Racism is a problem worldwide, but I agree, American racism is rather exceptional, and is a cause of our crime problem.
Yes, racism and its consequential crime rate are one of our unique problems. That doesn’t mean we should willingly allow ourselves to become victims of it.
It’s also true that when you villainize the police and authority and break down morals and family values and encourage people to live in ways that make them turn to crime, such as the attitude that no one has a right to tell them what to do, ‘social promotion’ in schools, defending and glamorizing ‘thug life’ with its concomitant evils, and defending and encouraging behaviors that result in young single ill-educated girls having babies and raising them in poverty and without a father, and of course drugs, which you seem to think is a throwaway but is a horrific problem and has ruined and cost more lives in the last 50 years than any other societal wrong. All of this has clearly been an outgrowth of the counterculture revolution, as evinced by any number of graphs showing both property and violent crimes skyrocketing in its immediate aftermath.
You sure threw a lot into that little pile of “What’s Wrong With America!”, didn’t you?
Yep, sure did. And believe me, I’m more unhappy about it than you are.
Yes, those cops who have carried on the legacy of Bull Connor (and his predecessors) and continued to brutalize black and brown people (along with those other cops who look the other way and/or actively defend their brutalizing compatriots) are doing terrible harm to America by making the police look like villains in the eyes of so many, such as the ~50% of black Americans who, according to polling, report that they personally have been mistreated by law enforcement. Until only a very small portion of black and brown people have personal experience of being mistreated by cops, it will be entirely reasonable that many of them see cops as dangerous and even deadly enemies.
The modern Republican party is a truly immoral organization, and only getting worse, and should be opposed for all the damage they’re doing to “break down morals and family values”.
Correlation does not equal causation. Just as one of the most basic examples, the rising popularity of hip-hop music since the 90s has correlated with a significant decrease in crime. Music does not cause crime and never has. Policy that forces people into having few or no other options at getting more income than basic poverty increases crime – and I blame conservatives and Republicans for most such policies.
From your perspective, things have gotten worse. But I’ve talked to lots of folks your age. Many of the white folks I’ve talked to agree with you. But almost all of the non-white folks, and almost all of the women, tell me that things have generally improved. I’m not going to take your word over all of theirs, especially when they have personal experience that you lack (e.g. the experience of not being white and not being a man).
Yes, I know I can always count on your boilerplate refutation of people you’ve talked to. But the trouble is that most of the things that have gotten better could easily have gotten better without all the nonsensical idiocy that I described. Prohibition was overturned, women got the right to vote, and important legislation was passed to address racism long before the great national idiocy of the late sixties took place. There’s nothing about any of the things I listed that have made anything better for anyone and none of them were necessary to lessen racism (if anything, some of them created more of it) or to achieve greater rights for women.
And speaking of women, virtually none I know who are my age approve of society as it is now. Like me they think that pre-counterculture America was more civilized, polite, better educated and had better values. My Facebook account is full of women my age who are just as contemptuous and critical of the way things are now as I am.
Much of what you hear is probably a result of how you ask. If you go around asking minorities if they think things are better now and they say yes, that means that they can live and shop and work wherever and they face less discrimination, all of which, like I said, could have been accomplished anyway. Ask if they think it’s better that our schools have gone to shit, that drugs are the problem they are and have been for 50 years, that crimes have skyrocketed and become more widespread, that kids are being born to young, single, unemployed and ill-educated mothers and raised in poverty without a father present, and I doubt they’ll say either that these things are good, or that the things in their lives that have improved were only made possible because of them.
Seriously: who is doing a better job of villainizing the police than the actual police themselves? Is it because of all the cameras? And if that is the case, have the police suddenly become more reckless and violent, or are we merely become more aware of what has been happening all along? Perhaps your halcyon days were not as delightful for everyone as you want us to believe.
One of the reasons drugs have ruined so many lives is the very fact that they were fucking illegal. When criminal justice is the primary means to deal with the issue, it almost always gets dealt with in the worst possible way. We are watching Portugal.
