Black Lives Matter is an honorable movement and is in no way racist

Who are you to say it means absolutely nothing? Are you a member of the African-American or Native American community?

 

Wow...well about 50 years ago was the civil rights movement...so umm...yeah

Also there was a time when black dudes were getting perms too. Trying to shape their hair so it was less 'black'. As the 'Black Power' movement strengthen it became a lot about being proud of your ancestry. So trying to drop the names that their oppressors had given them was important in that.

You say slavery is irrelevant here and the past but don't even see the connection to it and these names...do a little research before jumping into a conversation like this.

Also and honestly...who the ____ are you to determine culture? According to your logic nothing new should ever be presented to american culture. These names that are 'goofy' to you have been around for a long time now, by now they should be less goofy.

Also I guess according to your logic, there should be no italian names, or french names, or native american names, or muslim names...eventually if your family has been here long enough you should just drop your culture and conform.

 

PP is the person driving. They are actually performing the abortions. The legislators (and unfortunately the courts) are the ones raising the speed limit. Try to follow along.

I do not. I think only Catholics have a strict religious objection to contraception. Most other religions allow for a wide if varying range of contraceptive options.

I think you will find that I am not the rare bird in this regard that you believe.

And if they didn't exist, someone else would shoulder the burden, such is the nature of burdens.

Yes, now you are getting it.

I would need to know your definitions of overwhelming number, torture, and disappear. Was Sandra Bland tortured and/or disappeared in your opinion? Michael Brown? I would be interested to know how many people of any race have been tortured and/or disappeared by police departments in America, because one is far too many based on my understanding of those words.

 

You state:

"I don't think societal factors absolve people of individual responsibility. If two kids **** out of wedlock, it is their choice, not the fault of TV or Movies. If a black kid doesn't do his homework, that is his fault, not the fault of slavery. The data provides context and has predictive value of who will make those choices, but ultimately the choices are up to the individual."

The individual choice in this matter is made by the woman in question not PP. PP is a service provider for lawful, safe abortions. A woman can choose to get an abortion however she wants: pre-Roe v. Wade and history before that testifies to that. Just because a network of legal service providers exists as a societal factor to scratch this burden doesn't "absolve people of individual responsibility".

The woman is ALWAYS the driver and it's her choice that matters--not PP.

and, like you said with burdens--

"And if they didn't exist, someone else would shoulder the burden, such is the nature of burdens."

you defund PP, somebody will fill the gap--apparantly. it's in the "nature of burdens".

This is all fine and well and very vague with no data and a lot of anecdotal belief but you didn't answer why a Republican congress that was overwhelmingly in favor of Hobby Lobby and overwhelmingly in favor of cutting spending for maternal healthcare would ever support expanding access to contraceptives or indeed, maternal health care of any kind.

http://thinkprogress.org/health/2014/07/16/3461013/hobby-lobby-bill-blocked/

Going back to the "nature of burdens", do they disappear "evantually". Were slavery, segregation and red-lining covered by the nature of burdens? How long are you willing to wait until the utopian, fluffy idea you've used to reconcile your cognitive dissonance has a snowball's chance in hell of happening?

As Justice Ginsburg eloquently noted when the Supreme Court demolished Section 5 of the VRA, history repeats itself if we let it.

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/aug/05/homan-square-chicago-thousands-detained

Chicago police detained thousands of black Americans at interrogation facility
Wednesday 5 August 2015 17.56 BST

Does this qualify as disappeared and tortured for you?

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/24/chicago-police-detain-americans-black-site

And that's only one city. jeez.

 

The woman chooses to get an abortion. The doctor chooses to perform the abortion. Unless the woman is performing her own abortion, two are responsible.

You were the one saying congressional Republicans have a faith based objection to contraceptives. How might I disprove that besides informing you that most religions do not forbid contraceptive use, and it is a widely held position largely among Catholicism (if not individual Catholics themselves). I doubt every Republican congressperson has a stated opinion on contraception vis-a-vis their religion.

I don't understand your question. In a market where there is demand for a product or service, there will typically be someone who has the top market share (theoretically two or more entities could have exactly equal market share, but that is irrelevant to the discussion). If the entity that has the top market share disappears (goes out of business, is arrested, dies, whatever), the other entities providing the same product or service or a new entity or a combination thereof will fill the gap. If Microsoft pulled Windows from the market, all of the people, businesses, governments, etc. that use Windows based computers would not just stop using computers, their computers would just be on a different operating system as iOS, Linux, and/or one or more other entities would fill the gap. That is the nature of bearing the burden of being the number one provider of something.

