Lots of shootings...

[Wiltonauer]

Yeah, laws that make violent crime illegal were drafted specifically to put African Americans in jail. OK dude.

I see your point, but I think some people get angrier when a person of a different ethnic group is accused of committing a violent crime against “one of theirs”, and they want to punish them more harshly. Personally, I don’t feel like I need to feed on bigotry in order to get super pissed at people who rape, murder, etc. I’m always seeing white losers in mug shots accused of heinous crimes and I’m thinking, “Fuck this guy. Lock him in a room with the victim’s parents and a table full of medieval weapons for half an hour.”

 

[ArtDecade]

Fixed it for you man!

You didn't fix it for me. You made it super racist - for yourself and @Glades . Anyhow, tell me where the bad man touched you. I want to help you get to the center of your dysfunction and hopefully heal you.

Hey @jaxadam - I know we don't see eye to eye on politics, but I know that you aren't a racist. These two muppets are showing their stripes in this thread. And when "liberals" call out racism, it is people like this we are talking about.

 

[narad]

In theory there's nothing wrong with simply acknowledging a fact that blacks are disproportionately prosecuted for violent crimes, or that barring evidence to the contrary, commit disproportionately more of such crimes. After all, if you're going to cut people into racial categories, one is going to create disproportionately more crime. One is going to be disproportionately taller. One is going to be disproportionately watch more musicals. That's just going to be how these things tend to work out.

The issue is really not the observation, but how that information supports an argument, and in this case, that's where glades and amos fail. Even if we assumed that two populations, black and white, committed equally proportioned amounts of violent crime, policing of black neighborhoods is more prevalent, the types of crimes committed by blacks are more associated with mandatory minimum sentencing, black people are less able on average to post bond or afford legal support to minimize fines, and are on averaged sentenced longer for comparable crimes. So they took a piece of evidence that, again, was essentially bound to single out some race, and treated it as the causal factor in these outcomes, even though studies have shown these biases hold even when you control for the proportion of prosecuted crimes.

But ya, just another day, another bad take, par for the course here in SSO OT.

 

[TheBlackBard]

I'm not going to waste any time trying finesse my way around this, but if anyone can honestly say that the law is not unfairly targeting minorities despite heaps of evidence showing otherwise, you have to be willfully ignorant.

 

[ArtDecade]

Today, I suppose @Glades and @AMOS are reflecting upon James Earl Ray because we know how you feel about guns, Civil Rights, and African Americans. That said the rest of Americans are celebrating the life and work of Martin Luther King. "You can kill the dreamer, but you can't kill the dream."

 

[bostjan]

Any politics discussion on a guitar forum (or any forum?) is going to be essentially useless, right? I think it's just about feeling out what arguments people are actually using to position themselves in such diametric opposition to each other. On a guitar forum it's more interesting because in the space of people, we must all be sort of the same in some dimension if we spend a significant amount of time listening to the same music and playing the same instrument in the same genres, etc.

There's really no common ground on this topic, though, was what I was getting at. You have the loudest people on one side screaming to make all weapons vanish somehow and if we don't do it then we are dumb, and on the other extreme, the loudest people are saying that we should be arming fucking school teachers and ordering them to shoot anyone who appears to pose a threat.

Probably most of us are stuck here in the real world where none of these suggestions make a damned bit of sense, but we're just watching this thread devolve into explicit racism and rubbing our temples as the realization sets in that human kind is probably not worth the oxygen it wastes on this planet.

 

[Glades]

Today, I suppose @Glades and @AMOS are reflecting upon James Earl Ray because we know how you feel about guns, Civil Rights, and African Americans. That said the rest of Americans are celebrating the life and work of Martin Luther King. "You can kill the dreamer, but you can't kill the dream."

“By opening our lives to God in Christ, we become new creatures. This experience, which Jesus spoke of as the new birth, is essential if we are to be transformed nonconformists. Only through an inner spiritual transformation do we gain the strength to fight vigorously the evils of the world in a humble and loving spirit.”

“If any earthly institution or custom conflicts with God’s will, it is your Christian duty to oppose it. You must never allow the transitory, evanescent demands of man-made institutions to take precedence over the eternal demands of the Almighty God.”

