Funny how you've accused me of being dismissive, but have more or less done the same thing to me, but I digress. However, there was one bold assumption you made I take issue with.
I deleted that prior to your response, because I also thought it was unfair. The rest of the point still stands.
One group of people see it as vehicle to transfer wealth, power and property to themselves. The others want to use it to entrench their position in society (often unfairly at the expense of keeping other people down).
Funny how you've accused me of being dismissive, but have more or less done the same thing to me, but I digress. However, there was one bold assumption you made I take issue with.
I deleted that prior to your response, because I also thought it was unfair. The rest of the point still stands.
I would have deleted my response if I could, but what's done is done.
CoolHandMike wrote:
Ok so....how can I put this? You fail to understand how things from the past affect the present. And despite giving you evidence for economic discrimination you specifically ASKED is incredibly disingenuous.
The evidence you've used is instances of social discrimination; not economic. Much of which happened long before any of us were born. Where the cultural norms differed greatly. Being a believer in "economic discrimination" implies that you think giving a group of people money, or having some form of affirmative action policy is going to automatically solve the problem. You only have to look at what happened in post Apartheid South Africa to see what happened there. When an indigenous person was able to successfully prove that land was stolen from their ancestors. Did they choose to take the land or monetary compensation? They nearly always took the money. Treated it like a windfall and pissed much of it away.
If you're referring to hiring practises. It doesn't make much sense for a employer to do it. If they won't hire the best people for petty or political reasons, then their bottom line will suffer in the long run. Worse, people they should have employed end up working for their competitors. If government agencies are doing that, then it is a problem as they can escape the consequences of bad hiring practices.
The evidence you've used is instances of social discrimination; not economic.
The point you're trying to make here is a very thin distinction with little difference. Social discrimination is a form of economic discrimination.
Much of which happened long before any of us were born.
If poverty is generational, then the fact it happened only one or two generations ago is irrelevant. Especially because it happened for hundreds of years. Poverty is a generational phenomenon.
Being a believer in "economic discrimination" implies that you think giving a group of people money, or having some form of affirmative action policy is going to automatically solve the problem.
No, it doesn't. That's a straw position. I doubt that's CoolHandMike's position. It's certainly not mine. Money isn't the sole thing required for black people in America to claim the dignity of living a quiet and equal life in this country that they deserve.
If you're referring to hiring practises. It doesn't make much sense for a employer to do it. If they won't hire the best people for petty or political reasons, then their bottom line will suffer in the long run. Worse, people they should have employed end up working for their competitors.
By reducing this to a simple economic argument, you're missing the larger context. Black-owned businesses and white-owned businesses that hired black people were frequently the target of community attack historically. Even today research shows that characteristically black names on resumes get significantly fewer return calls compared to identical resumes with white sounding names. Clearly *not* hiring black people (or even preventing other people from hiring black people) has a social dimension, and attempting to ignore it by pointing to free markets is at best a vain distraction. If markets were an effective way of combating the problem then we already wouldn't have a problem. They weren't effective in 1863; they weren't effective in the Jim Crow era; they aren't effective today.
Build a man a fire, warm him for a day,
Set a man on fire, warm him for the rest of his life.
I keep hearing "Qualified Immunity," so I asked a friend of mine who was in the police academy what it was.
Essentially: It's protection from civil suits for police officers who acted in good faith on bad information - the person you get to sue in civil court is the person that gave bad information in the first place. In the case of Breonna Taylor, the persons you sue are the persons who gave her place of residence as the service point of the warrant (the judge, most likely) as well as the officer and/or dispatcher who confirmed "yes, this is the correct address."
It stops when you get to the root of the problem - the officers who killed Floyd would not be protected by it at all since it was under their judgment call that he was killed, for example.
With that said - have fun suing corrupt judges. Also, it is important to note that this only covers civil suits, not criminal charges. If the cop breaks the law in his attempt to enforce it, Qualified Immunity isn't supposed to apply in the first place.
I keep hearing "Qualified Immunity," so I asked a friend of mine who was in the police academy what it was.
Essentially: It's protection from civil suits for police officers who acted in good faith on bad information - the person you get to sue in civil court is the person that gave bad information in the first place. In the case of Breonna Taylor, the persons you sue are the persons who gave her place of residence as the service point of the warrant (the judge, most likely) as well as the officer and/or dispatcher who confirmed "yes, this is the correct address."
It stops when you get to the root of the problem - the officers who killed Floyd would not be protected by it at all since it was under their judgment call that he was killed, for example.
That's how qualified immunity works in theory.
