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@Siam said in US Politics:
By the way, the whole black people's plight in modern America goes nowhere until the prison industry is gutted and overhauled.
Believe no solution until that is included and talked about often.
No surprise you think that. Any well informed links to background?
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@Siam said in US Politics:
@Kiwiwomble said in US Politics:
@Siam I have already conceded that is obviously the “best” way to do it
The comment you’ve picked out is that start of a convo
But people are just playing dumb if they can’t see that the best way to fix things is infinitely harder than a much more flawed “group” approach, and easy to talk about waiting and doing it “right” when we we might not be the ones needing the help
I can appreciate the desire and need to do something useful and helpful to address the obvious inequalities staring us in the face seemingly everyday.
I'd rather sway away from a solution with subjective assessment of an individual by the arbitrary group he's in, as it's core principle.
We must have better definitions for those we wish to help. The solution must be applied on today's circumstances and universally cater for all who need it. It can't be skin colour because we'll just be racist to poor white people instead of poor black people.
If anything the solutions should be based around income and wealth differences, not skin colour ones.
The goal is to provide all with lives of equal opportunities, a high standard of outcomes, all at the expense of no one in particular, right?
The social engineering like proposition 16 are doomed to fail (designed to fail actually), because they never have definitions. Every single moving part comes down to someone's interpretation. No variables are fixed with group identity politics - every decision needs an arbiter. The whole system needs people in charge of it's application. That's enticing to bad faith actors.
E.g. proposition 16. Who does this apply to?
How black? Skin colour? Genetic percentage? Who gets left out of the opportunity?
Historical oppression? Just American slaves? Kurds allowed? How many years back? All ancestors of slaves?I'm saying don't even ever give the grouping of people in 2021 by race or skin colour any oxygen as a means to assess government help for it's citizens.
Never group by characteristics you were born with. Something no one can control. That's not how public policy should be drafted.
Assess by opportunities and income, then be fair dinkum about fixing them.
I agree it's clear where the problem areas are, and a genuine reluctance for those with the financial resources to mend things has also been stark. Yes something needs to be done but the foundations for deciding who needs help must be rational.
In 2021 skin colour is the least interesting and revealing thing about a person. Don't continue to make it the difference between a good life and a shit life, again.
Superb post.
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@nostrildamus said in US Politics:
Not the only ones going after ethnic votes:
Big difference between producing policies which garner support in specific groups - as both Trump & Biden did - and deliberately excluding people from government support because of their skin colour - as Biden and Harris appear to want to do.
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@pakman said in US Politics:
@Victor-Meldrew said in US Politics:
@Kiwiwomble said in US Politics:
@Victor-Meldrew you don't think there is any place for "righting" past wrongs? giving a leg up to those that may be starting from a less fortunate position because of the wrong done to previous generations of their family?
No. For the same reason that poor people in Spain and Portugal shouldn't expect a handout from North African countries for all the white slavery that went on 150 years ago. It's simply unworkable.
I'm massively in favour of helping people from disadvantaged groups realise their potential - regardless of race. It's pretty dumb for a country to throw that potential on the scrapheap. In the US that help would inevitably (but not always) be focussed on areas with high black populations.
(As an aside, the UK is taking a similar approach, but the groups mainly being targeted are white working class, as BAME people out-perform their white cohorts)
But doing this will mean reallocation of resources from better-off areas to poorer areas, at least initially. And the cynic in me thinks that those advocating equality and diversity are all in favour - as long as it doesn't impact them much.
Right past wrongs by compensation is a mug's game. At the risk of being labelled reductive, it boils down to those without sin casting the first stone.
I entirely agree with @Victor-Meldrew that the onus ought to be on trying to ensure equality of opportunity for ALL. For me that is about education, both the teaching itself, and the facilitation of the access thereto for poorer types.
A great example: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/oct/17/black-panther-party-oakland-free-breakfast-50th-anniversary
The thing that's annoying is that it's piss easy to make huge efforts to fund public money towards these communities without saying so.
Using Biden's small business analogy, why not just say assistance will be offered to small businesses in areas with lower wealth etc etc. So if by the way things are, this adds more cash towards the aimed communities, then people should accept this without too much bother.