MLK spoke the gospel. He knew only through Christ we could change this world for the better.

 

[ArtDecade]

“By opening our lives to God in Christ, we become new creatures. This experience, which Jesus spoke of as the new birth, is essential if we are to be transformed nonconformists. Only through an inner spiritual transformation do we gain the strength to fight vigorously the evils of the world in a humble and loving spirit.”

“If any earthly institution or custom conflicts with God’s will, it is your Christian duty to oppose it. You must never allow the transitory, evanescent demands of man-made institutions to take precedence over the eternal demands of the Almighty God.”

MLK spoke the gospel. He knew only through Christ we could change this world for the better.

Mark 4:11 "The impact is merely consequential to the fact that african-americans commit a disproportionately high number of crimes in this country."

Is that the right chapter and verse, Christian?

 

[bostjan]

“By opening our lives to God in Christ, we become new creatures. This experience, which Jesus spoke of as the new birth, is essential if we are to be transformed nonconformists. Only through an inner spiritual transformation do we gain the strength to fight vigorously the evils of the world in a humble and loving spirit.”

“If any earthly institution or custom conflicts with God’s will, it is your Christian duty to oppose it. You must never allow the transitory, evanescent demands of man-made institutions to take precedence over the eternal demands of the Almighty God.”

MLK spoke the gospel. He knew only through Christ we could change this world for the better.

The gospel, yes.

All of the religious right craze over weapons is justified by the old testament. Stuff about killing a person who breaks into your house being justified, because of some Levitical law or whatever.

But what did Jesus say about weapons?

“Put your sword back into its place. For all who take the sword will perish by the sword."

Or what Paul or Timothy said to the Corinthians:

"For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds."

The New Testament teaches nonviolence. It teaches those who own weapons to sell their weapons to feed the hungry.

Modern Christianity in the USA is so far disconnected from the teachings of Jesus that the two philosophies are largely incompatible. The hypocrisy of it shows so strongly, that this sort of cognitive dissonance results in the mass exodus from Christianity that we see every day. If you believe in Christianity, then you cannot believe in right wing policies. Jesus was a hippy. I don't get this characterisation of him as a gun-toting, cigarette-smoking, hummer-driving, rebel flag-wearing, tattoooed badass with an AR-15 and a bandolier full of ammo to shoot all of the minorities. It's satire that became embraced so strongly by the people it made fun of that it's no longer the satire, but the mainstream belief now.

 

[Drew]

Erm. Well, no. Laws can be written to be racist, and that would be institutional racism if they are, but, even if they are not, it doesn't mean that there is no institutional racism, right? Institutional racism means that a system that is in place systematically and unfairly discriminates between two different racial groups to one group's detriment over another. And I think that @Drew already provided anecdotal evidence as well as some data that suggests there is evidence that those are not just anecdotes...

To be fair, minorities weren't the ONLY group targeted by drug laws. The criminalization of marijuana use only really gained teeth under Richard Nixon, and I'm SURE it's just a wild, improbable, unbelievable coincidence that the group most associated with smoking weed were the anti-war hippies protesting the Vietnam war.

 

[bostjan]

To be fair, minorities weren't the ONLY group targeted by drug laws. The criminalization of marijuana use only really gained teeth under Richard Nixon, and I'm SURE it's just a wild, improbable, unbelievable coincidence that the group most associated with smoking weed were the anti-war hippies protesting the Vietnam war.

Haha, right. Might be worth noting, though, that Nixon's political opponents got us into Vietnam and the Nixon administration got us out of there. Not that Nixon was a good president, but he did end the Vietnam War (mostly out of pressure from his administrations numerous fuck-ups with the war effort) and also started the EPA by executive order, founded OSHA, and generally contributed to all of the bureaucracy that republicans now hate. He endorsed the ERA. He also started the "War on Drugs" as what seemed like a vain attempt to distract from how poorly Vietnam was going. Anyway, I still think he was a better leader than Trump, since he ultimately did take accountability and resigned. Side topic, though.

