Claims you've never actually heard spoken

[Janx]

The last gun-like object I owned was a squirt gun that looked like a Colt 1911. It was actually battery powered, and made a bit of a "crack" when it fired. Then a buddy borrowed it and blacked out the orange tip. That was in 1987.

I've only touched 2 firearms since then, both belonging to others, handled in the privacy of my own home. I'm simply not going to give someone good odds of making a bad mistake.

It's not good that the world still works that way. You should get the same levels of treatment i get. Period.

Solve poverty. I think that's part of the key to the treatment issue.

For cops, a rookie cop starts out all squeaky clean with no bias. After a year, the majority of perps he busts are black or hispanic. Makes him start thinking it's the blacks or hispanics that are the problem. Thus everybody fitting the profile starts off as "probably guilty" because in his limited experience of only dealing with bad people, that's what he's been conditioned to.

For teachers, they all talk about schools as a percentage of white, in order to provide a metric to the quality of the school (even at interviews). Same reason as the cop, the list of troublemakers trends to blacks and hispanics.

What's really going on:
A typical "good" school in Houston starts off pretty strong with a white demographic. Then the apartments come in, which leads to the poor flooding the school (there are schools in Houston with population rivaling towns and colleges). The poor are predominantly hispanic and black. Guess what kind of people don't value education or are more likely to have a parent in jail or get into crime? Poor people.

Its the alignment of the hispanics and blacks to being poor that reinforces the racial profile and negativity. Fix the poverty and the crime rate goes down, and hopefully the mix of crooks across all demographics levels out. Cops stop seeing the same colored people in the back of their car. This is where Quannel X gets biased that the cops are out to get the blacks. In Houston, they have a very diverse police force. That means the chance a perp gets busted by a black cop is just as likely as a white cop. The problem is there really are more poor blacks than whites, and the most desperate of poor turn to crime.

CPS has the same problem. If they remove a kid from the home, statistically, it's a poor family, and almost always in a non-white neighborhood. The law says they have to try to place the kid back with family, except that everybody in that family has likely done time, making them unsuited for re-homing.

I think the hardest thing to learn is to not blame the race for the pattern we see on the surface. Black folks doing more crime isn't because black folks are more crimey. It's because they are poor. They occupy the largest segment of the total poor in America. Couple being poor with the stigma we talked about in another thread about being unsuccessful implying you are lazy, bad.

Solve Poverty. Helps the crime rate. Helps end racism.

I have no clue how to do that.

 

[Scott DeWar]

forget I made this post





A.
B.
C.
C-1. You break the law, You pay the price

 

[Cor Azer]

how to solve poverty:




Teach a work ethic.
A. No one owes you anything
B. You don't work, you don't eat.
C. You go to jail, you still need to support your family
C-1. You break the law, You go to jail

That's a bit disingenuous.

Many poor have an excellent work ethic - heck, for some it's why they fail in school; it's not that they don't value education, it's that they don't have time for studying because they work after school to help their family. What they lack is opportunity, and unfortunately, you can't teach opportunity.

 

[Homicidal_Squirrel]

how to solve poverty:




Teach a work ethic.
A. No one owes you anything

Well, if you work someone owes you a paycheck.

B. You don't work, you don't eat.

As Cor Azer mentioned, this is one of the reasons some people fail at school. A lot of kids end up having to drop out of school to help put food on the table, pay the bills and support their families.
Also, it's a slogan used by the former Soviet Union, so...

C. You go to jail, you still need to support your family

Considering that prisoners can get paid as little as 12 cents per hour, it's going to be difficult for them to support their families.

C-1. You break the law, You go to jail

That sounds a bit extreme. Your statement doesn't seem to make any exceptions for breaking minor laws. I mean, what if you went 6 miles over the speed limit? You broke the law, you go to jail, right? Jaywalking? Jail time! Downloaded an illegal copy of a Game of Thrones episode? I hope you like prison sex.

