I got one of those who isn’t dead. But your interest in Mrs. Madison is… revealing. So if elected, will Ron Paul fuck Dolly Madison, or just the United States?
Uh, what exactly was going on here?
You apparently didn’t read my post, because if you did, you’d know that James Madison didn’t wear knee breeches, but was instead the first of America’s Presidents to wear pants.
- I’m pretty sure it’s already been pointed out, but excusing racism by saying “look at all the not-racist things that were also said!” is kinda silly.
- The war on drugs is not racist, and claiming that it is and claiming that people who support it are racist destroys any remaining credibility that your argument had. The war on drugs has a lopsided effect on various races, but rather obviously that’s not racism unless tay-sachs and sickle cell are horribly racist.
Galileo, please don’t ever advocate for my favorite nominee. He/she is sure to be doomed.
You are a defender of racism. No wonder you hate Ron Paul. Ron Paul is the most effective opponent of racism in the House of Representatives.
Great. Likewise please sure to advocate against my favoite nominees.
Is there any way you can tone down the foul language?
I’ve let this go (arguably too long) because it’s amusing, but you need to turn down the personal attacks. You’re responding to comments about Ron Paul or factual rebuttals by saying other posters hate America or are racist or other similarly unnecessary and invented criticisms. Stick to arguing about ideas.
Racism is a bad thing. The war on drugs is also a bad policy that is not racist..
- Pointing out that something that is not racist, is not a racist act.*
Speaking of your logic, has Ron Paul come out against Tay-Sachs?
Except when his chief of staff is publishing racist shit under Paul’s name and Paul is defending it personally and through his spokesman. And voting against honoring Rosa Parks and the Civil Rights struggle.
But surely this isn’t more factually erroneous nonsense. Please point out the actions that Paul has taken against racism during his tenure in the house. Perhaps he sponsored/supported legislation requiring diversity classes in high school? Perhaps he sponsored/supported legislation putting real teeth into anti-discrimination laws?
Perhaps he’s also taken a stand against vile bigotry, and has come out in strong support for adding gays and lesbians to the list of protected classes?
If the drug war itself isn’t racist, I’d say the effects certainly are. What’s the proportion of young black men that have done prison time - is it half? The drug war has a great deal to do with that. But that being said I have no idea what Ron Paul has done to combat racism. Even his defenders in this thread are saying his legislative accomplishments are somewhere between few and none, so I can’t imagine how Galileo Galilei says he has been “effective” at doing anything at all. Maybe he believes Paul’s policies would end some of the racism in society, but since none of his policies have been adopted, that would make him the opposite of effective.
Having a racial dynamic =/= racist.
Tay-sachs is not a racist disease. Saying that there is such a thing as Chinese food is not a racist claim. Breast cancer is not a sexist disease. Parkinsons is not an ageist disease.
Anybody at all who runs afoul of the drug laws is vulnerable, they aren’t written such that your skin color effects whether or not violating the law is a crime. Is there racism often involved in the sentencing and trial phases, perhaps even who cops hassle in the first place? Sure. Is the law itself a racist law or a law that has *racist *effects? No. For instance, a recent firefighter’s exam that had different results along racial lines was not a racist exam, was not designed by racists, and did not have a racist effect.
Equality of opportunity =/= equality of outcome, and all that.
There is of course that. Which makes me curious. What has Ron done to actually support his causes? Has he sponsored or supported bills to get us on the gold standard, to end the drug war, to make people war avocados as ear muffs?
If the answer is that Ron hasn’t done anything because he couldn’t get support to implement his agenda, then how would that change if the makeup of Congress was unchanged and none of his initiatives could get a veto-proof number of supporters?
20% according to this study (which looked at federal and state prison records only).
“Q: In your 1988 campaign you said, “All drugs should be decriminalized. Drugs should be distributed by any adult to other adults. There should be no controls on production, supply or purchase for adults.” Is that still your position?
A: Yeah”
So Ron Paul thinks anyone should be free to sell drugs (this sounds like all drugs, recreational/medicinal/whatever) with no controls whatsoever.
Apart from whether you think that’s a good idea, it’s bound to strike the vast majority of people as a disaster, and a good example (as if we needed more) of why Paul is not electable as President.
Out of curiosity, has Paul ever made a real push for drug law reform that had a chance of succeeding - i.e. leading an effort to change drug laws to try to get them to have more of a race-neutral effect?