In practice it also means a police officer can use "I thought it was legal" as a defense for their own behavior, and since their is no clear singular person or organization to point to for originating the notion "it is legal for cops to shoot a suspect simply for fleeing" no wrongful death suit can be filed at all.
Also a police officer can use "I thought that was illegal" as justification for arresting a person who was not committing a crime. Similar results.
No other person gets to use ignorance of the law as a defense for acting in contravention of it, only the agents that society uses to enforce the law.
Furthermore, police are often granted immunity from criminal prosecution, not just civil, on the criteria of qualified immunity. Additionally, this immunity is often inappropriately applied to actions that officers take while off-duty.
Agents of the government are supposed to have immunity from criminal and civil liability for the actions that they are directly required to take in order to discharge their governmental duty, but only for those actions.
For instance: A TSA agent, who is required as part of his duty as a federal agent to screen passengers before they board airplanes cannot be charged for sexual assault when giving a non-consensual pat down to a passenger's genital area. Nor can they be sued civilly for this.
However, if that same TSA agent grabs a person's crotch against their will at a night-club, there is no legal basis to claim they have no civil or criminal liability.
Currently, in fact, if not in law, the situation for police officers in most cities in this country is that, no matter what they do, no matter when they do it, regardless of any aggravating circumstances of their action, they are generally immune from any prosecution for anything.
This happens for a list of reasons
Police officers ignore citizen complaints against other officers, preventing investigation.
Public prosecutors frequently decline to prosecute police, for fear of damaging their working relationships with the police department.
When forced to indict, by orders from a superior, prosecutors still view cops as their allies, and will often lie to juries about what the relevant legal standards are.
Average citizens typically don't have much interaction with police, and tend to believe that most police officers are impartial defenders of the public, therefore this specific officer is probably giving an impartial account, and therefore conflicting accounts can be disregarded. (This thinking is compounded when cops give supporting testimony as character witnesses.)
How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.
I had no idea of where I'd put this sort of rant, but this thread is the one that seemed most appropriate.
Recently, I've started working on finance, and I was extremely surprised by the enormous amount of people that all of a sudden decided to ask me for advice on how to get jobs like that, I never imagined that they had such an interest.
In any case, I've kept some contacts and still participate in several groups involving non-profit causes, a very curious one involves a chess club I attended since childhood. They have a WhatsApp group with several high-profile people, including the president of the state federation and even some IM's and GM's. It's quite a mess, usually, with the rated players constantly spamming the group with their streams/courses, or people making accusations against people who manage the federations or claims that someone beat them online using a chess engine.
The company where I work sponsors some social causes, and I was helping them get these funds, because if the government approves a project, the company gets nice tax deductions, so in the end, everyone is happy.
Today there was some discussion about the current government not doing anything to help culture, and at some point I told them that I had worked at the government and it is completely dysfunctional, because of the blind hierarchy and the impossibility of firing anyone for doing something wrong, and it was useless to discuss politics there, it would be much more productive to leverage online platforms to popularize the sport.
At this point, one of the admins changed the group to admin posts only, and said "chess only, no politics" and unlocked it two minutes later. Anyway, since I had discovered recently how crazed people are for money, I decided to try something to see how they would react.
I simply said something like "well, if you read what I wrote, you'd see that I was telling people not to discuss politics. no problem, in case you need sponsorships, I'll be sure to remember your reaction". That caused an admin to lock the group again, only for two minutes later someone senior to him unlock it and do damage control saying how many players they are helping, that they are organizing lots of tournaments, and that no sport survives without sponsorships.
Anyway, I decided to drop this anecdote here as a friendly reminder about how people who work on "noble causes" wanting to "change the world" are willing to sell their soul for money just like everybody else...
Joined: 2/28/2006
Posts: 2275
Location: Milky Way -> Earth -> Brazil
The website's "anonymous" contributors strictly enforce a certain point of view.
Link to video
"Genuine self-esteem, however, consists not of causeless feelings, but of certain knowledge about yourself.
It rests on the conviction that you — by your choices, effort and actions — have made yourself into the
kind of person able to deal with reality. It is the conviction — based on the evidence of your own volitional
functioning — that you are fundamentally able to succeed in life and, therefore, are deserving of that success."
- Onkar Ghate
Bisqwit wrote:
"Genuine self-esteem, however, consists not of causeless feelings, but of certain knowledge about yourself.
It rests on the conviction that you — by your choices, effort and actions — have made yourself into the
kind of person able to deal with reality. It is the conviction — based on the evidence of your own volitional
functioning — that you are fundamentally able to succeed in life and, therefore, are deserving of that success."
- Onkar Ghate
Bisqwit wrote:
