you are prejudiced?

[wokking56]

4 hours ago, zexari said:

Being a society of laws means following the procedure to actually convict & punish (or, preferably, rehabilitate) a criminal. 

Yes in a perfect world this would be preferable. However in our world a criminal that eludes capture will continue to commit criminal acts. When captured and incarcerated the act of housing and attempting to rehabilitate can be quite costly. Recent financial records has shown that it costs California taxpayers just over $50000 to house and rehabilitate each prisoner for a year. Then when looking at the sad statistics that 77% of all released prisoners will be re-incarcerated within 5 years it is not a promising option.

 

Now I totally realize that police officers are not supposed to be Judge, Jury and Executioner; and that suspects shot while fleeing have been sadly cheated out of their "due process". There needs to be an alternative method of preventing their escape but I am at a loss as to what that might be given our current technology. I mean tasers have a rather limited range so stunning an escapee is a difficult proposition.

[markdf]

12 hours ago, GrimReaper said:

Nobody is arguing that corrupt and violent police officers shouldn't be punished for their wrongdoings. Which wasn't your point anyways, because everyone that works within the police force is obviously a spawn of the devil himself, so there's no need to differentiate because they're all evil. Doesn't matter if the person in question did actually something wrong, no. Group identity is all that matters here.

It's true, nobody is arguing that corrupt and violent police officers shouldn't be punished. But people ARE arguing that police officers who use excessive force aren't corrupt and violent. Shooting a non-violent offender when they flee is excessive and unnecessary. Shooting a mentally ill person when they don't respond to orders fast enough is excessive and unnecessary. Shooting an old man who is lying on the ground with his hands in the air is excessive and unnecessary. Shooting a teenager boy in his own backyard is excessive and unnecessary. And people still come to the defence of those cops. People still rationalize that pointless, stupid violence. And that's why cops get away with it -- because there are lots of people who support literally ANYTHING the police do and trust them implicitly.

 

No one with power should ever be trusted. And it's not a partisan issue or about identity -- I don't trust the politicians that I voted for myself. I ESPECIALLY don't trust them, because I'm partly responsible for anything they do.

 

12 hours ago, wokking56 said:

Currently blacks make up about 12% of the U.S. population yet they commit 50% of all violent crimes and a whopping 53% of the murders in the U.S. Furthermore 93% of blacks killed in this country are killed by other blacks. This is according to the FBI crime statistics from 2 years ago. Now whites do seem to excel at white collar crimes like fraud and embezzlement committing upwards of 70% of these crimes.

Keep in mind, there's a big difference between committing crimes and being arrested and charged for crimes. White people are much less likely to get caught, and much less likely to be charged and prosecuted when they are caught.

 

At the height of stop-and-frisk in New York, there's was a study which found that white male drug dealers vastly outnumbered black male drug dealers. And yet it was primarily black men who got stopped. So naturally most of the people being arrested for drug possession were black men, because they were the ones being stopped and frisked. And so the arrest statistics made it look like it was only black men who were dealing drugs.

[KoolHndLuke]

1 hour ago, markdf said:

Keep in mind, there's a big difference between committing crimes and being arrested and charged for crimes. White people are much less likely to get caught, and much less likely to be charged and prosecuted when they are caught.

This has much less to do with the color of a suspects skin and much more to do with whether a person is rich or poor. The "law" chews up and spits out the poor on a regular basis- throwing poor people in jail or putting them on probation for petty crimes. And once you're in the system....... you are considered a criminal in their eyes for life. I am white and say this from bitter experience.

 

What makes a cop treat one person different from another is the fear that the person might be able to hire a lawyer and fight- possibly getting them in trouble and maybe even thrown off the force or in fact thrown in prison themselves. With poor people they don't need to worry about it and do some very dirty things sometimes- like use excessive force. Of course they could just lose their heads in the heat of the moment on occasion. They don't exactly hire the brightest mofos to be cops or prison/security guards you know.