I would say none of them were disappeared from my quick perusal of the articles. It seems that everyone was accounted for, almost without exception within 24 hours of their detention. Some where tortured if taken at their word (I didn't see anything in the way of confirmation that the beating claims were true for example, only that someone had a head wound, not when and how it was received, but again, quick perusal). More were questioned in violation of Miranda and if their statements under interrogation were used to convict them, then those convictions should be overturned.

 

It is pretty sad that the blacks were much more a part of the U.S. 50 years ago...when they couldn't vote or eat with or marry other Americans. Ingrates should be thanking everybody, not naming their children whatever they want.

 

A woman can have a self-induced abortion, and many in developing nations with little access to healthcare systems do just that.

Your idealized vision of a doctor performing abortions is a concept that only has taken hold thanks to Roe v. Wade and organizations like PP.

The individual demand and ability to carry out self-induced abortions will always be there. Doctors performing abortions are just "raising the speed limit". Abortions would occur regardless if doctors were performing them.

You can't have your cake and eat it, and say societal factors don't absolve individual responsibility until they do in instances you like. You can't say social factors didn't cause person X not to do "his homework" and turn around and say a social factor, a network of safe, legal medical clinics and non-criminalization of a medical procedure caused person X to "have an abortion".

But returning to your other strand of logic, why even bother? You defund PP and somebody else will satisfy that demand. After all, everything works like a perfect free market.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/21/us/more-protestants-oppose-birth-control.html?_r=0

Yeah, except for the network of regulations and patchwork that don't allow clinics to profit from medical procedures related to abortion or in fact take federal funding for them. The "market" for giving contraceptives to the urban poor doesn't operate like a pure for-profit system, just like any number of the greatest moral issues of our time. If we based all of our thinking on the economics of it, organizations like PP would certainly not bother servicing poor, desperate communities, that's the whole point of Title X funding--to fill in the gaps for a free market that could care less about the access to contraceptives for the urban poor

You can't understand any discussion like this if your entire thinking on issues is based on economic free-marketeering and if you think people only think in terms of economic incentives. There are no economic incentives beside government-funded ones to take on the burden of the maternal health of the urban poor--and what makes you think a Congress that is inclined to cut maternal health at every angle will all of a sudden relent?

also, minor technicality: iOS is a mobile operating system for mobile phones. I believe you're thinking of OS X assuming your designation of "computers" as desktop computers.

-------irrelevant side tech rant because I do those sometimes

corporations wouldn't use Linux distributions unless a provider like Red Hat helped them out. Linux and a whole host of its distributions are inclined towards more customizability at the cost of accessibility. Even installations like Linux Mint and Ubuntu for "beginners" aren't perfectly built for the majority of Americans who couldn't understand command-line interfaces if their life depended upon it.

Even tech-savvy people pop Windows for the ecosystem of tools and ease of use. I use VMware and Vagrant to create a virtual Linux machine whenever I have to collaborate with people who have their s**t locked in a certain configuration on what tends to be Linux servers (thank the lord for Docker changing that slowly), but I still use Github for Windows and good old Windows command line if I just want to get a simple single-page application tested and running on localhost.

For a company like Microsoft to evaporate and for somebody to step in isn't a matter of "there's a lot of money to be made doing this so a solution that exists now will get at it". It requires a significant reorientation: either people are going to have to learn to be a lot more technical then they are now, or somebody will have to build an entire ecosystem of tools and infrastructure in a few short years--the few short years that can make the difference between Facebook and nothing these days.

The more accessible example is reddit. All of the code for reddit is open sourced and anybody can run their local distribution https://github.com/reddit/reddit. The problem isn't running a copy of reddit: it's creating the ecosystem of users that make it valuable, the server costs to keep it floating, and the infrastructure that optimizes the delivery of every pixel across all the countries of the world--we're talking millions of dollars a month. If reddit were to die today, Voat or no Voat, there wouldn't be an ample replacement for quite some time (see: every time redditors melt to Voat, the whole thing crashes).

