Protestors right to free speech: "Death to Leftists"

It cheapens it. It used to be a terrible thing to be a racist. They were the KKK, the skinheads, the people that were blowing up churches or shooting up synagogues. They were kidnapping and torturing people based on their skin color. Now, the new thing is that all white Americans are racist because they are white and in America and other people, no matter how vile their race based hatred and violence, are considered unable to be racist (this is not hyperbole, this is literally what is being presented). If every white American is racist regardless of their thoughts or actions, what does it even mean to be a racist anymore? Nothing.

This is an actual act of racism under the old meaning though. I would personally like to see all evaluations done blind with people assigned a number when they apply to something. Take race totally off the table. Similar to what they did with orchestra auditions.

You write laws that make no reference to race.

You don't make sure people aren't held back or judged in a way that creates a ceiling, you just don't base things off race/sex/orientation/etc. I am held back from being an NBA player because I am a 5'11" fat guy that can't play basketball very well. That is fine. If I were excluded because I am white, that is not fine.

Call out racism where it can be proven to exist. Where we are now, too much is made into a racial issue and all disparate outcomes are attributed to racism.

 

I think it's actually a fairly rational response to simply accept one's own racism/racist identity and then move on with life

 

I disagree. It is in the commission of acts of racial discrimination that one becomes a racist.

We can either design an ideal system, and eliminate racism, or refuse to do so and leave the question open to doubt.

Crack is more dangerous than powder cocaine. Meth is regulated just the same as crack. Which races use meth more frequently? Do you know who pushed for increased penalties for crack offenses initially? It was the black representatives of black districts. They knew that crack was an epidemic that was destroying their community, and they were trying to fight it. Powder cocaine addicts tend to be productive people, frequently occupying upper echelons of business and entertainment. Crack addicts are generally out on the streets either selling or stealing to feed their addiction. There is also nothing precluding black people from buying powder cocaine instead of crack. As long as the laws are race neutral, they should not be considered racist laws, in my opinion.

In my limited sphere of influence, I don't take race into consideration in my cases. Usually I don't even know what race the person is until I get to court. Sometimes I see it on the body worn camera, but that is usually after charging a case. The best way to fight racism is to choose not to be racist yourself.

The easiest and most frequently applicable method would be confession. Statistical analysis would sometimes be possible, but outside of an experimental context, it is frequently impossible or nearly impossible to exclude all confounding factors.

 

An ideal system to eliminate racism is hiring would be to mask the race of candidates, like the blind orchestra auditions. You look at qualifications instead of subjective "holistic" practices.

Crack is slightly more concentrated and more adapted to smoking, because the process of making it removes the hydrochloride. It does matter in how you use it and patterns of abuse. Crack is most commonly smoked and powder cocaine is most commonly snorted. The effects of smoking vs snorting is that smoking gives you a more intense, shorter lasting high. Because of this, there is a tendency to use it more frequently to chase the high, because you come down more quickly. Snorting powder cocaine results in a less intense, longer lasting high, tending to less frequent use. The fact that it is lower in price per dose also makes it more popular among lower class users, who are less able to support their habit with their legitimate income. The real divide between the user bases of crack and powder cocaine is along class lines.

If the racism cannot be proven to exist, it cannot be confronted or combatted. You are literally advocating for people to confront potentially non-existent biases that they may or may not have. If you are not actually making a decision because someone is a different race, but instead are subconsciously better at finding legitimate errors because of the color of someone's skin, that is not a problem you can solve (absent the process I described above, where the race of the people is unknown). If you re-examine your biases, and determine you were not being racially discriminatory, that may be because you are biased and you would then need to examine your re-examination, and then it is turtles all the way down. If you are not consciously choosing to treat people differently based on their skin color, you are not a racist and are not engaged in racial discrimination. The rest is baseless speculation.

 

I don't think there is any ideal system to addressing racism especially factors that are systemic and implicit. I think it's naïve just to to say "if we don't talk about race then racism doesn't exist." There is far too much evidence out there that while there isn't conscious racism there still is unequal treatment in everything from home valuations to bank loans.

Solutions like set asides and certainly quotas create other problems but I don't think that means we just say the problem of race doesn't exist or as a society we don't try to move things forward.

 

There's something inherent in conservatism that makes it so prone to violence.

 

You can have a separate investigation that searches whatever you are looking for on the candidate and then creates a report that scrubs identifying factors leaving you with only the material on which you want to evaluate someone. It puts an extra person in the chain, but the final decision maker would at least not have any means of applying racial bias. The investigator could theoretically introduce racial bias consciously or unconsciously, but this is again a purely speculative problem with no solution.

Here is a study concluding evidence exists showing a greater abuse liability, greater propensity for dependence, and more severe consequences when cocaine is smoked (cocaine-base) or injected intravenously (cocaine hydrochloride) compared with intranasal use (cocaine hydrochloride). The American Addiction Center talks about the same thing in this link, but also mentions that the majority of crack users are Caucasian. Here is a story from Public Radio about the changing attitudes of black elected officials from pushing tough punishments during the height of the crack epidemic to reform now. Conversely, do you have evidence that these laws were racially motivated?

Either you can know your motivations, in which case the solution to racism is to not be racist, or you cannot, in which case introspection on whether or not your actions are racially motivated are useless. What you are suggesting is some in between state, where you don't realize on your first pass that your decisions are racially motivated, but if you review each decision for racial bias then you will realize your racist intentions. I don't believe that is an accurate picture of reality or human psychology. Do you have any studies that show the success of this mechanism in action? I have seen repeated stories about how implicit bias training (which is an implementation of exactly this system) doesn't have any effect on behavior, are you seeing the opposite result somewhere?

