Oops. I forgot to also mention the dude’s adviseron the project was also white.
By your ad hominem logic, we might as well disregard everything Hillary Clinton, Terry McAuliffe, Nancy Pelosi, Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, Bill Clinton, John Kerry, Elizabeth Warren, Kirstin Gillibrand, Chuck Schumer, Tim Kaine, Michael Moore, Ruth Ginsberg, etc. have to say - after all, they’re white.
We live in different universes. In the Age of Trump, white folks routinely disregard everything Hillary Clinton, Terry McAuliffe, Nancy Pelosi, Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, Bill Clinton, John Kerry, Elizabeth Warren, Kirstin Gillibrand, Chuck Schumer, Tim Kaine, Michael Moore, Ruth Ginsberg, etc. have to say. White folks do not take anyone on this list seriously (with the possible exception of RBG).
Actaully, by his ad hominem logic, his debate opponents should be expected to regard everything by those people because they’re white - the implication was that his cite of exhaustive statistics needed to have the additional endorsement of white-person sourcing before he could expect his debate opponents to give it credence.
When interpreting ad-hominem logic it’s important to parse it correctly. 
There’s a useful general method to illuminate irrational prejudice that’s fashionable enough to pass unnoticed and without comment - imagine exactly the same words but targetted at a different group, one that it’s not fashionable to be prejudiced against.
With that in mind, going through the posts about “white folks” and mentally replacing “white folks” with “jews” is illuminating. Same words. Same way of thinking. Same “justification” of a partial correlation in shooting rates. Just a different target group. Which isn’t a difference in opinion, just in targetting.
I urge people to try that and consider whether or not they still think it’s an acceptable way of thinking.
Or try this:
Imagine a particularly extremist MRA ranting on about about women in the same way that some posters are ranting on about “white folks”, including claiming that the police are the miltary arm of women and single out men as targets of brutality and killing, etc, etc. They’d have a much stronger “justification” than the people in this thread because the correlation is far stronger - almost all (all?) of the people shot by police in the USA are men.
Ask yourselves - would you be OK with that? Would you consider it an acceptable way of thinking?
I consider Snopes a reliable source, but Harvard is better.
The most interesting part:
The guy who did the study isn’t white either.
Sorry, bro. The article - or working paper - you cited is neither peer-reviewed or published in a peer-reviewed journal. You’re free to try again.
Go ahead, Robin. Take it from here.
On a board dedicated to robust debate, you take argumentation as a sign of “white fragility”? Alrighty then
Because I’m freaked out by some screaming lunatic pointing a gun at me for no apparent reason?
Arrested and committed are not the same thing. Try again.
As I expected, you have no rational answer. People with passionately held irrational prejudices rarely do because, unsurprisingly, they are irrational.
You could have tried a little better at your attempt to dress up the age old “The same thing is different when the right biological group does it!” belief. You would still have failed because the belief is nonsense, but you could have put some effort in.
Actually, if you compare the figures to those of the National Crime Victimization survey you will find that they are roughly the same. Black people, especially black males, commit a hugely disproportionate amount of violent crime. Violent criminals tend to get shot by the police more than other groups. Go figure.
Regards,
Shodan
That sounds reasonable but, in fact, is not true. I have personally conducted training that addresses this very thing. We put a “suspect” in a room with his hands in his coat pockets. Officers are sent to search the building for a burglary suspect. Everybody is armed with guns that fire projectiles that leave a colored mark. When the officers encountered the suspect with guns drawn, and pointed at him they almost always commanded “Show me you hands!”. At that point he would draw the gun and fire at them. We did this around 200 times. I don’t recall a single instance where the officers got off the first shot. In about 80% of the cases the suspect hit an officer with that first, unaimed shot. The ranges involved here were 12-15 feet. This is what is known as the “reactionary gap”. It takes time for the officers to see what is happening, process it, decide on a course of action and then act. All this happens in a second or less. It is still more time than it takes the suspect to draw and fire.
This is not due to incompetent officers or training. It is due the way human beings work. The courts realize this and allow officers to use force before there is proof- positive that a threat exists. There have a been some “what if” scenarios posited by some contributors to this thread. Almost all are over-simple and lack the details that real life encounters have.
The kid in the playground, BTW, was the size of a small adult, had what appeared to be a real gun and had been pointing it at people. He wasn’t playing in the sandbox
with his GI Joe. And to say officers shouldn’t put themselves in positions where the might have to use deadly force is a joke. Unless you want them to stay at HQ all day and not respond to anything. I’m sure that there are those who would be just fine with that.
We’ve come full circle, then, and he still doesn’t get it.
No, that isn’t a correct reaction, because murder is a crime, not a “tragedy”. Tragedy is different. The correct reaction is “That police officer is a cold-blooded murderer, what the hell is someone like that doing in uniform, this is disgusting, how do we get the officer and the officer’s supervisor fired, and how do we prevent this from happening again”.
There’s only one possible way of doing that - stop having any police.
Of course, that would result in far more innocent people being killed, but it would prevent people being killed by the police. Since there wouldn’t be any police.
Other theoretically possible options that aren’t possible in practice:
Make it impossible to obtain a gun in the USA. Not just illegal. Impossible.
Make all police officers superhumans who can see into the future or react many times faster than a human. That might be possible with robots in the future, but it certainly isn’t possible now.
Although those last two still wouldn’t be enough. The USA is already well past the stage of sufficient propaganda on this issue to create false memories of the extremely recent (a couple of minutes) past in untargetted witnesses (e.g Anthony O’Grady and Sunny Khalsa). That’s quite remarkable, since creating false memories usually requires some degree of targetting and is much harder for recent memories than it is for older memories.
There’s a pretty high level of willful blindness going on. Why is this not an issue in all civilized countries? Why is it a big problem in the US, but not in Australia, not in Germany, not in Japan?
If it happens in Russia or China or Angola, people will point to corruption. I get that.
Really? Was the tragedy premeditated? What was his motive?
His motive was to not get killed himself.
As have I, several times. But trying to educate some on these boards will drive you nuts. They simply know more than those who have seen how things actually work in the real world.