To bring that all the way back, this is in technology, where things get broken and built fast. In a field like political and governmental access to contraceptives, you don't just defund one organization and expect somebody else to fill in.

-----irrelevant tech rant end

Given your rhetoric of equal protection, your concern and anger for Americans (overwhelmingly African-American) being stripped of basic Constitutional rights seems quite measured.

And if you can blame bankers who targeted predominantly black communities with subprime loans and the destruction that caused, then surely you can understand the social context of federal policies that prohibited African-Americans from participating in the largest wealth boom in human history (housing post WW2) and created those same isolated neighbourhoods without access to conventional financial means: the same sitting ducks that Wall Street sought to prey on to the tune of billions.

 

Before somebody e-mails me with the old canard of “Nobody in my family ever owned a slave,” I’d like to retire that excuse with a personal example: Generations ago, my ancestors fled the horrible conditions in their home countries to establish families in the United States. It was never much of a question as to whether or not we could pick wherever we wanted to live, have access to college or get a mortgage. If my family suffered under generations of knowing that those doors were closed, it would take generations more to overcome that lack of family know-how. In essence, my family zipped right past people whose families were here long before mine. I never even questioned that Rutgers would be open to accepting my application, that the Navy would send me to flight school or that McGraw-Hill or Time Warner would hire me–and that when I was there I would be in the vast majority (there were less than 3 percent people of color in both publications I worked for). I never doubted my ability to start a company and had plenty of friends to mentor me along the way.

If you go back to people being created equally, it is just math that a percentage of our country’s greatest minds were eliminated from the competition simply by fact of skin color, and by extension their families were denied the head-start of their accomplishments. Every white person benefits from this–even people who arrived to the United States yesterday.

http://www.diversityinc.com/ask-the-white-guy/how-does-slavery-benefit-white-people-today/

 

And in those cases, only the woman is responsible. See how that works. Each person is responsible for their own actions.

My idealized vision doesn't include abortions. Current America has doctors performing abortions (or increasingly providing abortifacients).

Yes, this is true.

No, doctors performing abortions are active participants. Judges legalizing abortion are "raising the speed limit".

Which is why I don't attempt to make such claims (re: times when societal factors do absolve individual responsibility).

I am not saying that a network of safe, legal medical clinics and non-criminalization "cause" person x to have an abortion, I said as active participants, abortion providers share responsibility.

Because I would prefer my tax dollars not go to baby murder. People can pay for their own abortions so long as it is legal. The people that are relying on PP for other services can seek out the other providers that offer the same services but do not offer abortions.

Yeah, I have read the article but don't see anything therein which indicates a protestant politician with an anti-contraception ideology, let alone voting record. I did notice the line that indicates that seemingly the vast majority of evangelicals use contraceptives.

The competition for government funds can appear every bit the market economy that the competition for private funds is.

Granted. Clearly I do not worship at the cult of the Apple.

I think you underestimate global tech companies and the willingness and ability to fill a gap that would be created by the sudden disappearance of Microsoft from the scene, but that was one of millions of possible examples. Replace Microsoft with McDonald's and computing with Fast Food if it makes you more comfortable.

Stripped of basic constitutional rights might be an overstatement from the articles provided. There is no constitutional guarantee that you be allowed contact with a lawyer within 24 hours, for example. Miranda grants access to an attorney during interrogation, but the guarantee is not of constitutional dimension, it relates to the determination of whether or not a confession is voluntary. The constitutional right to representation by counsel is a trial right (that has been expanded by the courts to such things as pretrial hearings regarding suppression of evidence and preliminary hearings of probable cause). In other words, your case doesn't get thrown out if the cops question you without offering you an attorney, so long as other evidence of guilt is available. Same for denial of a phone call. There are limits to how long you can be held without being brought before a judge or magistrate, but 24 hours is well within those limits, for people arrested on a Friday on a three day weekend, it will likely exceed 72 hours. I tend to generally have a measured tone, but just for you, here are some angry faces for any abridgment of the constitutional rights of any person of any race:

I have never said I don't understand social context. I said social context is not an excuse for behavior, nor does it justify racist policies.

 

Your framework of societal factors is interesting to say the least aside from it being entirely arbitrary. Anybody who has an "active role" in the process shares the responsibility or burden of some kind: the doctor needs to be accused for performing a legal medical procedure with the full sanction of the law--but anybody who helped systematize abortion gets away from this analysis.