Instead, if you say we are targeting non-white communities, then the struggling white business owners start to get pissy. And start to get noisy. And because USA is majority white, with a larger share of funds with white people (note, no racism here - just facts), they start to influence others in the same vain. Realityy is that due to twitter and like, there are movements for everything. Literally everything. A flat earth society FFS. So when you use divisive language, people who are put out, can and will immediately find others in same situation ... and next thing you know Cool Hand Luke / Civil War speech starts to be become relevant again:
What we've got here is failure to communicate. Some men you just can't reach. So you get what we had here last week, which is the way he wants it... well, he gets it. I don't like it any more than you men.
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@No-Quarter said in US Politics:
@nostrildamus said in US Politics:
@No-Quarter said in US Politics:
@Tim said in US Politics:
Biden pick to head DOJ Civil Rights Division wrote Blacks had 'superior physical and mental abilities'
That plus this:
Doesn't fill me with confidence that he is not beholden to the radicals of the party
Not the only ones going after ethnic votes:
Did you not argue that those with power in the Dems are moderate? I'd argue that playing identity politics like that, which is something Trump did as well, makes them pretty far from 'moderate'.
Actually, I wrote they weren't radical lefties - not necessarily the same as what you wrote.
In general, I'm beginning to wonder who doesn't play identity politics. But Trump does/did more than identity politics, and as I have said before I don't think Trump should be simply placed on a left/right spectrum, at least not a simple conservative one.
As to the VP elect, she seems to have critics on both sides of the spectrum. -
@Victor-Meldrew said in US Politics:
@nostrildamus said in US Politics:
Not the only ones going after ethnic votes:
Big difference between producing policies which garner support in specific groups - as both Trump & Biden did - and deliberately excluding people from government support because of their skin colour - as Biden and Harris appear to want to do.
That's an interesting point to consider.
But here we may get to the issue of whether I can discuss Trump the man. He seems to ignore deplore and exclude whole areas of concentrated ethinic minorities through attacking their city or state. Or is that a personal attack?
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@nostrildamus said in US Politics:
@Victor-Meldrew said in US Politics:
@nostrildamus said in US Politics:
Not the only ones going after ethnic votes:
Big difference between producing policies which garner support in specific groups - as both Trump & Biden did - and deliberately excluding people from government support because of their skin colour - as Biden and Harris appear to want to do.
That's an interesting point to consider.
But here we may get to the issue of whether I can discuss Trump the man. He seems to ignore deplore and exclude whole areas of concentrated ethinic minorities through attacking their city or state. Or is that a personal attack?
What I've highlighted is the nature of politics which I find alarming - and not just in the US. You only have to look at the Democrats attitude to blue-collar voters, or Biden's exclusion of white businesses in the video posted above. And it's interesting that an article in a left-wing publication mis-quotes Trump to "prove" he is racist and then dog-whistles that Trump's alleged racism is key to his support among whites. Divide and rule?
I would argue that it's the Left who have divided the electorate into "ethnic groups", far more than parties on the right, and appealed to those groups individually rather than the electorate as a whole. I think there's a big difference between campaigning to ethnic groups and having distinct, divisive messages for different groups.
Seems to me Trump did the former quite successfully and garnered record vote percent for Republicans in Hispanic and Black communities. Perhaps they appreciated not being patronised and treated differently?
The latter can be really dangerous as politicians come under pressure to excuse certain behaviours on race or ethnic grounds. Classic case in the UK with Asian Muslim grooming gangs where many Labour-run councils (and left-wing publications) knew organised abuse was going on but ignored it for years for fear of being branded "Islamophobic". Seriously divisive and corrosive stuff
Or is that a personal attack?
Feel very free to attack Trump as a person - I have no time for him.
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@nostrildamus said in US Politics:
@Victor-Meldrew said in US Politics:
@nostrildamus said in US Politics:
Not the only ones going after ethnic votes:
Big difference between producing policies which garner support in specific groups - as both Trump & Biden did - and deliberately excluding people from government support because of their skin colour - as Biden and Harris appear to want to do.
That's an interesting point to consider.
