Police shot in Dallas

Discussion in 'Off Topic Area' started by CrowZer0, Jul 8, 2016.

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  1. David Harrison

    David Harrison MAPper without portfolio

    I generally agree with your points, with a couple of small exceptions, or qualifications:

    I think that's just humans, American or not.

    But conditioned attitudes can inform primal fear.

    "Us and them" is a very hard nut to crack in humans.

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/sci...0563/Babies-show-racial-bias-study-finds.html

    But the silver lining is that it may not be hardwired:

    http://www.psychologicalscience.org...s-fear-is-quickly-learned-during-infancy.html
     
  2. pgsmith

    pgsmith Valued dismemberer

    This, in my opinion, is the underlying problem. Due to our ever-increasing population, there are more and more people being forced to interact with each other on a daily basis. Since our population is now extremely mobile, these interactions are now usually with people that think and act differently. People as a whole are ill at ease with those that are different, because they don't understand them well. Today's politicians and religious leaders have figured out that the easiest way to increase their influence over their constituents is to play upon this unease, creating the classic "us vs. them" scenario.

    The problem with this short-sighted thinking is that while it does increase the influence of those in power, it also increases the level of anxiety over those that are different. Since you must have a "them" for this to work, those that are different become the enemy, and the ever-increasing anxiety level naturally results in increased violence against "the enemy".

    I've no idea how this cycle can be fixed, since it will be impossible to get all of those in power to stop playing the "us vs. them" card, and that's pretty much the only way to decrease the ever-escalating prejudice over anyone different.
     
  3. Avenger

    Avenger Banned Banned

    Its probably more like a numbers games, when statistics show a better ratio of crime and income among different groups, then things will probably change, I don't think you can force change.
     
  4. flaming

    flaming Valued Member

    Hitler and Genghis Khan forced change didn't they?

    I speak purely as a lay person my knowledge of history is not very good.
     
  5. LemonSloth

    LemonSloth Laugh and grow fat!

    That data already exists though. You can already find breakdowns of crime data by race, age and gender along with broad averages regarding earnings and such. However, the people who often use that data also tend to be the ones that are often more blunt in their disagreements & usually end up being called "racist" and the like (because the data is rather unflattering and often contradicts popular narratives), so I'm not sure how helpful that approach is.

    Also, this was shared to me last night, Russia is considering whether BLM is a terrorist group:

    http://yournewswire.com/russia-put-black-lives-matter-on-official-terror-list/

    And the Dallas shooter was apparently a former member of the New Black Panther party rather than "just" a BLM supporter as many had assumed:

    http://www.chron.com/news/houston-t...ys-that-Dallas-police-shooter-was-8351761.php

    EDIT: There's a petition to get the US Government to recognise BLM as a terrorist group, which has received over 100k signatures already:

    https://www.rt.com/usa/350737-petition-terrorist-black-lives-matter/
     
    Last edited: Jul 12, 2016
  6. David Harrison

    David Harrison MAPper without portfolio

    Got a link?

    It doesn't make any sense to me to attribute cultural trends on "race". Crime has pretty much always been glorified by those who feel ostracised by society. I don't see mexican narco culture or gangsta rap as being any different from the idolisation of robbers and outlaws in Georgian Britain.

    There are plenty of competing theories when it comes to race and crime in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_crime_in_the_United_States

    That's about 0.0003% of the population. It hardly represents a popular opinion.
     
    Last edited: Jul 12, 2016
  7. David Harrison

    David Harrison MAPper without portfolio

    Oh, and the motivations for Russia trying to fan the flames and Russia Today being the mouthpiece for the Kremlin should not come as any surprise.
     
  8. LemonSloth

    LemonSloth Laugh and grow fat!

    Mostly I'd look at FBI/BJS data when it comes to violent crime & such.

    Violent Crime arrest estimates according to the FBI for 2014: https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2014/crime-in-the-u.s.-2014/tables/table-43

    BJS estimates for criminal victimisation for 2014 release: http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/cv14.pdf

    As for wage gap stuff, I'd suggest going to the BLS site. They have a link for wage (I prefer the term salary) data by gender & race up to 2014: http://www.bls.gov/cps/earnings.htm

    If the data doesn't come from one of those sources, I tend to be sceptical as a rule of thumb about its' veracity.

    No, I get you. It is slippery slope fallacy, but if you're not careful and you get overly fixated on raw numbers sans context, it leads you down a dodgy road for arguing about race and stuff (see The Bell Curve).

    That said...*cringe*...there are behavioural phenomenon that do correlate with people of particular races & communities within a country and although it's thoroughly unpleasant, racial profiling does have a certain efficiency about it.

    It's not technically wrong, for example, to say that black Americans are significantly more likely to be arrested for murder in America than white Americans are, after you factor in population size. But simply saying "these people are arrested more" doesn't tell you anything about the circumstances as to "why" that's the case.

    Never said it did, just that there was a petition. :p

    I am surprised it received that much attention, though.
     
