The shocking thing to Americans is they thought they were too powerful to ever be on the receiving end.
So does our media, government agencies, NGOs, Canada, Britain, Israel and many european nations. But lets scapegoat the russians and the chinese.
> How do you think we ended up with president chump?
Certainly not because of the chinese or europeans. The chinese and europeans wanted hillary to win.
Let me ask, did the chinese and russians get obama elected? I love how easily people are brainwashed by the media. They say something and the mindless just repeat it.
No. The alternative is a crook.
much earlier... i think it began when the federal power began to chip away at the state power.
theres no vulnerability in having a friendly northern ally, no eastwest neighbors, and a subjugation economy to the south. the vulnerability is internal, to the thinkers and activists... so lets keep them chained by debt & chasing tail & feeling scared
This has been a thing since the Constitution was ratified.
Yes there is inertia and self-perpetuation, like in any organisations, but not overwhelmingly much.
The voters vote what they're told to -- and they're told to by those in power who can pay for campaigns, have their pals in party positions, etc.
Plus, the voters get all kinds of stuff that benefit the powerful that they never explicitly asked or voted for, and that were never on any platform. Even whole wars can be promoted onto them...
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/posters-sold-world-wa...
Besides, there were tons of dirt poor whites picking cotton in the South. And they had no slaves, the were closer to slaves themselves...
It's more poor vs rich, than white vs black. Even if poor whites were also racist, those plantations weren't owned by poor white folk either...
Sure the public opinion is affected by PR efforts, but people still possess facilities for critical thinking, and everyone knows to be critical about political claims rather than take them at face value.
Voters might want lots of things, but do they get them though, when those things don't align with what those in power want?
/s
who's "they"?
People with this kind of power and money form a series of formal and informal interlocking networks, and often interests align across most or all of those networks. Tax cuts for the rich and for corporations is perhaps the most obvious one. Pushing for war might be a bit less unanimous, but wars do produce near-immediate profits for the military-industrial complex and those invested in it, and potential future business opportunities for other sectors (for example if the war results in regime change, which leads to an opening of previously closed markets, the sale of state-owned businesses and assets, etc).
It is also clear who is telling the media what to say.
The one thing that is not clear at all is how much the media actually influence voters. I don't think there's as much influence as the OP was trying to convey, but well, as I said, this is not clear.
From Murdoch to Bezos and NRA...
The policy preferences of the voting constituency in any given national election are not strongly correlated to policy results. This is shown convincingly in Benjamin Ginsberg's book, "Do Elections Matter?" I strongly recommend this book - after reading it, you will never again try to explain away an act of government by attributing it to voter sentiment.
It is a difficult-to-deny fact that, in the USA, the government frequently and quietly advances policies which do not appear to be derived from any kind electoral mandate, nor are favored by a substantial portion of the electorate.
[1] https://www.vox.com/2016/5/9/11502464/gilens-page-oligarchy-... [2] https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi...
Yesterday was May 4th, the anniversary of when the agency in government murdered unarmed, peaceful war protestors at Kent State, then 11 days later bayonetted about a dozen peaceful war protestors at University of New Mexico.
These are not things free people compelled their government to do.
Wars did get less popular when they went badly, so you can argue that they would have been shorter if public officials would have retreated when polls turned against them. But that's a separate discussion.
I remember those "love it or leave it" years well.
It could be argued that voters were manipulated towards that point of view.
I don't think this is giving public servants enough credit. Politicians are a little more self-serving than those working in the agencies, so don't paint all public servants with the same brush. The problem is that what public servants believe is in the public interest just doesn't align with what you believe is in the public interest. There's always going to be a little give and take like this, and this evolution is what makes democratic societies effective.
That said, there can't be any given and take without oversight, and that's the real problem here. No doubt NSA employees believe what they're doing is important and effective, but is it really? That's a debate we simply can't have because of the secrecy, and public trust in these institutions has eroded sufficiently, possibly with good reason, that the public can't simply have faith in the NSA.
Could you explain what you mean by enslaving as prisoner? So you would let a rapist free or what?
Here's the rest of the text:
"...as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."
So now, today, we have more black men under the supervision of the "criminal justice system" (which, like the NSA, is not now and have never been truly tasked with achieving its formal goals) than were enslaved in 1860.
https://mic.com/articles/88461/a-modern-day-slave-plantation...
edit: another link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louisiana_State_Penitentiary
Also: good to see you. :-)
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/12/michelle-alexander...
edit: I can't imagine why I'm being downvoted here. My statement was utterly correct, and when challenged I cited a credible source. What'd I do wrong?!
I've had enough experience doing volunteer work with people trying to complete their GED in/after prison that - despite the fact that I despise ultra-left fresh-out-of-college political babble (it's so disconnected from reality and non-constructive that it's reasonable to squash it with the rest of the noise) - I do believe that there are deep structural injustices in American society, and we really don't have a coherent story for how to fix them.
