Obviously they wouldn't have succeeded if the Russians weren't giving them shitloads of resources.
And there wouldn't have been a war at all if we hadn't given many times more resources to the French and then propped up the failing democratic movement.
The Vietnamese people did not want the style of government we were trying to force on them, and they would have died to the last man getting us out. The same is true of everywhere else we stick our tanks with "Don't Tread On Me" bumper stickers.
Shit, I had no idea it was okay to just kill people and take their resources. It seems a strange breed of Marxism has taken over slashdot. From each according to their weakness, to each according to their greed.
And you may want to take a cursory look at gas and oil pipelines in that region before you make any more uninformed guesses. There's a reason we invaded Afghanistan and Iraq and not the home of the terrorists, Saudi Arabia. It's because Saudi Arabia is already playing according to our rules.
The most important part of this for the Pentagon is that there's no human cost to losing a UAV on the American side. There are no airfields with reporters to deal with - you're not going to allow a journalist on to an airforce base inside the control room for "security" purposes. The pussies who call themselves reporters don't go out of the green zone anymore, and it's hard to get anyone to care about a grainy video or far away sounding reports from foreign news sources. You can bomb the hell out of whomever you like. Even the most dovish democrats will have jobs tied to it in their home districts. Americans have proved we have an endless capacity for funding war. And with UAVs, no caskets with American flags, no problems.
“Vietnam was the first war ever fought without any censorship. Without censorship, things can get terribly confused in the public mind.” -General Westmoreland
Dell XFRs start around $1,600 from the Outlet, with Core 2 Duos, no webcam, and designed to operate in the conditions you describe. I don't think they're quite as rugged as the Panasonic Toughbooks, but you can just buy two XFRs for the same price and switch the hard drives out if one breaks.
The misguided part of all this is going after Gamestop. The fault lies with the publisher advertising free dlc and requiring payment. Gamestop is just a store who sold you the used game.
Why? The publisher does offer the content for free. It's GameStop who should be putting stickers on the pack saying, "You will be required to purchase the DLC for $x.xx".
If I was arrested today, for whatever reason, and claimed as my defence that "society made me do it", I would be laughed out of court.
You live in a binary world that has nothing to do with reality. As I have shown with the studies you can't come to grips with, people are not arrested for possession of drugs. They are arrested for being poor and in possession of drugs. Apparently you'd have no problem with with Jim Crow laws, since as long as blacks stay away from white people, and accepted their "place" in society, they'd only be unjustly jailed when they were falsely accused of crimes.
Think of the people with bad mortgages right now. Yes, they need help, and should receive it. But ultimately they signed a bad mortgage of their own free will, and should have known better.
This is exactly what I was talking about. The people who signed those leases couldn't afford a lawyer to decode the hundreds of pages of documentation. They couldn't even afford the loan that was marketed to them, and they were targeted by companies who were reselling the toxic loans at huge commissions. This is exactly the absurdity that was decried by every socialist thinker I know when they were considering the ills of unbridled capitalism: the rich and powerful preying on the poor and the weak.
Socialism is the fight against injustice done by those in power by wealth, and democracy is the fight against injustice done by those in power by politics. You seem to care about neither.
Blacks and whites engage in drug offenses at about the same rate. They use drugs and they sell drugs at about the same rate. Since there are six-and-a-half times as many whites in this country, you would think there would be then proportionally six-and-a-half times as many whites being arrested on drug charges.
But that’s not the case, because the police aren’t going into white homes, white bars, white neighborhoods, white offices to make drug arrests. They’re going into black neighborhoods. And if you go into black neighborhoods, that’s where you’ll be arresting black people. And I don’t think that’s—I mean, I hate to say it, but it’s not coincidental.
That's Jamie Fellner, author of the above linked study. Since this is a problem that is ignored by Americans, you're going to have a hard time finding a study about it. Sort of like looking for studies about racism in South Africa in the 80s, or in America in the 40s and 50s.
I'm not sure where those statistics came from, so I ignored them. The article you cite lacked a source for that tidbit... Yes, there is a bit of racial issues involved, but it isn't the whole story.
Head in sand? Check. Callous disregard for other humans? Check.