These are poor comparisons, and the one with Chinese food doesn’t even make sense. You’re contrasting genetic malfunctions with policies that are devised, created, and enforced by people. Even if drug laws are not designed to have an effect on any particular racial group, they do. By that reasoning it’s fair to call the drug war racist.
Then that’s enough to prove his point. He didn’t say drug laws are racist. He said the War on Drugs is racist. That includes the laws, which are written in a race-neutral manner [although some people, including the ones who wrote my cite, argue that the different sentencing guidelines for crack and cocaine are themselves racist], and the enforcement of the laws, including sentencing.
“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.”
Sorry, but the disproportionate treatment of sentencing for two separate kinds of cocaine, with the variety favored by blacks suffering penalties ten times harsher than the variety favored by whites certainly includes a racist component. The law was not passed for racist reasons, but the failure of Congress to redress that disproportionate response for 25 years following the revelation from the medical community that the reasons behind the initial discrepancies are not factually founded, displays a bit of race-based malign neglect.
Beyond that, the claim is that the “war on drugs” is racist, not that the law is racist. That more funds are apportioned to interdict drugs in black neighborhoods and that the police (at the Federal, state, and locals levels), all spend more effort running down drugs in inner cities when drug usage is pretty evenly distributed among all communities, and that prosecutors are more likely to seek felony charges in black neighborhoods and misdemeanors or lower rated felonies in white neighborhoods, indicates a certain institutional racial bias.
I do not agree that the “war on drugs” is a deliberate war on the black community, but there is more than a bit of institutional racism at work that tilts its enforcement; it is not mere happenstance that such a high percentage of blacks have spent time in prisons on drug charges despite their drug usage differing little from whites.
I would tend to agree that the law is not racist, (aside from the idiotic rules regarding crack), but there is far more to the situation than rogue cops or biased judges.
Of course, none of this has any bearing on Ron Paul’s lack of suitability as president. No anti-vaxer should be permitted to get near any public office.
If the newsletters were so racist, why did not anyone complain about them back in the 1980s? Huh? They had wide distribution in the 1980s. But no distribution in the past 10 years. Ron Paul didn’t even know about them back then, nor did anyone else. How come you said nothing about the newsletters in the 1980s if they are so bad? Huh?
And if they have a racist message, why repeat it so others can hear the message? Why are you spreading the racist message? Huh? Why is the New Republic spreading a racist message?
Why is it OK for the *New Republic *to print the “racist” messages, but if Ron Paul’s newsletter does the same thing, then it is the crime of the century??
:eek:
No, they had a limited distribution among the same sort of people who generally agreed with the comments–including the silly race stuff.
They were not widely read by the general population of the U.S.
No, that doesn’t prove anything. Certainly not the spurious point that aggressively prosecuting totally race-neutral laws is really racist because individual judges/juries apply them in a racist manner. Especially since such a phenomena is not unique to the drug war, we’ve known for quite some time now that minorities tend to draw longer sentences than whites when the facts are all relatively equal. Is our entire systems of laws therefore racist? Since, after all, our system of laws isn’t just the laws themselves but the whole shebang, how they’re enforced and how people are sentenced for breaking them. Making violence against the law is racist, right?
Or no?
But making drugs against the law is?
Do you want to argue that the drug laws are improperly enforced by certain, specific people involved in LEO or the trial/sentencing phases? Go for it, you’d be right. But the claim that the war on drugs itself is racist because some of the people involved in it tend to be bigoted is nonsense.
You end up doing the same sort of thing that our two Paul fans do for their cause, actually. It’s quite possible to oppose the war on drugs for the facts; it doens’t work, it creates a massive criminal class, it removes the recourse to law and guarantees that the rule of force will be the most effective way to control the flow of profit, it criminalizes personal choices made by consenting adults, drug use is a crime with no victim, and so on. But to allege that everybody who supports keeping drugs illegal is supporting racism? Come on.
Kind of a trite and overused quote that auto-refutes, eh?
Or shall we legalize theft based on income level? And if so, would you put up signs all over town, like some people do for garage sales, advertising that you have food in your fridge that’s easily portable and your home has shitty locks? Since prohibiting rich and poor people alike from stealing food is such a silly idea, after all.
No?
No, it doesn’t do that either. It reflects the fact that making drug penalties softer is politically dangerous as it is almost guaranteed to be portrayed by a challenger as “being soft on drugs!”, not to mention that in public perception crack is a demon of a drug and the media sensationalized crack use to the point where the public saw it as a new menace and still hasn’t gotten to the point where they’d accept the concept that “crackhouse” shouldn’t be all that much more of a cause for extreme fear than “opium den”.