[markdf]

19 minutes ago, KoolHndLuke said:

This has much less to do with the color of a suspects skin and much more to do with whether a person is rich or poor. The "law" chews up and spits out the poor on a regular basis- throwing poor people in jail or putting them on probation for petty crimes. And once you're in the system....... you are considered a criminal in their eyes for life. I am white and say this from bitter experience.

 

What makes a cop treat one person different from another is the fear that the person might be able to hire a lawyer and fight- possibly getting them in trouble and maybe even thrown off the force or in fact thrown in prison themselves. With poor people they don't need to worry about it and do some very dirty things sometimes- like use excessive force.

The two things are linked. Black people have less money than white people, on average. But race alone is a big factor -- even wealthy people of color get harassed by the police sometimes. 

 

Read this interview with Levar Burton -- a successful affluent black man, Mister Reading Rainbow, Geordi Laforge himself. And still he feels the need to be extra careful around cops.

 

This is where prejudice comes in. We have the choice to believe this guy when he talks about his actual experiences about what it's like to be black in America, or we can decide that we know better than him what it's like to be black. One choice is very prejudiced, the other not so much.

[KoolHndLuke]

12 minutes ago, markdf said:

The two things are linked. Black people have less money than white people, on average. But race alone is a big factor -- even wealthy people of color get harassed by the police sometimes. 

I agree to some extent because the town I live in has a bloody history with white and hispanic cops harassing blacks to the point of bloodshed and some dead cops. Cops look out for their own, period. Yes, they are less likely to overstep their authority with whites, but they'll still do it if they think they can get away with it. Most of the officers and judicial system are fucking corrupt- what else is new? 

[Guest]

19 minutes ago, KoolHndLuke said:

I agree to some extent because the town I live in has a bloody history with white and hispanic cops harassing blacks to the point of bloodshed and some dead cops. Cops look out for their own, period. Yes, they are less likely to overstep their authority with whites, but they'll still do it if they think they can get away with it. Most of the officers and judicial system are fucking corrupt- what else is new? 

Joseph Fiennes holding a spoon, Not "Shawn Spencer" holding a pipe and thinking something psychic,

And me lumping the two together and wondering what happened to "Paul Newman", is a kind of a prejudice.

The small town cops lumping me into the guy robbing a liquor store, the (other small town) cops (One of them) manhandling me (cuz I looked at him wrong?) During a traffic stop where his partner sort of stared and let me off with a warning.....

People lump.

This thread was fruitful and it multiplied, thank you OP, if that's what you wanted.

Dear Paul, please start a thread about something (something besides "The commercialization of whatever"

You're a star and you can successfully go around asking "Do you know who I AM?"

and stuff.

*I* beg for green-ones on street-corners and forgotten alleys of dark and dismal threads.

It's depressing.

And yes, it WAS suddenly taken from me, twice...(lol)

 

 

[markdf]

31 minutes ago, KoolHndLuke said:

I agree to some extent because the town I live in has a bloody history with white and hispanic cops harassing blacks to the point of bloodshed and some dead cops. Cops look out for their own, period. Yes, they are less likely to overstep their authority with whites, but they'll still do it if they think they can get away with it. Most of the officers and judicial system are fucking corrupt- what else is new? 

It doesn't have to be that way though. It's harder to fix in the US than it is in other countries, because police commissioners and prosecutors and judges are all elected positions. But there ARE places that have made things better.

 

The hardest part is just getting people to see that there is problem. That's why I like the Levar Burton interview. If HE doesn't feel safe in America, then you know there's a BIG problem.

[KoolHndLuke]

1 hour ago, 2dk2c said:

what happened to "Paul Newman", is a kind of a prejudice.

Better? might go for a hot lady pic later, though.

[wokking56]

3 hours ago, markdf said:

The two things are linked. Black people have less money than white people, on average. But race alone is a big factor -- even wealthy people of color get harassed by the police sometimes.  

And why is that? Black people as a general rule have less money than white people because of poor life choices. Now plenty of white people are guilty of these same choices and end up in the same boat as blacks (low income, low social status and no apparent way out). The truly sad part is that it is a cycle that can be broken.

