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Read the rules in the OP before posting, please.In order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a re-read to refresh your memory! The vast majority of you are contributing in a healthy way, keep it up! NOTE: When providing a source, explain why you feel it is relevant and what purpose it adds to the discussion if it's not obvious. Also take note that unsubstantiated tweets/posts meant only to rekindle old arguments can result in a mod action. |
On August 15 2014 23:06 Roswell wrote:Show nested quote +On August 15 2014 13:23 sc2isnotdying wrote:On August 15 2014 12:59 Roswell wrote:On August 15 2014 12:42 sc2isnotdying wrote:On August 15 2014 11:02 Roswell wrote:On August 15 2014 05:22 sc2isnotdying wrote:On August 15 2014 04:59 Roswell wrote:Blacks kill white people at a much higher rate than the reverse and for black victims almost 90% of the offenders are black thttp://ago.mo.gov/VehicleStops/ttp://ago.mo.gov/VehicleStops/http://ago.mo.gov/VehicleStops/ttp://ago.mo.gov/VehicleStops/emselves. So who cares? If this policeman is a murderer then so be it, no need to start acting like this is the 1800s. Of 2011 homicides... (Fbi web, http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/crime-in-the-u.s.-2011/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-6 ) 3127 were white offenders 2694 were black offenders Yet blacks make up less than 10% of the population. Oh my god, we should start reversing our entire livelihoods and get all lame. I get that this is a policeman and things are different, but judging from theguardian it would appear unarmed blacks are being killed by the dozens every day by the great evil white people. Stupid shit to get riled up at. People are people. Race card is lamer than farcry 3s multiplayer Don't be dumb. Over policing of black communities specifically in Missouri goes way beyond this one incident. Heres the data as collected by the States Attorney General s office. http://ago.mo.gov/VehicleStops/ Oh, sorry I thought we were talking about homicides not if someone was speeding too fast. Fact remains, black on black homicide rates are absurd, (as are any where blacks are the offenders.) If you want to talk about which car insurance hispanics drive vs hawaiian then that is cool though. This is a social and cultural issue, poorer people in urban areas tend to commit more crime, unfortunately blacks represent a great portion of those statistics. There are bigger evils happening in america than 4/20,000 homicides annually occurring where a controversial he said she said between a white offender and a black victim. For a country moving away from superstition it sure is funny that somehow someway "If a person kills a member of a different race, the evil neutrons and energy manifests itself greater, and that perpetrator must be punished more, thus sayeth the emperor of black people, the honorable and talented mr sharpton." Except we weren't talking about homicide. At least I wasn't. I was talking about the way police treat black communities differently. That's what the Ferguson protests are about. A white policeman shooting an unarmed black teenager is just the incident that brought these long lingering racial tensions to the surface. It's not about white on black violence. It's about a white police force that treats the black community its supposed to be serving antagonistically. That's why the racial profiling data is relevant. It is hard evidence that black people are targeted by the mostly white police more aggressively than other racial groups. It's not like you need the data to know that though. For the people who live there, it's obvious. So yeah, Don't be dumb. You don't seem to get what this is about. Or maybe you're just unclear in your point. Maybe you believe that racial profiling and aggressive policing of black neighborhoods is warranted and you're pointing to homicide statistics to make that point. I would disagree. I have different values. Well you were the one randomly throwing in fucking driving arrests, when I was solely talking about homicides. I still think, no one should give a rats ass about this event. Its like hyping up a mediocre movie, you are only feeding the fire. By the time this event/trial ends, we will have 300 black on black homicides. But the narrative here would make a much better movie than those other deaths. Ok. I'm confused. What exactly is your point? I already explained why those traffic stops are relevant to this discussion. Best I can tell your position is: Because black people kill each other all the time nobody should care about this one time a white guy killed a black guy. My point was that people care about this incident because its representative of a larger issue about the how the police treat black people in Ferguson specifically, and Missouri more broadly. That traffic stop data is evidence of that police behavior. What don't you get? I didnt know this young man was killed for a routine traffic stop. All you care about is the pointless aftermath. We dont know if this was racially charged, we just dont.
So you're either an idiot or a deliberate troll. Did you see me write that Michael Brown was killed for a traffic stop? Do you really not understand how racial profiling data is relevant to a discussion about police behavior with regards to race? Do you really believe the aftermath of this event is pointless?
It barely matters if the shooting was racially charged or not. That's not what this is really about. As I've explained. Where do you disagree? What aren't you following?
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On August 16 2014 02:48 Wolfstan wrote:
Isn't wages beating inflation more of a pipe dream, I'm not big on macro economics but isn't wages and inflation basically the same thing? I mean an individuals wages can beat inflation by being part of sector or demographic trends, opening of larger markets, and increasing productivity/skills, but society as a whole cannot beat inflation over the long haul. The better way to measure societal progress is lifestyle improvements.
No, wages and inflation aren't the same thing. If productivity is increasing you can have income grow faster than inflation.
To put it another way, if workers are each producing more shit, they can each consume more shit.
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On August 16 2014 01:00 WhiteDog wrote:Show nested quote +On August 16 2014 00:30 Crushinator wrote:On August 16 2014 00:00 aksfjh wrote:On August 15 2014 23:39 Crushinator wrote:On August 15 2014 23:07 aksfjh wrote:On August 15 2014 15:45 OuchyDathurts wrote:On August 15 2014 14:47 mcc wrote:On August 15 2014 14:12 OuchyDathurts wrote:On August 15 2014 13:48 Sermokala wrote:On August 15 2014 13:29 sc2isnotdying wrote:
[quote]
No. My solution to crime is to tackle the root causes. Poverty, education, etc...
