Straight Dope Message Board

[rat avatar]

Originally Posted by Urbanredneck

No I wasn't. Sorry I wont bring up Evergreen again.

BTW, if they dont have grades, then how do they make sure the students learn?

The teachers give a pass fail by the teachers evaluation, which is why some of the claims made by the video you provided were clearly not realistic to me. If you piss off a teacher enough they can simply fail you in the course and without grades you have no recourse. I personally didn't like the idea as I want feedback or metrics, so I can't answer why others may find the idea compelling. 151

[Urbanredneck]

Originally Posted by rat avatar

The teachers give a pass fail by the teachers evaluation, which is why some of the claims made by the video you provided were clearly not realistic to me. If you piss off a teacher enough they can simply fail you in the course and without grades you have no recourse. I personally didn't like the idea as I want feedback or metrics, so I can't answer why others may find the idea compelling.

Right. Me either. But my background was more in the sciences and grades were based on things like tests and labs.

Tests for example, were graded by computers and you were either right or wrong on a calculus test.

OTOH I can see it as a good life lesson because often you have to kiss up to your boss and its always good to be on the good side with your professor. 152

[Urbanredneck]

Originally Posted by manson1972

Isn't it obvious? They get to yell and scream at white teachers and protest the assignment of homework while having ignorant Americans think they represent the entire base of Liberal thought and/or the Democratic Party.

I wonder if this is a kind of "last chance" college for students who couldnt get in or couldnt hack a real university?



Looking back I remember all the students who flunked out of KU their freshmen year because they couldnt hack the heavy homework and work load and hadn't learned good study habits. They often switched to community colleges which like Evergreen, took anyone. 153

[Budget Player Cadet]

Originally Posted by Urbanredneck

Actually I think a better answer would be "All of the Above" since for example
A - look at republicans or members of the Trump administration getting kicked out of restaurants and vilified by the MSM as being radical right wingers.

Do you understand the difference between "isolated incident" and "indicative of politics as a whole"? You can't take one isolated incident, point to another isolated incident, and say, "this is representative of typical politics in the US". It isn't even indicative of a movement! And what the fuck does that have to do with what happened at Evergreen?

B. Ok try this. Walk thru any university with a MAGA hat on and just see how it goes over. You will be yelled at, spat on, threatened, etc... You would be blind not to see how crazy the left is on college campuses.

Bit of a shifting of the goal posts here. Yes, a general hostility towards those who will wear MAGA hats on campus is definitely a thing at institutes of higher learning. This should come as no shock; in an environment that tends to lean smart and young, Trump is phenomenally unpopular. Wearing a MAGA hat doesn't just say "I'm a republican", it specifically says "I support Trump". It's akin to, say, having a "black lives matter" or "Fuck Trump" bumper sticker in Buttfuck, Texas - see what kind of reactions you get there. Or showing up in literally any hick town high school wearing a shirt from the rival town's high school football team.

But no. Nice try, but no. This is a very different story. If this were, in fact, emblematic of colleges as a whole, you would be able to bring up stories like the riots at Evergreen - not two teenagers wearing MAGA hats to a historically black college the week of Charlottesville and seeing some backlash - on a regular basis. These "alternative media" sources you bring up would guarantee it! But you can't, and that's my point - this kind of thing does not happen regularly. It's not typical. It's a rarity. It's not a real problem.

C. Ok, on that one I dont know that college

Yeah, you really don't. You've made all kinds of insinuations about how awful Evergreen is, and how it's a hippy-dippy-radical-leftist school that makes no sense and where students get coddled and don't learn anything. Here's the thing, though - it really isn't. Graduation rates, post-graduation earnings, and student loan repayment, all well above the national median. By all accounts, Evergreen is a thoroughly decent liberal arts college, whose students go on to find decent employment.

So if we're talking about whether these actions are emblematic of the school as a whole... Well, no. Fuck no. Not any more than god knows how many schools should be seen as "That rioting school" because their students land them headlines by setting cars on fire after losing (or winning) some sports game. It's just that when a student screws up at Evergreen, right-wing hack pundits take it upon themselves to turn it into national news.

Well you know what, again, pictures dont lie. The campus was total chaos. NO LEARNING was taking place.

Ever seen Penn State after a football game? Most schools have some kind of riots or parties or something. Ohio State riots over winning a football game. Evergreen riots for social justice. Somehow the latter is national news, and the former is just what we expect after a sports game.

(Side note - the same thing happens after major protests. The average San Francisco NFL game leads to 11 arrests. But when 20 Antifa activists were arrested at a far larger protest in Berkeley, this is suddenly national news.)

Watch the damn video and see the students demanding that they not be held accountable for homework and projects.

Keep in mind that these are college students - young, often still teenagers, and often quite stupid. You are complaining about a bunch of teenagers demanding "no homework". Shit, I should transport you to every single high school classroom in the world for some perspective.

Should that college get reprimanded and even lose state funding? Well that is taxpayer money isnt it? Dont ALL the taxpayers in the state deserve a say so on how their tax money is spent? This is why tax money doesnt go to private, religious based schools.

Again, I feel the need to point out that college students rioting is nothing new. Ohio State rioted after they won a football championship. Notre Dame's football team is named after a particularly famous riot against the KKK. Here's a little list of noteworthy riots - number 20 might interest you. Notice how many of these are over sports or over nothing whatsoever.

You're treating this like a big deal we really need to deal with. It's really not.

Now have there been similar incidents at other colleges this year? I dont know but the thing is video cameras are everywhere. Alternate news sites are everywhere. Where once college students could do about whatever they want and it wouldnt get out other than local news, now with the power of cameras and the web, it does make the national news. Its a new world for the left and they better deal with it.

But that's just it - leftist protesters go overboard protesting racism at evergreen, and the entire "alternative media" freaks out over it for weeks, months, years (seriously how long are you going to flog this single fucking case as though it were emblematic of colleges as a whole?), right-wing politicians argue we should privatize a state college which is, by all means, reasonably successful, the campus sees countless threats of violence, students get doxxed and threatened, and ultimately the right-wing backlash is far more significant than the actual event.

That is the part of this which is emblematic of policy in America. Abusive accusations of abuse of accusations of sexism/bigotry are a real, endemic problem. You don't really address any of my points, beyond saying, "Hey, maybe privatizing this college is a good idea if the students are going to riot like that!"

So with that in mind, do you support privatizing University of Mississippi? 154

[Left Hand of Dorkness]

Originally Posted by Urbanredneck

I wonder if this is a kind of "last chance" college for students who couldnt get in or couldnt hack a real university?



Looking back I remember all the students who flunked out of KU their freshmen year because they couldnt hack the heavy homework and work load and hadn't learned good study habits. They often switched to community colleges which like Evergreen, took anyone.

To be clear, Evergreen is ranked #7 in top public schools in the Western region of the country. It's not a #1 school, but it's also very far from a "last chance" college.

My transcript from UNCA is 1 page long. My Evergreen transcript, for twice as many years, is thirty pages long.

Every single professor wrote a full-page evaluation of the work I did in their class. In one science/history of agriculture class, I lamed out on the weekly homework assignments, and this shows up in the transcript. My transcript also mentions that I did extra research to challenge the veracity of claims in one of our textbooks, and that I filled a gap in the syllabus (the history of post-Civil War agriculture in the South) with an excellent project/presentation I did with a friend, and my score on the soil chemistry exam.

My transcript also includes the full-page evaluations I wrote of my own work. Sometimes my opinions of my work differed from my professors: in some cases I evaluated myself more harshly, and in other cases less harshly than my professors did.

If you don't want any feedback from professors, Evergreen is the wrong school for you. If the only feedback you want is a grade, Evergreen is the wrong school for you. If you want an insane level of feedback, go to Evergreen.

And yes, it has a very strong science program. 155

[rat avatar]

If my explanation on why Evergreen wasn't right for me made it sound like a sub-par school I apologize. It serves a very specific population, but that small population is often highly self motivated.

A self motivated student will learn more from the back of a cereal box than a legacy ivy league student will if they are just trying to get a piece of paper.

It is fairly common for Community Colleges to have better teachers and more access to those teachers compared to a lot of research schools BTW. 156

[Damuri Ajashi]

Originally Posted by Gyrate

"Minds closing" at the use of the term "white fragility" is pretty much the fucking definition of "white fragility".

Yes, and it works fucking beautifully if what you are trying to achieve is electing Donald Trump president, losign both houses of congress, losing the majority of governor's mansions and state legislatures and dealing with a shift in the Supreme Court. 157

[Damuri Ajashi]

Originally Posted by iiandyiiii

Here's the ProPublica report:

https://www.propublica.org/article/d...lack-and-white

It makes its conclusions based on analyzing over 1200 shootings over a 3 year period. So I'm not sure what you're talking about. It analyzed the limited federal data available for police shootings.

