need to fix.
3. No shit. Mass media has been fear-mongering Trump for so long that CNN could release an "insider bulletin" that says Trump is going to start deporting every non-white person in the US and they'd buy it, hook, line, and sinker. Here's the truth though, if you actually took the time to pay attention to what he said in all of his campaign speeches and rallies, you'd see he actually does not mind Muslims, or Mexicans, or immigrants in general. What he minds are those in here through illegal means, and the wanton and unchecked entry of refugees from areas where ISIS/Taliban presence is strong. But you bought into the narrative that Clinton and her media shills sold you: that he hates everyone who isn't a straight white male. It's something Trump needs to come out and address, and one I expect him to cover in his State of the Union speech, providing the news doesn't spin it again.
4. Race-baiting. I'm not even touching this one.
5. My opinion? We have a race war-inciting group running around rioting every time a black man is shot by police. And what do we do? We look the other way, because we've created a society where telling someone "no" or "stop" or "you shouldn't do that" is somehow marginalizing and oppressing them. The result is more people are hurt, cities are damaged, and the moral fabric of society is eroded. Should we be investing in more police training? Absolutely. Are body cameras still necessary. Totally. And when they show the same thing that officers are saying happened, I.E. a suspect pulled a weapon on police and got shot, shouldn't we then say "that cop made the choice that his life was at risk and acted to protect it"? According to you, evidently not.
6. Sure, the Second allows grenades, mortars, and tanks. And how many tanks do you see around? Just because you can have one doesn't mean you're going to have one. And, uh, newsflash, buying any sort of explosive device is often a fast track to an FBI profiling, as well as requiring quite a bit more paperwork. And you say magazine limits and better background checks are needed? You mean like the ones in California, which has already been the site of a couple mass shootings? Tell me how well that's worked. But it's quite funny that you'd bring up Prohibition, since that's basically what gun control advocates are pushing for. How about this. Why don't we actually start enforcing the gun laws we already have? And that whole nonsense about terrorists buying weapons willy-nilly? They're either doing it through the black market, or are using third-party buyers, which you'll have about as much progress stopping as law enforcement has in stopping kids from getting their cigarettes bought by older people. One of the changes I've often felt necessary to gun ownership is a requisite class, much in the way driver's training works. The only issue with that is people who are buying guns legally? Most of them are already aware of the risks in having and using one. I still think we should go forward with it, but it doesn't fix the issue that gangs will still get their weapons no matter what we do.
7. Classic "let's blame guns instead of people using them" argument. Rather than holding the weapon accountable, why don't you hold the person? Oh, wait, that's too convenient, and too much effort. Ever wonder why involved communities have lower violent crime rates? It's called accountability and responsibility. But youth today have shown a clear disregard for responsibility, and now we have gun violence skyrocketing, because it's so much easier to just take what you want and kill someone if they disagree, right?

 

You sit there and claim disinformation when your entire arguments are laid on biased media reports and personal feelings. There's a time and a place for feelings, but never should they be the only factor in deciding political policy. 

[Final_Boss]

I don't really understand why the electoral college votes have the last word.  It should definitely be the other way around.  With that said, hey, look on the brightside:  At least we avoided a WW3 since Russia wants to make peace talks with us. I don't think that would've happened if Killary became pres..I still don't like either of them which is why I voted 3rd party for the first time getting into politics.

Edited by Final_Boss, 12 November 2016 - 11:03 PM.

[Natureboy]

Pence is the one who hates gays, not Trump. Trump has just demonstrated (in the debates which I watched) and in his stump speeches that he doesn't understand those portions of the Bill of Rights that limit executive power, nor the equal protection guaranteed by the 14th amendment. Direct anecdotes from my own life and my family members' aren't biased media reports or personal feelings, they are simply examples of behavior and social situations.

[ClothoBuer]

Pence is the one who hates gays, not Trump. Trump has just demonstrated (in the debates which I watched) and in his stump speeches that he doesn't understand those portions of the Bill of Rights that limit executive power, nor the equal protection guaranteed by the 14th amendment. Direct anecdotes from my own life and my family members' aren't biased media reports or personal feelings, they are simply examples of behavior and social situations.