Also advocating police reform is not the same as saying "let's allow crime to happen" The problems with poverty and education are caused by the high rate of crime. Dealing with crime solves poverty and poor education the same as dealing with poverty and poor education would solve crime. They couldn't be any less independent and blindly ignoring that fact is what caused the current mess to begin with. The problems are all intertwined. A child born into a shit neighborhood is surrounded by poverty. Odds are at least one of his parents are not around. The adult he is with is probably working a dead end minimum wage job, maybe multiple jobs to make ends meet. If that adult is never around working to scrape by a living they're not around to raise that kid properly. The kid is accountable to no one, supervised by no one, with nothing to do. Odds are he's going to the worst school in the area so his education sucks dick, when he gets home there's no one to help with homework, no one to talk to, hang out with, play with, or discipline him. Even if the adult in his life is a great person and trying their absolute hardest they're still stuck in a shit situation. So the kid's got no one, odds are he'll turn outside the home for friends, companionship, entertainment. All those kids with no supervision are going to make some awful choices, that's how even the best of kids work. But they're surrounded by poverty, education isn't instilled in them, crime is everywhere, those choices are going to be even worse. The kid sees hopelessness and squalor everywhere around him, sees adults working to get no where, maybe minimum wage if you can get it. Crime doesn't seem so bad now, he can make more money, he can work for himself or his friends, he doesn't need to be highly educated academically, maybe he can help lift his family up doing it! Odds are he ends up in jail sooner or later if not dead. Maybe somewhere along the line he ended up having a kid of his own who like countless others, and like himself, now doesn't have a dad, and so the cycle continues. There's no miracle cure that fixes it all over night. Things have to change fundamentally, thought processes have to be rewired on all sides of the equation to tackle it properly. But, the journey of 1000 miles starts with but a single step. If you ask me starting with education is the first step to take. Get the children, teach them, show them the possibilities, make education important and cool. The young people can effect more change than the adults. It won't work for them all, but nothing ever works for 100% of the population. If you were born in the shittiest ghetto in the asshole of the country you should have the same shot at a good education as anyone else. Try and stop the hopelessness before it takes root. You are correct on the complexity of the issue and Sermokala's one way causal link and solution based on it are extremely suspect and unlikely. But your proposed solution - education - is a nice slogan, but making it work is much harder and as far as I can tell nobody actually succeeded at this. There are some marginally successful programs at making education more "cool", but they seem far from reliable. I think much better is to improve policing and governance of the area, but not in a way Sermokala is promoting. It needs to be targeted not at increasing actual crime fighting (although that never hurts), but on fairness and reliability of the police and law. The people in the area need to be shown that the police and government and law is fair and that they will profit by relegating their issues to the system. This is a long term plan and will not have results immediately, but that is the only way I know of to "civilize" such crime ridden areas. Simple "tough on crime" approaches that parts of US are so in love with will fail as they are ideological and dogmatic, not actually result-oriented. It does not actually matter if police are fair and law is too if the population of the area does not perceive them as such, as in such case you cannot expect any improvement. Not mentioning that fairness of the local police force is more than in doubt. Education done right isn't easy. I think our education system as a whole sucks. When everything is about giving the right answer and regurgitating things to pass the class instead of critical thinking and reasoned discussion there's a problem IMO. School being a one size fits all prospect instead of letting kids learn more about fields they're interested sucks. Hell, the first time I recall thinking something I was learning was legitimately cool was when I started taking Physics, it was an actual mind fuck learning that stuff and I was excited to learn more. If it takes that long to reach a kid there's a problem. But going into the problems of our education system we could be here forever. Targeting crime first to me probably means more people in prison which doesn't change anything. It's trying to deal with adults while none of the problems underneath are being dealt with. Yeah the whole "Children are our future" thing is cliche, but it's also true. If you don't deal with them then it'll be one more generation gone to waste. Young people have a knack for changing the way society sees things. Things that were one taboo become the way things are and they become more accepted. We had extreme racism and segregation, we got rid of the segregation and kids ended up thinking "hey, those black/white/asian/hispanic/etc kids aren't so bad!" and it became more normal. Then different races hanging out together and interracial relationships became more normal. Kids started having an openly gay friend or family member, homosexuality became more openly accepted. Video games will rot your brain and make you a serial killer, kids have grown up with them and now everyone plays them. Less and less people care about those things that were once huge issues because young people have grown up with them and made them no big deal in society, and that's a great thing. Education IMO has become "cooler" over time. We went from nothing to Mr. Rogers who was a square, to Bill Nye, to Mythbusters, etc. Educational science programming is letting people see all the cool shit you can do and how the universe works, that stuff can be engaging to kids. Our technology, which most people love, is evolving so fast. Everyone wants the newest gadget, all this stuff that was seen as dorky is really sweet and everyone wants it. Video games for learning have been a boon. Number Munchers and Oregon Trail back in my day were sick, now the tech and what we can do is way way better. The problems are all intertwined. Adults need to make enough money where they can be with their kids, parent, and help with homework. Crime needs to not be all the kids see or know, minorities can't get unequal treatment from the law. Education needs to be improved and given way more money. Stigmas must be changed. It's a fucking giant disaster that no one seem to legitimately give a shit about since none of these issues are being looked at let alone changed. But, in my opinion it all comes back to the education. Jesus Christ I need to stop writing novels >< Just adding a tiny bit of my own thoughts on this. Education is very much a competitive aspect, so improving education for everybody doesn't help with the problems of racial discrimination (intentional or not). Not only that, but it doesn't even really help with poverty (or crime for that matter) if the floor somebody can be paid is at or below the poverty level. Thus, from a policy standpoint, it makes much more sense to approach poverty and crime first. I would think it would be obvious that people with more valuable skills are less likely to be poor. All research shows that when average human capital goes up, so does productivity, wages, and general well-being. Your own little thoughts are just dead wrong. You must have missed the last 30 years of tremendous productivity growth with stagnating wages... Productivity has more components than human capital, and it is not required for wages and productivity to be perfectly correlated for education to be a worthwhile investment. Increasing human capital investment is an incredibly succesful method of reducing poverty, crime, and all sorts of other social costs. People who come from the most disadvantaged backgrounds benefit the most from increased human capital investment due to diminishing returns (meaning additional units of education are more valuable if you have had little). Not only can this be understood intuitively, it has been shown so many times emperically it really isn't worth debating. You forgot the part where he said education was competitive. If you give a bachelor degree to everyone, it will increase human capital and productivity, but it can have no or almost no impact on income distribution as long as the distinctions between class or groups stays the same (all the rich get a master to distinguish themselves). It has been done in France actually, with the 80% bachelor goal from Mitterand. Our labor productivity is one of the best of the world, but inequality and poverty are rising (despite a social safety net and a huge welfare program). Things are much more complicated in real life than in the "intuitive understanding" of the market.
I am not particularly interested in debating the disparity between labor productivity and wages, since the issue is indeed complex. However, the idea that education is ineffective in reducing poverty and social problems is just absurd. Massive investment in human capital is how countries like south korea and taiwan have been able to graduate from third world low-labor cost economies with no natural resources to prosperous high skill economies, for example.
Competition, or lack thereof, is exactly why higher levels of education result in more favorable returns to labor. Higher levels of education result in higher levels of specialisation, or heterogeneity, as opposed to the homogenous and easily exploitable homogenous labor offered by unskilled laborers. Heterogeneity in this sense allows workers to gain in monopoly power in their labor markets (less competition).
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Wow. Didn't expect for the police to have a QuickTrip video of Mike Brown stealing $50 worth of cigars and pushing the store owner. (guy who got shot in Ferguson, MO)
6ft4 292 lbs is pretty hard to miss(identify).
This is going to become a bigger cluster now.
So wow... the first business looted and torched, and spray painted with "Snitches get stitches"... was the store he allegedly robbed? http://kplr11.com/2014/08/11/snitches-get-stitches-message-spray-painted-on-burned-out-quiktrip/
And now we know why Obama stayed quiet on this one.
![[image loading]](http://4-ps.googleusercontent.com/h/www.thegatewaypundit.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/xbrown-robbery-stroe.jpg.pagespeed.ic.Dzg1QE4GTT.jpg)
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On August 16 2014 04:21 RCMDVA wrote:Wow. Didn't expect for the police to have a QuickTrip video of Mike Brown stealing $50 worth of cigars and pushing the store owner. (guy who got shot in Ferguson, MO) 6ft4 292 lbs is pretty hard to miss(identify). This is going to become a bigger cluster now. So wow... the first business looted and torched, and spray painted with "Snitches get stitches"... was the store he allegedly robbed? http://kplr11.com/2014/08/11/snitches-get-stitches-message-spray-painted-on-burned-out-quiktrip/And now we know why Obama stayed quiet on this one.
So stealing 50 bucks worth of cigars justify an execution without trial ?