Don't call yourself a socialist. You're just a keynesian who pretends to be compassionate. You're more like a National Socialist who would wipe the ash off of his windshield, and then whistle on his way to work.
Yes, there is some enforcement bias... not because of white over-enforcement.
You are not making any sense. There are 5 times more white drug users than black drug users, yet black users are sent to prison at 13x the rate of white users. Both are breaking the law, but only black drug users are incarcerated. I really can't understand why you refuse to see the double standard. That's not "some" enforcement bias. That's injustice.
If you flooded affluent neighborhoods with cops who pulled over every person with a broken tail light or who failed to signal a lane change and then searched their car for small amounts of drug possession or tested them for DUIs, then the system would be operating in a just manner. So why aren't the affluent neighborhoods patrolled with the same zeal? Because the affluent citizens, who have much more wealth and power, wouldn't tolerate it, and so they're allowed to play by different rules.
I appreciate your can do attitude, and as I stated before, black and poor communities can do more to help themselves. But putting them so far behind and then punishing them for finishing last is a failure of moral reasoning.
You have a fantastically fucked up view of the world.
The US military is what has keeps all of North America safe. The US military is the defensive force for all of NA and many other parts of the world. I don't see why Canada doesn't pay us taxes to fund our military. It's not like they could fight off an invasion. -Lord Ender http://bsd.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=61192&cid=5756853
You could have just told me that you are an apparatchik. It would have made it easier to understand why reality is so confusing for you.
Why did you skip over the incarceration rates? Is it because they were detrimental to your argument?
My parents raised me to get above the street kid I was turning into, they taught me the value of learning and not being a tool. That was the only thing that saved me.
And so the kids who have drug addicts or dead parents or learning disabilites, just fuck'em, huh?
In the end, ALL OF YOUR PROBLEMS ARE YOUR FAULT
At some point, when you multiply and multiply hardships for people, the chance of success becomes fairly close to zero. This isn't the result of some secret white cabal conspiring to put black people, or more accurately, poor people down, but it is a result of the institutional structures which dominate their lives.
When these people fail, it shouldn't surprise anyone. But when a young man watches his parents wither under drug addiction, because if they try to get help they are often arrested, then watches a few of his friends die, watches some of them get used up by the same drugs, tries to get job after job but is denied constantly because of his skin color, spends hours a day on the bus because he can't afford a car, it leads to a certain atmosphere of desperation that can happen to anyone, regardless of how well they were brought up.
People do not choose to be failures. They embrace the culture of failure only after they have given up. I guarantee if you gave any one of those young kids the same kind of environment of support their peers experience miles down the road, they would be just as successful. But instead of investing in poor communities, they are ignored, and then jailed after we criminalize their lifestyle.
Despite studies confirming that illicit drug use by African Americans is no greater than that of whites, black offenders are less likely to be offered a chance to plea bargain and more likely to fall under the federal or state mandatory minimum sentencing law. The escalation in black incarceration is the single major reason for the massive bulge in the number of inmates in federal prisons. The number has jumped four-fold since the late 1980s. More than half of them are there for drug crimes or other petty offenses...
The law has wreaked havoc beyond the prison system. It has debilitated many black communities and families. Women convicted of felony drug offenses are barred for life from receiving welfare benefits. This puts thousands of women and their children at dire social risk and increases the likelihood that they will commit more crimes. The high black imprisonment rate also drastically increases health risks and costs in black communities, since many prisoners are released with chronic medical afflictions, particularly HIV and AIDS.
The original poster has correctly stated a fact, which I acknowledged, but he failed to provide context for it. The richest country in the world having the highest value of manufacturing is what would be expected. Now, do they outperform other economies in terms of manufacturing per capita, per gdp, or exports as a percentage of GDP? These numbers would indicate a strong manufacturing sector.
The GPP stated
We don't actually make much anymore, we just invent it and have someone else make it. If we don't control the profits from the inventing, we're fucked.
And, judging from the export numbers, he's right, so I said
We're between Burundi and Cape Verde, at number 179 [in exports per gdp]... These numbers are by "value added" manufacturing. So, we've got a lot of bullshit that we put together that's manufactured almost entirely in east asia. Gluing it together, shoving it in a box, and then raising the price is not what I would call manufacturing.
