The Donald vs Big Tech

[Kunt 4 Life]

Quote]

And lastly, flying in the face of the point of the letter I'm going to write, I bought these for my homosexual brother in law last christmas



He laughed, because he isn't a militant shitehawk.

My gay friend when he was heading of to uni his uncle got him some food. Those faggots there and a pack of fairy cakes. He hadn't come out to his family at the time. He found it funny though

[Caomhaoin]

Yeah there would be the odd one at school and then disappear, and they'd be complete outsiders.

A lad called John Dooley used to drift in and out, but it was if he was a leper the way he was avoided by the other kids. We had a song about him, 'Dooley Dooley' (to the tune of Bouli an fear sneachta).

[mugz]

Yeah there would be the odd one at school and then disappear, and they'd be complete outsiders.

A lad called John Dooley used to drift in and out, but it was if he was a leper the way he was avoided by the other kids. We had a song about him, 'Dooley Dooley' (to the tune of Bouli an fear sneachta).

I hadn't thought of the snowman song for a long time until now. Nostalgia rush for the very early 80s, fuck me I'm old.

[astfgyl]

Napalm.

Would Napalm Death do? I can see the lads bringing a bit of unity to the situation

[Emphyrio]

The law doesn't apply to them in most meaningful ways. Can you imagine how many Gardai would have to go to a halting site over a truant child? You make your own luck. Living outside the law don't expect much help from it.

100% true. With regular dealings with them, they have very little respect for authority. And that's when they're kids. It gets exponentially worse as they get older. They terrorise rural communities and pubs are extremely hesitant to let them in. Speaking to many bar workers, they say the stereotype is highly accurate.

Pavee Point rationalise the craziest antics as either also being done by settled people or simply part of their culture. I mean, seriously..racing horses up a motorway. Come off it.

[Kurt Cocaine]

I always have a little chuckle when I'm leaving the motorway for The Siege and I see those Sulky signs as you're entering Limerick. 

[Ollkiller]

The law doesn't apply to them in most meaningful ways. Can you imagine how many Gardai would have to go to a halting site over a truant child? You make your own luck. Living outside the law don't expect much help from it.

For sure. For me keeping a child in school till 16 is one of the most important things we can do as a society. When we don't apply that law you see the consequences. It won't happen as it would require leadership willing to implement it. No hope of that happening.

[hellfire]

Ideally 18. There is also this thing called parental responsibility. To say that wider society is responsible when they wont send their kids to school is to diminish them as intelligent humans. I'd say a lot about them, but they ain't thick. Once police start calling to halting sites to make sure the kids are going to school then the war starts. The cries of targeting and discrimination will resound for ages.

[Black Shepherd Carnage]

We're actually getting somewhere here. I agree with all of the above. How then does the villification of 800k policepeople across the United States help with any of this. How does washing people's feet and ridiculous kangaroo courts help this? Most decent minded people want this to change. I'd wonder if the outrage artists will ever be happy though? And while I agree that you're damned if you do and damned if you don't from a community perspective, I would also say the opposite applies. Underpaid police people working in conditions you'd hesitate at sending a Navy Seal into, filmed, assaulted, spat on, constant, unending intimidation. Surely there's got to be someone in the African American community that can bridge the gap here without being labelled an Uncle Tom or whatever other underhanded suggestions are thrown at them. Coleman Hughes that McLove refers to there, a very balanced, educated, well thought out guy, but probably too much of each to be widely accepted.

We've stopped accepting stereotypical and demeaning roles for women in Hollywood supposedly(billions of porn videos don't seem to come under any scrutiny of course). When do black actors and rap artists stop reinforcing every negative stereotype related to their community. If it's going to be a left sided approach, then surely community and society is where changes need to happen, instead of always waiting for some move from above.

Here's something from a discussion I was having elsewhere, written before I'd watched the documentary '13th', but which still holds up, except that '13th' adds on top of the higher actual crime rate among Afro-Americans the higher perceived crime rate due to real life cop shows on US TV. I wrote it to try to explain to someone what actual range of social phenomena 'systemic racism' refers to. Most people I've discussed with don't seem to know, and from any of the little bits of Coleman Hughes I've listened to, he doesn't deal with it head on either, he goes around it, or picks it up in the wrong way, but doesn't tackle the core of the real (i.e. not hysterical) arguments. And I think it's safe to say that most African-Americans would indeed see him as, at best, a Carlton Banks, and at worst an Uncle Tom, since his lived experience as an Ivy league student isn't exactly representative of the reasons for these protests, all the while he's saying the conditions (which he has little or no first-hand experience of) don't actually exist.