It doesn't make the claim that black 15-19 year old boys are 21 times more likely to be shot that 15-19 year old white boys based on 1200 shootings of 15-19 year old boys. It is using a data set of 1200 shootings but that includes ALL shootings for which they have data. They are reaching this statistical conclusion based on a few dozen shootings. 158

[Damuri Ajashi]

Originally Posted by MrDibble

I'm not trying to convince anyone to vote away discrimination in broader society. At least, not the same people who currently maintain it by their inaction.

In a democracy, you have no other choice. If you don't really care about changing society then all you are really doing is whining and hoping to annoy society into doing what you want. Without popular support, and voter support I don't see how you get the changes you think you want.

You say that like it's a bad thing...

Its a horrible thing. Its a cancer on reasoned rational thought.

Yes. I believe it's called "white fragility"

No, its called democracy. Throwing tantrums just gets you ignored or disdained.

Of course, that didn't make it a good reason.

Its the only reason that counts. 159

[MrDibble]

Originally Posted by Damuri Ajashi

In a democracy, you have no other choice.

Of course you do. Only piss-poor democracies are tyrannies of the majority with no judicial checks and balances.

Without popular support, and voter support I don't see how you get the changes you think you want.

Patience and education of the next generation, usually.

Its a horrible thing. Its a cancer on reasoned rational thought.

A cancer, you don't say?

Anyway, exclusive reliance on supposed "reasonable, rational thought" is highly overrated, especially when its underlying assumptions, like whiteness, are never questioned.

Hell, here you'll find people arguing how rational the Nazis were. That's what prizing rationality über alles gets you.

No, its called democracy.

Pre-Civil Rights America (the era we were specifically discussing there) was not a democracy in anything but name, any more than Apartheid-era South Africa was.

Throwing tantrums just gets you ignored or disdained.

History shows that's not entirely the case.

Its the only reason that counts.

... for the fragile Whites. For the oppressed PoCs, not so much.

Here, try an experiment - put "democracy" in one hand, and shit in the other, and tell me which gets filled first... 160

[Urbanredneck]

Originally Posted by Budget Player Cadet

So with that in mind, do you support privatizing University of Mississippi?

Can you even freaking read or do you just go around implying things?



Where did I ask for the schools to be privatized?



I'm just saying maybe do not let the lunatics run the asylum. Have rules. Enforce them. Back when I was in college at KU we had all kinds of looney demonstrations and such but we as students, still hand to do our homework and pass our exams.


Now back to my question - how will the left deal with the real situation of cameras being everywhere and the actions of leftist students getting broadcasted?



Here is an idea. Start being proactive and being adults. For example in THIS video posted recently of a pro Kavanaugh demonstration at the University of Texas and their signs getting ripped up. This time an actual adult (Dean of Students) steps in to tell the idiot leftist to stop the attacks and remind students of free speech rules. 161

[Budget Player Cadet]

Originally Posted by Urbanredneck

Can you even freaking read or do you just go around implying things?

There's a certain bitter irony here. Let's see if anyone else can spot it; I'm on my phone which makes going through strings of quotes obnoxious. In the meanwhile, if you'd like to actually respond to my point, I'd love to hear it. 162

[Budget Player Cadet]

Actually never mind, it's really easy.

Should that college get reprimanded and even lose state funding? Well that is taxpayer money isnt it? Dont ALL the taxpayers in the state deserve a say so on how their tax money is spent? This is why tax money doesnt go to private, religious based schools.

I'm reading what you wrote and responding to it. Please, do me the same courtesy. 163

[Left Hand of Dorkness]

Originally Posted by Urbanredneck

I'm just saying maybe do not let the lunatics run the asylum. Have rules. Enforce them. Back when I was in college at KU we had all kinds of looney demonstrations and such but we as students, still hand to do our homework and pass our exams.

Oh! Well that's all right then. We had to turn in our homework and pass our exams at Evergreen, too. And I betcha that at your school, students complained about homework, too.

And guess what? Evergreen has rules, and they're enforced. The problem is that you don't like how they were enforced. 164

[Gyrate]

Originally Posted by Damuri Ajashi

Yes, and it works fucking beautifully if what you are trying to achieve is electing Donald Trump president, losign both houses of congress, losing the majority of governor's mansions and state legislatures and dealing with a shift in the Supreme Court.

Yes, the reason that all those white supremacists, neo-Nazis, homophobes and misogynists voted for Trump was because Hillary called them a bad name. Otherwise they would have been totally open to voting for Democrats. Yes, that makes complete sense. I mean, Trump and other Republicans poured out a steady stream of abuse that dwarfed anything the Democrats said but no, Hillary is the bad guy here.

And never mind that the right-wing has dedicated decades to building a massive propaganda machine, including multiple mass media networks, pumping out lies and slander against Democrats and the left. Never mind the vast coordinating disenfranchisement and voter suppression efforts by the right under the guise of "preventing voter fraud" despite evidence of actual voter fraud being infinitesimal (and frequently carried out by Republicans themselves. Never mind the known foreign interference with the US elections, happily facilitated by many, many high level Republicans themselves, including the systematic dismantlement of security and oversight of electronic voting systems. Never mind organizations like ALEC which have been effectively writing legislation at all levels of government designed to skew the system in their favor in return for paying off their pet politicians to sponsor whatever bills they're handed (sometimes without even reading them). No, what's important is that we can blame the Democrats for everything. Because that's totally a rational conclusion to come to. Admittedly it has fuck-all to do with the original point, but one should never miss an opportunity to blame Hillary and the Democrats just on principle.

Seriously, dude, the argument you're making is that white fragility is not just a real thing but is actually a significant factor in how the right make their voting decisions, and that in fact they are a bunch of... what's the word? oh yes... snowflakes who have to be shielded from reality lest they lash out in some brainstem-driven fury of petty retaliation that will ultimately harm them in a variety of ways but which will briefly allow them to feel all smug and superior. Is that the argument you wanted to make? 165

[Gyrate]

Originally Posted by Budget Player Cadet

Do you understand the difference between "isolated incident" and "indicative of politics as a whole"? You can't take one isolated incident, point to another isolated incident, and say, "this is representative of typical politics in the US". It isn't even indicative of a movement!

It depends on how many of them involve singing the chorus of "Alice's Restaurant". 166

[iiandyiiii]

Originally Posted by Damuri Ajashi

It doesn't make the claim that black 15-19 year old boys are 21 times more likely to be shot that 15-19 year old white boys based on 1200 shootings of 15-19 year old boys. It is using a data set of 1200 shootings but that includes ALL shootings for which they have data. They are reaching this statistical conclusion based on a few dozen shootings.

A few dozen? Where in the link does it say that? I'm pretty sure you're looking at the wrong paragraph. There's one paragraph about shootings of teens under 14 that refers to 41 shootings, but that has nothing to do with the numbers for shootings of boys age 15-19 between 2010 and 2012, which is where the 21 times ratio comes from. 167

[Damuri Ajashi]

Originally Posted by BigT

Protests are themselves a form of free speech. They cannot be a form of censorship.

When those protests are used to shout down dissent or to pressure others to censor, then it is a form of censorship. Don't you think it is a form of censorship when you protest a speaker and demand that your college ban them from speaking on campus?

Or is that just more speech? 168

[Damuri Ajashi]

Originally Posted by rat avatar

In an attempt to move these discussions forward I want to expand on this.

Cognitive dissonance or the mental discomfort of finding out a fact that you were not aware of and provides a conflict with two beliefs or moral views is not uncommon.

Privilege is NOT AN INSULT but call feel like one or yes sometimes used as one, just as the term ignorance is. We are not omniscient, we simply are mostly ignorant, and privilege is one example as a case where that is often true.

Unless you believe you are some type of omniscient god to not take insult to someone pointing out that there are ideas and information that you may just not have experienced. And check your pride when you assume that you some how know how someone else feels.

Fragility is also a pretty good term for what happens with 'white fragility' or in other types. Where a person, even due to no fault of their own, have no possibility of knowing some information but also lack the ability to talk about the subject.

Both of these terms even if they are used as an insult do not need to be taken as an insult. If you want to de-weaponize them you have a choice to do so by just refusing to view them as an insult and address the topic at hand.

The crux is if you just ignore it or show it down with irrelevant counter examples you are not addressing it. And yes people will get pissed off and frustrated by this and to be honest even if you simply ignore it you are adding to the problem.

When a person says "Political candidate X is causing problem Y" returning with "Well political candidate A also caused problem Y or problem Z two decades ago" does nothing to solve problem Y.