Per the norm, these reasonable conclusions are modded down because no one takes the time to understand what they say.
Scroll down - we're between Burundi and Cape Verde, at number 179.
Does the richest country in the world have the most manufacturing? Yep. Are they in the top ten in manufacturing per capita? Nope. Are they even in the top fifty for manufacturing per GDP? Nope.
These numbers are by "value added" manufacturing. So, we've got a lot of bullshit that we put together that's manufactured almost entirely in east asia. Gluing it together, shoving it in a box, and then raising the price is not what I would call manufacturing.
In the 1980s, both the Reagan and Thatcher administrations, in the USA and UK respectively, followed a 'constructive engagement' policy with the apartheid government, vetoing the imposition of UN economic sanctions on South Africa, justified by a belief in free trade and a vision of South Africa as a bastion against Marxist forces in Southern Africa. Thatcher declared the ANC a terrorist organisation, and in 1987 her spokesman, Bernard Ingham, famously said that anyone who believed that the ANC would ever form the government of South Africa was "living in cloud cuckoo land".
You don't have a clue what it's like to be born into and grow up in a ghetto. You can't even imagine waking yourself up to go to school, not having breakfast, being half asleep all day from the sirens and the gunfire and the fights from the night before, and then going back home straight into your room, because it's simply not safe to be outside.
White kids absolutely glorify the same things. They love violence committed by the army and the police. They love bling in the form of 3 series BMWs and high end clothing labels and watches. They glorify drugs and use them, too. But here's the difference:
Since the mid 1980s, the United States has undertaken aggressive law enforcement strategies and criminal justice policies aimed at curtailing drug abuse. The costs and benefits of this national war on drugs are fiercely debated. What is not debatable, however, is its impact on black Americans. Ostensibly color blind, the war on drugs has been waged disproportionately against black Americans.
Our research shows that blacks comprise 62.7 percent and whites 36.7 percent of all drug offenders admitted to state prison, even though federal surveys and other data detailed in this report show clearly that this racial disparity bears scant relation to racial differences in drug offending. There are... five times more white drug users than black. Relative to population, black men are admitted to state prison on drug charges at a rate that is 13.4 times greater than that of white men. In large part because of the extraordinary racial disparities in incarceration for drug offenses, blacks are incarcerated for all offenses at 8.2 times the rate of whites. One in every 20 black men over the age of 18 in the United States is in state or federal prison, compared to one in 180 white men.
Sure, the poor and black communities can do more, but they are under constant surveillance and attack from police and the press (Fox versus ACORN, for instance.) How many times have you been stopped in your own neighborhood for walking? If the answer is never, you're probably white. If the answer is every week, you're probably black. And when they find a joint on you, or there's been a crime reported nearby, or you're under 18 and it's after 11, where do you think you go? Do you think someone can afford to bail you out? What kind of person are you going to be after the first time you're picked up and thrown in jail on petty offenses? What about the second time? What about the third?
Humans are not perfect, They cannot grin and bear every situation. You can turn them into criminals with not too much effort. And you can keep lying to yourself if you like about the end of racism. But you can't lie to me, or to anyone else who's stepped foot outside of the gates of white America.
The government has passed laws guaranteeing that all races are equal in the eyes of the law. There's no way to see this through unless they have data based on race. Minorities have only had true equal rights since the 1960s and 1970s - that's not too long ago. I still know small business owners who refuse to hire non-white employees.
Black unemployment is roughly double that of white unemployment. If you're a black male between 18 and 25, there's a 1 in 9 chance you are currently in jail. The rate for whites is much lower. Obviously there is something going on, and unless you know how bad the problem is, there's no way to figure out how to fix it.
Perhaps I should be more clear. I don't think there have been trade sanctions in the last sixty years by the United States based on moral grounds. You are welcome to provide me with a real world example, but it seems like you don't have any that you're willing to present. North Korea is probably the best case you could make. So, make a case, or you can reply with vague implications of begging the question in imaginary scenarios that do little to prove any point.