 

Hence why I called it an ideal system for eliminating bias, and not a realistic suggestion. A realistic system that is probably good enough is people just don't be consciously racist.

Sure. I think criminalization of controlled substances at all is ridiculous and has been a colossal failure with the empowerment of violent thugs at home and abroad. The fact that they are different and have different societal effects is evidence against the claim that it must be racism that caused the disparity though. The fact that it was championed by black legislators representing black districts is further evidence.

As the study references the sentencing disparity, I would say it would have been impossible to reference it when the law was passed, absent time travel.

Yes, now what happens when you propose as a solution that people re-examine their decision making to look for bias?

That is what happens. You recognize that you cannot tell people to re-examine their biases, and that it doesn't work when tried. So why would that be the solution. No, the only reasonable thing we can expect is for people to choose not to be consciously racist. Anything asking for more introspection doesn't work, and anything requiring additional resources (like my blind screening plan) is unrealistic.

 

You were discussing people re-examining their biases as a way to confront their own racism and overcome it. Are you saying that is the current state of things?

Your military example is explicitly not true. The Marine Corps found that mixed gender units performed substantially worse than all male units in their testing. Marine Corps Releases Results Of Study On Women In Combat Units : NPR

That is changing the meaning of the word racism. The original definition of racism was race hatred, treating people differently on the basis of race, or believing that race imparts certain immutable characteristics in people separate from skin color. What you are describing is none of those things, and instead a disparate impact of a race neutral policy. The NBA draft has a racially disparate impact, but it is not racist - structurally or otherwise. Credit scores have a disparate impact, but they are also not racist. The law was not racially biased in it's inception - it was a response to crack being more devastating to neighborhoods than powder cocaine and was not racially biased in it's application - people with 5 grams of crack were subject to the same penalties, regardless of skin color. You are attacking the structure to try to engineer a racially balanced outcome, but a racially balanced outcome is not the right goal, a fair application of race neutral rules should be the goal, regardless of outcome.

Oh boy would it be nice if people had more critical thinking skills. Or even non-critical thinking skills. Sadly, we are an imperfect species with normally distributed intelligence and half of all people are less intelligent than average. Fifteen percent of people have an IQ of 85 or less, which puts them outside of any reasonable expectation of performing cognitively challenging tasks (like critical thinking). I am less optimistic than you that we can reform education in such a way that the majority of people are going to be sound decision makers, especially since the efficacy of the education system probably depends more on the student's life outside the classroom rather than inside.

 

Some tasks of being a Marine require extreme physical effort. If a 180 pound man wearing 40 pounds of gear is injured and you need to get him to a helicopter to evacuate him for medical treatment, he doesn't become lighter to accommodate a woman trying to carry him. A 155mm round for a howitzer weighs 95 pounds and must be lifted and loaded into a cannon several times per minute. Some jobs just have a physical aspect to them. Obviously being a file clerk or something would not require extreme physical activity.

Soviet women were well regarded in some tasks (like snipers and pilots) but I don't think they extensively used mixed infantry units or tank crews to benefit from diversity. Would adding some women to the Houston Rockets make them a better basketball team because they are more diverse, or some blind players, or people that have only played tennis? Diversity can be a strength or a weakness, like many other traits. Should the Manhattan Project have added a few people that didn't believe in atomic structure to give a different viewpoint when trying to develop the atomic bomb, or was it better to have only people with a scientific bent?

I gave the three pronged definition for a reason. Race hatred was one form of racism, believing all members of a race had immutable characteristics due to being a member of the race was another, treating people differently based on their race was the third. The slave owners treated black people differently based on their race, and per the writings of the secessionists certainly believed in racially specific traits.

So you think the NBA draft is in fact racist, because NBA teams are demographically very different from the city they play in, the United States, and the world (whichever measure you want to use).

On the other hand, a history of responsible credit use is a good indicator of future responsible credit use. So it is a perfectly legitimate thing to take into consideration, just like being good at basketball is a perfectly good thing to take into consideration when deciding who to draft. So, either racism is not a bad thing, because of course lenders should consider credit scores and NBA GMs should consider who is good at basketball, even if the outcomes are racially disproportionate, or you can't identify racism by looking at outcomes.

I have less faith than you in the ability of people to learn critical thinking skills. General intelligence is widely recognized as influencing the ease and ability to learn and especially to learn complex things that require more than rote memorization. I agree though, that education should be improved. There are a number of schools that get excellent results, and should be used more as models for success.

 

Eh... It's actually really difficult especially given the context of when that happens which is usually during the middle of a 12 hr patrol after walking with 80 lbs of gear on you in 115 degree heat in **** terrain while receiving contact.

It's not that no women can do that feat. Yes, some women can. The question is is there enough of them where you won't have like a 20 to 1 male to female ratio in infantry battalions.

I'm going to be biased here I admit. I have bad personal anecdotal experience with females in grunt units. We had a female engagement team attached to us for when we did census patrols where we didn't expect contact where they were required to interview and engage the local females in the route.


Even on those patrols, they couldn't keep up with our pace. Keep in mind they also had the lightest kit with just a basic m4 and 6 magazines and a day pack while most of us grunts had to carry heavier equipment like 240s, m249s, mortar systems etc. We had to slow down multiple times and had to carry day packs for some to keep a certain pace.

Comparing female soldiers of past generations like in WW2 to modern grunts has its faults. The biggest one is modern grunts carry A LOT more weight such as front/back and side sapi plates. Modern grunts are far more cumbersomed than previous era grunts.

 

I think it's seen with how conservatives immediately jump to "the second amendment exists to fight tyranny" to solve corruption.

How about first trust vote for politicians who are for reversing citizens united and lobbying reform?