On August 16 2014 04:07 Crushinator wrote:Show nested quote +On August 16 2014 01:00 WhiteDog wrote:On August 16 2014 00:30 Crushinator wrote:On August 16 2014 00:00 aksfjh wrote:On August 15 2014 23:39 Crushinator wrote:On August 15 2014 23:07 aksfjh wrote:On August 15 2014 15:45 OuchyDathurts wrote:On August 15 2014 14:47 mcc wrote:On August 15 2014 14:12 OuchyDathurts wrote:On August 15 2014 13:48 Sermokala wrote:
[quote]
The problems with poverty and education are caused by the high rate of crime. Dealing with crime solves poverty and poor education the same as dealing with poverty and poor education would solve crime. They couldn't be any less independent and blindly ignoring that fact is what caused the current mess to begin with. The problems are all intertwined. A child born into a shit neighborhood is surrounded by poverty. Odds are at least one of his parents are not around. The adult he is with is probably working a dead end minimum wage job, maybe multiple jobs to make ends meet. If that adult is never around working to scrape by a living they're not around to raise that kid properly. The kid is accountable to no one, supervised by no one, with nothing to do. Odds are he's going to the worst school in the area so his education sucks dick, when he gets home there's no one to help with homework, no one to talk to, hang out with, play with, or discipline him. Even if the adult in his life is a great person and trying their absolute hardest they're still stuck in a shit situation. So the kid's got no one, odds are he'll turn outside the home for friends, companionship, entertainment. All those kids with no supervision are going to make some awful choices, that's how even the best of kids work. But they're surrounded by poverty, education isn't instilled in them, crime is everywhere, those choices are going to be even worse. The kid sees hopelessness and squalor everywhere around him, sees adults working to get no where, maybe minimum wage if you can get it. Crime doesn't seem so bad now, he can make more money, he can work for himself or his friends, he doesn't need to be highly educated academically, maybe he can help lift his family up doing it! Odds are he ends up in jail sooner or later if not dead. Maybe somewhere along the line he ended up having a kid of his own who like countless others, and like himself, now doesn't have a dad, and so the cycle continues. There's no miracle cure that fixes it all over night. Things have to change fundamentally, thought processes have to be rewired on all sides of the equation to tackle it properly. But, the journey of 1000 miles starts with but a single step. If you ask me starting with education is the first step to take. Get the children, teach them, show them the possibilities, make education important and cool. The young people can effect more change than the adults. It won't work for them all, but nothing ever works for 100% of the population. If you were born in the shittiest ghetto in the asshole of the country you should have the same shot at a good education as anyone else. Try and stop the hopelessness before it takes root. You are correct on the complexity of the issue and Sermokala's one way causal link and solution based on it are extremely suspect and unlikely. But your proposed solution - education - is a nice slogan, but making it work is much harder and as far as I can tell nobody actually succeeded at this. There are some marginally successful programs at making education more "cool", but they seem far from reliable. I think much better is to improve policing and governance of the area, but not in a way Sermokala is promoting. It needs to be targeted not at increasing actual crime fighting (although that never hurts), but on fairness and reliability of the police and law. The people in the area need to be shown that the police and government and law is fair and that they will profit by relegating their issues to the system. This is a long term plan and will not have results immediately, but that is the only way I know of to "civilize" such crime ridden areas. Simple "tough on crime" approaches that parts of US are so in love with will fail as they are ideological and dogmatic, not actually result-oriented. It does not actually matter if police are fair and law is too if the population of the area does not perceive them as such, as in such case you cannot expect any improvement. Not mentioning that fairness of the local police force is more than in doubt. Education done right isn't easy. I think our education system as a whole sucks. When everything is about giving the right answer and regurgitating things to pass the class instead of critical thinking and reasoned discussion there's a problem IMO. School being a one size fits all prospect instead of letting kids learn more about fields they're interested sucks. Hell, the first time I recall thinking something I was learning was legitimately cool was when I started taking Physics, it was an actual mind fuck learning that stuff and I was excited to learn more. If it takes that long to reach a kid there's a problem. But going into the problems of our education system we could be here forever. Targeting crime first to me probably means more people in prison which doesn't change anything. It's trying to deal with adults while none of the problems underneath are being dealt with. Yeah the whole "Children are our future" thing is cliche, but it's also true. If you don't deal with them then it'll be one more generation gone to waste. Young people have a knack for changing the way society sees things. Things that were one taboo become the way things are and they become more accepted. We had extreme racism and segregation, we got rid of the segregation and kids ended up thinking "hey, those black/white/asian/hispanic/etc kids aren't so bad!" and it became more normal. Then different races hanging out together and interracial relationships became more normal. Kids started having an openly gay friend or family member, homosexuality became more openly accepted. Video games will rot your brain and make you a serial killer, kids have grown up with them and now everyone plays them. Less and less people care about those things that were once huge issues because young people have grown up with them and made them no big deal in society, and that's a great thing. Education IMO has become "cooler" over time. We went from nothing to Mr. Rogers who was a square, to Bill Nye, to Mythbusters, etc. Educational science programming is letting people see all the cool shit you can do and how the universe works, that stuff can be engaging to kids. Our technology, which most people love, is evolving so fast. Everyone wants the newest gadget, all this stuff that was seen as dorky is really sweet and everyone wants it. Video games for learning have been a boon. Number Munchers and Oregon Trail back in my day were sick, now the tech and what we can do is way way better. The problems are all intertwined. Adults need to make enough money where they can be with their kids, parent, and help with homework. Crime needs to not be all the kids see or know, minorities can't get unequal treatment from the law. Education needs to be improved and given way more money. Stigmas must be changed. It's a fucking giant disaster that no one seem to legitimately give a shit about since none of these issues are being looked at let alone changed. But, in my opinion it all comes back to the education. Jesus Christ I need to stop writing novels >< Just adding a tiny bit of my own thoughts on this. Education is very much a competitive aspect, so improving education for everybody doesn't help with the problems of racial discrimination (intentional or not). Not only that, but it doesn't even really help with poverty (or crime for that matter) if the floor somebody can be paid is at or below the poverty level. Thus, from a policy standpoint, it makes much more sense to approach poverty and crime first. I would think it would be obvious that people with more valuable skills are less likely to be poor. All research shows that when average human capital goes up, so does productivity, wages, and general well-being. Your own little thoughts are just dead wrong. You must have missed the last 30 years of tremendous productivity growth with stagnating wages... Productivity has more components than human capital, and it is not required for wages and productivity to be perfectly correlated for education to be a worthwhile investment. Increasing human capital investment is an incredibly succesful method of reducing poverty, crime, and all sorts of other social costs. People who come from the most disadvantaged backgrounds benefit the most from increased human capital investment due to diminishing returns (meaning additional units of education are more valuable if you have had little). Not only can this be understood intuitively, it has been shown so many times emperically it really isn't worth debating. You forgot the part where he said education was competitive. If you give a bachelor degree to everyone, it will increase human capital and productivity, but it can have no or almost no impact on income distribution as long as the distinctions between class or groups stays the same (all the rich get a master to distinguish themselves). It has been done in France actually, with the 80% bachelor goal from Mitterand. Our labor productivity is one of the best of the world, but inequality and poverty are rising (despite a social safety net and a huge welfare program). Things are much more complicated in real life than in the "intuitive understanding" of the market. I am not particularly interested in debating the disparity between labor productivity and wages, since the issue is indeed complex. However, the idea that education is ineffective in reducing poverty and social problems is just absurd. Massive investment in human capital is how countries like south korea and taiwan have been able to graduate from third world low-labor cost economies with no natural resources to prosperous high skill economies, for example. Competition, or lack thereof, is exactly why higher levels of education result in more favorable returns to labor. Higher levels of education result in higher levels of specialisation, or heterogeneity, as opposed to the homogenous and easily exploitable homogenous labor offered by unskilled laborers. Heterogeneity in this sense allows workers to gain in monopoly power in their labor markets (less competition).
