Red Mosquito

tree_ wrote:

"how can we discuss the actual problem without embracing this lunacy?" And it is lunacy. The idea of removing the police is basically a gun to the head of the Republic.

tree_ wrote:OK.. sorry.. I take it back. I'm willing to discuss it. It's just difficult when I feel like I'm being piled on constantly for speaking my mind.. and when I feel I'm doing it very fairly and you're not being fair to me.

B wrote:

tree_ wrote:

"how can we discuss the actual problem without embracing this lunacy?" And it is lunacy. The idea of removing the police is basically a gun to the head of the Republic.

I suspect there may be SOMEONE out there who thinks "Defund the Police" is about a police free society, but you'd have to dig really hard. That's why arguing against he elimination of police is a strawman argument. "We can't solve the problem because someone might believe that we should literally eliminate all police!" That's not an argument. That's a refusal to do anything.

B wrote:

tree_ wrote:OK.. sorry.. I take it back. I'm willing to discuss it. It's just difficult when I feel like I'm being piled on constantly for speaking my mind.. and when I feel I'm doing it very fairly and you're not being fair to me.

You tend to post weak arguments with weak falacies in them that you KNOW literally everyone on the board disagrees with and then make sarcastic comments or claim you don't actually have any idea what you're doing.

Expect to be met with anger.

B wrote:

B wrote:

wease wrote:

Bammer wrote:I viewed a seminar / town hall type of thing yesterday and one of the panelists (who appears to be well educated and well respected in this arena) made the outright claim that homelessness simply would not exist if it weren’t for racism.

Thoughts?

What about white homeless people?

If you target services toward minorities, but allow anyone to use them equally, you'll scoop up a lot of homeless whites while you're at it.

I wanted to add to this.

Anti-racism doesn't mean "help black people." It means identifying and addressing the issues (homelessness) or policies (housing discrimination, punitive ex-con laws) that disproportionately affect people of color. Maybe in the reverse order of what I stated because your efforts to address homelessness will be less effective until you address housing discrimination.

McParadigm wrote:

one of the panelists (who appears to be well educated and well respected in this arena) made the outright claim that homelessness simply would not exist if it weren’t for racism.

One assumes that, if they were educated about and well respected regarding this topic, they said more than one sentence about it. Stripping the claim of all content leaves people with nothing but a contextless proposal and their own pre-existing suppositions.

Bi_3 wrote:

B wrote:

B wrote:

wease wrote:

Bammer wrote:I viewed a seminar / town hall type of thing yesterday and one of the panelists (who appears to be well educated and well respected in this arena) made the outright claim that homelessness simply would not exist if it weren’t for racism.

Thoughts?

What about white homeless people?

If you target services toward minorities, but allow anyone to use them equally, you'll scoop up a lot of homeless whites while you're at it.

I wanted to add to this.

Anti-racism doesn't mean "help black people." It means identifying and addressing the issues (homelessness) or policies (housing discrimination, punitive ex-con laws) that disproportionately affect people of color. Maybe in the reverse order of what I stated because your efforts to address homelessness will be less effective until you address housing discrimination.

Who decides what is an actionable disparate impact? Who decides what the addressing policy changes are? For example, you could say that "statistics show that black people have worse health outcomes" and one way to address that would be to make all healthcare for black people funded by the state. Would that be antiracist?

B wrote:

Bi_3 wrote:

B wrote:

B wrote:

wease wrote:

Bammer wrote:I viewed a seminar / town hall type of thing yesterday and one of the panelists (who appears to be well educated and well respected in this arena) made the outright claim that homelessness simply would not exist if it weren’t for racism.

Thoughts?

What about white homeless people?

If you target services toward minorities, but allow anyone to use them equally, you'll scoop up a lot of homeless whites while you're at it.

I wanted to add to this.

Anti-racism doesn't mean "help black people." It means identifying and addressing the issues (homelessness) or policies (housing discrimination, punitive ex-con laws) that disproportionately affect people of color. Maybe in the reverse order of what I stated because your efforts to address homelessness will be less effective until you address housing discrimination.

Who decides what is an actionable disparate impact? Who decides what the addressing policy changes are? For example, you could say that "statistics show that black people have worse health outcomes" and one way to address that would be to make all healthcare for black people funded by the state. Would that be antiracist?

That would be "antiracist," I guess, but only if you knew that they had worse outcomes because of lack of heathcare. If that's true, it's not true of ONLY black people. So, you'd address it by providing healthcare to people who currently don't have it, regardless of race.

B wrote: I suspect there may be SOMEONE out there who thinks "Defund the Police" is about a police free society, but you'd have to dig really hard. That's why arguing against he elimination of police is a strawman argument. "We can't solve the problem because someone might believe that we should literally eliminate all police!" That's not an argument. That's a refusal to do anything.

Rob wrote:

B wrote: I suspect there may be SOMEONE out there who thinks "Defund the Police" is about a police free society, but you'd have to dig really hard. That's why arguing against he elimination of police is a strawman argument. "We can't solve the problem because someone might believe that we should literally eliminate all police!" That's not an argument. That's a refusal to do anything.

Agreed. And I would argue that we've been doing nothing for a long time, despite plenty of rhetoric. So when people get mad that things are going "too far" they should remember that nothing happened when things went "far enough".

Defunding the police, which is really just a provocative way to say re-distribute funds to programs that have a greater track record in reducing crime, like social workers, after school programs and drug intervention, is a good start but it has a fatal flaw.

We can’t reform the police. The only way to diminish police violence is to reduce contact between the public and the police.

McParadigm wrote:Yeah we hate white people Burt

BurtReynolds wrote:

McParadigm wrote:Yeah we hate white people Burt

Lol you act like that couldn't possibly be the case.

tree_ wrote:I just heard Mr. Weinstein say this and... yeah

We're beginning to be able to discuss just how preposterous the movement is. Which does not mean that the fuel that is driving it isn't based on something very important. The frustration about an economic system that is rigged against many people, millennials through debt, many populations, based on where you are born and grow up, what kinds of schools are there. The frustration is real. It is bewildering to everybody. It seems to be that either you land on the "I'm in favor of these protests" side and therefore "I accept their discussion of what has taken place and what should happen now", or "I reject these protests and I believe civilization is pretty fair and I'm not listening". The right position is in the space that has not existed until now, or has struggled to exist and so far failed to get a foothold, which is "how can we discuss the actual problem without embracing this lunacy?" And it is lunacy. The idea of removing the police is basically a gun to the head of the Republic.

OK now I'm done.. can't keep obsessing over this..