And of course we have both tobacco and alchol as totally legal drugs. This shows that our drug policy isn’t rational, not that it’s racist.
The claim is not that the drug war isn’t racist and Ron Paul just wants to fight the bias in its implementation, but that the war itself is racist and Ron Paul wants to do away with it entirely because he’s against racism.
Your (and Gal’s) reasoning is fallacious. As I’m sure you’d see if you applied it to other topics. Let’s just take, for argument’s sake, the claim that hiring preferences based on nomenclature show a distinct ‘anti-black’ form of racism at work. Does that mean that:
A) some, perhaps even many people who are in charge of hiring applicants, are letting their racism drive hiring choices
B) hiring people for jobs is racist
C) the system which we know as the job hunt is racist
D) the system which we know as the job hunt is racist, and you must support ending it or else you are endorsing a racist system even if you don’t realize it
So:
A) some, perhaps even many of the people involved in carrying out the functions of law enforcement and criminal justice are letting their racism/biases/prejudices drive their choices
B) sentencing people for drug use and busting them for drug use is racist
C) the system which we know as the war on drugs is racist
D) the system which we know as the war on drugs is racist, and you must support ending it or else you are endorsing a racist system if you don’t realize it
A distinction without a difference… unless the idea that we should spend megabucks to interdict the flow of illegal drugs and punish those who use/sell them is devised, created and enforced to keep minorities down. If instead it was devised, created and enforced because people think that drugs are bad, then it’s exactly as neutral as evolution on that dynamic. I’ll also point out that this statement you just made contradicts with your next statement:
Tay-Sachs was not devised, created or enforced by anybody. Therefore, even though “Tay-Sachs was not designed to have an effect on any particular racial group, it does. By that reasoning it’s fair to call Tay-Sachs racist.”
I know, what with their uber-wide circulation the internet must have been abuzz with news about them. Of course, the actual reason is exactly what I cited, the audience was pretty damn racist and they ate that shit up. The same as when Paul bragged that his best source of campaign contribution was the mailing list for the racist publication, The Spotlight.
[
](Who Wrote Ron Paul's Newsletters?)
Yes. Your brother in arms has already argued that Paul’s own words, on Paul’s own website, overstate Paul’s own position. The idea that Paul didn’t know about the newsletters that he started and had named after him, that were edited by his chief of staff and had family on staff is… similar.
To say nothing of the fact that, as already pointed out, not only did Paul not deny he wrote the racist trash when it was first brought to light, but he defended it both personally and through a spokesman and argued as if he had written it or at the very least, endorsed the ideas contained therein.
Do you think this tactic is going to strengthen your argument?
“Why oh why are you spreading Ron Paul’s racist message by calling him on the carpet for having a racist message?!?”
Shall we also not study the Nazis lest we spread the Nazi message? Why oh why are all those Holocaust scholars spreading Nazism!?!
It’s funny that you’re now attempting to deny that they’re racist. Yeah, saying that the LA riots only ended when it was time for blacks to pick up their welfare checks is not racist, nopers. And pointing out that Paul’s newsletter printed racist things and it’s bad is exactly the same as printing those racist things and saying that they’re good.
“Ron Paul: twas brilling and the slivey toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe. Vote for Ron!”
I’m not about to jump into the fray here to defend Ron Paul or his supporters in this thread, but I think you’re going too far in your defense of the War on Drugs. Drug laws and policy are designed and implemented by human beings, who are notoriously capable of bias. Especially when politics is involved. Do you really think that if the crack/cocaine disparity worked in the other direction, the political will to adjust it couldn’t be found?
The disparity in the impact of the War on Drugs by race is huge, and, unlike genetic conditions or diseases, is a product of human design. It may not be a specific intent of the architects of drug policy (although, sometimes it was), but it didn’t just sprout up naturally without any human intervention.
In your job hunt example, if a company’s hiring practices, however fairly designed on paper, showed a disparate impact on the scale that the War on Drugs does, they could be sued (at least prior to the Supreme Court’s decision in the New Haven Firefighter Case, I’m not sure how much that provision has been weakened). I’m not, and I’m going to go out on the smallest limb ever and say that tomndebb isn’t either, advocating that a vote for Ron Paul is a vote against racism, or that ending the War on Drugs is necessary to prevent racism, just that you are going a bit too far in dismissing the extent that those responsible for our nation’s drug policies ought to be called to answer for the fact that they are overwhelmingly targeted towards minorities.