"Human capital" is the new flavor of the decade for economists, after R&D in the 90s. I believe that policies that seeks to reduce poverty and income disparities are the most effective - policies that favor education for the poorests, maybe, but for a big part just simple policies that effectively redistribute wealth from richest to the poorest. I'm not very "educated" about the korean miracle, but I'm pretty sure that kind of policies existed at some point, and played a role.
As a teacher myself I believe "education" is for a big part a hoax (a way to class people and permit distinction) - for exemple, experience is really important to be productive and it is always discarded in contemporary societies because we believe in the "charismatic ideology of the gift". Human capital is a lot bigger than education by the way : investing in infrastructures and health services is part of "human capital". The concept in itself is very vague to understand what happen in reality - for exemple if you look at boss' press, one of the major concern of firm in the occidental world is to find good workers, considering that - despite a global increase in "education" - it is harder and harder to find good workers.
In sociology there is a lot of work about relative frustration (like Why men rebel from T. Gurr), from this perspective achieving higher education for the poorest neighborhood, but without objective chance to get to higher positions and income would result not in less violence but more.
My response is a bit messy because that's a very broad topic and I don't have the patience to be structured in my answer.
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Canada11426 Posts
Petty theft = Death Penalty
Don't you know?
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On August 16 2014 04:46 WhiteDog wrote:Show nested quote +On August 16 2014 04:21 RCMDVA wrote:Wow. Didn't expect for the police to have a QuickTrip video of Mike Brown stealing $50 worth of cigars and pushing the store owner. (guy who got shot in Ferguson, MO) 6ft4 292 lbs is pretty hard to miss(identify). This is going to become a bigger cluster now. So wow... the first business looted and torched, and spray painted with "Snitches get stitches"... was the store he allegedly robbed? http://kplr11.com/2014/08/11/snitches-get-stitches-message-spray-painted-on-burned-out-quiktrip/And now we know why Obama stayed quiet on this one. So stealing 50 bucks worth of cigars justify an execution ?
It puts a very different spin on things, and the circumstances of the stop, and the credibility of the witness if he's the #2 guy in the robbery that they are looking for.
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I'm pretty drunk but aren't there a bunch of eyewitness accounts of how this kid was just straight up murdered? Or is the argument just that black people have no right to complain because the police murder all races equally? Cigar theft hardly seems relevant in any case.
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The primary witness was his friend named "Johnson" and the police named a 2nd robber in the video "Johnson".
So if the primary witness gets arrested for a felony (strong arm robbery) here soon. Shit's going to hit the fan again.
Witness (Dorian Johnson) just admitted he did in fact rob the store with Mike Brown:
http://www.ksdk.com/story/news/local/2014/08/15/attorney-dorian-johnson-michael-brown-robbery/14118769/
FERGUSON, Mo. (AP) - The friend who was with Michael Brown when he was shot and killed by a police officer near St. Louis over the weekend is reportedly confirming that he and Brown had taken part in the theft of cigars from a convenience store that day.
That word comes from the attorney for Dorian Johnson, speaking to MSNBC. Police in Ferguson had earlier announced that Brown was suspected of taking cigars from the convenience store in what was described as a "strong-arm robbery."
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On August 16 2014 04:50 Falling wrote:
Petty theft = Death Penalty
Don't you know?
No one is claiming that. Don't be dumb.
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On August 16 2014 04:51 Crushinator wrote:
I'm pretty drunk but aren't there a bunch of eyewitness accounts of how this kid was just straight up murdered? Or is the argument just that black people have no right to complain because the police murder all races equally? Cigar theft hardly seems relevant in any case.
The relevance is that it can explain why Mike was being arrested in the first place or why Mike really didn't want to be arrested or explain why someone the community described as a 'gentile giant' (Hodor) is also accused of resisting arrest.
I don't know the extent of witnesses, but afaik there were not a bunch of eyewitness accounts saying he was straight up murdered. The closest to that is the friend he was with admitting to a struggle with the cop and then claiming Mike put up his hands before he was shot.
Edit: that friend being part of the robbery.
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On August 16 2014 04:51 RCMDVA wrote:Show nested quote +On August 16 2014 04:46 WhiteDog wrote:On August 16 2014 04:21 RCMDVA wrote:Wow. Didn't expect for the police to have a QuickTrip video of Mike Brown stealing $50 worth of cigars and pushing the store owner. (guy who got shot in Ferguson, MO) 6ft4 292 lbs is pretty hard to miss(identify). This is going to become a bigger cluster now. So wow... the first business looted and torched, and spray painted with "Snitches get stitches"... was the store he allegedly robbed? http://kplr11.com/2014/08/11/snitches-get-stitches-message-spray-painted-on-burned-out-quiktrip/And now we know why Obama stayed quiet on this one. So stealing 50 bucks worth of cigars justify an execution ? It puts a very different spin on things, and the circumstances of the stop, and the credibility of the witness if he's the #2 guy in the robbery that they are looking for.
The release of the video and incident report was clearly bullshit. They even came out and said that the officer didn't know that he was a suspect and that it was totally unrelated.
How about releasing how many times he got shot (or at least how many bullets the cop fired) or any explanation as to how he ended up dead ~30ft from where he was 'grabbing for the officers gun'?
Ferguson PD looks really bad in their handling of this. Obviously if the state hadn't taken the policing out of their hands they were only going to make things worse.
I don't know the extent of witnesses, but afaik there were not a bunch of eyewitness accounts saying he was straight up murdered. The closest to that is the friend he was with admitting to a struggle with the cop and then claiming Mike put up his hands before he was shot.
Well...
“It looked as if Michael was pushing off and the cop was trying to pull him in,” Tiffany Mitchell told CNN on Wednesday night.
Instead, a shot went off, then the teen broke free, and the officer got out of the vehicle in pursuit, the women said.
“I saw the police chase him … down the street and shoot him down,” Crenshaw said. Brown ran about 20 feet.
“Michael jerks his body, as if he’s been hit,” Mitchell said.
Then he faced the officer and put his hands in the air, but the officer kept firing, both women said. He sank to the pavement.
Source
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On August 16 2014 04:46 WhiteDog wrote:Show nested quote +On August 16 2014 04:21 RCMDVA wrote:Wow. Didn't expect for the police to have a QuickTrip video of Mike Brown stealing $50 worth of cigars and pushing the store owner. (guy who got shot in Ferguson, MO) 6ft4 292 lbs is pretty hard to miss(identify). This is going to become a bigger cluster now. So wow... the first business looted and torched, and spray painted with "Snitches get stitches"... was the store he allegedly robbed? http://kplr11.com/2014/08/11/snitches-get-stitches-message-spray-painted-on-burned-out-quiktrip/And now we know why Obama stayed quiet on this one. So stealing 50 bucks worth of cigars justify an execution without trial ? Show nested quote +On August 16 2014 04:07 Crushinator wrote:On August 16 2014 01:00 WhiteDog wrote:On August 16 2014 00:30 Crushinator wrote:On August 16 2014 00:00 aksfjh wrote:On August 15 2014 23:39 Crushinator wrote:On August 15 2014 23:07 aksfjh wrote:On August 15 2014 15:45 OuchyDathurts wrote:On August 15 2014 14:47 mcc wrote:On August 15 2014 14:12 OuchyDathurts wrote:
[quote]
The problems are all intertwined. A child born into a shit neighborhood is surrounded by poverty. Odds are at least one of his parents are not around. The adult he is with is probably working a dead end minimum wage job, maybe multiple jobs to make ends meet. If that adult is never around working to scrape by a living they're not around to raise that kid properly. The kid is accountable to no one, supervised by no one, with nothing to do. Odds are he's going to the worst school in the area so his education sucks dick, when he gets home there's no one to help with homework, no one to talk to, hang out with, play with, or discipline him. Even if the adult in his life is a great person and trying their absolute hardest they're still stuck in a shit situation.