The counterculture movement did not happen in a vacuum. It was not causeless. Unless you want to actually look at why it arose instead of blindly heaping blame, I suggest you shut the fuck up about it, because every time you spew that vapid nonsense, just about everyone takes your posts a little less seriously.
I have my boilerplate to respond to your boilerplate.
I think it mostly was. I think most of your complaining is just plain incorrect.
I don’t think you actually know much about this, or how it could have been accomplished, based on the way you’ve described the situation for black people in the past.
This hasn’t happened, for the most part. Some schools are better, some are worse. In general, schools for black people and other minorities are quite a bit better than they were 50 years ago. For example, black people achieve college degrees at much, much higher rates now than in the past. Black Americans are far better educated now, on average, than 50 years ago. This is a fact.
If we’d had reasonable social and economic policies, there would have been many fewer obstacles for black Americans, and many fewer would be in disadvantaged economic and family scenarios.
I did see your previous post, but I didn’t see a question addressed to me or feel any particularly strong disagreement with anything you wrote, so I didn’t feel the need to reply.
There was a really excellent post on this point a while ago that I recall reading. I’ll see if I can find it. Thus far, my search skills have failed me, and the 120-second delay between searches makes it a tedious process.
My impression is that between the FBI and the WISQARS data, we have pretty decent information on “gun deaths”. As for “studies in what works regarding making us safer”, sure, that’d be good too. Bloomberg ought to pledge a few million to that. Should the CDC spend >$100K on it? I don’t know the particulars of the CDC’s budget to give a reasonable answer to this. Broadly speaking, we’ve been running significant budget deficits for many years now, so I’m not thrilled by new government spending. If the CDC decided they wanted to shift some funds from studying some less-important topics to studying this, in a way that complied with Congress’ directive(s), I’d be fine with that. Does Congress usually get into the specifics of their budget with how much they should spend on a particular category of research?
In context that doesn’t make sense.
We were talking about the Dickey Amendment, and how that had basically shut down gun research by the CDC. You disagreed, saying all it does is prevent advocating a particular position. How can you now agree that yes, it has shut down research?
Do you recall any of the salient points?
So in summary, you don’t want research on this topic.
$100,000 a year, for an agency this big, in a country the size of the US, on a topic this far-reaching is as close to zero as it’s practically possible to be. It’s basically hiring a guy to periodically tell the press “Yeah, we got nothin’”.
You’re fine with us flying blind, and working from ignorance on this issue, because at least that way you won’t hear something that challenges your view.
The original post I responded to was this:
Your post, that you asked if I had seen, was this (I believe):
I see some important distinctions between Sjoe’s claim (“not allowed”) and your more carefully-qualified claim (“subjective nature”, “coupled with”, and “basically”). In short, I’m not interested in contesting the claim that (please forgive if you feel this is mis-stating your position) the Dickey Amendment and other factors have combined to have a chilling effect on gun research, but I do protest the claim that it is flat-out “not allowed”. That may seem like hair-splitting to you, but it seems like a worthwhile distinction to make to me.
Also please note that “not interested in contesting” does not necessarily mean I am convinced by a claim or that I agree with it. It might, probably often does in fact, mean simply that I don’t want to take the time to try to argue against a position, either because I think supportive cites will be difficult or time-consuming to track down, or I simply lack the time or interest to do it properly.
I found it:
My question went unanswered. Do you know if Congress has specified that they cannot spend additional funds on gun research, or is it just that the CDC has decided it has different priorities? I’d be just fine with the CDC pulling funds from whatever else they’re spending their 6 or 7 billion dollar budget on to study this, as long as they comply with Congress’ mandate(s).
I don’t think this is even remotely representative of my position. It’s got nothing at all to do with me not hearing something that challenges my view. To restate the obvious, I’m a conservative and a regular poster on the SDMB. I hear things that challenge my views most days. This is the just about the lamest possible charge that could be leveled against me.