 

[AMOS]

Today, I suppose @Glades and @AMOS are reflecting upon James Earl Ray because we know how you feel about guns, Civil Rights, and African Americans. That said the rest of Americans are celebrating the life and work of Martin Luther King. "You can kill the dreamer, but you can't kill the dream."

You don't know shit about me, I'm not afraid to call a spade a spade. Because I don't lick the balls of the liberal narrative I'm considered all kinds of things, that's how your little liberal world works. You just assume everything because you don't know the facts.

 

[ArtDecade]

You don't know shit about me, I'm not afraid to call a spade a spade.

I don't need to know your inner world when you publicly out yourself with your words. And after getting called out for racist comments, you might want to leave home additional racial epithets as some sort of defense.

 

[CanserDYI]

You don't know shit about me, I'm not afraid to call a spade a spade. Because I don't lick the balls of the liberal narrative I'm considered all kinds of things, that's how your little liberal world works. You just assume everything because you don't know the facts.

You just lick the balls of the conservative narrative, got it.

 

[Drew]

Haha, right. Might be worth noting, though, that Nixon's political opponents got us into Vietnam and the Nixon administration got us out of there. Not that Nixon was a good president, but he did end the Vietnam War (mostly out of pressure from his administrations numerous fuck-ups with the war effort) and also started the EPA by executive order, founded OSHA, and generally contributed to all of the bureaucracy that republicans now hate. He endorsed the ERA. He also started the "War on Drugs" as what seemed like a vain attempt to distract from how poorly Vietnam was going. Anyway, I still think he was a better leader than Trump, since he ultimately did take accountability and resigned. Side topic, though.

Yeah... Nixon's a complex guy. Strong foreign policy too - Chinese were terrified of him, and if I remember right he went a long way towards creating trade relations with China. The EPA alone makes him a different breed of conservative than we have today, and if that was as far as it ever went, you have to wonder how e would have been remembered.

Instead, he was ALSO a president who would bend the law as far as he could (the "war on drugs" was pure politics, one more pillar of his "silent majority," and was very careflly tailored to target his political foes under the guise of being "tough on crime," just selectively choosing which crimes to get tough on), and if that didn't go far enough he'd just break it. Not for nothing, the 1972 election that got us Watergate was such a blowout that the Democrats rewrote primary rules after McGovern managed to seize the nomination on the convention floor, and went on to only win Massachusetts. And yet, Nixon STILL felt the need to wiretap the DNC.

So, today he's arguably the second worst president in American history, and known for being the only president to step down, before he could be impeached and removed from office.

 

[TheBlackBard]

You don't know shit about me, I'm not afraid to call a spade a spade. Because I don't lick the balls of the liberal narrative I'm considered all kinds of things, that's how your little liberal world works. You just assume everything because you don't know the facts.

For what it's worth, I just got done butting heads with the most unforgiving person as it comes to guns here to the point of them wanting absolutely NONE of them on the streets, yet he and I are both seemingly in agreement that minorities are adversely affected by the same or similar situations as it comes to law enforcement. I'm not conservative, but I don't exactly consider myself to be liberal either, and yet I haven't had an issue with discussing issues with these fine people. We might disagree on some things, even get a little jovial at times with it, but if it has gotten to the point where you're the butt of the joke in the thread, then perhaps you debating in good faith has a good reason to be in question.

 

[Wiltonauer]

Hey, guys, if anyone’s interested, there’s a whole forum upstairs where we’re talking about guitars and other cool stuff. Just in case ya didn’t know.

 

[ArtDecade]

Hey, guys, if anyone’s interested, there’s a whole forum upstairs where we’re talking about guitars and other cool stuff. Just in case ya didn’t know.

 

[narad]

Hey, guys, if anyone’s interested, there’s a whole forum upstairs where we’re talking about guitars and other cool stuff. Just in case ya didn’t know.

We're just gonna stay here at the kids' table

 

[Riff the Road Dog]

Haha, right. Might be worth noting, though, that Nixon's political opponents got us into Vietnam and the Nixon administration got us out of there. Not that Nixon was a good president, but he did end the Vietnam War

...after he illegally interfered with the peace talks to win the election of 1968 (known as the Chennault Affair) and lied about it on tape after being confronted by LBJ.