People are justifiably frustrated with problem Y never being honestly discussed and problem Y will never be solved. As the discussion is about problem Y and not problem Z it is not useful to focus on problem Z at the same time even if it is important.

If you are concerned that the terms white privilege and white fragility are weaponized you have the power to disarm them. You can do so by simply choosing to not taking it personally, not trying to shift the blame, and staying on topic.

Bullshit.

Its one thing to use the terms White privilege and white fragility with someone who already understands what those terms mean but those terms are provocative when used with someone who doesn't know what it means. They are invented terms and it is unreasonable to expect people to react to them based on the meaning given to them by race scholars.

I could just start making up terms like Liberal Ignorance to mean a fairly innocuous phenomenon where the term ignorance might reasonably be applied and Feminist Castrator to refer to elements of feminism that go overboard in trying to confront "toxic masculinity" but they would be a bad place to start a conversation.

If someone said "I think you are stepping on my foot" you do not solve that problem by saying that "well Bill Clinton stepped on this other persons foot" you simply look at your own foot and see if it is true.

But you aren;t saying something as simple as "you are stepping on my foot" you are making up a term (say foot rape) and accusing me of it.

If you practice this a few times and work through the discomfort it will become painfully obvious how childish and unnecessary your previous response was.

The use of terms like white privilege and white fragility are unnecessarily provocative and it seems deliberately so. 169

[Damuri Ajashi]

Originally Posted by MrDibble

Of course you do. Only piss-poor democracies are tyrannies of the majority with no judicial checks and balances.
Patience and education of the next generation, usually.

Shouting and stamping your feet is none of those things.

A cancer, you don't say?

Anyway, exclusive reliance on supposed "reasonable, rational thought" is highly overrated, especially when its underlying assumptions, like whiteness, are never questioned.

Classic critical race theory. Logic and reason are only useful to the extent that they can be used to justify YOUR positions. When they work against you, then they are flawed.

Hell, here you'll find people arguing how rational the Nazis were. That's what prizing rationality über alles gets you.

Well then, we might as well shut this whole site down. After allAmerican society is like the Nazis so we have to ignore logic and reason.

Pre-Civil Rights America (the era we were specifically discussing there) was not a democracy in anything but name, any more than Apartheid-era South Africa was.

But it was, that's why the civil rights movement worked. It wouldn't have worked in a tyranny.

History shows that's not entirely the case.

I'll go with the percentages on this one. People think that critical race theorists are a joke at best and harmful to society at worst. It is based on ignoring logic and reason in favor of anecdote and subjective feelings.

... for the fragile Whites. For the oppressed PoCs, not so much.

When has that ever been the case? Minorities throwing tantrums without convincing the majority that there is a problem to begin with hasn't worked well anywhere, ever.

Here, try an experiment - put "democracy" in one hand, and shit in the other, and tell me which gets filled first...

wtf are you talking about? 170

[Damuri Ajashi]

Originally Posted by Gyrate

Yes, the reason that all those white supremacists, neo-Nazis, homophobes and misogynists voted for Trump was because Hillary called them a bad name. Otherwise they would have been totally open to voting for Democrats. Yes, that makes complete sense. I mean, Trump and other Republicans poured out a steady stream of abuse that dwarfed anything the Democrats said but no, Hillary is the bad guy here.

You think Trump won with the votes of nazis, white suprememcists, homophobes and misogynists? You don't think anyone else voted for him? Were these nazis the same folks that told pollsters they wouldn't vote for trump but then went and voted for Trump? Trump need more than Nazis to win and you gave them to him. Good job.

And never mind that the right-wing has dedicated decades to building a massive propaganda machine, including multiple mass media networks, pumping out lies and slander against Democrats and the left.

And the left does the same to the right. This isn't merely both sides do it. its simply partisan politics.

Never mind the vast coordinating disenfranchisement and voter suppression efforts by the right under the guise of "preventing voter fraud" despite evidence of actual voter fraud being infinitesimal (and frequently carried out by Republicans themselves.

Boy, I'm glad that wasn't there when we elected a black man... TWICE!!!

Never mind the known foreign interference with the US elections, happily facilitated by many, many high level Republicans themselves, including the systematic dismantlement of security and oversight of electronic voting systems. Never mind organizations like ALEC which have been effectively writing legislation at all levels of government designed to skew the system in their favor in return for paying off their pet politicians to sponsor whatever bills they're handed (sometimes without even reading them). No, what's important is that we can blame the Democrats for everything. Because that's totally a rational conclusion to come to. Admittedly it has fuck-all to do with the original point, but one should never miss an opportunity to blame Hillary and the Democrats just on principle.

Seriously, dude, the argument you're making is that white fragility is not just a real thing but is actually a significant factor in how the right make their voting decisions, and that in fact they are a bunch of... what's the word? oh yes... snowflakes who have to be shielded from reality lest they lash out in some brainstem-driven fury of petty retaliation that will ultimately harm them in a variety of ways but which will briefly allow them to feel all smug and superior. Is that the argument you wanted to make?

Yes. And you should stop poking the bear. It serves no useful purpose other than give the speaker the psychic gratification of being able to say shitty things under the guise of saying non-shitty things.

You should stop vilifying people for being white. You should stop using language that is prima facie offensive and then retreat to say "well the meaning of that offensive phrase is actually not offensive if you had read the scholarly article on the kneejerk reaction white people (and really everyone) has when confronted with their own privilege or bias. 171

[Damuri Ajashi]

Originally Posted by iiandyiiii

A few dozen? Where in the link does it say that? I'm pretty sure you're looking at the wrong paragraph. There's one paragraph about shootings of teens under 14 that refers to 41 shootings, but that has nothing to do with the numbers for shootings of boys age 15-19 between 2010 and 2012, which is where the 21 times ratio comes from.

Math.

If using the same kill ratio on white boys would result in 185 white boys shot over 3 years you get a number somewhere in the dozens. I think. 172

[iiandyiiii]

Originally Posted by Damuri Ajashi

Math.

If using the same kill ratio on white boys would result in 185 white boys shot over 3 years you get a number somewhere in the dozens. I think.

Somehow I'm unconvinced by this very vague non-calculation.

But if you don't want to go further, that's fine. The most damning statistic to me is that 50% of black people report that they personally have been mistreated by police, as compared to only 3% of white people. Unless you believe that black people are less honest or accurate than white people, then this is indicative of a very significant problem with the way law enforcement treats black people. 173

[Damuri Ajashi]

Originally Posted by iiandyiiii

Somehow I'm unconvinced by this very vague non-calculation.

There is a calculation that can be made based on the fact that the article says that if young white males were killed by cops at the same rate as young black males then there would be 185 dead white boys. There are about 5 times as many young white males as young black males. 20% of 185 is about 37 young black males that have been killed by police over 3 years. In which time about 9 white boys have been killed by police (185/21). Now take into account things like poverty and gang activity and that 21 multiplier you are using starts to look less and less meaningful.

This is not hard math. Almost all simple multiplication and division.

But if you don't want to go further, that's fine. The most damning statistic to me is that 50% of black people report that they personally have been mistreated by police, as compared to only 3% of white people. Unless you believe that black people are less honest or accurate than white people, then this is indicative of a very significant problem with the way law enforcement treats black people.

The same study that said that cops don't shoot black people more frequently than white people also said that cops harass black people more than they harass white people. 174

[iiandyiiii]

Originally Posted by Damuri Ajashi

There is a calculation that can be made based on the fact that the article says that if young white males were killed by cops at the same rate as young black males then there would be 185 dead white boys. There are about 5 times as many young white males as young black males. 20% of 185 is about 37 young black males that have been killed by police over 3 years. In which time about 9 white boys have been killed by police (185/21). Now take into account things like poverty and gang activity and that 21 multiplier you are using starts to look less and less meaningful.

This is not hard math. Almost all simple multiplication and division.



The same study that said that cops don't shoot black people more frequently than white people also said that cops harass black people more than they harass white people.

Okay, assuming your calculations are valid, now show me the statistical analysis that says that this sample size is too small to be valid and provide useful information for the populations we're talking about. I've taken a statistics class, but it's been a long time. If you don't think that ProPublica's statistical analysis is valid, you'll have to prove it if you want to convince anyone. From my reading, their analysis is good math and in line with good statistical and probabilistic practices - they even give their confidence levels (that it's really between ten and forty times different). If you feel differently, show me why. 175

[Gyrate]

Originally Posted by Damuri Ajashi

You think Trump won with the votes of nazis, white suprememcists, homophobes and misogynists? You don't think anyone else voted for him? Were these nazis the same folks that told pollsters they wouldn't vote for trump but then went and voted for Trump? Trump need more than Nazis to win and you gave them to him. Good job.