All trade sanctions are out of self-interest, as one would expect. Whether they cross the line to imperialism depends on the intention of the sanctions, and I already addressed what you thought was your best case, which was humanitarian intervention. As illustrated by the Rwandan and Darfur genocides, when there are no geopolitical or monetary rewards, we do not interfere, and in cases like Iraq where the stated goals are known to be failing, we continue to interfere even if the sanctions are known to exacerbate human rights violations.
This is why you would need to provide some evidence, if you indeed ever present an argument, instead of grasping at imaginary straws.
So all trade sanctions, even those related to human rights violations, are "imperialism" in your opinion?
In a pretend world, there could be sanctions related to human rights violations that were based on moral values. You're welcome to provide me with a real world example from the United States.
Keep in mind we have supported governments of Iraq, Indonesia, Iran, Columbia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Chile, Argentina, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, China, and others while they violated human rights. We even supported apartheid South Africa and we still support apartheid in Israel/Palestine. Some support was financial aid, or trade deals, or even with direct military support. In places like Guatemala we were directly involved in torture, murder, and violence, like the raping of an American nun, who was also burned with cigarettes and lowered into a pit full of rats and dead bodies.
So, what I don't think should count is sanctions against Iraq, for instance, since our political goals changed our policy. Not even the facade of something I would call a moral value system had anything to do with it. You are still welcome to provide evidence to the contrary.
Slashdot Mirror
Obviously they wouldn't have succeeded if the Russians weren't giving them shitloads of resources.
And there wouldn't have been a war at all if we hadn't given many times more resources to the French and then propped up the failing democratic movement.
The Vietnamese people did not want the style of government we were trying to force on them, and they would have died to the last man getting us out. The same is true of everywhere else we stick our tanks with "Don't Tread On Me" bumper stickers.
That stench was your upper lip and nose.
If you don't understand the veto power of controlling a majority of the world's oil, you can't be expected to understand anything else.
You think the shareholders would be the voters in the analogy, and not the workers?
And you said the word think as if you were acquainted with it...
Or there's some cunt out there who happens to call himself ghandi.
Shit, I had no idea it was okay to just kill people and take their resources. It seems a strange breed of Marxism has taken over slashdot. From each according to their weakness, to each according to their greed.
And you may want to take a cursory look at gas and oil pipelines in that region before you make any more uninformed guesses. There's a reason we invaded Afghanistan and Iraq and not the home of the terrorists, Saudi Arabia. It's because Saudi Arabia is already playing according to our rules.
The most important part of this for the Pentagon is that there's no human cost to losing a UAV on the American side. There are no airfields with reporters to deal with - you're not going to allow a journalist on to an airforce base inside the control room for "security" purposes. The pussies who call themselves reporters don't go out of the green zone anymore, and it's hard to get anyone to care about a grainy video or far away sounding reports from foreign news sources. You can bomb the hell out of whomever you like. Even the most dovish democrats will have jobs tied to it in their home districts. Americans have proved we have an endless capacity for funding war. And with UAVs, no caskets with American flags, no problems.
“Vietnam was the first war ever fought without any censorship. Without censorship, things can get terribly confused in the public mind.” -General Westmoreland
Because everyone except for you knows that we are in the region purely for control over energy resources.
Dell XFRs start around $1,600 from the Outlet, with Core 2 Duos, no webcam, and designed to operate in the conditions you describe. I don't think they're quite as rugged as the Panasonic Toughbooks, but you can just buy two XFRs for the same price and switch the hard drives out if one breaks.
http://outlet.us.dell.com/ARBOnlineSales/topics/global.aspx/arb/online/en/InventorySearch?c=us&cs=28&l=en&s=dfb
It's not Gamestop's responsibility to look over every game's box art to ensure its advertising is legit.
It is if they are selling it.
The misguided part of all this is going after Gamestop. The fault lies with the publisher advertising free dlc and requiring payment. Gamestop is just a store who sold you the used game.
Why? The publisher does offer the content for free. It's GameStop who should be putting stickers on the pack saying, "You will be required to purchase the DLC for $x.xx".
If I was arrested today, for whatever reason, and claimed as my defence that "society made me do it", I would be laughed out of court.