That shift in attitude was born of experience that is not universally shared, though. Most people have their hobbies and their jobs and their families and their insecurities and their resentments, and they don't take kindly to strangers telling them that the American social structure that passively benefits them and makes their lifestyle possible is built in part on some very deep nastiness.
Which isn't to point fingers, or level blame, or shame anyone. Those are the rhetorical techniques of demagogues, and they have neither truth value nor do they tend to point society in a better direction. It's just to say that the psychological landscape is complicated.
Wait no, sorry, I got that backwards. It's feminist women who do the female equivalent of this. And who find it deeply irritating if you only imply men do not exist to serve at their beck and call, and have zero obligation to them even if they damsel.
And no, not all women. But definitely even some who do have all the power, money and influence they could want. So who's fragile? Or perhaps more accurately: who succeeds in using their facade of weakness as a lever of power, time and time again?
I don't mind admitting the world is not fair, but it takes a special kind of obliviousness to look at women's position in the West in the 21st century and still see a class of victims and men as the ones who need to suck in their gut and soldier on for once.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email [email protected] and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
I feel duty-bound to engage patiently with people with whom I disagree, but I understand that this might be inconsistent with the more general goal of running a forum.
The analogy is good in another way too: we don't care what color the flames are, or what was used to start them. People sometimes complain that we moderate red flames more than blue and vice versa, but the issue is the same in both cases.
I really don’t get what you are saying. I understand you have a point to make on whether or not women are the biggest victims today — but what is the link to the post?
If anything, the problem is they're very vague about stuff, and only admit guilt for their history, and not for present misbehaviour.
In 1860 there were 3,953,761 slaves counted in the census.
In 2016, if you count everyone under probation and parole in addition to those in jail and prison, the number is 6,613,500 (https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/cpus16.pdf)
If you assume 40% of them are black, like the article claims, the number comes out to 2,645,400. This is considerably less than the number of slaves in 1860, or 1850 for that matter.
If you have a source to back up your claim then you should post it. I'm actually curious what sources the author might have been using.
I don't think you're acting in bad faith, I think you just read that huffpost article and assumed it was correct. I just wanted to reply since you were curious about what you might have done wrong.
I initially heard about this not from The New Jim Crow but from this (seemingly awesome) Brown University student:
http://www.politifact.com/rhode-island/statements/2014/dec/0...
...but if I'm doing the math correctly, it appears to hold even for 1860 for adult males.
Look, I too watched 13th on Netflix. Black people are over-represented in violent crime like assault, murder and rape, and so are over-represented in prisons.
Isn't this materially the same as, "if you are black, and especially black and male, choose your diet according to what the government says you can put in your body?"
If "the crime" is ingesting cannabis, I do the crime all the freakin' time and I have never, ever imagined that I might suffer any consequence of it.
Is "Don't do the crime, don't do the time" a reasonable thing to say in an environment of such intense selective enforcement?
> Isn't this materially the same as....
No it's not. Are you suggesting that because a crime is so prevalent it should be ignored? As long as a crime is a crime and people commit that crime you can expect consequences for that crime. We live in a nation of rules and laws.
Anyway let's visit the facts:
- 59% of black prisoners sentenced to more than 1 year in state prison were sentenced for a violent offense, not drug crimes.
- More than half of the extra prisoners added in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s were imprisoned for violent crimes; two thirds were in for violent or property crimes. Only about a fifth of prison inmates are incarcerated for drug offenses. Only a fraction of those for marijuana.
- Black Democrats and the NAACP were instrumental in enforcing tough sentences for drug crime as drugs were decimating their communities.
So violent crime is still the main reason for the incarceration rates. As for those incarcerated for drug crimes - perhaps there are too many imprisoned but it's mostly for selling hard drugs, not weed. And even if it was weed, it's not slavery.
> Is "Don't do the crime, don't do the time" a reasonable thing to say in an environment of such intense selective enforcement?
Yes, yes it is. And the 95% of blacks (and any race for that matter) that don't do drugs would agree.
http://www.drugwarfacts.org/node/876
http://rainystreets.wikity.cc/naacp-citizens-mobilization-ag...
That said, it's hard to equate incarceration with slavery unless there's an economic benefit to the state in incarcerating prisoners. Is there?
As far as I can tell, the tables in: "Recapitulation of the Tables of Population, Nativity, and Occupation" from[1] indicate that there were roughly 800.000 male slaves 15 years or older in 1860 - they're listed next to free coloureds" - but I find no indication about black/non-black slaves (I imagine there were some Native Americans, Chinese at least in non-insignificant number?).
I believe op was talking about adult black males.
On a side note, would be nice if this data was digitized properly and available for easy analysis? I couldn't find any indication that it is?
[1] https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/decennial-census/dec...