You blame the soldier, but not the despot who ordered them to kill, the lawmen, instead of the law that requires them to act a certain way--

Your remarkable resilience at saying "I want to ignore societal factors, everything is dependent on the individual" ignores the incredible effect social context has on all of our lives and represents an irrational blind spot to your ability to reason. Let's paint it this way:

You are aware that abortion only represents 3% of the services PP offers and that by law, PP cannot use any of the federal money it receives for abortions?

http://www.factcheck.org/2011/04/planned-parenthood/

So none of your tax dollars are going to "baby murder". None of your tax dollars are going to active participants in "baby murder". The majority of PP has nothing to do with abortion. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater is all you're doing: nothing about defunding PP of federal funds will actually target active providers of abortions who share responsibility in your framework. It'll only increase your cognitive dissonance, I suppose.

you're splitting hairs with me because you clearly can't argue that Catholic politicians are not guided by their faith to oppose contraception (hey Santorum and your strong evangelical base) which was one premise of my quote and you clearly can't argue that your utopian vision of a Republican congress working actively to restrict access to contraceptives would support expanding access, but hey, what the hell:

http://prospect.org/article/strange-bedfellows-anti-contraception-alliance

oh yeah, to finish splitting hairs:

Let's strike a bit at home.

A 'War On Birth Control'

http://www.npr.org/2011/09/20/140449957/gov-perry-cut-funds-for-womens-health-in-texas

There's your protestant politician with an anti-contraception ideology.

um appearances can be deceiving especially because the Republican Congress is trying to dismantle Title X altogether? I think you're missing a larger point here that not everything works like a perfect free market but even saying that government funds = private funds misses some pretty important points. Like, if it were private funds, why this whole notion of defunding Title X?

Your utopian vision is entirely unrealistic. Come on. Don't tell me you actually think this Congress wants to expand access to maternal health care.

I don't worship Apple products (strong inclination against closed systems), but the difference between desigining for iOS and OS X is as stark as the cliff between Linux and Android. Mobile operating systems are for mobile systems. It's a technicality, but one that I find glaring for my own persnickity reasons, a Pavlovian reaction of having to deal with some of the frustrations of iOS (the wall on your own analytics. grr) You don't have to pay any heed to those though.

I'm very comfortable with the tech comparision. I think you are missing the larger point of how not every system functions like a perfect market, and how even destroying things in one of the "fastest" free markets can cause significant delays beyond what you'd expect, nevermind an opaque, byzantine system that is Congress, federal programs, and the funding arguments/debates.

Maybe this requires a less measured tone. I guess a facial fracture is just an "allegation".

My definition of disappeared and tortured is when nobody knows where the hell you are and you are tortured. That has happened several times, disproportionately to African-Americans in one investigative report in 2015 in one city. You can quibble with me whether a nasal fracture, electrocution, burning, mock executions et al. are torture, but regardless, a system that injures a group of people disproportionately like this cannot be said to hold the "equal protection" of the law as a sacred value.

And yes, racism is certainly a force in this.

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/18/guantanamo-torture-chicago-police-brutality

Your expression of individual responsibility is touching but even at its extreme, it still begs shared responsibility from the enacters of actively racist choices such as torturing police officers or "ghetto loan" bankers, of which there are alarmingly many still.

If you choose to ignore all social context to force all of the onus of choices on an individual, well, I suppose there is still the above way of understanding the effect of systematic racism.

 

It is because that is the last stage at which malfeasance can be stopped. This is the reason that "I was just following orders," doesn't excuse war crimes. It would be hard to find societal factors exerting more pressure than a commanding officer in time of war ordering his men to do something, but we still hold the man giving the order and the man following the order responsible. We don't hold responsible those who set up the chain of command, only the active participants in the malfeasance.

Then it should be simple to transition to an identical organization that does the other 97% of what planned parenthood does, but without the abortions.

If I make $100 from work and steal $10, then spend $60 on food and $50 on gas, I can claim that I didn't spend any of the stolen money on food. Or I can claim I didn't spend any of the stolen money on gas. Money is fungible, that from one source is the same as that from another source. So, if planned parenthood receives federal funds and planned parenthood does abortions, then federal funds are being used for abortions, no matter the accounting.

