So we are gonna ignore the riot thats happening in Baltimore

He he. Your circle of acquaintances accurately describes the world, huh? it describes your myopia.

Your "hard work" crock is the most deluded **** I've heard on the board in some time.

Let me guess: you've never seen the world, e.g. lived in a foreign country.

Saying you're a racist is basically a fact (cf. your own post). Go tell your racist convictions to "the wealthiest person you know." (Is he the manager of your apartment building?)

 

If you think all it takes is hard work and determination than you must not work in any corporate or political environment. Being well liked is the number one factor in succeeding. It's more important to be well liked than anything else, the next thing is having the perception that you are hard working and determined. Even for start-ups it's more important to be well connected and such than anything else. It's called hustling for a reason. Yes it takes a lot of hard work. But hard work alone is not enough.

You also neglect to mention that for blacks and crime, that blacks serve longer sentences for the same rap sheet as a white person. There's no way to explain that away.

 

Yes, the advertisers on Fox make money hand over fist preying on them.

 

Nobody said that black folks can't be wealthy even with the cards stacked against them. The problem is that you use your anecdotal stories and apply it to the entire race and social structure in the United States. What I'm referring to are actual valid studies that are far more representative of our culture and society than the one person you know. These are the studies that show a black person with a college degree gets a job at the same rate as a white person with a criminal record. How fair is that? It doesn't mean that blacks can't get jobs and shouldn't try, but it does mean that it's more difficult and the system isn't equal. Whether you deny it based on your singular person experiences and disbelieve the representative studies doesn't make it any less true.

The problem with the criminal justice system goes far beyond high incarceration rates. That isn't what I was talking about at all.

I'm talking about blacks getting longer sentences for the exact same crimes as whites.

The problems exist in the educational system, the employment system, the criminal justice system, etc. All have been researched. That research goes beyond one white person and the guy they know.

 

And every other media outlet...

 

It's really amazing that right wingers see everyone as the enemy except themselves. Doesn't matter if it's immigrants or long time citizens or foreign countries or people. Everyone's a threat. What kind of life is that to live? How can that not slowly tear at the fabric of your psyche until you become a paranoid old man who keeps his gun next to his sofa and can't enjoy life?

Even the democrats - which by international standards are right wingers themselves - are seen by Republicans as careless doves who are too compassionate towards the people they're raining bombs onto.

In the grand scheme of things, it's a very sad situation and it's unfortunate that as a race we haven't yet been able to treat the fear and security which is exasperated by right wingers' constant self-immersion into a culture of aggression and violence.

To have this group of people muscle their way into power such that they are one of only two players in the political game is such a shame. They don't represent 50% of Americans. They don't even represent 30% of Americans. So many people are republicans because of traditional/historic republican values which were flushed down the toilet a few decades ago. But those people don't identify with establishment republicans or trump or even Rand paul. Americans are the most diverse people in the world with the least diverse democracy in the world. It's so unfair. There should be 3 or 4 parties at least, and leadership should be more inclusive even when a member of one party wins an election.

The sad truth of why right wingers are able to mobilize such a high % of their contingent is because it's hard to be as motivated as a person who is scared of everyone else in the world to the point where they're willing to allow gun violence to get out of hand but insist on protecting the loose gun ownership laws. Imagine you're scared of the government, the immigrants into North America and Western Europe, the democrats, the unions, the activists, Muslims, atheists, Chinese, Russians. That's most of the world, it's easily 3-4 billion. How likely are you to go ape**** about getting your candidate in power?

Really sad. Americans deserve better. You guys are brothers and sisters. You so desperately need a significant chunk of both parties to defect, join unrepresented far left wing and right wing progressives and form a new party dedicated to fixing your home, your future, our planet.

Things have been a mess for a long time. It's coming out of the wood work now. A lot of what used to be called conspiracy or rumors is now reality. Just the other day I was browsing old threads and there was a discussion about how the government watches everything and people came back with the tin foil hat joke, calling the guy a conspiracy theorist who needs help. Remember that? When we could laugh at that? It's not like that anymore man. They didn't start spying and abusing citizens when cellphones were invented. They've been doing it a long time to you and now you know and they are struggling to control it with the media like they used to. What are we going to discover in 15 years about what they started doing in 2015?

You have to admit, things feel different. I know it's hard to accept it because of what we know happens after we all accept that. But it's different, the mood is different in congress, in the white house, on the streets, on the internet, in establishment media. Things are getting weird.

Sure, they have people sitting up there studying the threshold of American citizens for desperation. It's right wing god Alan Greenspan who said you have to keep job insecurity high, but not too high. They know what's up, and every time it boils up a little they do something to cool it down a little. That's not having the same effect it used to cause humans are not as predictable as authorities wish and psychology is too young a science to be perfectly effective.

/ramble

 

Sure, that's another example of it, yet another could be those on MSNBC. No one has a monopoly when it comes to preying on the mentally weak losers of this country.

 

FIFY.

OK, so the choice you give is successful hard-working person or lazy loser. Which means that you are one of the successful ones, right? I remember that you're a vet. I was watching a video last night of Iraq war vets talking about the war. I'm sorry to say that there are some vets who are not "successes" by most measures now, but I don't believe it's because they failed to work hard. They got scarred by the war, among other things. People get affected by stuff. If it only took lots of hard work and gumption and elbow grease, don't you think half the population would decide to become a billionaire or Olympic champion movie star?