But here we may get to the issue of whether I can discuss Trump the man. He seems to ignore deplore and exclude whole areas of concentrated ethinic minorities through attacking their city or state. Or is that a personal attack?
The issue of personal attacks which threaten the continuation of the thread is when we start insulting each other.
Keep the debate on the topic and we're all fine.
The topic is US Politics.
Therefore Trump's electability, of which his personality is part, is fair game.
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@Siam said in US Politics:
By the way, the whole black people's plight in modern America goes nowhere until the prison industry is gutted and overhauled.
Believe no solution until that is included and talked about often.
I think more broadly we would be talking about the justice system, and policy failures like the War On Drugs and mandatory sentencing minimums.
An electoral system that appoints judges, law enforcement, incarceration oversight etc. is also hard to justify as sound policy.
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Prison system is fucked at all levels. Amazing how privitisation and profit focused incarceration + "The war on (insert noun)" hasn't produced great outcomes.
Really hope the 'reform the police' movement (not defund) grows to include looking at the justice system + prison system alongside policing. Those seem to be the three main threads - although you could argue that social services fits in the mix.Anywho - have heard some Reps saying the impeachment is just another witch hunt, while others do seem genuine about Trump having incited the events at Capitol Hill. Interesting that during 2-3 in person events Trump continued to push back about doing anything wrong, but a white house release from him today has explicitly said 'don't riot, vandalise, get violent' etc. Too little too late? really hope the inauguration event proceeds without any (extra) madness!
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@Paekakboyz said in US Politics:
Amazing how privitisation and profit focused incarceration
I was curious about that, so looked it up: while private prisons are still only ~9% of prisoners, their growth in the last couple of decades has been something like 45%! And, no surprises, their level of cost saving is practically nonexistent over state run prisons.
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@NTA said in US Politics:
policy failures like the War On Drugs
I studied the US WoD program as part of my history degree a few years back. Arguably the biggest cluster-fuck in US policy post WW2, if not ever. Still impacting today in all sorts of ways. A shortage of opium to make morphine and a post-Taliban Afghanistan was a great opportunity to fill a shortage and help get a country back on its feet, but the overhang from the WoD killed that.
There's a lot to admire about LBJ, but his focus on this was worse than his Vietnam actions.
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TL;DR - some GOP officials are afraid to impeach Trump in case there is dangerous backlash from the angries.
There is a disturbing reason Republicans in Congress are giving for refusing to break with President Donald Trump: They fear for their lives. According to Rep. Jason Crow (D-CO), this is a major reason why more House Republicans aren’t voting to impeach Donald Trump in the wake of the attack on the Capitol. “The majority of them are paralyzed with fear,” Crow said in a Wednesday MSNBC appearance. “I had a lot of conversations with my Republican colleagues last night, and a couple of them broke down in tears — saying that they are afraid for their lives if they vote for this impeachment.” Tim Alberta, Politico’s chief political correspondent, found in his own reporting that “Crow was right.” “I know for a fact several members *want* to impeach but fear casting that vote could get them or their families murdered,” Alberta writes. “Numerous House Republicans have received death threats in the past week.” This fear has not only affected the impeachment vote. Rep. Pete Meijer (R-MI) has said that he personally knows several House Republicans who wanted to vote to certify Joe Biden’s 2020 electoral win but were afraid for their lives if they chose to do so. “I had colleagues who, when it came time to recognize reality and vote to certify Arizona and Pennsylvania in the Electoral College, they knew in their heart of hearts that they should’ve voted to certify, but some had legitimate concerns about the safety of their families,” Meijer told Reason magazine’s Matt Welch. “They felt that that vote would put their families in danger.” The comments from Crow, Alberta, and Meijer illustrate a devastating truth: The Capitol Hill attack was, in large part, a success. The violent seizure of the Capitol demonstrated to legislators that crossing Donald Trump puts them in the literal crosshairs. This was explicitly part of the point for some: In online comments cited in an FBI document on the violent threats before the attack, one person wrote that “Congress needs to hear glass breaking, doors being kicked in.” “We get our President or we die,” they added. “NOTHING else will achieve this goal.” Convincing Congress to install Trump for another presidential term was always an unattainable goal. But influencing legislators to vote differently in the future, in