So the kid's got no one, odds are he'll turn outside the home for friends, companionship, entertainment. All those kids with no supervision are going to make some awful choices, that's how even the best of kids work. But they're surrounded by poverty, education isn't instilled in them, crime is everywhere, those choices are going to be even worse. The kid sees hopelessness and squalor everywhere around him, sees adults working to get no where, maybe minimum wage if you can get it. Crime doesn't seem so bad now, he can make more money, he can work for himself or his friends, he doesn't need to be highly educated academically, maybe he can help lift his family up doing it! Odds are he ends up in jail sooner or later if not dead. Maybe somewhere along the line he ended up having a kid of his own who like countless others, and like himself, now doesn't have a dad, and so the cycle continues.
There's no miracle cure that fixes it all over night. Things have to change fundamentally, thought processes have to be rewired on all sides of the equation to tackle it properly. But, the journey of 1000 miles starts with but a single step. If you ask me starting with education is the first step to take. Get the children, teach them, show them the possibilities, make education important and cool. The young people can effect more change than the adults. It won't work for them all, but nothing ever works for 100% of the population.
If you were born in the shittiest ghetto in the asshole of the country you should have the same shot at a good education as anyone else. Try and stop the hopelessness before it takes root. You are correct on the complexity of the issue and Sermokala's one way causal link and solution based on it are extremely suspect and unlikely. But your proposed solution - education - is a nice slogan, but making it work is much harder and as far as I can tell nobody actually succeeded at this. There are some marginally successful programs at making education more "cool", but they seem far from reliable. I think much better is to improve policing and governance of the area, but not in a way Sermokala is promoting. It needs to be targeted not at increasing actual crime fighting (although that never hurts), but on fairness and reliability of the police and law. The people in the area need to be shown that the police and government and law is fair and that they will profit by relegating their issues to the system. This is a long term plan and will not have results immediately, but that is the only way I know of to "civilize" such crime ridden areas. Simple "tough on crime" approaches that parts of US are so in love with will fail as they are ideological and dogmatic, not actually result-oriented. It does not actually matter if police are fair and law is too if the population of the area does not perceive them as such, as in such case you cannot expect any improvement. Not mentioning that fairness of the local police force is more than in doubt. Education done right isn't easy. I think our education system as a whole sucks. When everything is about giving the right answer and regurgitating things to pass the class instead of critical thinking and reasoned discussion there's a problem IMO. School being a one size fits all prospect instead of letting kids learn more about fields they're interested sucks. Hell, the first time I recall thinking something I was learning was legitimately cool was when I started taking Physics, it was an actual mind fuck learning that stuff and I was excited to learn more. If it takes that long to reach a kid there's a problem. But going into the problems of our education system we could be here forever. Targeting crime first to me probably means more people in prison which doesn't change anything. It's trying to deal with adults while none of the problems underneath are being dealt with. Yeah the whole "Children are our future" thing is cliche, but it's also true. If you don't deal with them then it'll be one more generation gone to waste. Young people have a knack for changing the way society sees things. Things that were one taboo become the way things are and they become more accepted. We had extreme racism and segregation, we got rid of the segregation and kids ended up thinking "hey, those black/white/asian/hispanic/etc kids aren't so bad!" and it became more normal. Then different races hanging out together and interracial relationships became more normal. Kids started having an openly gay friend or family member, homosexuality became more openly accepted. Video games will rot your brain and make you a serial killer, kids have grown up with them and now everyone plays them. Less and less people care about those things that were once huge issues because young people have grown up with them and made them no big deal in society, and that's a great thing. Education IMO has become "cooler" over time. We went from nothing to Mr. Rogers who was a square, to Bill Nye, to Mythbusters, etc. Educational science programming is letting people see all the cool shit you can do and how the universe works, that stuff can be engaging to kids. Our technology, which most people love, is evolving so fast. Everyone wants the newest gadget, all this stuff that was seen as dorky is really sweet and everyone wants it. Video games for learning have been a boon. Number Munchers and Oregon Trail back in my day were sick, now the tech and what we can do is way way better. The problems are all intertwined. Adults need to make enough money where they can be with their kids, parent, and help with homework. Crime needs to not be all the kids see or know, minorities can't get unequal treatment from the law. Education needs to be improved and given way more money. Stigmas must be changed. It's a fucking giant disaster that no one seem to legitimately give a shit about since none of these issues are being looked at let alone changed. But, in my opinion it all comes back to the education. Jesus Christ I need to stop writing novels >< Just adding a tiny bit of my own thoughts on this. Education is very much a competitive aspect, so improving education for everybody doesn't help with the problems of racial discrimination (intentional or not). Not only that, but it doesn't even really help with poverty (or crime for that matter) if the floor somebody can be paid is at or below the poverty level. Thus, from a policy standpoint, it makes much more sense to approach poverty and crime first. I would think it would be obvious that people with more valuable skills are less likely to be poor. All research shows that when average human capital goes up, so does productivity, wages, and general well-being. Your own little thoughts are just dead wrong. You must have missed the last 30 years of tremendous productivity growth with stagnating wages... Productivity has more components than human capital, and it is not required for wages and productivity to be perfectly correlated for education to be a worthwhile investment. Increasing human capital investment is an incredibly succesful method of reducing poverty, crime, and all sorts of other social costs. People who come from the most disadvantaged backgrounds benefit the most from increased human capital investment due to diminishing returns (meaning additional units of education are more valuable if you have had little). Not only can this be understood intuitively, it has been shown so many times emperically it really isn't worth debating. You forgot the part where he said education was competitive. If you give a bachelor degree to everyone, it will increase human capital and productivity, but it can have no or almost no impact on income distribution as long as the distinctions between class or groups stays the same (all the rich get a master to distinguish themselves). It has been done in France actually, with the 80% bachelor goal from Mitterand. Our labor productivity is one of the best of the world, but inequality and poverty are rising (despite a social safety net and a huge welfare program). Things are much more complicated in real life than in the "intuitive understanding" of the market. I am not particularly interested in debating the disparity between labor productivity and wages, since the issue is indeed complex. However, the idea that education is ineffective in reducing poverty and social problems is just absurd. Massive investment in human capital is how countries like south korea and taiwan have been able to graduate from third world low-labor cost economies with no natural resources to prosperous high skill economies, for example. Competition, or lack thereof, is exactly why higher levels of education result in more favorable returns to labor. Higher levels of education result in higher levels of specialisation, or heterogeneity, as opposed to the homogenous and easily exploitable homogenous labor offered by unskilled laborers. Heterogeneity in this sense allows workers to gain in monopoly power in their labor markets (less competition). "Human capital" is the new flavor of the decade for economists, after R&D in the 90s. I believe that policies that seeks to reduce poverty and income disparities are the most effective - policies that favor education for the poorests, maybe, but for a big part just simple policies that effectively redistribute wealth from richest to the poorest. I'm not very "educated" about the korean miracle, but I'm pretty sure that kind of policies existed at some point, and played a role. As a teacher myself I believe "education" is for a big part a hoax (a way to class people and permit distinction) - for exemple, experience is really important to be productive and it is always discarded in contemporary societies. Human capital is a lot bigger than education by the way : investing in infrastructures and health services is part of "human capital". The concept in itself is very vague to understand what happen in reality - for exemple if you look at boss' press, one of the major concern of firm in the occidental world is to find good workers, considering that - despite a global increase in "education" - it is harder and harder to find good workers. In sociology there is a lot of work about relative frustration (like Why men rebel from T. Gurr), from this perspective achieving higher education for the poorest neighborhood, but without objective chance to get to higher positions and income would result not in less violence but more. My response is a bit messy because that's a very broad topic and I don't have the patience to be structured in my answer.