You just can't stop yourself. "It's the Democrats' fault Republicans keep nominating and electing deeply corrupt politicians!" Seriously, does this "It's your fault for not stopping us from doing evil" argument work anywhere outside Spider-Man comics?

And the left does the same to the right.

No it doesn't - not to the scale, breadth, frequency, or level of consequence that the right do it, with a difference of several orders of magnitude. Oh, the right claim that the left do it... but where on the left are the major news networks who directly coordinated talking points with the Obama White House? Where are the national television syndicates forcing their news anchors to broadcast - and often read directly - pre-prepared leftist propaganda as part of their news bulletins? Where are left-wing equivalents of ALEC? Where are the Democrats deliberately restricting access to voting booths in Republican-leaning areas? Until you can answer those, you don't get to claim that it's all just business as usual.

This isn't merely both sides do it. its simply partisan politics.

Got it - this isn't merely "both sides do it", it's "both sides do it".

Boy, I'm glad that wasn't there when we elected a black man... TWICE!!!

I like how you think that's an argument. Seriously. Did that make sense in your head?

Also, are you now aware that the massive ramping up of the disenfranchisement and voter suppression efforts is specifically because we elected a black Democrat twice?

Yes. And you should stop poking the bear. It serves no useful purpose other than give the speaker the psychic gratification of being able to say shitty things under the guise of saying non-shitty things.

Setting aside which of us is engaging in "the psychic gratification of being able to say shitty things under the guise of saying non-shitty things", I thought right-wingers liked people who "tell it like it is"? Who were plain-speaking and open and honest about the Way Things Are? But now you say this sort of thing is "poking the bear." Are you telling me that Democrats instead should start lying more? That they should deliberately engage in massive misinformation campaigns designed to dupe the voting public? That they should keep repeating lies over and over again no matter how often they are debunked until people just automatically believe them without thinking? I mean, that seems to me to be what you're arguing.

You should stop vilifying people for being white.

Again, this is less a "thing that is actually happening" and more a "deliberate right-wing misrepresentation of left-wing positions against racism". I know this has been pointed out to you before - why do you keep repeating it?

You should stop using language that is prima facie offensive and then retreat to say "well the meaning of that offensive phrase is actually not offensive if you had read the scholarly article on the kneejerk reaction white people (and really everyone) has when confronted with their own privilege or bias.

I'll stop doing that once it gets translated into 1) English and 2) reality. 176

[Urbanredneck]

Originally Posted by Left Hand of Dorkness

Oh! Well that's all right then. We had to turn in our homework and pass our exams at Evergreen, too. And I betcha that at your school, students complained about homework, too.

And guess what? Evergreen has rules, and they're enforced. The problem is that you don't like how they were enforced.

You know, you might rethink your constant praise about Evergreen, According to THIS their freshmen class this year will be about 350 students. Thats right. The school whos current enrollment is about 3100 students, if things dont change could quickly drop to less than 1500. Their high point was in 2010 when enrollment was 4500.



It's also interesting that the article said Evergreen was the only college in Washington which is losing students or not losing them anywhere near as bad.


So maybe cutting funding DOES make sense. After all the funding was based on the school having about 4,000 students.If enrollment drops the states money could better be spent at other colleges. 177

[MrDibble]

Originally Posted by Damuri Ajashi

Shouting and stamping your feet is none of those things.

"Shouting and stamping your feet" is your own characterization of a movement that actually does far more than that.

Classic critical race theory. Logic and reason are only useful to the extent that they can be used to justify YOUR positions. When they work against you, then they are flawed.

No, logic and reason are only one tool in a set of them. And not the only, or even most important, tool, people not being robots and all.

And only as good as their underlying axioms.

Well then, we might as well shut this whole site down.

Naah, I'm OK with keeping the Cafe.

After allAmerican society is like the Nazis

Well...

so we have to ignore logic and reason.

You can quote where I said "ignore", as opposed to "not prize above all else", right?

But it was, that's why the civil rights movement worked. It wouldn't have worked in a tyranny.

several civil rights movements have succeeded in tyrannies. This is just American exceptionalism.

People think that critical race theorists are a joke at best and harmful to society at worst.

"People are saying..." is a piss-poor argument.

It is based on ignoring logic and reason in favor of anecdote and subjective feelings.

Naah. It's just based on not buying into the bullshit axioms that pass for "reasoning" in the existing discourse. Like the assumption of the validity of whiteness.

When has that ever been the case? Minorities throwing tantrums without convincing the majority that there is a problem to begin with hasn't worked well anywhere, ever.

Worked well enough here for 50 years.

wtf are you talking about?

I thought you prized logic and reason - doesn't that include empiricism? I'm just proposing a concrete experiment for you to try. Let us know how it goes... 178

[Budget Player Cadet]

Originally Posted by Urbanredneck

You know, you might rethink your constant praise about Evergreen, According to THIS their freshmen class this year will be about 350 students. Thats right. The school whos current enrollment is about 3100 students, if things dont change could quickly drop to less than 1500. Their high point was in 2010 when enrollment was 4500.



It's also interesting that the article said Evergreen was the only college in Washington which is losing students or not losing them anywhere near as bad.


So maybe cutting funding DOES make sense. After all the funding was based on the school having about 4,000 students.If enrollment drops the states money could better be spent at other colleges.

Yeah it turns out constant nonstop vilification can have an effect on an institution, especially a relatively small one. Go figure!

This doesn't exactly hurt my case about right-wing manufactured blowback being far more significant than any actual perceived events at these colleges, mind you... 179

[Left Hand of Dorkness]

Originally Posted by Urbanredneck

You know, you might rethink your constant praise about Evergreen, According to THIS their freshmen class this year will be about 350 students. Thats right. The school whos current enrollment is about 3100 students, if things dont change could quickly drop to less than 1500. Their high point was in 2010 when enrollment was 4500.



It's also interesting that the article said Evergreen was the only college in Washington which is losing students or not losing them anywhere near as bad.


So maybe cutting funding DOES make sense. After all the funding was based on the school having about 4,000 students.If enrollment drops the states money could better be spent at other colleges.

What an absurd post. First, you're citing some hardcore rightwing talk radio twit, not a legitimate news source. Second, even if his numbers are entirely accurate, this is a non sequitur: your criticisms of Evergreen are in no way supported by the allegation that enrollment is down. Enrollment may be down because of a successful smear campaign against them by people who use dishonest misrepresentations of the school.

Please tell me you're ashamed of posting such absurdities. 180

[Shodan]

Originally Posted by Left Hand of Dorkness

Enrollment may be down because of a successful smear campaign against them by people who use dishonest misrepresentations of the school.

And Evergreen students and their parents are too stupid to see thru it. Makes sense.

Regards,
Shodan 181

[Left Hand of Dorkness]

Originally Posted by Shodan

And Evergreen students and their parents are too stupid to see thru it. Makes sense.

As a drive-by, that's like a C-. As a thoughtful, considered post that recognizes the entire point of smear campaigns?

Doesn't even rate. 182

[Damuri Ajashi]

Originally Posted by iiandyiiii

Okay, assuming your calculations are valid, now show me the statistical analysis that says that this sample size is too small to be valid and provide useful information for the populations we're talking about. I've taken a statistics class, but it's been a long time. If you don't think that ProPublica's statistical analysis is valid, you'll have to prove it if you want to convince anyone.

No, I don't. People can look at the anemic sample size and reach the conclusion that the sample size is too small to be able to say that 21::1 is a valid statistic. It might very well be the result of a violent turf war in Chicago or couple of violent drug/gang encounters in LA. The only ACTUAL study done has said the exact opposite of what you are saying. The only ACTUAL study done has said that cops don't shoot blacks at higher rates than white after adjusting for reasonable variables. What pro publica did was take a few very small subset of numbers and extrapolated something about society as a whole.

Based on this methodology, I could say that cops kill asians age 14-19 three times as frequently as they shoot whites.

From my reading, their analysis is good math and in line with good statistical and probabilistic practices - they even give their confidence levels (that it's really between ten and forty times different). If you feel differently, show me why.

Its bad math. The numbers are small and you are cherrypicking the data to reach those statistics. The fact remains that cops shoot blacks generally 3 times ore frequently than whites generally. P Hacking has been pretty prominent in the news recently and this sort of cherrypicking is a close relative. You get a big data set and look for anomalies that help prove your point. 183

[Damuri Ajashi]

Originally Posted by Gyrate

You just can't stop yourself. "It's the Democrats' fault Republicans keep nominating and electing deeply corrupt politicians!" Seriously, does this "It's your fault for not stopping us from doing evil" argument work anywhere outside Spider-Man comics?

