US Politics Mega-thread - Page 1243

On August 22 2014 06:34 Crushinator wrote:
What is your point? Why is framing it in terms of victims/perpetrators so important to you? What is the black community and how would one go about changing it? Everyone understands that the social dynamics of a racial group/ethnicity are complex with many interacting factors. A people's history certainly plays a major role. But you would have us believe that the biggest problem is that black people aren't told that its their own fault often enough?

On August 22 2014 06:39 radiatoren wrote:

That is a disturbing point, if true, but could you find the studies so we can discuss them more specifically?

Major Findings:
Police and the justice system are not biased against minorities.
Crime Rates
Blacks are seven times more likely than people of other races to commit murder, and eight times more likely to commit robbery.
When blacks commit crimes of violence, they are nearly three times more likely than non-blacks to use a gun, and more than twice as likely to use a knife.
Hispanics commit violent crimes at roughly three times the white rate, and Asians commit violent crimes at about one quarter the white rate.
The single best indicator of violent crime levels in an area is the percentage of the population that is black and Hispanic.
Interracial Crime
Of the nearly 770,000 violent interracial crimes committed every year involving blacks and whites, blacks commit 85 percent and whites commit 15 percent.
Blacks commit more violent crime against whites than against blacks. Forty-five percent of their victims are white, 43 percent are black, and 10 percent are Hispanic. When whites commit violent crime, only three percent of their victims are black.
Blacks are an estimated 39 times more likely to commit a violent crime against a white than vice versa, and 136 times more likely to commit robbery.
Blacks are 2.25 times more likely to commit officially-designated hate crimes against whites than vice versa.
Gangs
Only 10 percent of youth gang members are white.
Hispanics are 19 times more likely than whites to be members of youth gangs. Blacks are 15 times more likely, and Asians are nine times more likely.
Incarceration
Between 1980 and 2003 the US incarceration rate more than tripled, from 139 to 482 per 100,000, and the number of prisoners increased from 320,000 to 1.39 million.
Blacks are seven times more likely to be in prison than whites. Hispanics are three times more likely.

On August 22 2014 06:36 xDaunt wrote:

I don't know what "issues" that you're describing, but studies in the US show that race -- or more specifically, the presence of blacks and hispanics -- is the best indicator of crime.

EDIT: Go look at "The Color of Crime." It's conclusions paint a rather stark picture.

On August 22 2014 06:36 xDaunt wrote:

I don't know what "issues" that you're describing, but studies in the US show that race -- or more specifically, the presence of blacks and hispanics -- is the best indicator of crime.

EDIT: Go look at "The Color of Crime." It's conclusions paint a rather stark picture.

On August 22 2014 06:17 xDaunt wrote:


Basically, yes. Whenever I raise an incendiary point, I receive too many responses for me to address. Most responses are shit anyway, so I'd rather not waste my time. I will, however, take the time to respond to well-thought-out posts or other posters whom I know will give me an interesting conversation. We all have our reputations around here.



Of course there's a correlation between socio-economic status and crime. However, you can control for that factor, and once you do, it becomes fairly obvious which groups are more problematic than others.

On August 22 2014 06:43 Jormundr wrote:

I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you took that from my earlier (satirical) post. The color of crime is not a credible source, considering it is written by a write supremacist organization, to further the message of white supremacy.

On August 22 2014 06:36 xDaunt wrote:

I don't know what "issues" that you're describing, but studies in the US show that race -- or more specifically, the presence of blacks and hispanics -- is the best indicator of crime.

EDIT: Go look at "The Color of Crime." It's conclusions paint a rather stark picture.

On August 22 2014 06:45 xDaunt wrote:

Didn't realize it was a white supremacist group. Has someone found that the data is bad?

On August 22 2014 06:52 Jormundr wrote:

Let's just say that the people who are willing to cite color of crime as their primary source tend to get banned

On August 22 2014 06:46 GreenHorizons wrote:



See it's blind stuff like this... Have you not realized that part of the problem is that when minorities do it it's a 'crime' and when whites do it, it's much more likely to be interpreted as a 'mistake'.

Think to the 18 yo who killed 4 people and didn't even get a week in jail. Literally because he grew up rich and white and didn't know better.

If you think there is any chance a 18 yo black kid could kill 4 white people in a drunk driving collision and not go to prison let alone jail you are delusional. And if you can't see how that kind of disproportionate BS is part of the problem you are more of a lost cause than I imagined.

On August 22 2014 06:44 Souma wrote:

But while socio-economic status can be a major factor, there are other major factors that can distinguish people. For instance, one thing I believe you and I can agree with is that Asian-Americans really do have a culture that really promotes education and moving up on the social ladder, and this gives Asians an edge in terms of social mobility; however, we must keep in mind that Asians (for the most part) came here with promises of a better life and have had a positive outlook from the get-go. African-Americans, however, were brought and kept here as losers - from slavery to Jim Crow, and some can argue that the war on drugs has been another major factor hampering their progress. I believe this very nuance has created some major culture gaps between Asian-Americans and African-Americans in terms of the importance of education and success.