 

Children need a strong father figure at home.

People need to get a higher education

People need to wait to have children until they have a permanent partner and are in their later 20s or early 30s

People need to hold down a steady job

 

Four relatively minor things that are unfortunately interlinked. Children with out a father at home are more troubled than children with a father. Then we have the babies having babies when they are nowhere ready for that kind of commitment. Now they have children so the higher education is out the window. With out the education a good job is hard to find and having children makes keeping even a crappy job difficult if you are on your own. So now you are a low income family on your own raising children without a father and soon the cycle begins again. Now some people manage to navigate this difficult circumstance with the help of their parents, but if you are the 3rd or 4th generation into the cycle your single parent isn't much better off than you. So maybe a bit of babysitting but no financial help thereby propagating the cycle.

 

White, Black, Hispanic or whatever once you fall into this trap getting out is damn hard but it is doable.

[Jazzman]

38 minutes ago, wokking56 said:

Children need a strong father figure at home.

People need to get a higher education

People need to wait to have children until they have a permanent partner and are in their later 20s or early 30s

People need to hold down a steady job

 

Children need a strong, loving mother to rely on

People need a future that calls for a qualified education

People need to wait to have children until both partners are aware of the manifold consequences

People need a steady job to hold down

[Kamen Rider Kuuga]

23 minutes ago, Jazzman said:

People need to wait to have children

Biology does not agree; the older a woman is when they have a kid, the more likely it is to have some kind of genetic defect. The chance for a child to be born with Down Syndrome, for example, rapidly multiples with age.

[GrimReaper]

5 hours ago, markdf said:

It's true, nobody is arguing that corrupt and violent police officers shouldn't be punished. But people ARE arguing that police officers who use excessive force aren't corrupt and violent. Shooting a non-violent offender when they flee is excessive and unnecessary. Shooting a mentally ill person when they don't respond to orders fast enough is excessive and unnecessary. Shooting an old man who is lying on the ground with his hands in the air is excessive and unnecessary. Shooting a teenager boy in his own backyard is excessive and unnecessary. And people still come to the defence of those cops. People still rationalize that pointless, stupid violence. And that's why cops get away with it -- because there are lots of people who support literally ANYTHING the police do and trust them implicitly.

 

Depends on the context but since all you're doing is moving the goalposts I don't think this will lead anywhere.

[Jazzman]

42 minutes ago, Kamen Rider Kuuga said:

Biology does not agree; the older a woman is when they have a kid, the more likely it is to have some kind of genetic defect. The chance for a child to be born with Down Syndrome, for example, rapidly multiples with age.

You're referring to the Down syndrome.

Well, if it takes some 40 years to understand the various consequences of having a child, then one better gives it a try in the next life...

[FauxFurry]

Was the OP trying to turn this thread into a miniaturized version of ResetEra? Well, it might be just the right era to reset this thread in.

Don't justify people's prejudice against DLC, dlc123.

[wokking56]

2 hours ago, Jazzman said:

 

Children need a strong, loving mother to rely on 

People need a future that calls for a qualified education

People need to wait to have children until both partners are aware of the manifold consequences

People need a steady job to hold down

Sorry Jazz I didn't mean to infer that children ONLY need a father because hell yes a mother is also very important (but my little rant went with the supposition that she would be there). Your point however is quite valid she needs to do much more than just be there, as a matter of fact all your point are right on target.

 

1 hour ago, Kamen Rider Kuuga said:

Biology does not agree; the older a woman is when they have a kid, the more likely it is to have some kind of genetic defect. The chance for a child to be born with Down Syndrome, for example, rapidly multiples with age.

While this true to a point there are many other factors that figure in. I am also well aware that in the past "girls" would be married and start having children by the age of 13 or 14. That however was a different time and those 13 year olds already understood their world, people today hardly have a grasp of what goes on outside their immediate group until they are well into their 20s. So my suggestion wasn't one of a biological imperative but more of a question on mental and emotional maturity.