I think drug laws in this country are way too harsh, but those are the laws. People should not break them if they don't want to be jailed.
Also slavery was a human problem for thousands of years, it took humanity collectively waking up to the evils of slavery to abolish it. Human governments the world over supported the instition in the past, and now they've evolved. Don't judge them today based on the mistakes of the past.
This quote might be a defensible argument if the laws were applied equally in the United States. What has happened is that we have so many laws that the government doesn't even know how many laws there are anymore[0]. This has led to something called selective enforcement[1]. When everyone breaks the law, but you are twice as likely to be punished for it if you are one color vs another, then personal responsibility has very little to do with it. The government is setting up an environment where they can punish whomever they want, whenever they want, and then punishing the people they don't like for non law related reasons
[0]https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304319804576389... [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_enforcement
> People should not break them if they don't want to be jailed.
I'm white. That means I can smoke as much herb as I want and not even dream of entering the criminal justice system unless I'm extraordinarily unlucky. Moreover, I don't give a flying fuck what some politician in Washington has to say about my diet. I don't base what I put into my body on bad laws.
But if you are black, you have a much more difficult decision to make.
> now they've evolved. Don't judge them today based on the mistakes of the past.
If drug prohibition is the "evolved" form, then we still have a long way to go. That's the point.
Moving the bar from "you're enslaved based on your color" to, "you're enslaved based on your diet" is not much of a move.
The reason we have more blacks than white in prison is for dozens reasons:
- legacy - cultural differences - social injustice
Etc.
Don't solve problems, ignore them, expect that people behave the way you want, wait until someone screws up here and here, let it escalate, ignore again and/or apply short term solutions, mix all this stuff, fast forward all of it, and you have the current situation.
Just be lucky to be on the right side and have good parents.
> Don't solve problems, ignore them, expect that people behave the way you want, wait until someone screws up here and here, let it escalate, ignore again and/or apply short term solutions, mix all this stuff, fast forward all of it, and you have the current situation.
I think that's pretty reasonable. That's pretty much the point I was trying to make about intelligence agencies as well.
Hippies too; that's why Nixon choose to schedule pot.
https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-rich...
I'm sure I do, but I'm not sure exactly which point you're asking about here. :-)
Even after we were freed there was Jim crow and the peonage system (I'm sure you'll have to look that up). Even after Jim crow there was red lining.
You don't have to be a history major to know that what your said is beyond dumb. I seriously hope you put a little more thought into the things you believe going forward.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crow_economy
And in doing so I read this bit about "it may have had as much to do with spreading poverty around"
I presume that white people no longer having the black people to live off meant
A. white people had to do alot more work themselves, and
B. white people had to share much more of the available resources with black people
So that they actively participated in racism to keep more resources for themselves..
Is this a reasonable take on this?
This is the part from the Wikipedia cited above I am referring to..
"However, the African American struggle to earn economic parity, that had made progress during the first half century of the postbellum era, had largely been reversed during the second half. Legally, equality was assured, but that did little to actually promulgate equal conditions in daily life.
Some of the gains in the South's economic relation to the rest of the U.S. can be explained by population shifts to other regions; so, it may have had as much to do with spreading poverty around, as spreading wealth around."
If you are not American then it would be perfectly understandable to be unaware
It means having 25% of the world's prison population but only 4% of the world's population.
It means being a prison state.
It means using BS reasons, like marijuana possession, to imprison a large part of your population.
It means predominantly giving long prison sentences for small offenses, just because of an "Old Testament" idea of revenge -- that is carried forward in the culture from the days of the nutty religious minorities that established the country.
It means having absurd legal constructs, like "3 strikes" laws.
It means exploiting prisoners for free labor, and having private prisons, and other such practices, and being the shame of the western world (and large part of the developing world) in this area.
It means people casually joking of people getting raped or attacked in your prisons.
It means still having the death penalty in 2018.
And other such things...
You don't have to free them to stop allowing slavery in prison.
As I matter of legislative priority, however, I think it makes sense to work in the direction direction, ie, to work toward ending drug prohibition with an aim to making a substantial dent in what slavery remains in the USA.
But was there ever any indication to the contrary? How did we as Americans convert to the myth that our government, let alone our "intelligence" agencies, have any inclination to protect us or advance our interests? That has never been their practice ever.
Our government spent the better part of a century not only allowing 3.5 million of us to live in slavery, but actively facilitating and promoting it. Even after it finally put an end to this practice de jurie, it immediately allowed us to be enslaved as "prisoners", and today 2 million of us are in that situation.
I don't mean to bring up such generic anarchism here, but I think it's sharply relevant when considering questions like, "why do the CIA and NSA behave the way they do?" They were created and charged to do it. It's their job. We can debate about how best to end that job, but I really don't think it's reasonable to suggest that they ever had some high-minded democratic purpose.