 

[Umbran]

how to solve poverty:

Teach a work ethic.
A. No one owes you anything
B. You don't work, you don't eat.
C. You go to jail, you still need to support your family
C-1. You break the law, You go to jail

Um, no. The meme that those in poverty are so because they are lazy, or otherwise lack willingness to work does not stand up to scrutiny. It is fiction.

Work ethic does not get you out of poverty if the jobs available do not pay living wage, and/or society as a whole keeps opportunity away from you.

We are told from youth that if you work hard, all your dreams will come true, but that's not quite right. Hard work is required, yes, but hard work alone doesn't do the trick.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

1) Yes, there are people who are abusing the system- I know a lot of them. But there is also a lot more to poverty than not "getting a job".

My maternal aunt is poor. She works @6 days a week. Sometimes 7.

Her youngest son is poor. He has trouble getting enough hours at work to make money. Places that are hiring right now and pay better and/or have better work schedules are too far away to walk. But he currently can't afford any vehicle, and there is no public transportation here.

2) not being poor doesn't insulate you from racism. If you look, there are all kinds of news stories out the about blacks in the middle class or even 1% getting treated like crooks in retail settings. I am one.

3) there are other dynamics to racially stereotyping people's views of their fellow human beings than merely being exposed to their poorest or their social misfits. Merely being beaten out for a job promotion by a black, a woman or other workplace minority has been shown to increase negative feelings towards those groups in white males in ways that losing out to another white male does not. There is complex psychology going on: the defeated assumption that the job was theirs gets replaced by an assumption that the person they lost out to got it solely because they had some special treatment, either by law or some kind of "political correctness" impetus by management.

I think the hardest thing to learn is to not blame the race for the pattern we see on the surface.

True. But I'll go further: the hardest thing to do is to dissociate race (or gender, or sexual identity or religion) from surface patterns of failure or success. They may contribute in some ways, but culture is a bigger culprit.

 

[Umbran]

For cops, a rookie cop starts out all squeaky clean with no bias.

Well, no more bias than anyone else. Which isn't really saying much.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Yup. Racial bias has been found in young kids...of all ethnicities. They learn it quick.

 

[Janx]

Um, no. The meme that those in poverty are so because they are lazy, or otherwise lack willingness to work does not stand up to scrutiny. It is fiction.

Work ethic does not get you out of poverty if the jobs available do not pay living wage, and/or society as a whole keeps opportunity away from you.

We are told from youth that if you work hard, all your dreams will come true, but that's not quite right. Hard work is required, yes, but hard work alone doesn't do the trick.

weren't we just talking about this in another thread? That Puritan work ethic leads to blamey thinking that somebody who is failing to be successful is lazy, because you're successful, and you must be working hard.

 

[bone_naga]

Not arguing with the math, but deterrent effect seemed to be debunked as I learned in sociology 101 a zillion years ago.

Kind of sort of but not exactly. On an individual level, it can work. There was a National Crime Victimization Survey where they talked to convicted criminals and many of them stated that they had avoided targeting a specific person because they believed that person to have a gun. Criminals aren't stupid. They're like any other predator, they tend to pick off the easy targets that give them what they want with minimal risk to themselves (assuming that there isn't a personal motivation involved, of course).

However, that doesn't stop them from committing the crime at all. If they pass one person up, they will choose another.

Mass shootings seem to nearly always take place at a soft target where guns are not allowed, even if it is an otherwise gun-friendly state. There are cases of possible shooting sprees being stopped but it's impossible to say how many would have been killed had no intervention occurred because we don't have crystal balls that can show us what might have been.

Back to the individual level, though, defensive gun uses outnumber all gun deaths (including suicides, which account for the majority of gun deaths), so I'd say it is still worth consideration. In fact, I really don't think that basing policy around mass shootings vs normal everyday crime really makes a lot of sense. Instead of real solutions, all we get from those events are worthless knee-jerk reactions.