[Jazzman]

@wokking56

 

I've never assumed being banged-up by the Holy Ghost either, not even when I couldn't see my toes...  So everything is just fine

A debate on the natural bond b/t mother and child and the social bond b/t father and child /w some fathers that perfectly imitate the natural role of a mother in 'sitting hen' fashion (which I see positively but a great many folks don't, to say the least) would require another thread tho.

 

The main reason why today teens are incapable to perform as parents is urbanization caused by industrialization, the infrastructural trend toward big town and the shift from less complex down-home to more complex external work. This leads to a prolongation of schooling, the artificial prolongation of childhood during education, resulting in so-called 'adult children still living with the parents' when the qualified job flow is running dry and the own claims are flying high.

 

In rural areas, however, the clocks don't keep pace with their urban counterparts. Still most children of ranchers and farmers work after school in part time on the parental farm (of course for free), and all-too often on the weekends as well. Childhood (felt) ends at the age of eight when you are trained to ride a cattle horse or to drive a tractor /w trailer etc. And there's no way to steal yourself away from the hard work, not yet. Yippee-ki-yay!

 

When you are fourteen and a trained cowgirl or vegetable-bitch you should have made up your mind - stay where you are and stick to one of the guys you had already sex with under the big sky or, you tell your parents that you want to go to high school and college first before you even think about a committed relationship and children. The advantage of being some sort of mating kagouti in high school is quite evident, isn't it?

[GrimReaper]

14 hours ago, wokking56 said:

And why is that? Black people as a general rule have less money than white people because of poor life choices. Now plenty of white people are guilty of these same choices and end up in the same boat as blacks (low income, low social status and no apparent way out). The truly sad part is that it is a cycle that can be broken.

 

Children need a strong father figure at home.

People need to get a higher education

People need to wait to have children until they have a permanent partner and are in their later 20s or early 30s

People need to hold down a steady job

 

Four relatively minor things that are unfortunately interlinked. Children with out a father at home are more troubled than children with a father. Then we have the babies having babies when they are nowhere ready for that kind of commitment. Now they have children so the higher education is out the window. With out the education a good job is hard to find and having children makes keeping even a crappy job difficult if you are on your own. So now you are a low income family on your own raising children without a father and soon the cycle begins again. Now some people manage to navigate this difficult circumstance with the help of their parents, but if you are the 3rd or 4th generation into the cycle your single parent isn't much better off than you. So maybe a bit of babysitting but no financial help thereby propagating the cycle.

 

White, Black, Hispanic or whatever once you fall into this trap getting out is damn hard but it is doable.

Idk, seems a bit like the just world hypothesis. The question is, do poor life choices lead to poverty or does poverty lead to poor life choices? I think both of these interact with each other regularly. If you come from a rich background, you fucking up won't have much of a consequence but if you keep doing it, you'll eventually hit rock bottom, too. On the other hand, if you're from a poor background, there's much less opportunity for you to fuck things up until consequences start catching up to you.

 

The same can imo be said about single parents. While it's true that statistically single parents (which happen to be mothers most of the time, meaning it's really hard to tell if single dads would perform better or worse overall) do a worse job in raising their children the question remains exactly why this happens. It might just be that the workload of raising a child and providing an income for the household is simply too much for a single person, could be that a father is important after all or any number of things, really. Socialization is an important aspect, too, and many parents nowadays are quite schizophrenic in that regard. However, one thing seems certain: Our current way of doing things isn't working well.

 

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/talking-about-men/201706/is-there-really-boy-crisis

 

Interesting article to read despite 'only' being about boys and young men. It's also quite alarming that most killing sprees are done by men and that the amount of killing sprees is rising. Which either means that men are inherently more violent and dangerous than women or that societal pressure has build up so much over the recent years that men simply start to crack more often today. Also this: https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/02/16/female-teachers-give-male_n_1281236.html

 

No matter how you look at it, things aren't looking well. And how much of this is down to life choices, I don't know. Personal responsibility is obviously important, but it's not the be all end all, it looks like.