You live in a binary world that has nothing to do with reality. As I have shown with the studies you can't come to grips with, people are not arrested for possession of drugs. They are arrested for being poor and in possession of drugs. Apparently you'd have no problem with with Jim Crow laws, since as long as blacks stay away from white people, and accepted their "place" in society, they'd only be unjustly jailed when they were falsely accused of crimes.
Think of the people with bad mortgages right now. Yes, they need help, and should receive it. But ultimately they signed a bad mortgage of their own free will, and should have known better.
This is exactly what I was talking about. The people who signed those leases couldn't afford a lawyer to decode the hundreds of pages of documentation. They couldn't even afford the loan that was marketed to them, and they were targeted by companies who were reselling the toxic loans at huge commissions. This is exactly the absurdity that was decried by every socialist thinker I know when they were considering the ills of unbridled capitalism: the rich and powerful preying on the poor and the weak.
Socialism is the fight against injustice done by those in power by wealth, and democracy is the fight against injustice done by those in power by politics. You seem to care about neither.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go listen to Rush while I jerk off to a picture of Ann Coulter.
Real Republicans do it the other way around.
http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2009/06/19/race-drugs-and-law-enforcement-united-states
Blacks and whites engage in drug offenses at about the same rate. They use drugs and they sell drugs at about the same rate. Since there are six-and-a-half times as many whites in this country, you would think there would be then proportionally six-and-a-half times as many whites being arrested on drug charges.
But that’s not the case, because the police aren’t going into white homes, white bars, white neighborhoods, white offices to make drug arrests. They’re going into black neighborhoods. And if you go into black neighborhoods, that’s where you’ll be arresting black people. And I don’t think that’s—I mean, I hate to say it, but it’s not coincidental.
That's Jamie Fellner, author of the above linked study. Since this is a problem that is ignored by Americans, you're going to have a hard time finding a study about it. Sort of like looking for studies about racism in South Africa in the 80s, or in America in the 40s and 50s.
I'm not sure where those statistics came from, so I ignored them. The article you cite lacked a source for that tidbit... Yes, there is a bit of racial issues involved, but it isn't the whole story.
Head in sand? Check. Callous disregard for other humans? Check.
Don't call yourself a socialist. You're just a keynesian who pretends to be compassionate. You're more like a National Socialist who would wipe the ash off of his windshield, and then whistle on his way to work.
Yes, there is some enforcement bias... not because of white over-enforcement.
You are not making any sense. There are 5 times more white drug users than black drug users, yet black users are sent to prison at 13x the rate of white users. Both are breaking the law, but only black drug users are incarcerated. I really can't understand why you refuse to see the double standard. That's not "some" enforcement bias. That's injustice.
If you flooded affluent neighborhoods with cops who pulled over every person with a broken tail light or who failed to signal a lane change and then searched their car for small amounts of drug possession or tested them for DUIs, then the system would be operating in a just manner. So why aren't the affluent neighborhoods patrolled with the same zeal? Because the affluent citizens, who have much more wealth and power, wouldn't tolerate it, and so they're allowed to play by different rules.
I appreciate your can do attitude, and as I stated before, black and poor communities can do more to help themselves. But putting them so far behind and then punishing them for finishing last is a failure of moral reasoning.
You have a fantastically fucked up view of the world.
The US military is what has keeps all of North America safe. The US military is the defensive force for all of NA and many other parts of the world. I don't see why Canada doesn't pay us taxes to fund our military. It's not like they could fight off an invasion. -Lord Ender
http://bsd.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=61192&cid=5756853
You could have just told me that you are an apparatchik. It would have made it easier to understand why reality is so confusing for you.
Why did you skip over the incarceration rates? Is it because they were detrimental to your argument?
My parents raised me to get above the street kid I was turning into, they taught me the value of learning and not being a tool. That was the only thing that saved me.
And so the kids who have drug addicts or dead parents or learning disabilites, just fuck'em, huh?
In the end, ALL OF YOUR PROBLEMS ARE YOUR FAULT
At some point, when you multiply and multiply hardships for people, the chance of success becomes fairly close to zero. This isn't the result of some secret white cabal conspiring to put black people, or more accurately, poor people down, but it is a result of the institutional structures which dominate their lives.