Why not have the FBI do the study, with Criminologists rather than Doctors?
Look, those Doctors went in biased- of that there is no doubt. They used a unusual method- case control, which has only been proven valid for epidemiology , and which Criminologists disagree with and so do others. Noted criminologists have published scientific studies which show the opposite. So why are we even talking about having the CDC do the studies?
In fact noted criminologists have continued to publish studies on gun violence, with interesting results: Public Health Gun Control: A Brief History—Part III – Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership
so why the CDC?
Why The Centers For Disease Control Should Not Receive Gun Research Funding major danger of treating gun violence as a public health issue is that invites a false, politically-driven association of guns with disease, rather than the addressing much more fundamental mental health and social causes underlying violent behavior in general. This mischaracterization is made clear in 1994 American Medical News interview with Dr. Katherine Christoffel, head of the “Handgun Epidemic Lowering Plan”, a CDC-funded organization who said: “guns are a virus that must be eradicated… They are causing an epidemic of death by gunshot, which should be treated like any epidemic…you get rid of the virus…get rid of the guns, get rid of the bullets, and you get rid of deaths.”
In the same article, Mark Rosenberg, who then headed CDC, agreed: “Kathy Christoffel is saying about firearms injuries what has been said for years about AIDS: that we can no longer be silent. That silence equals death and she’s not willing to be silent anymore. She’s asking for help.*
Doctors For Responsible Gun Ownership? That’s a project of The Second Amendment Foundation-not exactly impartial, wouldn’t you say?
As an aside a better way to search the SDMB is to use Google.
Go to https://www.google.com
Type in:
<<search term>> site:straightdope.com
Example:
“gun control” CDC HurricaneDitka site:straightdope.com
FWIW republicans have agreed to allow the CDC to study gun violence. I’m a bit dubious so will withhold judgement till (if) they pass something:
In related news The United Federation Of Foxes, Wolves and Weasels has recently embarked on a five year study about the growing Hens Missing from Henhouse controversy.
Is there something object to, or just the ad hominem against the source?
If I told you that the CDC had as a goal to reduce overall handgun ownership by 15%, would you consider that evidence that they were advocating a position? Trying to level set if we agree on what advocating a position could consist of.
The left has been villainizing cops since the very beginning of the counterculture revolution. Primarily because it was populated by druggies and the cops were enemies, and secondarily because misbehaving leftie protestors got their asses kicked by cops at the 1968 Democratic convention.
And addictive, and ruinous of people’s lives, and capable of making some go crazy and imagine weird shit and kill people, or overdose and die. Drugs were made illegal for very good reasons. They are regarded as such a problem in the Far East that dealing in them frequently carries the death penalty.
I know exactly why it happened because I was there watching in contempt and disgust the whole time it unfolded. It was kicked off originally by the confluence of two things: the British musical invasion begun by the Beatles, and the war in Vietnam. People didn’t want to be sent off to fight in Vietnam and they wanted to wear long hair and silly clothes, do drugs and be promiscuous, all of which put them at odds with the “Establishment”. This is the real and original reason for opposition to things like family values and most of the other mores of the time. The counterculture movement had been focusing on these issues for five or six years before anyone even began to think about piggybacking race and women’s rights onto it. And the reason it was successful wasn’t because it was right or beneficial or sensible or wise, it was because the baby-boom generation had just come of voting age and had large enough numbers to turn the tide their way. And what we have now is just what you might expect by having the future of the country set by a generation of drug-addled and radicalized 20-year-olds and their political progeny.
No, but they* cite* impartial studies. In any case, they are exactly as impartial as the CDC people who wrote those anti-gun “studies”
They got their asses kicked but I cannot understand why you apparently think what the police did was a good thing:
So you are for outlawing alcohol then right? It is one of the most ruinous drugs in the country in terms of lives ruined by it directly or indirectly. So too pharmaceutical companies should be banned from making opioids right?