 

And considering, thanks to the wonderful people at Wikileaks, that we know that Hillary had the debate questions leaked to her, using the debates as any sort of gauge on either candidate is a mistake. Yes, Trump is still not fully aware of what he can and cannot do, and that's why both his VP (hopefully) and a Congress that, despite being the same party, is generally against him, will keep him in line. But speaking of executive power, let's talk about how Obama has been abusing the Executive Order system to push through bills that he wants and knows won't make it through Congress. Because that's clearly okay, yea?

 

You're using personal feelings based on singular instances with a very small data set to draw a conclusion that lines up with what you want it to be. Can you say that all dark-skinned Italians are treated the same way? I bet not. Blinders.

[Natureboy]

I wrote an answer to this ^, but what's the point?  Of course anecdotes aren't formal, controlled scientific studies. What they offer is a measure of catharsis and the potential for empathy.

 

As to whether Trump has the skills or desire for a fascist takeover of the U.S. government, we'll have to see. I doubt it, but with the risks to our form of government so high, even a small chance is worrisome. Whether his relationship to Russian intelligence services amounts to naive self-indulgence or high treason, the U.S. counterintelligence services will need to figure that out.

 

 

 

Well this has gotten a bit tiresome. I think I'd rather go watch The Virgin Suicides.  Have fun campers.

[The Corinthian]

Trump is the real life Batman.

 

 

That is: He might not be the hero we need. But he sure as hell is the hero we deserve right now!

 

 

Seeing as I am not an american I can only look at this from an outsider perspective. But all the liberals melting down like you would not believe is causing me a lot of schadenfreude.

 

Here is a song for all the liberals out there that I feel is very fitting. 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwS3_B4axn0

[PItiful Boar]

I don't really understand why the electoral college votes have the last word. It should definitely be the other way around. With that said, hey, look on the brightside: At least we avoided a WW3 since Russia wants to make peace talks with us. I don't think that would've happened if Killary became pres..I still don't like either of them which is why I voted 3rd party for the first time getting into politics.

More people should vote third party - imo every state should be a swing state. What keeps the system honest is people being able to switch allegiances between major powers. In medieval times, you could choose between the church and the state. When one misbehaves you can throw your support for the other.

The two parties in the US aren't keeping the other other in check. Lately the Democratic Party has been adopting the policies of the Republican party, and moderating them a bit. Obamacare was basically Romneycare, and came from the Heritage Foundation, a Repbulican think tank. After Bush Sr signed NAFTA, Clinton twisted the arms of his own party to pass NAFTA and resigned it, when he was elected with the mandate to repeal NAFTA. The effect is that more people ended up being disgruntled and stayed home and not bother voting. This is exactly what the ruling class would want. The US doesn't have mandatory voting like Australia, so the net effect of this is a very divided electorate. And the ruling class can play off one party against the other, just as the media can play off one race against another.

I don't like people saying "Killary". That triggers me. The Democratic party is traditionally the war party, pursuing viscious international policies and being more generous in domestic policies. It's true that Hillary Clinton's policy killed a lot of people in Libia, Honduras, and her foundation is supported by the same people who fund ISIL. However, compare her to the CEO's who backstabbed their brothers in the back by shpping the jobs to Mexico. Compare her to Bush Sr who first signed the NAFTA agreements. If you have to choose between shooting someone who is your skin color, and who speaks your language, versus someone who doesn't, who would you shoot? I would probably shoot the second guy, because I'm racist. If you don't want to shoot anyone, you probably shouldn't run for higher office.

 

As a person, Hillary is rather sad. Julian Assange the "hero" of wikileaks felt sorry for her because she's an example of someone who pushed herself beyond her limits, emotional and physical, as she was eaten up by her own ambition. I would say it's not only her ambition alone, but also the ambition of those around her, who wants a piece of the pie when she becomes president. All those around her hide her flaws and pushed her forward, and in the end, caused her to lose. This is like a Shakespearean tragedy, where you want to get power and in the end power gets you.

Edited by Feisty Bit Moar, 14 November 2016 - 05:28 PM.

[cmertb]

I'll just leave this here with no comment: http://vatoto.com/comic/_/comics/trump-manga-r20172

[Superoni]

I'm pretty sure Trump chose Pence as an assassination deterrent:

"Are you really sure you want to kill me?"

Spoiler