When these people fail, it shouldn't surprise anyone. But when a young man watches his parents wither under drug addiction, because if they try to get help they are often arrested, then watches a few of his friends die, watches some of them get used up by the same drugs, tries to get job after job but is denied constantly because of his skin color, spends hours a day on the bus because he can't afford a car, it leads to a certain atmosphere of desperation that can happen to anyone, regardless of how well they were brought up.
People do not choose to be failures. They embrace the culture of failure only after they have given up. I guarantee if you gave any one of those young kids the same kind of environment of support their peers experience miles down the road, they would be just as successful. But instead of investing in poor communities, they are ignored, and then jailed after we criminalize their lifestyle.
Despite studies confirming that illicit drug use by African Americans is no greater than that of whites, black offenders are less likely to be offered a chance to plea bargain and more likely to fall under the federal or state mandatory minimum sentencing law. The escalation in black incarceration is the single major reason for the massive bulge in the number of inmates in federal prisons. The number has jumped four-fold since the late 1980s. More than half of them are there for drug crimes or other petty offenses...
The law has wreaked havoc beyond the prison system. It has debilitated many black communities and families. Women convicted of felony drug offenses are barred for life from receiving welfare benefits. This puts thousands of women and their children at dire social risk and increases the likelihood that they will commit more crimes. The high black imprisonment rate also drastically increases health risks and costs in black communities, since many prisoners are released with chronic medical afflictions, particularly HIV and AIDS.
http://www.southernstudies.org/2009/10/new-crack-cocaine-bill-leaves-thousands-behind-bars.html
You claim not to be a "randroid", but you seem to fully believe in the libertarian value of indifference to suffering and injustice.
The original poster has correctly stated a fact, which I acknowledged, but he failed to provide context for it. The richest country in the world having the highest value of manufacturing is what would be expected. Now, do they outperform other economies in terms of manufacturing per capita, per gdp, or exports as a percentage of GDP? These numbers would indicate a strong manufacturing sector.
The GPP stated
We don't actually make much anymore, we just invent it and have someone else make it. If we don't control the profits from the inventing, we're fucked.
And, judging from the export numbers, he's right, so I said
We're between Burundi and Cape Verde, at number 179 [in exports per gdp]... These numbers are by "value added" manufacturing. So, we've got a lot of bullshit that we put together that's manufactured almost entirely in east asia. Gluing it together, shoving it in a box, and then raising the price is not what I would call manufacturing.
Per the norm, these reasonable conclusions are modded down because no one takes the time to understand what they say.
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/eco_exp_pergdp-economy-exports-per-gdp
Scroll down - we're between Burundi and Cape Verde, at number 179.
Does the richest country in the world have the most manufacturing? Yep. Are they in the top ten in manufacturing per capita? Nope. Are they even in the top fifty for manufacturing per GDP? Nope.
These numbers are by "value added" manufacturing. So, we've got a lot of bullshit that we put together that's manufactured almost entirely in east asia. Gluing it together, shoving it in a box, and then raising the price is not what I would call manufacturing.
In the 1980s, both the Reagan and Thatcher administrations, in the USA and UK respectively, followed a 'constructive engagement' policy with the apartheid government, vetoing the imposition of UN economic sanctions on South Africa, justified by a belief in free trade and a vision of South Africa as a bastion against Marxist forces in Southern Africa. Thatcher declared the ANC a terrorist organisation, and in 1987 her spokesman, Bernard Ingham, famously said that anyone who believed that the ANC would ever form the government of South Africa was "living in cloud cuckoo land".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Africa_under_apartheid
Strike three. You're out.
You don't have a clue what it's like to be born into and grow up in a ghetto. You can't even imagine waking yourself up to go to school, not having breakfast, being half asleep all day from the sirens and the gunfire and the fights from the night before, and then going back home straight into your room, because it's simply not safe to be outside.