I don't think I said any of this.

I said that you drove people on the fence to the other side of the fence. It is your fault that Trump won. Congratulations. Trump thanks you.

No it doesn't - not to the scale, breadth, frequency, or level of consequence that the right do it, with a difference of several orders of magnitude. Oh, the right claim that the left do it... but where on the left are the major news networks who directly coordinated talking points with the Obama White House? Where are the national television syndicates forcing their news anchors to broadcast - and often read directly - pre-prepared leftist propaganda as part of their news bulletins? Where are left-wing equivalents of ALEC? Where are the Democrats deliberately restricting access to voting booths in Republican-leaning areas? Until you can answer those, you don't get to claim that it's all just business as usual.

I remember when John McCain was the worst person in the world according to Democrats. I chimed in too because I really wanted Obama to win and every little thing McCain did was amplified and magnified until he we reached maximum outrage. Then Mitt Romney was the worst person in the world. I still remember how Romney was an unfit POTUS because his dog shit himself in a car roof rack.

Its just poliitics. Both sides actually do it.

Got it - this isn't merely "both sides do it", it's "both sides do it".

Yes exactly. Just like both sides in a war vilify their enemy, both sides vilify the other side, at least these days. It wasn't always this way.

I like how you think that's an argument. Seriously. Did that make sense in your head?

Hmmm, yeah, I think I might have meant that for another post. Its a non sequitor.

Also, are you now aware that the massive ramping up of the disenfranchisement and voter suppression efforts is specifically because we elected a black Democrat twice?

Are you sure it wasn't because the seminal SCOTUS case that declared Voter ID constitutional was published in 2008?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crawfo...Election_Board

Setting aside which of us is engaging in "the psychic gratification of being able to say shitty things under the guise of saying non-shitty things", I thought right-wingers liked people who "tell it like it is"? Who were plain-speaking and open and honest about the Way Things Are? But now you say this sort of thing is "poking the bear." Are you telling me that Democrats instead should start lying more?

First, I'm not a conservative except by the grossly distorted yardstick of this board. Second, its not plain speaking to refer to something in the most offensive way possible. Its not honest to refer to the instinctive defensiveness whites feel when discussing racism as white fragility. Its not particularly descriptive or helpful.

That they should deliberately engage in massive misinformation campaigns designed to dupe the voting public? That they should keep repeating lies over and over again no matter how often they are debunked until people just automatically believe them without thinking? I mean, that seems to me to be what you're arguing.

Because of course Democrats never engage in deceptive misinformation campaigns. Democrats lie just as easily as Republicans if it suits their purposes.

But I agree that Republicans are better at propoganda.

Again, this is less a "thing that is actually happening" and more a "deliberate right-wing misrepresentation of left-wing positions against racism". I know this has been pointed out to you before - why do you keep repeating it?

Because its true. It doesn't happen every time but there is a vilification of white people and as 75% of the voting population, they are starting to notice.

I'll stop doing that once it gets translated into 1) English and 2) reality.

Crit race theory terms like "white fragility" do more harm than good. You can convey the thoughts and ideas in a way that are easier to understand and digest if you pick less offensive words. Or you can keep electing Donald Trump. I'm sure he is grateful for your efforts. 184

[iiandyiiii]

Originally Posted by Damuri Ajashi

No, I don't. People can look at the anemic sample size and reach the conclusion that the sample size is too small to be able to say that 21::1 is a valid statistic. It might very well be the result of a violent turf war in Chicago or couple of violent drug/gang encounters in LA. The only ACTUAL study done has said the exact opposite of what you are saying. The only ACTUAL study done has said that cops don't shoot blacks at higher rates than white after adjusting for reasonable variables. What pro publica did was take a few very small subset of numbers and extrapolated something about society as a whole.

Based on this methodology, I could say that cops kill asians age 14-19 three times as frequently as they shoot whites.

Its bad math. The numbers are small and you are cherrypicking the data to reach those statistics. The fact remains that cops shoot blacks generally 3 times ore frequently than whites generally. P Hacking has been pretty prominent in the news recently and this sort of cherrypicking is a close relative. You get a big data set and look for anomalies that help prove your point.

If you're not a statistician, then your opinion on this is pretty meaningless to me -- believe it or not, statistics is a real discipline, and statisticians can determine from sample sizes and such whether a piece of data is large enough to be statistically likely to be valid or not, and in my understanding (again, I am not a statistician, but it doesn't appear you are either), this analysis by ProPublica meets those requirements. 185

[Damuri Ajashi]

Originally Posted by MrDibble

"Shouting and stamping your feet" is your own characterization of a movement that actually does far more than that.

Mine and a significant portion of the voting public.

No, logic and reason are only one tool in a set of them. And not the only, or even most important, tool, people not being robots and all.

Logic and reason are not the most important in YOUR toolbox because you have found that you can win arguments with accusations of racism and bigotry. Critical race theory is horse shit and only gains traction because it allows people who would lose arguments on the merits to win by accusing others of racism and bigotry.

And only as good as their underlying axioms.

Logic and reason are efforts to define THE objective truth. Not your truth or my truth, etc. THE truth. If that's not really interesting to you, you might be on the wrong website.

The axioms of logic and reason were laid out over a thousand years ago in an effort to discern the truth. Critical race theory has little concern for the truth, only a subjective storytelling.

Naah, I'm OK with keeping the Cafe.

Well...

You can quote where I said "ignore", as opposed to "not prize above all else", right?

You're right, you don't ignore logic. You only ignore it when it is inconvenient and leads to conclusions that are contrary to your political goals.

several civil rights movements have succeeded in tyrannies. This is just American exceptionalism.

So you think a march on Selma could have stopped the Holocaust? Which tyrannies were open to change as a result of civil rights movements like the one we had?

"People are saying..." is a piss-poor argument.

Its a lot to repeat. So let me just link it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critic...heory#Critique

And that's the more disciplined face of crit race theory that you find in law schools. The stuff you see coming from the other social sciences is absolute horse shit.

Naah. It's just based on not buying into the bullshit axioms that pass for "reasoning" in the existing discourse. Like the assumption of the validity of whiteness.

That's bullshit. Whiteness is not a cornerstone of reason or logic. You can argue about whiteness without relying on anecdote and storytelling but it doesn't get you to the promised land of being able to say that all the troubles that minorities face today is the direct result of an invisible form of straight white male supremacy and this social urge is so powerful that as a general rule only straight white males can succeed in this society.

You don't need crit race theory to tell us that life is easier for straight white males.

Worked well enough here for 50 years.

You really think that's what happened?

I thought you prized logic and reason - doesn't that include empiricism? I'm just proposing a concrete experiment for you to try. Let us know how it goes...

Once again. WTF are you talking about? Is this what you consider argument because if so then I see why crit race theory appeals to you. 186

[Damuri Ajashi]

Originally Posted by iiandyiiii

If you're not a statistician, then your opinion on this is pretty meaningless to me -- believe it or not, statistics is a real discipline, and statisticians can determine from sample sizes and such whether a piece of data is large enough to be statistically likely to be valid or not, and in my understanding (again, I am not a statistician, but it doesn't appear you are either), this analysis by ProPublica meets those requirements.

Well at least you aren't disagreeing with the math. But apparently it doesn't matter to you that the sample size went from 1200 to a few dozen.

Why does it matter what I am, I have a degree in economics and I am familiar with economics and statistics even though I am not an economist or statistician. Just as I don't have to be a mathemetician to know that pi is the ratio between a circle's circumference and its diameter; I don't need to be a statistician to know that 37 deaths over 3 years is not enough to declare a racist epidemic as severe as you describe. Pro Publica is feeding you factoids to rile you up.

The only actual peer reviewed study published by a Harvard economist in a prominent journal says that cops don't really shoot blacks significantly more than whites. The differences to the extent they exist can be chalked up to statistical noise.

The one statistician that supported the pro publica statement has withdrawn his support. It is effectively P Hacking the data.

Police shoot and kill ~1000 people each year. You are saying that based on ~12 shooting in each of 3 years you can conclude something?

I'm not saying that the peer reviewed study is irrefutable but pro publica is a news organization. They are good at uncovering and reporting news. It is indeed an interesting factoid that in the population of 60+ kids 15-19 shot by police from 2015-2017, 37 of them were black. But this is a factoid because it is a cherry picked fact that distorts the truth. This factoid is not enough to reach the conclusion that cops shoot black kids at 21 times the rate that they shoot white kids.