I do think education is often overemphasized when it comes to solving social problems and it certainly is not the only answer, but it to me it seems strange to attribute no importance to it at all, especially because it contradicts most emperical evidence. Achieving higher education but no opportunity to make use of it would indeed be quite a tragic situation, but is this really what happens in the real world? On the whole becoming more skilled, and making use of it would result in less frustration, even in the absence of higher wages because people value being competent at a difficult task, and being less replaceable (not a sociologist but I would think this is true, no?).
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On August 16 2014 05:14 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On August 16 2014 04:51 RCMDVA wrote:On August 16 2014 04:46 WhiteDog wrote:On August 16 2014 04:21 RCMDVA wrote:Wow. Didn't expect for the police to have a QuickTrip video of Mike Brown stealing $50 worth of cigars and pushing the store owner. (guy who got shot in Ferguson, MO) 6ft4 292 lbs is pretty hard to miss(identify). This is going to become a bigger cluster now. So wow... the first business looted and torched, and spray painted with "Snitches get stitches"... was the store he allegedly robbed? http://kplr11.com/2014/08/11/snitches-get-stitches-message-spray-painted-on-burned-out-quiktrip/And now we know why Obama stayed quiet on this one. So stealing 50 bucks worth of cigars justify an execution ? It puts a very different spin on things, and the circumstances of the stop, and the credibility of the witness if he's the #2 guy in the robbery that they are looking for. The release of the video and incident report was clearly bullshit. They even came out and said that the officer didn't know that he was a suspect and that it was totally unrelated. How about releasing how many times he got shot (or at least how many bullets the cop fired) or any explanation as to how he ended up dead ~30ft from where he was 'grabbing for the officers gun'? Ferguson PD looks really bad in their handling of this. Obviously if the state hadn't taken the policing out of their hands they were only going to make things worse.
Can you link a source on the 30ft? Is that official?
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Higher education doesn't equal opportunity. Here in Germany college degree rates are extremely low.( about 20% for people between age 25-35, compared to about 40% in most other developed countries), still I don't think the danger of ending up in poverty especially for the people who don't have a college degree here is higher than in the US.
I think the problem with the US is that there is no middle-ground. Either you get a fancy degree with tens of thousands of dollars in debt in some field that's not completely overcrowded, or it's going to be not so easy for you.
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On August 16 2014 05:22 JonnyBNoHo wrote:Show nested quote +On August 16 2014 05:14 GreenHorizons wrote:On August 16 2014 04:51 RCMDVA wrote:On August 16 2014 04:46 WhiteDog wrote:On August 16 2014 04:21 RCMDVA wrote:Wow. Didn't expect for the police to have a QuickTrip video of Mike Brown stealing $50 worth of cigars and pushing the store owner. (guy who got shot in Ferguson, MO) 6ft4 292 lbs is pretty hard to miss(identify). This is going to become a bigger cluster now. So wow... the first business looted and torched, and spray painted with "Snitches get stitches"... was the store he allegedly robbed? http://kplr11.com/2014/08/11/snitches-get-stitches-message-spray-painted-on-burned-out-quiktrip/And now we know why Obama stayed quiet on this one. So stealing 50 bucks worth of cigars justify an execution ? It puts a very different spin on things, and the circumstances of the stop, and the credibility of the witness if he's the #2 guy in the robbery that they are looking for. The release of the video and incident report was clearly bullshit. They even came out and said that the officer didn't know that he was a suspect and that it was totally unrelated. How about releasing how many times he got shot (or at least how many bullets the cop fired) or any explanation as to how he ended up dead ~30ft from where he was 'grabbing for the officers gun'? Ferguson PD looks really bad in their handling of this. Obviously if the state hadn't taken the policing out of their hands they were only going to make things worse. Can you link a source on the 30ft? Is that official?
Yes, yes I can.
St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar did say Brown was hit “multiple times” and died about 35 feet from the police car where the confrontation occurred.
Source
That change anything for you?
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On August 16 2014 05:13 JonnyBNoHo wrote:Show nested quote +On August 16 2014 04:51 Crushinator wrote:
I'm pretty drunk but aren't there a bunch of eyewitness accounts of how this kid was just straight up murdered? Or is the argument just that black people have no right to complain because the police murder all races equally? Cigar theft hardly seems relevant in any case. The relevance is that it can explain why Mike was being arrested in the first place or why Mike really didn't want to be arrested or explain why someone the community described as a 'gentile giant' (Hodor) is also accused of resisting arrest. I don't know the extent of witnesses, but afaik there were not a bunch of eyewitness accounts saying he was straight up murdered. The closest to that is the friend he was with admitting to a struggle with the cop and then claiming Mike put up his hands before he was shot. Edit: that friend being part of the robbery.
The claim about having the hands up isn't from his friend, but from two random women who both claim that he ran away, was shot in the back, then turned around put up his arms after being shot, and then the cop just kept shooting.