But like others have said, black culture is the way it is because of the horrific conditions in which they are raised. This is not just about slavery from years past but what has been going on more recently. Remember, everyone starts off as a child. When that child grows up in a community that is abundant with drug-addicts, single mothers, gang/drug-related violence, non-existent fathers (due to incarceration or otherwise), the child is less likely to find the proper path to move forward. Some people blame this on schools, but these are really things that schools, on their own, cannot fully deal with. You can make a parallel of this with the situation in Central America, where kids are fleeing their unstable, dangerous environments to come to America, because they and their parents know they are on a one-way track to failure or death if they do not escape. And really, if we want to save these kids from these toxic neighborhoods one of the best things we could do would be to remove them from said environment so that they can learn to make the proper choices going forward in a more stable community. Otherwise, the only thing you can do is to fix said communities themselves, which takes even more time and effort yet needs to be done anyway.

I agree that it is possible to overcome your environment with the right mindset and with a bit of luck, but I do not think it is something we should ask of everyone who has experienced so much more than we can imagine, especially children. We certainly do not ask our veterans to man the fuck up when they come back with PTSD and other disabilities - surely we can give these kids who have been at the beck and call of unimaginable circumstances some consideration as well.

On August 22 2014 06:54 xDaunt wrote:

Satan himself could publish it for all I care. I just want to know if the data is bad. It purports to be a simple cross-referencing of data from government databases, so short of making shit up, I don't see what the problem would be. And I don't see any arguments anywhere suggesting the data is bad.

On August 22 2014 06:41 xDaunt wrote:


Here: http://solargeneral.org/wp-content/uploads/library/color-of-crime.pdf



Source.

I don't think that you can credibly attribute the gross disparities in crime rates to just prosecutorial discretion. That said, I agree that minorities (particularly blacks) tend to be over-charged and over-sentenced when compared to whites. This is it's own problem, but it certainly isn't the biggest.

Didn't realize it was a white supremacist group. Has someone found that the data is bad?

This basic fact is so well understood among scholars of criminal justice that the preface to Minnesota's official crime data reports carries this caveat: "Racial and ethnic data must be treated with caution. ... Existing research on crime has generally shown that racial or ethnic identity is not predictive of criminal behavior with data which has been controlled for social and economic factors."

When more sophisticated methodology is employed, socioeconomic factors including poverty, education, social status and urban residence account far better for criminal behavior than race. Above all, income counts.

Taylor's decision to simply ignore these well-documented criminological findings is not his report's only flaw. Another major error — a cardinal sin in the science of statistics — is "selection bias." Although Taylor wants crime patterns to be explained by the mere presence of black people, only a contorted analysis based on a small subset of crime data is able to produce such "evidence."

What Taylor actually does is consider only a subset of data on crime — statistics on interracial crimes between blacks and whites from the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS).

For crimes of violence — the crimes Taylor focuses on — that data covers just 16 percent of the crimes committed in 1994. The result is a skewed view of the impact of race on crime that suggests that whites ought to be terrified of blacks who, in Taylor's view, present a serious threat to society.

When the Supreme Court reassembles in October, the same nine justices will gather in the robing room, but the Court itself will be different. As one example, consider the position of Justice Antonin Scalia. For a quarter of a century, Scalia has been the conservative wing’s alpha dog. By June of 2014, that seemed to have changed.

Scalia entered the October 2013 term with panache, capturing headlines with his contrived confession to a New York reporter that “I even believe in the Devil.” On the last day of the term, Scalia was not the center of attention; he wasn’t even there. (The Court’s public information staff said that he was “traveling.”) His junior colleague, Samuel Alito, delivered two of the term’s highest profile opinions, in Harris v. Quinn and Burwell v. Hobby Lobby.

There was a new sheriff in town.

Since Scalia’s appointment in 1986, he has succeeded brilliantly in seizing the spotlight, establishing himself as a conservative hero. He told one questioner to “get over it!” when asked about Bush v. Gore, and responded to pro-choice protesters with an indecent Sicilian hand gesture. Confronted politely by a gay student, he snapped, “If we cannot have moral feelings against homosexuality, can we have it against murder?”

But Scalia may have outdone himself in his 2013 dissent in the case of United States v. Windsor. For years, he has been unrelenting in opposing constitutional protections for gays and lesbians. In his 2003 dissent in Lawrence v. Texas, Scalia warned darkly that the Court majority “has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda” even though “many Americans do not want persons who openly engage in homosexual conduct as partners in their business, as scoutmasters for their children, as teachers in their children’s schools, or as boarders in their homes.”

On August 22 2014 07:12 xDaunt wrote:

Yes, I agree that this is the core problem. More refined: the problem is the breakdown of the black family. So how do you fix something like this? I tend to think that it is not something that government intervention can solve. It's something that has to be handled at the community level -- maybe through churches or some other community outlet. Regardless, it is something that only the black community can fix for itself.

WASHINGTON — When President Obama announced in June that he planned to bypass congressional gridlock and overhaul the nation’s immigration system on his own, he did so in a most public way: a speech in the White House Rose Garden.

Since then, the process of drafting what will likely be the only significant immigration changes of his presidency — and his most consequential use of executive power — has been conducted almost entirely behind closed doors, where lobbyists and interest groups invited to the White House are making their case out of public view.

Mr. Obama’s increasingly expansive appetite for the use of unilateral action on issues including immigration, tax policy and gay rights has emboldened activists and businesses to flock to the administration with their policy wish lists. It also has opened the president, already facing charges of executive overreach, to criticism that he is presiding over opaque policy-making, with the potential to reward political backers at the expense of other interests, including some on the losing side who are threatening to sue.

On August 22 2014 08:08 Gorsameth wrote:

If the republicans are upset about it they should have done something about it themselves.

If executive power is the only way anything changes in a situation that is unanimously seen as in need of fixing then look to no one but yourself as to why that is the case.