Why is it that you think that a news article is the equivalent of a peer reviewed study? 187

[iiandyiiii]

Originally Posted by Damuri Ajashi

Well at least you aren't disagreeing with the math. But apparently it doesn't matter to you that the sample size went from 1200 to a few dozen.

Why does it matter what I am, I have a degree in economics and I am familiar with economics and statistics even though I am not an economist or statistician. Just as I don't have to be a mathemetician to know that pi is the ratio between a circle's circumference and its diameter; I don't need to be a statistician to know that 37 deaths over 3 years is not enough to declare a racist epidemic as severe as you describe. Pro Publica is feeding you factoids to rile you up.

The only actual peer reviewed study published by a Harvard economist in a prominent journal says that cops don't really shoot blacks significantly more than whites. The differences to the extent they exist can be chalked up to statistical noise.

The one statistician that supported the pro publica statement has withdrawn his support. It is effectively P Hacking the data.

Police shoot and kill ~1000 people each year. You are saying that based on ~12 shooting in each of 3 years you can conclude something?

I'm not saying that the peer reviewed study is irrefutable but pro publica is a news organization. They are good at uncovering and reporting news. It is indeed an interesting factoid that in the population of 60+ kids 15-19 shot by police from 2015-2017, 37 of them were black. But this is a factoid because it is a cherry picked fact that distorts the truth. This factoid is not enough to reach the conclusion that cops shoot black kids at 21 times the rate that they shoot white kids.

Why is it that you think that a news article is the equivalent of a peer reviewed study?

I'm not fully convinced of anything by either study -- two studies, with different results, demand further investigation. All of your numbers here are uncited (and I found your earlier math explanation highly confusing), so I'm responding as if they are accurate for the purposes of this discussion, though I certainly would not vouch for them without further explanation. In my understanding, the ProPublica Risk Ratio calculation is valid and provides a reasonable level of confidence -- 95% that the real ratio is somewhere between 10 and 40, based on a solid exercise in statistical analysis.

I don't offer the ProPublica report as "You are WRONG!", but rather "here is conflicting data". And this data is not easy to come by -- most shootings aren't recorded in this manner and made available to analyze.

My overall opinion on law enforcement treatment of black people is based on many, many pieces of data -- the most prominent of which is the polling that shows that 50% of black people report personal mistreatment by law enforcement. 188

[MrDibble]

Originally Posted by Damuri Ajashi

Mine and a significant portion of the voting public.

"A significant portion of the voting public" also voted for Donald Trump. Being "a significant portion of the voting public" doesn't preclude being dumber than a box of hammers and just plain bone-ignorant about the world.

Logic and reason are not the most important in YOUR toolbox because you have found that you can win arguments with accusations of racism and bigotry.

If that's all it took to win arguments, I'd never lose them. I win arguments with racists and bigots because racists and bigots are fundamentally dumb.

Critical race theory is horse shit and only gains traction because it allows people who would lose arguments on the merits to win by accusing others of racism and bigotry.

You realise you're accusing people like Bell, Matsuda and Crenshaw of being unable to debate?

Critical race theory allows people to speak with the underlying racist assumptions of our entire social framework exposed to the best disinfectant first. That's its strength, not its weakness, much as you would have it otherwise.

Logic and reason are efforts to define THE objective truth.

There is no objective truth.

Not your truth or my truth, etc. THE truth. If that's not really interesting to you, you might be on the wrong website.

Fortunately, you don't get to decide what this website is and isn't exclusively about.

Or choose for me how I get to debate race.

The axioms of logic and reason were laid out over a thousand years ago in an effort to discern the truth.

The axiom of whiteness which underpins social discourse is not as old as that.

Critical race theory has little concern for the truth, only a subjective storytelling.

Since race has no scientific validity, it's entirely subjective too. So subjectivity is an entirely appropriate approach.

But no real, reasoned, logical response, I see...

You're right, you don't ignore logic. You only ignore it when it is inconvenient and leads to conclusions that are contrary to your political goals.

I never ignore logic. I just never mistake myself for a Vulcan or a robot.


And you have no frigging idea what my political goals might be.

So you think a march on Selma could have stopped the Holocaust?

Do you know the difference between a single event and a movement?

Which tyrannies were open to change as a result of civil rights movements like the one we had?

Visited Eastern Europe lately?

Its a lot to repeat. So let me just link it.

Repeating it doesn't actually make the argument. Especially when the critiques include such absolute absurdities as there being no white racism inherent in the US legal system.

That's bullshit. Whiteness is not a cornerstone of reason or logic.

It's a cornerstone of how most people discuss race, though.

You can argue about whiteness without relying on anecdote and storytelling

You really can't.

but it doesn't get you to the promised land of being able to say that all the troubles that minorities face today is the direct result of an invisible form of straight white male supremacy and this social urge is so powerful that as a general rule only straight white males can succeed in this society.

Yet this is self-evidently the case.

You don't need crit race theory to tell us that life is easier for straight white males.

And if this is so, why is this so?

You really think that's what happened?

Yes, "throwing a tantrum" is exactly what the Whites here did when the British quit governing.

Once again. WTF are you talking about? Is this what you consider argument because if so then I see why crit race theory appeals to you.

It's a statement about the negligible value if the pure idea of democracy (which is what you seem to prize) vs the lived experience of that democracy for many PoCs. I realised just saying this might be too much of a subjective thing for you, so I turned it into a concrete empirical exercise for you. I figured you would be eager to put the much-ballyhooed faculty of reasoning to work on something undeniably real, not an airy-fairy subjective account.

But it looks like you only prize reason in the abstract, when you think it lets you win internet arguments. You appear unwilling to apply it to anything real. 189

[Kimstu]

Originally Posted by Damuri Ajashi

People can look at the anemic sample size and reach the conclusion that the sample size is too small to be able to say that 21::1 is a valid statistic. It might very well be the result of a violent turf war in Chicago or couple of violent drug/gang encounters in LA.

The footnote in the linked article indicates that they took the small sample size into account, and still came up with a range of 10% to 40% for the risk ratio, with a 95% confidence level:

Risk ratios can have varying levels of precision, depending on a variety of mathematical factors. In this case, because such shootings are rare from a statistical perspective, a 95 percent confidence interval indicates that black teenagers are at between 10 and 40 times greater risk of being killed by a police officer.

So, while it may not be statistically valid to claim black teens are exactly 21 times as likely to be killed by police as white teens, it is statistically valid to say that black teens are anywhere from 10 to 40 times as likely to be killed by police as white teens. 190

[Gyrate]

Originally Posted by Damuri Ajashi

I don't think I said any of this.

I said that you drove people on the fence to the other side of the fence. It is your fault that Trump won.

And this remains total nonsense. People largely voted for Trump because they wanted to vote for Trump or because they believed the firehose of bullshit the right have been spraying at Clinton for two decades, not because Hillary was mean to them. Oh, some people whined about being called "deplorables" but those people were never going to vote for Hillary. This idea that if only the Democrats had been a bit nicer Trump would have lost is ludicrous.

I remember when John McCain was the worst person in the world according to Democrats. I chimed in too because I really wanted Obama to win and every little thing McCain did was amplified and magnified until he we reached maximum outrage. Then Mitt Romney was the worst person in the world. I still remember how Romney was an unfit POTUS because his dog shit himself in a car roof rack.

I'm sure that's how you remember it. Of course, I remember a lot of Democrats saying positive things about McCain, at least until he saddled himself with a grossly unqualified running mate. And even then, he wasn't considered "the worst person in the world" - that's entirely your hyperbole. And while Romney was a rich, entitled asshole who insulted half the population (which did drive some undecided people to vote for Obama), deeply embarrassed himself abroad and, yes, bragged about animal cruelty, that didn't make him the "worst person in the world" either. Again, that's your hyperbole.

Heck, I don't even think Trump is the "worst person in the world". He's certainly a terrible person by all sorts of metrics and I'm guessing in the end he'll give Buchanan a run for his money in the "worst president" rankings but there are far worse people in the world, including several of the people Trump has openly expressed admiration for.

Its just poliitics. Both sides actually do it.

Yes exactly. Just like both sides in a war vilify their enemy, both sides vilify the other side, at least these days. It wasn't always this way.

Way to completely ignore my point.

Are you sure it wasn't because the seminal SCOTUS case that declared Voter ID constitutional was published in 2008?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crawfo...Election_Board

That gave them to the power to do it. That's not what drove Republican voters to push for implementation of voter ID under the assumption that the only way Democrats - and particularly a black guy - win elections is by cheating.

First, I'm not a conservative except by the grossly distorted yardstick of this board.

No, but you expend every effort to build liberal strawmen so you can knock them down and you have shown no qualms about repeating right-wing memes and propaganda.