ways more congenial to the Trumpist movement, was not. In weak and young democracies, especially ones with recent experience of civil war, you often see a phenomenon called “electoral violence,” in which armed groups use intimidation and force to coerce voters into supporting their preferred political parties. In the United States, it seems like we’re seeing the emergence of something more properly termed “legislative violence.” Far-right demonstrators in both DC and state capitals are using both threats and actual violence to coerce members of their own broad political faction, the Republican Party, to toe their line. In a country where firearms are omnipresent and easily attainable by legal means, legislators have good reason to take such threats seriously. Of course, both electoral and legislative violence are antithetical to democracy. They replicate the political conditions of an authoritarian state, where the fear of physical violence prevents citizens and government officials from having an authentic voice in their government. It is the antithesis of the democratic ideal of self-government, its replacement with the rule of the most ruthless and brutal. It is alarming that this is happening in the United States today. And there are very good reasons to believe that the success of these tactics — that the rioters successfully took the Capitol and scared elected officials — will lead to them being tried again. A recent Politico article describes an unnamed GOP House member flying home after the Capitol attack, expecting support after their ordeal from constituents. Instead, he recalls being greeted by a striking refrain from his supporters. “Do you think that Congress got the message?”
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@Paekakboyz said in US Politics:
"The war on (insert noun)"
One of the worst politicians on this over the last 50 years has been Joe Biden. Various crime bills and 'war on drugs' bills etc. The racially charged language he used really didn't help either.
Harris of course is a Prosecutor who aggressively sent drug users to prison. On the media circuit last year she joked about her own drug use.
Of the 25 of so Dems running for President last year they picked the two worst candidates for this issue
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@Paekakboyz said in US Politics:
but a white house release from him today has explicitly said 'don't riot, vandalise, get violent' etc. Too little too late?
I haven't actually read what he tweeted leading up to the riots - apart from calling the election rigged. What did he say/tweet that kicked the violence off?
Heard some say he said "be peaceful" to the marchers, others say the opposite.
really hope the inauguration event proceeds without any (extra) madness!
Apart from the politicians....
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I think the even bigger issues are making Trump a martyr, and the proceedings being seen as some sort of Soviet era show trial by revengeful Democrats - ending up being as big a reputational stain as last weeks riots
It's almost as if the Democrats want to keep the country divided.
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@Victor-Meldrew without having it verbatim the gist of his speech ahead of the riot was calls to be strong, send a message, convince some Reps (the weak ones - the strong ones were ok) that the election was a rort and to vote down the electoral votes (something, something), then called on the crowd to take a walk up the avenue to express their feelings.
At best it was a stunning lack of any kind of awareness of his influence on that crowd, or what could emerge as mob mentatility kicked in.But one of the most insane things I've read in the last day or two is the (new) Rep Senator who was live tweeting where Pelosi was located in the building during the riot! wt in the actual f? sounds like there are investigations underway about visits/tours she might have interacted with in the days leading up to the event. A few cases of footage where rioters seemed to know the layout of the building and were trying to direct the mob. Seems too crazy to believe but .... yeah.
@Duluth totally agree on your call about the Dem candidates. Not that it was a stunning crop to pick from but they went with Joe for the Obama carry over and Harris as something of a nod to the newer groups emerging. Stink aye.
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@Victor-Meldrew GOP willingness (even if on the down low) to see Trump impeached seems to be growing. I guess they can support it to ensure no Trump in 2024, without having to say they led the calls for impeachment, so the Dems still get cast as trying to get Trump at any and all cost.
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@Paekakboyz said in US Politics:
At best it was a stunning lack of any kind of awareness of his influence on that crowd, or what could emerge as mob mentatility kicked in.
Sums up the man.
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@Paekakboyz said in US Politics:
Dems still get cast as trying to get Trump at any and all cost.
Could be a smart strategy for the GOP in '24 - particularly if Harris & Biden carry on the divisive rhetoric we've seen in the last few weeks. Bad for the country though.
Not that I'd expect Pelosi to see the danger - too flaky and deranged about Trump.
US Politics