    Last edited: Jul 12, 2016
  9. holyheadjch

    holyheadjch Valued Member

    It's a weird chicken and egg. Is it race that predicts criminality, or is it socio-economic background of which race is a key predictor?

    I don't believe that there is any evidence at all that African-Americans are predisposed to criminal behaviour, but there is evidence that African-Americans are more likely to be born into poverty, receive sub-standard levels of education, experience widespread racism from an early age etc etc.

    If my society treated me with the same levels of contempt and neglect that American society treats African-Americans, I might not care so much about following society's rules either.
     
  10. David Harrison

    David Harrison MAPper without portfolio

    I am deeply suspicious of biological determinism, especially when social factors are so difficult to separate from the data.




    ...but we won't get into feminism again in this thread :p
     
  11. LemonSloth

    LemonSloth Laugh and grow fat!

    Ha!
     

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    Last edited: Jul 12, 2016
  12. LemonSloth

    LemonSloth Laugh and grow fat!

    Quips aside :p

    Honestly I think the only time biological differences can apply to any significant level is when you observe behaviours that cannot be reasonably explained by environmental circumstances. An example of this might be that women & girls diagnosed with autism (across the spectrum) are frequently considered to be higher functioning on average than men & boys (and thus far harder to diagnose to the point there are many different estimates as to ratios http://www.autism.org.uk/about/what-is/gender.aspx) which do not appear to be affected by social, racial or economic circumstances. Another might be that women are frequently found to be more risk averse on average than men (though there are plenty of exceptions) regardless of which country & economic circumstances you control for.

    The reason I don't apply it to race is because if you look at the phenomenon associated with minorities in America (for example), those observed phenomenon as pointed out by The Bell Curve are repeated with different racial minorities in different countries to similar extents, so we can't sufficiently rule out cultural, economic and legal circumstances relating to those issues.

    So there *blows raspberry*. :D
     
    Last edited: Jul 12, 2016
  13. pgsmith

    pgsmith Valued dismemberer

    The 60's forced a lot of change, most of it for the good.
     
  14. philosoraptor

    philosoraptor carnivore in a top hat Supporter

    Nevermind the fact that race as we perceive it is not grounded in any sort of biological fact...
     
  15. The Iron Fist

    The Iron Fist Banned Banned

    I know I have a lot of these annoying academic anecdotes brother but this is sincerely the truth. I took a very good class on Sociology many years ago, once and we discussed in detail FBI crime statistics, 19th-20th century eugenics theories, the news media and public perception.

    It was pretty clear that all crime (whether you are a perpetrator or a victim) is directly tied to socioeconomic status, and biological causes have been rejected as surely as eugenics was rejected by science, after being used for decades and decades to target poor minorities and even the mentally disabled. When you compare and contrast the 'raw' FBI statistics with other important variables, such as the unemployment and poor education success minorities have suffered over the centuries in America, you have the perfect combination to create a drive for crimes of all kinds. On one side, you have theft, dealing drugs, and petty crimes to feed families, on the other you have dangerous criminal enterprises that are quite frankly, as sophisticated as any modern commercial operation, and these organized criminals always take advantage of the poor most of all, the least protected element of society.

    In either case, skin color is not the causal factor, instead it's simply that the poor must feed themselves, or are simply fed upon. Something not illustrated in the FBI statistics or a lot of the media hyperbole about black on black crime is that most of the victims are in fact, poor and vulnerable. Sadly, this also explains why so little is often done to deal with crime in poor neighborhoods. When crime starts impacting wealthier areas (for example, downtown Dallas) police respond promptly and definitively, in force. If that sniper had been in South Central Los Angeles, how long for SWAT to show up?
     
    Last edited: Jul 12, 2016
  16. philosoraptor

    philosoraptor carnivore in a top hat Supporter

    I don't think that Holy is asserting that there's a biological factor in race based crime statistics but one of a self fulfilling prophecy - that if you exclude people from access to society based upon their skin color, then they adopt extra societal means to get by (selling loose cigarettes, bootleg DVDs, dealing drugs, theft), which society uses to justify their exclusion from society.
     
  17. LemonSloth

    LemonSloth Laugh and grow fat!

    There's also that, but one thing at a time. As a sociological concept it does :p
     
  18. philosoraptor

    philosoraptor carnivore in a top hat Supporter

    I thought we were talking about why biological differences couldn't be attributed to race? Sorry if I've lost the plot.
     
  19. LemonSloth

    LemonSloth Laugh and grow fat!

    We were, I was just being silly :p
     
  20. Ero-Sennin

    Ero-Sennin Well-Known Member Supporter

    After reading the last two pages where, "does ethnicity ("race") contain biological factors in determining crime rate" . . . I have now considered it wasted time. Damn Jews ruining Germany, and those smaller brained negro slaves. They're all about as good as the Untouchables.

    I kind of class people who talk about religion and race as thinking they're playing a real world version of World of Warcraft, or Lord of the Rings. They might as well be, I mean damn.

    My only solace in life is that everyone is going to die. ^__^
     
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