Second, its not plain speaking to refer to something in the most offensive way possible.

Oh, but that's the whole point of that argument - have you not been paying attention? It's dragged out to excuse assholes being assholes, often by the assholes themselves. And anyone offended by the "plain speaking" is a "snowflake". It gets used as an excuse quite a lot.

Its not honest to refer to the instinctive defensiveness whites feel when discussing racism as white fragility. Its not particularly descriptive or helpful.

It's both honest and accurate, as your own description of these people reflects.

Because of course Democrats never engage in deceptive misinformation campaigns. Democrats lie just as easily as Republicans if it suits their purposes.

This is like saying "Democrats break the speed limit, Republicans break the speed limit through elementary school playgrounds - they're exactly the same!". It is an argument deliberately designed to handwave away the significant differences of degree, frequency and impact.

Because its true.

No, it really isn't.

It doesn't happen every time but there is a vilification of white people and as 75% of the voting population, they are starting to notice.

No, there really isn't. There's a vilification of whiny assholes, and a tendency of whiny assholes to ascribe that vilification to their race rather than the fact that they're whiny assholes, but that doesn't make it true. It's the same way homophobes claim that when people call them out for their homophobia they're really being persecuted for their faith - it's just deflection.

Crit race theory terms like "white fragility" do more harm than good. You can convey the thoughts and ideas in a way that are easier to understand and digest if you pick less offensive words. Or you can keep electing Donald Trump. I'm sure he is grateful for your efforts.

Which "less offensive words" do you suggest will magically stop fragile white people from voting for Trump?

Oh, and by the way:

Logic and reason are not the most important in YOUR toolbox because you have found that you can win arguments with accusations of racism and bigotry.

If that's an accusation you want to level, you might want to re-read your own posts. Because this whole "The Democrats are picking on white people" thing is exactly the type of argument you're claiming to be against. 191

[Damuri Ajashi]

Originally Posted by iiandyiiii

I'm not fully convinced of anything by either study --

Really?

because you seemed pretty convinced when you cited the pro-publica article.

two studies, with different results, demand further investigation.

What pro-publica did was not a study. Its not really a study any more than what I did in that post with the math was a study. They engaged in simple division and multiplication, not a study.

All of your numbers here are uncited (and I found your earlier math explanation highly confusing), so I'm responding as if they are accurate for the purposes of this discussion, though I certainly would not vouch for them without further explanation. In my understanding, the ProPublica Risk Ratio calculation is valid and provides a reasonable level of confidence -- 95% that the real ratio is somewhere between 10 and 40, based on a solid exercise in statistical analysis.

Where do you get the "a solid exercise of statistical analysis"? The one statistician they were relying on recanted.

I don't offer the ProPublica report as "You are WRONG!", but rather "here is conflicting data". And this data is not easy to come by -- most shootings aren't recorded in this manner and made available to analyze.

Pro Publica didn't use any new data.

So on the one hand, you have an actual study by an award winning Harvard economist. And another study by Michigan State university. Both peer reviewed and analytical. And on the other hand you have an exercise in simple arithmetic that pro-publica calls a study. Yeah, both sides are equal here.

My overall opinion on law enforcement treatment of black people is based on many, many pieces of data -- the most prominent of which is the polling that shows that 50% of black people report personal mistreatment by law enforcement.

And both studies show that you are correct that police engage in more harassment against blacks than whites. But they don't kill them disproportionately. Not saying that everything is peachy keen as long as cops aren't killing blacks but the discrimination we see in law enforcement is not quite as fatal as you have been led to believe. 192

[iiandyiiii]

Originally Posted by Damuri Ajashi

Really?

because you seemed pretty convinced when you cited the pro-publica article.

What pro-publica did was not a study. Its not really a study any more than what I did in that post with the math was a study. They engaged in simple division and multiplication, not a study.

Where do you get the "a solid exercise of statistical analysis"? The one statistician they were relying on recanted.

Pro Publica didn't use any new data.

So on the one hand, you have an actual study by an award winning Harvard economist. And another study by Michigan State university. Both peer reviewed and analytical. And on the other hand you have an exercise in simple arithmetic that pro-publica calls a study. Yeah, both sides are equal here.

And both studies show that you are correct that police engage in more harassment against blacks than whites. But they don't kill them disproportionately. Not saying that everything is peachy keen as long as cops aren't killing blacks but the discrimination we see in law enforcement is not quite as fatal as you have been led to believe.

Got it, you're not interested in conflicting data, only in finding various rhetorical ways to justify dismissing it. And I'm not interested in a bunch of uncited dismissals. No need to discuss this further. 193

[Damuri Ajashi]

Originally Posted by MrDibble

"A significant portion of the voting public" also voted for Donald Trump. Being "a significant portion of the voting public" doesn't preclude being dumber than a box of hammers and just plain bone-ignorant about the world.
If that's all it took to win arguments, I'd never lose them. I win arguments with racists and bigots because racists and bigots are fundamentally dumb.

How many arguments have you won with racists? Have you changed even one racist mind in your life? Probably not. But unless you are saying that all Trump supporters are racists and bigots there are in fact people whose minds can be changed and shouting them down with accusations of racism isn't going to do it.

You realise you're accusing people like Bell, Matsuda and Crenshaw of being unable to debate?

No, I think they can debate just fine. I know Mari Matsuda and as Posner says, she is among the most likely contemporary legal scholars to have a long lasting effect on society. She uses Crit race theory to try and provide another lens through which we can [should?] view the law. She doesn't use it as the foundation for legal arguments.

Critical race theory allows people to speak with the underlying racist assumptions of our entire social framework exposed to the best disinfectant first. That's its strength, not its weakness, much as you would have it otherwise.

No that's not what crit race theory does. Here is the wiki link for our viewers at home. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_race_theory

There is no objective truth.

Science and facts beg to differ.

Fortunately, you don't get to decide what this website is and isn't exclusively about.

Or choose for me how I get to debate race.

You can proselityze on this board but the board does in fact have a mission. Its right there in the banner (its in a small font tho).

The axiom of whiteness which underpins social discourse is not as old as that.

Since race has no scientific validity, it's entirely subjective too. So subjectivity is an entirely appropriate approach.

I think you are misinterpreting the notion that race is a social construct.

But no real, reasoned, logical response, I see...

So you think that you photo proves that America is Naziland? Really?

I never ignore logic.

It seems like you do.

I just never mistake myself for a Vulcan or a robot.

And you have no frigging idea what my political goals might be.

I think I have some idea what your political goals are (or at least your political views). I think any7one reading this thread does.

Do you know the difference between a single event and a movement?

OK fine. Do you think the civil rights movement could have stopped the Holocaust?

Visited Eastern Europe lately?

I take your point, and not to quibble but those were widely regarded as revolutions not civil rights movements. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutions_of_1989 I doubt it would have worked for small beleaguered minorities protesting for their rights.

Repeating it doesn't actually make the argument.

It does when I am repeating an actual argument.

"shit in one hand democracy in the other" is an argument? I STILL don't know WTF that was about.

Especially when the critiques include such absolute absurdities as there being no white racism inherent in the US legal system.

Who said that again?

It's a cornerstone of how most people discuss race, though.
You really can't.

Just FYI history and actual laws on the books are not generally considered subjective anecdotes or storytelling.

Yet this is self-evidently the case.

Brack Obama
Mark Zuckerberg
Hillary Clinton
See Jewish-Americans Generally
See Asian-Americans generally
See African immigrants generally
See Cuban-Americans generally

Because the argument of crit race theory isn't that white males have an advantage (which, I think most people could agree with). Its that white males have an almost unassailable advantage.

And if this is so, why is this so?

Because knew that white males had it easier long before crit race theory came along. What crit race theory adds to the mix is the notion that this advantage is almost insurmountable.

Yes, "throwing a tantrum" is exactly what the Whites here did when the British quit governing.

Once again, that's called a revolution. In a democracy, that doesn't happen a whole lot, its one of the best features of democracies. But you are succeeding in alienating a lot of voters in a democracy, where people vote for stuff.

It's a statement about the negligible value if the pure idea of democracy (which is what you seem to prize) vs the lived experience of that democracy for many PoCs. I realised just saying this might be too much of a subjective thing for you, so I turned it into a concrete empirical exercise for you. I figured you would be eager to put the much-ballyhooed faculty of reasoning to work on something undeniably real, not an airy-fairy subjective account.

But it looks like you only prize reason in the abstract, when you think it lets you win internet arguments. You appear unwilling to apply it to anything real.

Pure ideal or not, democracy is what we have and its better than anything else we've come up with to date. I happen to think that making me king would be fucking fantastic but you would probably disagree. So...democracy is what we have.