Black people are almost three times more likely to live below the poverty line than whites (27.4 vs 9.9% of the population).
This means they are much more likely to end up in crime, since they are born into and live in neighbourhoods with little to no job prospects, a pre-existing high crime rate, and the worst schools in the US (I mean, we've all seen The Wire... it's based on real life observations).

So, firstly, the fact that a higher proportion of young black men turn to crime is itself a product of systemic racism; because they are born African American, they are more likely than any other ethnicity to be born into the worst living conditions, and this is for historical reasons which are directly related to the segregation era.

Right, so now the police have in their heads (because it's true, but the fact it's true is itself a product of systemic racism, I'm just going to keep hammering this out) this idea that a random black person is more likely to be a criminal than a random white person (in the same way that the random black person is more likely to be poor, more likely to be badly educated, and so on), and so they stop and search more random black men than others; much more. This also means that black men are much more likely to get hit for possession than white men, and as I'm sure you've heard, the US is not a place you want to get hit with a possession charge, since in the US you can do more time for it than for child molesting or rape. Oh, and the maximum amount of a drug in possession before you hit minimum sentencing? Roughly 25g for crack, 500g for cocaine... which community do you think that policy hits the hardest? And before 2010, it was 5g versus 500g!

Again, for the same reasons as above - and remembering that in the US it's easier to get a gun than a decent education - police are also more likely to presume that a black man is going to be violent or that he is armed, and if they think he is armed, they are more likely to immediately think he is a threat. This is how Tamir Rice, 12 years old, ended up shot dead by police over a toy gun, which wasn't even visible at moment of shooting. Overall result? 30 in a million black men are killed by police, 12 in a million white men. And, as I've said already, the imbalance only gets worse when you look at unarmed cases.

This is how systemic/structural/institutional racism can manifest through a police force, even if it doesn't necessarily contain a single officer having any individual racist thoughts or ideas of his own. Of course, we know there are plenty of documented cases of actual racists who were police officers (and no, I don't just mean the lyrics to Killing In The Name Of ). But even imagining that those few individuals didn't exist, the entire US society is structured in such a way that if you are born African American, you are more likely to be absolutely fucked over by the system, perhaps as soon as you're born - if you're born into dire poverty - perhaps a little later, perhaps much later. But the probability of you having a terrible and short life in the US is much, much higher if you're African American. That is systemic racism. And that's just a small glimpse at the various aspects of it. Finally, the fact of having worse living conditions, worse clinics, more pollution, etc., is also what makes the community up to three times more vulnerable to mortality from COVID-19 (and similar illnesses before this one came along). There is no genetic predisposition, and obviously the coronavirus itself isn't "racist", but the consequences of ongoing historical neglect and abuse of African-American communities makes that epidemiological fact another result of systemic/structural/institutional racism.

So, the police are seen as the instrument of the most easily perceived consequences of systemic racism: the fact that almost 900,000 African-American men are in prison, most of them without trial. The fact that they have worse health and worse education because of environmental and socio-economic conditions, they're things that are less salient, less visible, have less identifiable agency behind them. Why are the police being vilified? Because they're visible. Are the police actually the main cause? Absolutely not.

[Caomhaoin]

On remand in jail without trial, maybe, but you can't go to prison unless you've been convicted and sentenced to at least a year in most US states.

Apart from that, a well argued post.

My problem with the expression 'systematic racism' is that it implies there is some kind of conspiracy to 'keep the negro down, y'all'.

There are no laws, none, which favour whites above other races. Asians do significantly better than whites in terms of income, run-ins with the polis, etc. Shouldn't they be kneeling a bit as well?

[Black Shepherd Carnage]

Maybe that's a typo, but it's 'systemic' not 'systematic', an important difference.