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On August 16 2014 05:15 Crushinator wrote:Show nested quote +On August 16 2014 04:46 WhiteDog wrote:On August 16 2014 04:21 RCMDVA wrote:Wow. Didn't expect for the police to have a QuickTrip video of Mike Brown stealing $50 worth of cigars and pushing the store owner. (guy who got shot in Ferguson, MO) 6ft4 292 lbs is pretty hard to miss(identify). This is going to become a bigger cluster now. So wow... the first business looted and torched, and spray painted with "Snitches get stitches"... was the store he allegedly robbed? http://kplr11.com/2014/08/11/snitches-get-stitches-message-spray-painted-on-burned-out-quiktrip/And now we know why Obama stayed quiet on this one. So stealing 50 bucks worth of cigars justify an execution without trial ? On August 16 2014 04:07 Crushinator wrote:On August 16 2014 01:00 WhiteDog wrote:On August 16 2014 00:30 Crushinator wrote:On August 16 2014 00:00 aksfjh wrote:On August 15 2014 23:39 Crushinator wrote:On August 15 2014 23:07 aksfjh wrote:On August 15 2014 15:45 OuchyDathurts wrote:On August 15 2014 14:47 mcc wrote:
[quote]
You are correct on the complexity of the issue and Sermokala's one way causal link and solution based on it are extremely suspect and unlikely. But your proposed solution - education - is a nice slogan, but making it work is much harder and as far as I can tell nobody actually succeeded at this. There are some marginally successful programs at making education more "cool", but they seem far from reliable. I think much better is to improve policing and governance of the area, but not in a way Sermokala is promoting. It needs to be targeted not at increasing actual crime fighting (although that never hurts), but on fairness and reliability of the police and law. The people in the area need to be shown that the police and government and law is fair and that they will profit by relegating their issues to the system. This is a long term plan and will not have results immediately, but that is the only way I know of to "civilize" such crime ridden areas. Simple "tough on crime" approaches that parts of US are so in love with will fail as they are ideological and dogmatic, not actually result-oriented. It does not actually matter if police are fair and law is too if the population of the area does not perceive them as such, as in such case you cannot expect any improvement. Not mentioning that fairness of the local police force is more than in doubt. Education done right isn't easy. I think our education system as a whole sucks. When everything is about giving the right answer and regurgitating things to pass the class instead of critical thinking and reasoned discussion there's a problem IMO. School being a one size fits all prospect instead of letting kids learn more about fields they're interested sucks. Hell, the first time I recall thinking something I was learning was legitimately cool was when I started taking Physics, it was an actual mind fuck learning that stuff and I was excited to learn more. If it takes that long to reach a kid there's a problem. But going into the problems of our education system we could be here forever. Targeting crime first to me probably means more people in prison which doesn't change anything. It's trying to deal with adults while none of the problems underneath are being dealt with. Yeah the whole "Children are our future" thing is cliche, but it's also true. If you don't deal with them then it'll be one more generation gone to waste. Young people have a knack for changing the way society sees things. Things that were one taboo become the way things are and they become more accepted. We had extreme racism and segregation, we got rid of the segregation and kids ended up thinking "hey, those black/white/asian/hispanic/etc kids aren't so bad!" and it became more normal. Then different races hanging out together and interracial relationships became more normal. Kids started having an openly gay friend or family member, homosexuality became more openly accepted. Video games will rot your brain and make you a serial killer, kids have grown up with them and now everyone plays them. Less and less people care about those things that were once huge issues because young people have grown up with them and made them no big deal in society, and that's a great thing. Education IMO has become "cooler" over time. We went from nothing to Mr. Rogers who was a square, to Bill Nye, to Mythbusters, etc. Educational science programming is letting people see all the cool shit you can do and how the universe works, that stuff can be engaging to kids. Our technology, which most people love, is evolving so fast. Everyone wants the newest gadget, all this stuff that was seen as dorky is really sweet and everyone wants it. Video games for learning have been a boon. Number Munchers and Oregon Trail back in my day were sick, now the tech and what we can do is way way better. The problems are all intertwined. Adults need to make enough money where they can be with their kids, parent, and help with homework. Crime needs to not be all the kids see or know, minorities can't get unequal treatment from the law. Education needs to be improved and given way more money. Stigmas must be changed. It's a fucking giant disaster that no one seem to legitimately give a shit about since none of these issues are being looked at let alone changed. But, in my opinion it all comes back to the education. Jesus Christ I need to stop writing novels >< Just adding a tiny bit of my own thoughts on this. Education is very much a competitive aspect, so improving education for everybody doesn't help with the problems of racial discrimination (intentional or not). Not only that, but it doesn't even really help with poverty (or crime for that matter) if the floor somebody can be paid is at or below the poverty level. Thus, from a policy standpoint, it makes much more sense to approach poverty and crime first. I would think it would be obvious that people with more valuable skills are less likely to be poor. All research shows that when average human capital goes up, so does productivity, wages, and general well-being. Your own little thoughts are just dead wrong. You must have missed the last 30 years of tremendous productivity growth with stagnating wages... Productivity has more components than human capital, and it is not required for wages and productivity to be perfectly correlated for education to be a worthwhile investment. Increasing human capital investment is an incredibly succesful method of reducing poverty, crime, and all sorts of other social costs. People who come from the most disadvantaged backgrounds benefit the most from increased human capital investment due to diminishing returns (meaning additional units of education are more valuable if you have had little). Not only can this be understood intuitively, it has been shown so many times emperically it really isn't worth debating. You forgot the part where he said education was competitive. If you give a bachelor degree to everyone, it will increase human capital and productivity, but it can have no or almost no impact on income distribution as long as the distinctions between class or groups stays the same (all the rich get a master to distinguish themselves). It has been done in France actually, with the 80% bachelor goal from Mitterand. Our labor productivity is one of the best of the world, but inequality and poverty are rising (despite a social safety net and a huge welfare program). Things are much more complicated in real life than in the "intuitive understanding" of the market. I am not particularly interested in debating the disparity between labor productivity and wages, since the issue is indeed complex. However, the idea that education is ineffective in reducing poverty and social problems is just absurd. Massive investment in human capital is how countries like south korea and taiwan have been able to graduate from third world low-labor cost economies with no natural resources to prosperous high skill economies, for example. Competition, or lack thereof, is exactly why higher levels of education result in more favorable returns to labor. Higher levels of education result in higher levels of specialisation, or heterogeneity, as opposed to the homogenous and easily exploitable homogenous labor offered by unskilled laborers. Heterogeneity in this sense allows workers to gain in monopoly power in their labor markets (less competition). "Human capital" is the new flavor of the decade for economists, after R&D in the 90s. I believe that policies that seeks to reduce poverty and income disparities are the most effective - policies that favor education for the poorests, maybe, but for a big part just simple policies that effectively redistribute wealth from richest to the poorest. I'm not very "educated" about the korean miracle, but I'm pretty sure that kind of policies existed at some point, and played a role. As a teacher myself I believe "education" is for a big part a hoax (a way to class people and permit distinction) - for exemple, experience is really important to be productive and it is always discarded in contemporary societies. Human capital is a lot bigger than education by the way : investing in infrastructures and health services is part of "human capital". The concept in itself is very vague to understand what happen in reality - for exemple if you look at boss' press, one of the major concern of firm in the occidental world is to find good workers, considering that - despite a global increase in "education" - it is harder and harder to find good workers. In sociology there is a lot of work about relative frustration (like Why men rebel from T. Gurr), from this perspective achieving higher education for the poorest neighborhood, but without objective chance to get to higher positions and income would result not in less violence but more. My response is a bit messy because that's a very broad topic and I don't have the patience to be structured in my answer. I do think education is often overemphasized when it comes to solving social problems and it certainly is not the only answer, but it to me it seems strange to attribute no importance to it at all, especially because it contradicts most emperical evidence. Achieving higher education but no opportunity to make use of it would indeed be quite a tragic situation, but is this really what happens in the real world? On the whole becoming more skilled, and making use of it would result in less frustration, even in the absence of higher wages because people value being competent at a difficult task, and being less replaceable (not a sociologist but I would think this is true, no?).
The issue is that many of those that are stuck in poverty and high crime areas can't even get to the higher educational part, despite having all the opportunity required to do so (on paper). Meanwhile, of those that HAVE that education, many of them are struggling to make wages comparable of a high school graduate of 20 years ago. The "specialized" world you talked about earlier doesn't exist for a Starbucks barista with a college degree. Getting better educated may increase US productivity, but that apparently isn't reflected in median US incomes.