And in fact I bet you probably are more in favor of the "pure ideal" of democracy rather than what we have now with the gerrymandering and the voter suppression and all that shit. 194

[Damuri Ajashi]

Originally Posted by Kimstu

The footnote in the linked article indicates that they took the small sample size into account, and still came up with a range of 10% to 40% for the risk ratio, with a 95% confidence level:

So, while it may not be statistically valid to claim black teens are exactly 21 times as likely to be killed by police as white teens, it is statistically valid to say that black teens are anywhere from 10 to 40 times as likely to be killed by police as white teens.

Didn't the statistician withdraw his support? 195

[Damuri Ajashi]

Originally Posted by Gyrate

And this remains total nonsense. People largely voted for Trump because they wanted to vote for Trump or because they believed the firehose of bullshit the right have been spraying at Clinton for two decades, not because Hillary was mean to them. Oh, some people whined about being called "deplorables" but those people were never going to vote for Hillary. This idea that if only the Democrats had been a bit nicer Trump would have lost is ludicrous.

What you are saying is very defeatist. You are basically saying that there is nothing you did wrong or could have done differently to change the outcome of the last election. That if you had to do it all over again, you would have done it the same and you would have lost yet again.

Effectively, you are saying that Trump was inevitable because this is America. You did not encourage anyone to the polls for trump or discourage anyone from going to the polls for Hillary.

I'm sure that's how you remember it. Of course, I remember a lot of Democrats saying positive things about McCain, at least until he saddled himself with a grossly unqualified running mate. And even then, he wasn't considered "the worst person in the world" - that's entirely your hyperbole.

There was literally a segment on a TV show called "worst person in the world" McCain was on it. The politics of destruction had been around for a while by 2008.

And while Romney was a rich, entitled asshole who insulted half the population (which did drive some undecided people to vote for Obama), deeply embarrassed himself abroad and, yes, bragged about animal cruelty, that didn't make him the "worst person in the world" either. Again, that's your hyperbole.

Like I said in previous threads, by the time Trump came around, we had practically run out of horrible things to say because we had used them all up on people like McCain and Romney. Saying this stuff about Trump lost some of its efficacy because we had overused these superlatives. Kind of like how we overuse accusations of racism and bigotry.

Heck, I don't even think Trump is the "worst person in the world". He's certainly a terrible person by all sorts of metrics and I'm guessing in the end he'll give Buchanan a run for his money in the "worst president" rankings but there are far worse people in the world, including several of the people Trump has openly expressed admiration for.

Oh I see what's going on. You think I am saying that YOU called McCain the worst person in the world.

Way to completely ignore my point.

I got your point. I just thought your point was useless and injected something useful in response.

That gave them to the power to do it. That's not what drove Republican voters to push for implementation of voter ID under the assumption that the only way Democrats - and particularly a black guy - win elections is by cheating.

You said they did it because of Obama. I'm saying they would have done it way before Obama if they could have gotten away with it and it was the SCOTUS case that gave them the room to do it.

No, but you expend every effort to build liberal strawmen so you can knock them down and you have shown no qualms about repeating right-wing memes and propaganda.

Examples?

And what right wing memes are you talking about?

Oh, but that's the whole point of that argument - have you not been paying attention? It's dragged out to excuse assholes being assholes, often by the assholes themselves. And anyone offended by the "plain speaking" is a "snowflake". It gets used as an excuse quite a lot.

I thought I had been paying attention and plain speaking usually refers to situations where ignorant people say ignorant things that they THINK are the truth but they aren't true. This is a case where educated people are saying true things and saying it in the way that is most likely to give offense.

It's both honest and accurate, as your own description of these people reflects.

I don't think white fragility is accurate or descriptive at all. I think if you asked a bunch of collge stuents what it means they will not have a very good idea based on the term itself. If I called it "white discomfort talking about racism" everyone would know wtf I was talking about.

This is like saying "Democrats break the speed limit, Republicans break the speed limit through elementary school playgrounds - they're exactly the same!". It is an argument deliberately designed to handwave away the significant differences of degree, frequency and impact.

OK s you give an example of deceptive republican misinformation and I will give an example of deceptive Democratic misinformation and we will see who runs out first. The notion that your liars are any less deceptive than the other guy's liars is a form of self deception.

No, it really isn't.

Yes it is.

No, there really isn't. There's a vilification of whiny assholes, and a tendency of whiny assholes to ascribe that vilification to their race rather than the fact that they're whiny assholes, but that doesn't make it true. It's the same way homophobes claim that when people call them out for their homophobia they're really being persecuted for their faith - it's just deflection.

And of course this is where I say "yes there is" 196

[Damuri Ajashi]

Originally Posted by iiandyiiii

Got it, you're not interested in conflicting data, only in finding various rhetorical ways to justify dismissing it. And I'm not interested in a bunch of uncited dismissals. No need to discuss this further.

What you have is not data, its a factoid. Its a journalistic article conveying a trivial item of information claiming to be data.

Once again.

On the one hand: Two peer reviewed studies say that cops do not kill blacks more frequently than whites.

On the other hand: Pro publica does some back of the napkin math to conclude cops kill blacks (between the ages of X and Y) 21 times more frequently than whites and calls it a study that has a 95% degree of confidence that the actual number is 10 times to 40 times, and then the statistician withdraws his support of the "study"

So obviously there is conflicting data, amirite?

This is how the right perpetuates the global warming debate...with conflicting "data"

Or the left perpetuates the GMO debate

Or the whackadoodles perpetuate the vaccine debate 197

[iiandyiiii]

Originally Posted by Damuri Ajashi

What you have is not data, its a factoid. Its a journalistic article conveying a trivial item of information claiming to be data.

Once again.

On the one hand: Two peer reviewed studies say that cops do not kill blacks more frequently than whites.

On the other hand: Pro publica does some back of the napkin math to conclude cops kill blacks (between the ages of X and Y) 21 times more frequently than whites and calls it a study that has a 95% degree of confidence that the actual number is 10 times to 40 times, and then the statistician withdraws his support of the "study"

So obviously there is conflicting data, amirite?

This is how the right perpetuates the global warming debate...with conflicting "data"

Or the left perpetuates the GMO debate

Or the whackadoodles perpetuate the vaccine debate

Considering what you've said before about black culture, BLM, and many other related issues, I don't find your opinion on this remotely convincing. 198

[Damuri Ajashi]

Originally Posted by iiandyiiii

Considering what you've said before about black culture, BLM, and many other related issues, I don't find your opinion on this remotely convincing.

So you don't find facts convincing because you think I'm racist? Or are you calling me racist because you want to ignore the peer reviewed studies that I am presenting to rebutt your pro-publica article?



For viewers at home I believe iiandyiiii is getting rejecting peer reviewed studies because he feels that I am racist to place any of the responsibility for the plight of blacks in America on blacks. (this fits in nicely with the subject of this thread) And the studies that I put forward as evidence should be ignored because I said something that he thinks is racist.

The thing that thinks makes him think I am racist is that I say that some significant part of the failure of black society to succeed in America is black culture. I don't say that racism doesn't exist or that its not a big deal. I think he was particularly offended by my use of the phrase "toxic culture" and I no longer use the term because I can say what I want to say without using a term that causes undue offense.

I also called BLM a violent organization. But this was back when we BLM events were still ending in violence or rioting. That's not really happening any more. 199

[iiandyiiii]

Originally Posted by Damuri Ajashi

So you don't find facts convincing because you think I'm racist? Or are you calling me racist because you want to ignore the peer reviewed studies that I am presenting to rebutt your pro-publica article?



For viewers at home I believe iiandyiiii is getting rejecting peer reviewed studies because he feels that I am racist to place any of the responsibility for the plight of blacks in America on blacks. (this fits in nicely with the subject of this thread) And the studies that I put forward as evidence should be ignored because I said something that he thinks is racist.

The thing that thinks makes him think I am racist is that I say that some significant part of the failure of black society to succeed in America is black culture. I don't say that racism doesn't exist or that its not a big deal. I think he was particularly offended by my use of the phrase "toxic culture" and I no longer use the term because I can say what I want to say without using a term that causes undue offense.

I also called BLM a violent organization. But this was back when we BLM events were still ending in violence or rioting. That's not really happening any more.

No, I'm very interested in the studies you cited, and I'm very interested in finding more data, both since the data available is so sparse, and since the ProPublica study directly conflicts with the data you cited.

But because your mind is already made up on this, and you're choosing to dismiss any data that doesn't match your preconceived notions, I'm not really interested in further exploration of your opinions on the issue.

And not surprisingly, you're misstating my views on some other things, a discussion of which would probably belong in another thread. 200