Then it should be simple to transition to an identical organization that does the other 97% of what planned parenthood does, but without the abortions.

Catholics only make up about 32% of Congresspeople though, and about half of them are Democrats and don't even reliably oppose abortion, let alone contraception. Nancy Pelosi, for example, identifies as Catholic. So I guess I can argue that Catholic politicians are not guided by their faith to oppose contraception to the level that they actually do so.

I don't know if you are even reading your own articles. That one, despite the title, clearly states that even a majority of Catholics are not opposed to hormonal birth control and even sterilization. Hobby Lobby, which we already covered and which this article was about, is about the religious freedom of closely held corporations, and they were specifically objecting to the morning after pill.

From the article:

Seems like they would have no problem funding birth control, they just want to avoid funding abortion even more.

They aren't private funds, but there is competition for government funds just like there is competition for private funds. People and organizations apply for government funding. There is a limited amount of funding to be had. If the funding doesn't go to entity A (say Planned Parenthood), it will instead go to entity B (something else).

I think if Congressional Democrats put forward support for a constitutional amendment banning abortion, with the caveat that there would be increased funding for birth control, pre-natal and neo-natal care, and adoption, it would draw overwhelming Republican support.

Like I said, I reviewed the article quickly, the only injury I saw mentioned was a "head injury" and it was unspecified how the injury was inflicted. Any injuries sustained from law enforcement personnel while in custody (and not as a result of unlawful resistance) is of course unacceptable. If there is proof of such, I oppose those responsible and they should be prosecuted as the criminals they are.

My definition of disappeared is when you suddenly go missing and either never turn up again, or only turn up after an unreasonably long delay. Being arrested and taken to a police facility and not having your name put into the computer for 16 hours doesn't qualify in my book.

Yes, all of those could qualify as torture (obviously a nasal fracture sustained during arrest while fighting the cops is different than being beaten during interrogation, being tased during arrest is a form of electrocution which is not torture, etc.) Anyone that was torturing people should be prosecuted.

Clearly, and I don't believe I said otherwise.

 

http://fusion.net/story/184032/black-lives-matter-martin-luther-king-hate-mail/

 

Delete

 

Yep, as has been said...

There are people that are fine with the status quo and it changing scares them. Even during segregation people thought that black people were treated fairly.

Also yeah, those arguments are the same ones used today.

 

One group wanted equal treatment, the current group wants favorable treatment to "even the odds" as if your relative being denied a proper high school education suddenly entitles you to a good college instead of the kid next door who's just as poor and hardworking.

 

#BLM is a cry out for help. To be treated fairly. People will continue to dismiss that and not understand the bias against them. Or they do understand there is bias, but dismiss that under reasoning such as "too bad" or "be happy with what you have" or "you aren't asking for this, you wanted that" or ... (endless reasons). Probably the worse of the reason is, somehow #BLM means White lives doesn't matter.

Aff actions that you ref to was put in place way before #BLM movement.

 

It goes further back than that, duh.

There used to be people who argued that they take good care of their slaves so allegations of mistreatment are too general therefore the movement towards freeing slaves shouldn't come into effect.

Black people in America are not treated fairly and that has to change regardless of whether some people are lazy, committed crimes, unemployed, bla bla bla. The problem has been institutionalized and now the institution has to GO no matter if some people on any side don't embody all the principles of the movement.

Further it's pretty clear now that if someone is a criminal abroad then they will be a criminal at home. If white supremacists are willing to spend time and money and effort planting staged violence in democratic movements abroad, they will do so at home too. But again, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if someone in Ferguson blew up an entire building. That person would be a criminal and Black Lives would still Matter and they should still go about doing things with whatever tools they have left over.

 

#BLM means something different to different people. It is like OWS.... There are leaders in #BLM that are extremely radical and there are others that simply want the police force to enforce the existing laws fairly.

 

Maybe those moderates should come forth and speak against the actions and messages of the radical members of #BLM

Sounds familiar, doesn't it?

 

Sure. That's the meaning to me. A movement is messy in infancy. You can't expect a grass root movement to have a uniformed message from the start. But, to focus mainly at the anger, the radical portion of it and be dismissive of the other messages, that inherently doesn't attract as much attention because of the nature of it, is viewing it with too narrow a lens, sometime on purpose with or without realizing it.