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On August 16 2014 05:15 Crushinator wrote:Show nested quote +On August 16 2014 04:46 WhiteDog wrote:On August 16 2014 04:21 RCMDVA wrote:Wow. Didn't expect for the police to have a QuickTrip video of Mike Brown stealing $50 worth of cigars and pushing the store owner. (guy who got shot in Ferguson, MO) 6ft4 292 lbs is pretty hard to miss(identify). This is going to become a bigger cluster now. So wow... the first business looted and torched, and spray painted with "Snitches get stitches"... was the store he allegedly robbed? http://kplr11.com/2014/08/11/snitches-get-stitches-message-spray-painted-on-burned-out-quiktrip/And now we know why Obama stayed quiet on this one. So stealing 50 bucks worth of cigars justify an execution without trial ? On August 16 2014 04:07 Crushinator wrote:On August 16 2014 01:00 WhiteDog wrote:On August 16 2014 00:30 Crushinator wrote:On August 16 2014 00:00 aksfjh wrote:On August 15 2014 23:39 Crushinator wrote:On August 15 2014 23:07 aksfjh wrote:On August 15 2014 15:45 OuchyDathurts wrote:On August 15 2014 14:47 mcc wrote:
[quote]
You are correct on the complexity of the issue and Sermokala's one way causal link and solution based on it are extremely suspect and unlikely. But your proposed solution - education - is a nice slogan, but making it work is much harder and as far as I can tell nobody actually succeeded at this. There are some marginally successful programs at making education more "cool", but they seem far from reliable. I think much better is to improve policing and governance of the area, but not in a way Sermokala is promoting. It needs to be targeted not at increasing actual crime fighting (although that never hurts), but on fairness and reliability of the police and law. The people in the area need to be shown that the police and government and law is fair and that they will profit by relegating their issues to the system. This is a long term plan and will not have results immediately, but that is the only way I know of to "civilize" such crime ridden areas. Simple "tough on crime" approaches that parts of US are so in love with will fail as they are ideological and dogmatic, not actually result-oriented. It does not actually matter if police are fair and law is too if the population of the area does not perceive them as such, as in such case you cannot expect any improvement. Not mentioning that fairness of the local police force is more than in doubt. Education done right isn't easy. I think our education system as a whole sucks. When everything is about giving the right answer and regurgitating things to pass the class instead of critical thinking and reasoned discussion there's a problem IMO. School being a one size fits all prospect instead of letting kids learn more about fields they're interested sucks. Hell, the first time I recall thinking something I was learning was legitimately cool was when I started taking Physics, it was an actual mind fuck learning that stuff and I was excited to learn more. If it takes that long to reach a kid there's a problem. But going into the problems of our education system we could be here forever. Targeting crime first to me probably means more people in prison which doesn't change anything. It's trying to deal with adults while none of the problems underneath are being dealt with. Yeah the whole "Children are our future" thing is cliche, but it's also true. If you don't deal with them then it'll be one more generation gone to waste. Young people have a knack for changing the way society sees things. Things that were one taboo become the way things are and they become more accepted. We had extreme racism and segregation, we got rid of the segregation and kids ended up thinking "hey, those black/white/asian/hispanic/etc kids aren't so bad!" and it became more normal. Then different races hanging out together and interracial relationships became more normal. Kids started having an openly gay friend or family member, homosexuality became more openly accepted. Video games will rot your brain and make you a serial killer, kids have grown up with them and now everyone plays them. Less and less people care about those things that were once huge issues because young people have grown up with them and made them no big deal in society, and that's a great thing. Education IMO has become "cooler" over time. We went from nothing to Mr. Rogers who was a square, to Bill Nye, to Mythbusters, etc. Educational science programming is letting people see all the cool shit you can do and how the universe works, that stuff can be engaging to kids. Our technology, which most people love, is evolving so fast. Everyone wants the newest gadget, all this stuff that was seen as dorky is really sweet and everyone wants it. Video games for learning have been a boon. Number Munchers and Oregon Trail back in my day were sick, now the tech and what we can do is way way better. The problems are all intertwined. Adults need to make enough money where they can be with their kids, parent, and help with homework. Crime needs to not be all the kids see or know, minorities can't get unequal treatment from the law. Education needs to be improved and given way more money. Stigmas must be changed. It's a fucking giant disaster that no one seem to legitimately give a shit about since none of these issues are being looked at let alone changed. But, in my opinion it all comes back to the education. Jesus Christ I need to stop writing novels >< Just adding a tiny bit of my own thoughts on this. Education is very much a competitive aspect, so improving education for everybody doesn't help with the problems of racial discrimination (intentional or not). Not only that, but it doesn't even really help with poverty (or crime for that matter) if the floor somebody can be paid is at or below the poverty level. Thus, from a policy standpoint, it makes much more sense to approach poverty and crime first. I would think it would be obvious that people with more valuable skills are less likely to be poor. All research shows that when average human capital goes up, so does productivity, wages, and general well-being. Your own little thoughts are just dead wrong. You must have missed the last 30 years of tremendous productivity growth with stagnating wages... Productivity has more components than human capital, and it is not required for wages and productivity to be perfectly correlated for education to be a worthwhile investment. Increasing human capital investment is an incredibly succesful method of reducing poverty, crime, and all sorts of other social costs. People who come from the most disadvantaged backgrounds benefit the most from increased human capital investment due to diminishing returns (meaning additional units of education are more valuable if you have had little). Not only can this be understood intuitively, it has been shown so many times emperically it really isn't worth debating. You forgot the part where he said education was competitive. If you give a bachelor degree to everyone, it will increase human capital and productivity, but it can have no or almost no impact on income distribution as long as the distinctions between class or groups stays the same (all the rich get a master to distinguish themselves). It has been done in France actually, with the 80% bachelor goal from Mitterand. Our labor productivity is one of the best of the world, but inequality and poverty are rising (despite a social safety net and a huge welfare program). Things are much more complicated in real life than in the "intuitive understanding" of the market. I am not particularly interested in debating the disparity between labor productivity and wages, since the issue is indeed complex. However, the idea that education is ineffective in reducing poverty and social problems is just absurd. Massive investment in human capital is how countries like south korea and taiwan have been able to graduate from third world low-labor cost economies with no natural resources to prosperous high skill economies, for example. Competition, or lack thereof, is exactly why higher levels of education result in more favorable returns to labor. Higher levels of education result in higher levels of specialisation, or heterogeneity, as opposed to the homogenous and easily exploitable homogenous labor offered by unskilled laborers. Heterogeneity in this sense allows workers to gain in monopoly power in their labor markets (less competition). "Human capital" is the new flavor of the decade for economists, after R&D in the 90s. I believe that policies that seeks to reduce poverty and income disparities are the most effective - policies that favor education for the poorests, maybe, but for a big part just simple policies that effectively redistribute wealth from richest to the poorest. I'm not very "educated" about the korean miracle, but I'm pretty sure that kind of policies existed at some point, and played a role. As a teacher myself I believe "education" is for a big part a hoax (a way to class people and permit distinction) - for exemple, experience is really important to be productive and it is always discarded in contemporary societies. Human capital is a lot bigger than education by the way : investing in infrastructures and health services is part of "human capital". The concept in itself is very vague to understand what happen in reality - for exemple if you look at boss' press, one of the major concern of firm in the occidental world is to find good workers, considering that - despite a global increase in "education" - it is harder and harder to find good workers. In sociology there is a lot of work about relative frustration (like Why men rebel from T. Gurr), from this perspective achieving higher education for the poorest neighborhood, but without objective chance to get to higher positions and income would result not in less violence but more. My response is a bit messy because that's a very broad topic and I don't have the patience to be structured in my answer. I do think education is often overemphasized when it comes to solving social problems and it certainly is not the only answer, but it to me it seems strange to attribute no importance to it at all, especially because it contradicts most emperical evidence. Achieving higher education but no opportunity to make use of it would indeed be quite a tragic situation, but is this really what happens in the real world? On the whole becoming more skilled, and making use of it would result in less frustration, even in the absence of higher wages because people value being competent at a difficult task, and being less replaceable (not a sociologist but I would think this is true, no?).
I did not say that education play no role, but its role is secondary (in my opinion), after experience (and for that you need some opportunity on the job market), income redistribution policies, health insurance, etc. Those are the thing that actually help the "poorest" in a society.
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EPT