As for "no laws which favour whites", the law that stipulates mandatory sentencing for 25g of crack but allows up to 500g of powdered cocaine is, in effect, just such a law. And when such laws came in, in the 70s and 80s, when it was 5g of crack, they genuinely were intended to 'keep the negro down'. There are recorded conversations to precisely that effect.

[Pedrito]

Very very interesting and a far subtler way of expressing things. Unfortunately, I'm not sure even the majority of people who are protesting would understand systemic racism in those terms, but it's certainly a breakdown worth reading a couple of times. So, there's something there that obviously need tackling and yet it does nothing to assuage the fears of statistics like the following which weren't included in your breakdown:


'According to the US Department of Justice, African Americans accounted for 52.5% of all homicide offenders from 1980 to 2008, with Whites 45.3% and "Other" 2.2%. The offending rate for African Americans was almost eight times higher than Whites, and the victim rate six times higher. Most homicides were intraracial, with 84% of White victims killed by Whites and 93% of African American victims killed by African Americans'.

So I'm shooting the shit here so bear with me: With figures like that, it's clear that somthing radical needs to occur in these communities. You read an autobiography like that of Mike Tyson and the guy lived more crazy shit before the age of 10 than a football team's worth of Irish adult men. Crime, murder, chaos seems is an accepted part of life in these communities. The poverty thing is an interesting one but it could be argued that there are far poorer communities in the world that aren't committing crime to the same degree.

The problem is cultural. There needs to be a shift in the culture of these communities. It cannot all be coming from outside. That perception of black people is a 'stereotype', that is within the system i.e. cops will react to a black guy quicker than a white guy(as you explained this amounts to 'systemic' racism i.e. an expectation that a certain group is going to act a certain way). That seems really self explanatory and a very human reaction if we look at the crazy amount of crimes and murders they are responsible for. That's not excusing it. It's a vicious cycle and one would have to question if it is ever going to get resolved as long as one side i.e. the police, are always the guilty party. It's a conundrum, very hard to see it changing for the better any time soon.

[Pedrito]

Maybe that's a typo, but it's 'systemic' not 'systematic', an important difference.

As for "no laws which favour whites", the law that stipulates mandatory sentencing for 25g of crack but allows up to 500g of powdered cocaine is, in effect, just such a law. And when such laws came in, in the 70s and 80s, when it was 5g of crack, they genuinely were intended to 'keep the negro down'. There are recorded conversations to precisely that effect.

This is an old one trotted out. Crack destroyed whole inner cities, causing untold damage to the black community whereas some middle class lads doing coke certainly didn't have the same devestating effects. So, certainly, while the comparison can seem racist and may even have had racist tones to it, surely the only way to stop a crack epidemic tearing the soul out of an already beleaguered community was to simply introduce laws to that effect. It's more of the damned if you do and don't stuff. Crack ravaged the black community. Was it better to leave offenders on the street or pinpoint them. Again, I'm not arguing either way or trying to paint one race one way or any of that dogshit. I'm simply trying to step back with a non racist tinted look at things and question the POSSIBLE underlying motives.

Now that argument does imply a certain categorizing and many would argue stereotyping but maybe it's just poor human judgement in the face of all out catastrophe?

[Caomhaoin]

That's easily fixed, if it's put in to the public domain. Plenty of white crackheads too, although I take your point.

Do you think that welfare destroyed the black family? Is that racist?

I'd love to drag the auld third wave feminism into this, something I'm less ad-lib about, but I've a notion we'll both be 'cancelled' by popular demand if I strike that match.

[Pedrito]

That's easily fixed, if it's put in to the public domain. Plenty of white crackheads too, although I take your point.

I'd love to drag the auld third wave feminism into this, something I'm less ad-lib about, but I've a notion we'll both be 'cancelled' by popular demand if I strike that match.

Well ok, crack ravaged poor communities. Coke didn't ravage anything only people's manners. Imagine inner city Dublin and you have a different approach to people doing heroin than doing coke? I'm not saying it's necessarily right, but you'd have less walking dead strolling around the place roaring at eachother the poor hopeless bastards. Blah blah blah then you put them into hellhole jails and they come out worse than they ever did going in. Fuck it, I'm not solving this one tonight