[Guest]

1 hour ago, Jazzman said:

@wokking56

 

I've never assumed being banged-up by the Holy Ghost either, not even when I couldn't see my toes...  So everything is just fine

A debate on the natural bond b/t mother and child and the social bond b/t father and child /w some fathers that perfectly imitate the natural role of a mother in 'sitting hen' fashion (which I see positively but a great many folks don't, to say the least) would require another thread tho.

 

The main reason why today teens are incapable to perform as parents is urbanization caused by industrialization, the infrastructural trend toward big town and the shift from less complex down-home to more complex external work. This leads to a prolongation of schooling, the artificial prolongation of childhood during education, resulting in so-called 'adult children still living with the parents' when the qualified job flow is running dry and the own claims are flying high.

 

In rural areas, however, the clocks don't keep pace with their urban counterparts. Still most children of ranchers and farmers work after school in part time on the parental farm (of course for free), and all-too often on the weekends as well. Childhood (felt) ends at the age of eight when you are trained to ride a cattle horse or to drive a tractor /w trailer etc. And there's no way to steal yourself away from the hard work, not yet. Yippee-ki-yay!

 

When you are fourteen and a trained cowgirl or vegetable-bitch you should have made up your mind - stay where you are and stick to one of the guys you had already sex with under the big sky or, you tell your surprised parents that God has called you last night to go to high school and college first and to give birth to the firstborn later. And so it came to pass that I did God's bidding, what else?

The part about the Ghost and being called by God made me run to look up "kwisatz haderach" but I could not spell it,

Plus he was a guy

Plus they've "memed" it to death (and it was the only freaking line in the movie I liked)

I still say you should run for something....I wouldn't care what you stood for but I'd LOVE your speeches.

  See, now *That's* your prejudice, right there.

 

Oooo, and the pictures of kids sayin 'sup' in school, cocking their baseball hats a certain way to fit the times or the video,

and the dinky girl in her parochial dress doing stuff with an iPhone...

All the pictures, the visual majesty, it was only missing a sound track.

I await the sequel.

TLDR

You write so perty

[Jazzman]

3 hours ago, 2dk2c said:

The part about the Ghost and being called by God made me run to look up "kwisatz haderach" but I could not spell it,

Plus he was a guy

Plus they've "memed" it to death (and it was the only freaking line in the movie I liked)

I still say you should run for something....I wouldn't care what you stood for but I'd LOVE your speeches.

  See, now *That's* your prejudice, right there.

 

Oooo, and the pictures of kids sayin 'sup' in school, cocking their baseball hats a certain way to fit the times or the video,

and the dinky girl in her parochial dress doing stuff with an iPhone...

All the pictures, the visual majesty, it was only missing a sound track.

I await the sequel.

TLDR

You write so perty

 

It's very dangerous. The Bene Gesserit sisterhood would use it (the Water of Life, the bile from the ill-borne worms of Arrakis) to see - within. There is a place - terrifying to us. To women. It is said: A man will come, the Kwisatz Haderach. He will go where we can not. Many men have tried...  and died.

_ Reverend Mother Mohiam; Dune

 

Thanks for your words. Unfortunately, I've revised the last paragraph not to lure the folks too deep into unknown allegorical waters only to be called out as cryptic or worse later. Glad you have preserved it tho.

Since you know already that I'm familiar /w ancient texts, at least some of their buried writing style full of metaphors has come down to me and there is no fuckin' explanation as to why. It just happened. Maybe I was simply too young and not fully formed when I tried to understand the sacred mysteries by thinking like the authors.

 

I drank from the Water of Life to see - within, to put it that way. Wanna try a cup yourself? Maybe you're the much-anticipated Kwisatz Haderach, who knows? Already heard that the emperor has a business-minded daughter that is hard to trump...

[Guest]

3 hours ago, Jazzman said:

 

It's very dangerous. The Bene Gesserit sisterhood would use it (the Water of Life, the bile from the ill-borne worms of Arrakis) to see - within. There is a place - terrifying to us. To women. It is said: A man will come, the Kwisatz Haderach. He will go where we can not. Many men have tried...  and died.