White kids absolutely glorify the same things. They love violence committed by the army and the police. They love bling in the form of 3 series BMWs and high end clothing labels and watches. They glorify drugs and use them, too. But here's the difference:
Since the mid 1980s, the United States has undertaken aggressive law enforcement strategies and criminal justice policies aimed at curtailing drug abuse. The costs and benefits of this national war on drugs are fiercely debated. What is not debatable, however, is its impact on black Americans. Ostensibly color blind, the war on drugs has been waged disproportionately against black Americans.
Our research shows that blacks comprise 62.7 percent and whites 36.7 percent of all drug offenders admitted to state prison, even though federal surveys and other data detailed in this report show clearly that this racial disparity bears scant relation to racial differences in drug offending. There are... five times more white drug users than black. Relative to population, black men are admitted to state prison on drug charges at a rate that is 13.4 times greater than that of white men. In large part because of the extraordinary racial disparities in incarceration for drug offenses, blacks are incarcerated for all offenses at 8.2 times the rate of whites. One in every 20 black men over the age of 18 in the United States is in state or federal prison, compared to one in 180 white men.
http://www.hrw.org/legacy/reports/2000/usa/Rcedrg00.htm#P54_1086
Sure, the poor and black communities can do more, but they are under constant surveillance and attack from police and the press (Fox versus ACORN, for instance.) How many times have you been stopped in your own neighborhood for walking? If the answer is never, you're probably white. If the answer is every week, you're probably black. And when they find a joint on you, or there's been a crime reported nearby, or you're under 18 and it's after 11, where do you think you go? Do you think someone can afford to bail you out? What kind of person are you going to be after the first time you're picked up and thrown in jail on petty offenses? What about the second time? What about the third?
Humans are not perfect, They cannot grin and bear every situation. You can turn them into criminals with not too much effort. And you can keep lying to yourself if you like about the end of racism. But you can't lie to me, or to anyone else who's stepped foot outside of the gates of white America.
The government has passed laws guaranteeing that all races are equal in the eyes of the law. There's no way to see this through unless they have data based on race. Minorities have only had true equal rights since the 1960s and 1970s - that's not too long ago. I still know small business owners who refuse to hire non-white employees.
Black unemployment is roughly double that of white unemployment. If you're a black male between 18 and 25, there's a 1 in 9 chance you are currently in jail. The rate for whites is much lower. Obviously there is something going on, and unless you know how bad the problem is, there's no way to figure out how to fix it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/28/us/28cnd-prison.html
date: Mon, Mar 22, 2010 at 6:22 PM
subject: Huge old mommy
Perhaps I should be more clear. I don't think there have been trade sanctions in the last sixty years by the United States based on moral grounds. You are welcome to provide me with a real world example, but it seems like you don't have any that you're willing to present. North Korea is probably the best case you could make. So, make a case, or you can reply with vague implications of begging the question in imaginary scenarios that do little to prove any point.
All trade sanctions are out of self-interest, as one would expect. Whether they cross the line to imperialism depends on the intention of the sanctions, and I already addressed what you thought was your best case, which was humanitarian intervention. As illustrated by the Rwandan and Darfur genocides, when there are no geopolitical or monetary rewards, we do not interfere, and in cases like Iraq where the stated goals are known to be failing, we continue to interfere even if the sanctions are known to exacerbate human rights violations.
This is why you would need to provide some evidence, if you indeed ever present an argument, instead of grasping at imaginary straws.
So all trade sanctions, even those related to human rights violations, are "imperialism" in your opinion?
In a pretend world, there could be sanctions related to human rights violations that were based on moral values. You're welcome to provide me with a real world example from the United States.
Keep in mind we have supported governments of Iraq, Indonesia, Iran, Columbia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Chile, Argentina, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, China, and others while they violated human rights. We even supported apartheid South Africa and we still support apartheid in Israel/Palestine. Some support was financial aid, or trade deals, or even with direct military support. In places like Guatemala we were directly involved in torture, murder, and violence, like the raping of an American nun, who was also burned with cigarettes and lowered into a pit full of rats and dead bodies.
So, what I don't think should count is sanctions against Iraq, for instance, since our political goals changed our policy. Not even the facade of something I would call a moral value system had anything to do with it. You are still welcome to provide evidence to the contrary.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gscKnNAxBpE
Nice! I can never proof read enough.