 

It doesn't surprise me in the least that a partisan nut hugger like you would think of things only in binary terms....but it's really not productive to intelligent conversation.

 

Well that's a lot nastier than I was expecting, but I'll survive

 

Were you not the one thinking of things in binary when you suggested that anyone that talks about these issues were unsuccessful losers that don't put in the work?

He gave an example of how people can work hard and still come up short, seems he's more open to diving into the middle than you.

 

There are plenty of losers that are successful. He only implied that it would be a loser who suggested that another person's success was created by a biased world and not hard work... I agree.

None of that has anything to do with being successful, it has to do with the loser mentality...

It's a hard concept

 

Talking about the issues are one thing, there are legitimate cases (though not as many as some would have you believe) of injustice that should be dealt with. Talking about that is fine, trying to pretend like those cases are evidence that "the man" is out to get you or that the reason for failure is systemic instead of due to individual choices is a completely different matter.

If you are a failure, it's not because illegals stole your job or because "the man" was out to get you, it's almost always because of poor life choices or lack of ability. Thinking otherwise is a loser's mentality. Hell, people can be losers and not have that mentality.

 

First of all, success is based on perception any ways. Most people base it off financial success, but there are many people that think they have lived a full life with just being loved by their family...or being a humble artist etc etc...

Secondly. Who suggests that another person's success is because of this biased world? This is what people don't get. When a black person talks about these things they are not saying that 'successful' white people didn't work hard. They are not saying that Steve Jobs didn't deserve his success, or Warren Buffet, or anyone most people would consider successful.

All they are saying, what most mean is that SOMETIMES there are obstacles in their way that SOMETIMES are not in the way of white people. To deny this is to flat out lie, as I did post the Dothan report for example where racist officers were looking for black people to arrest. As if this were the ONLY report of biased policing then maybe we could just say "Oh, that's isolated." yet knowing that, knowing the federal report on Ferguson, knowing that cops have come out and admitted that they rather get their arrests in more black communities than white...we are then to just ignore people when they let out their grievance?

This isn't about hard work. You can work your tail off and not get any where in this country. You can work two jobs and barely keep your family above water.

The world IS BIASED. It just is. To say otherwise is to be completely ignorant of the world.

It's just that some of us are not okay with the varying biases of the world and advocate for a more level playing field and some are completely content with it. It's no surprise that the ones content with it are those that think they benefit from it.

 

Sorry, but with the history of this country you are going to have to prove to people that they are not being treated unfairly. That would be better, if you had numbers or stats on your side to prove that things are alright instead of just ignoring their concerns completely.

Sorry, but failure is not always because of poor life choices. It's not even almost always. I like that poor people are being knocked for not working hard but they usually are the ones working full work weeks and OT whenever they can just to get by...meanwhile you have politicians that get extended holidays that wag their fingers at these so called lazy moochers.

 

No, you really don't have to prove it because it doesn't matter if a group of people falsely believe that they are being mistreated. Sure those delusions of persecution are damaging to those people, but it's really on them to grow up and move on from the mental slavery they have forced themselves into.

 

Actually you do, how can you say something is false without actually proving it is false?

We have numbers, videos, recent history and you are all saying those are false?

That's not how it works. When a woman says she's raped you don't just say. "No, you were not raped. Moving on." when evidence is presented that she may have been raped you don't continue to say "Nope, that's false and you are paranoid. Move on." unless you just don't care and are more worried with your peace of mind than someone's misery.

That's what this is about. You don't give a ____. Whether if people were wrongly thrown into jail in a community with racist cops, if cops are too quick to gun down people, if a man is tortured in police custody and killed as a result you personally don't give a _____ about them.

I mean at least provide a counter. Your only counter is "Everything is alright, trust ME." as if your word is the only one that matters. Your word is the one that matters more than officials in that area, it's citizens, etc. This is the same thing people have said all throughout human history with human rights issues. "It's fine, everything is fine."

Luckily most people don't think this way, otherwise we'd still be living in segregation right now. You do realize that a huge chunk of the country thought things were fine all throughout that mess right? It just shows you, that maybe you are the delusional paranoid one.

 

Reality proves that it is false, I have no need to. Also, it's not really a problem for me if others have a persecution complex, they only harm themselves with that nonsense. Hopefully they find a way to free their mind from the chains of slavery they shackled themselves with....but if they don't, it doesn't really matter to me.

At some point maybe people will realize that it's 2015 and not 1815, not 1950. We can only hope that the next generation will be smarter than the current one.

 

It being 2015 has nothing to do with things that have really happened.

You are either beyond delusional as you have ignored straight facts, video evidence, official government reports about this, even cops admitting to it...

Or

You're cool with it happening. Your choice.

 

It has everything to do with it.

The president is black, CEO's of some of the wealthiest companies in the country are black, one of the wealthiest self made women in America is black. There really aren't any true barriers to success that aren't self-made. The days of that are long over, and they've been over for so long that a lot of people can't honestly say they even remember them.

Today there are potentially small pockets remaining, but pretending like it's still a widespread issue like it was 65 years ago is just delusional. Those delusions are poisonous for young people, so it would be best if you didn't spread that BS. People like you are what is keeping that kind of thinking from dying off, you keep infecting new generations with it no different from people who do so with racism.