_ Reverend Mother Mohiam; Dune

 

Thanks for your words. Unfortunately, I've revised the last paragraph not to lure the folks too deep into unknown allegorical waters only to be called out as cryptic or worse later. Glad you have preserved it tho.

Since you know already that I'm familiar /w ancient texts, at least some of their buried writing style full of metaphors has come down to me and there is no fuckin' explanation as to why. It just happened. Maybe I was simply too young and not fully formed when I tried to understand the sacred mysteries by thinking like the authors.

 

I drank from the Water of Life to see - within, to put it that way. Wanna try a cup yourself? Maybe you're the much-anticipated Kwisatz Haderach, who knows? Already heard that the emperor has a business-minded daughter that is hard to trump...

The original theatrical release must have been epic.

I only get to see the ones they show on rare holidays, punctuated by commercials about feminine hygiene.

I write the pictures in my head, 

and my head said to write "For She IS the Burrito Supreme!!" but of course I needed to translate that.

Google was recalcitrant and said "There are no Qwizatz Haderachs" and this was *after* it had the freaking

temerity to correct my spelling (as if it knew what it was talking about).

There I go again, Writing my visions, ignoring the warning light that says "Burrito Supreme?? Geez Pick something like "Taco-whatever".

And then the warning came on again "Are you prejudiced against [Latin] Food??"

If I listened to my warning lights, I'd never write a thing.

And on Judgement day, I hope God is nice and has a sense of Humor.

You lift this place up when others suppress it and bring it down.

Plus you have a way of speaking I love to read (but otherwise it defies descriptions)

  Warning lights galore here.

 

[Jazzman]

@2dk2c

 

Dunno what to say. So I simply enjoy the silence of the moment.

[wokking56]

6 hours ago, Jazzman said:

 

It's very dangerous. The Bene Gesserit sisterhood would use it (the Water of Life, the bile from the ill-borne worms of Arrakis) to see - within. There is a place - terrifying to us. To women. It is said: A man will come, the Kwisatz Haderach. He will go where we can not. Many men have tried...  and died.

_ Reverend Mother Mohiam; Dune

Don't try your powers on me. Try looking into that place where you dare not look.You'll find me there, staring back at you. Paul Muad'Dib; Dune

[Jazzman]

43 minutes ago, wokking56 said:

Don't try your powers on me. Try looking into that place where you dare not look.You'll find me there, staring back at you. Paul Muad'Dib; Dune

Wow! By the Lords of Cobol, that was a frakkin short moment of silence, just 15 minutes. Is that even legal?

Yup, I remember that quote. The kangaroo mouse (muad'dib) always stares back at us in the moonlight, not

just in the desert. It's the 'Man in the Moon' over Arrakis. Nice (analogy) pun made by Frank Herbert...

[wokking56]

7 hours ago, GrimReaper said:

The question is, do poor life choices lead to poverty or does poverty lead to poor life choices? I think both of these interact with each other regularly. If you come from a rich background, you fucking up won't have much of a consequence but if you keep doing it, you'll eventually hit rock bottom, too. On the other hand, if you're from a poor background, there's much less opportunity for you to fuck things up until consequences start catching up to you.

That is pretty much exactly what I said in one rather lengthy sentence "Now some people manage to navigate this difficult circumstance with the help of their parents, but if you are the 3rd or 4th generation into the cycle your single parent isn't much better off than you." Yet it still all boils down to choices Have a baby at 16 or 17 and often never finish even High School. With no higher education the only work you will find is in the service or hospitality industries, neither of which pays worth a damn. So now you are a teen mother who ends up missing several days in a row here and there because you baby got sick. Eventually you will lose that crappy job due to absenteeism (though not really your fault).

So don't get pregnant as a child yourself, stay in school (women and minorities get preferential treatment when applying to a College or University and have better access to financial aid than men). After acquiring a degree most jobs are also much more accommodating towards women and minorities. I know these are still not guaranteed but they have a much better chance at a decent quality of life.

[Jazzman]

I really don't understand the serious concerns of men to get pregnant under the wrong conditions when there are no such conditions whatsoever... for men.