quote: African immigrants in America might have the same distaste for the ghetto mentality as a fifth generation German immigrant.
Y'know who else has distaste for 'ghetto mentality'? The folks who actually live in a ghetto. Though I don't suppose that would be very persuasive to someone with the smug, comforting idea that everyone is in the place they deserve and want in life, because if they didn't they wouldn't be there.
quote: I do not believe that racism exists.
Of course it exists. How do I know? Because plenty of people - you, I suspect, for example, though you tailor your remarks carefully - dislike or disdain black people on sight, not on experience. And of course disliking someone's culture can also be racism if you don't harbor an equally strong and oft-mentioned disdain for that culture when other races exhibit it.
I don't hear you going on about trailer parks in this thread, which is just one reason why many folks are wondering if you're a racist. Sure, you can take the easy way out and think that it's the massive PC-culture that makes so many people think that way, or you could man up and wonder if maybe the problem is with you.
Drop the victim mindset, in other words.
quote: The so called protectors of minorities who created the welfare state created this problem.
Ugh, what stupidity. Don't you think that maybe literally hundreds of years of systematic oppression might have something to do with it, too? You're so incredibly narrow-minded. You take a span of five hundred years and say, "The only real problem is in the last thirty; the previous four-hundred and seventy don't matter anymore."
Humanity doesn't work that way. Human cultures don't work that way. The world doesn't work that way. While it's easy and lazy to assume it does, that doesn't make it true. You're a typical conservative white dude looking for post-facto explanations.
Oh, and for more recent history: the government does a helluva lot more to and 'for' minorities in this country than have a welfare state mentality for them. Just the easiest, most obvious example: crack vs. cocaine.
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quote:Originally posted by Orincoro: I just don't think doing it that particular way is particularly criminalistic.
I don't know what you mean by that. Deliberately and knowingly violating the law is criminal. Removing a boot fulfills both of those requirements.
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posted
I think it's criminal, but I think it's stupid that to remove the boot and then return it to the dang government while repaying the fine is a criminal act. To remove and keep, destroy, or sell, sure. It smacks of, "You've irritated us, now we're sticking it to you." In fact that's pretty much the purpose of it.
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posted
I was more than a little troubled by a detailed account of the returning of the boot. It may have been in the local student paper. Not sure -- I can go looking.
Regardless, it sounded like this wasn't a straightforward putting of it in a box and then taking it up to a desk. The box was first stashed in a hallway, then (presumably when it hadn't been noticed) moved to a central waiting room. It just didn't seem like the point of the exercise was to merely return the item and pay the fine, but more some sort of stunt to spark an uproar or prove a point.
If so, any sympathy I could have mustered would be rapidly drained away.
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posted
Yeah, it sounds to me as though there was perhaps something deliberately mischievous going on, too. Especially if it turns out that was the case, I'm fine with criminality here-just not *only* for taking it off and returning it while/after paying the fine, or in order to pay the fine.
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quote:Originally posted by Rakeesh: I think it's stupid that to remove the boot and then return it to the dang government while repaying the fine is a criminal act.
Look, you don't want a boot, pay your tickets. You get a boot, you have to play the game their way. And that means you pay the fine and wait for them to remove the boot.
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posted
Errr...yes, rivka, no one's disputing that. I'm saying the game is stupid and we should change the rules, not that because the game is stupid it should be acceptable to violate the rules with impunity.
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posted
Well, you were disagreeing with a point nobody was making (or at least not me).
Anyway, why do you disagree? Note I'm not objecting to the use of the boot at all, but to making it criminal to take it off if you're taking it off to go pay the fine.Posts: 17164 | Registered: Jun 2001
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posted
But officer, I just took it off to pay the fine! Well, yeah, I haven't gotten there yet and it's been three weeks, but I was on my way, honest!
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posted
On a slight tangent, I will admit that most American blacks I have met (not a large sample) tend to put me off a bit, because they are often rather loud, and also to apparently believe that their private conversations are of interest to the entire street. A general trait in Americans, true, but for some reason I notice it particularly with black people.
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posted
I disagree...I don't care WHAT they say, parking violations do NOT excuse stealing/preventing me from using my own property, which I have paid for and own.
I know that isn't what other people here are saying, but it's what I believe. I don't think boots are a good thing, nor would I have any problem removing one placed on my car, legal or not.
Just my 2 cents, of course.
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quote:Originally posted by Kwea: I don't think boots are a good thing
So you'd rather they went back to impounding vehicles with lots of unpaid tickets instead? Which was more expensive both for the car's owner and for the city, FYI.
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posted
The thing that bothers me about this, is that they guy was charged as a terrorist. That's the part I think indicates we've gone completely mental as a society.
We may disagree about whether what he did was criminally stupid or just regular stupid, but I think we can all pretty much agree that it is in a fundamentally different category from blowing up a federal building and killing hundreds of people or boarding a bus with a bomb strapped to your body.
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quote:Originally posted by The Rabbit: The thing that bothers me about this, is that they guy was charged as a terrorist. That's the part I think indicates we've gone completely mental as a society.
Given the information I've seen so far, I agree. But I share CT's skepticism as to what actually happened and whether he was trying to cause
quote:some sort of stunt to spark an uproar or prove a point.
In that case, the charges might be reasonable.
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posted
I believe the exact charges were "terroristic mischief" and "possession of stolen property."
Also, I think I had it backwards. This isn't the same link I found before, which was more detailed, but the following gives some additional information. From the IndyStar'sPurdue senior accused of 'terroristic mischief':
quote: ... According to a university press release, three college-aged people entered the Visitor Information Center in the Northwestern Parking Garage with a package they placed in the lobby. They then moved the package to a hallway and left.
Police evacuated about 10 people from the building, then used a portable X-ray machine to examine the box, the release said.
The box contained a wheel lock, a parking ticket and $20.
People were allowed back inside around 9 a.m., the release said.
Purdue Parking Services had written the ticket found in the box and placed the wheel lock on Sun’s vehicle the previous day because the car allegedly displayed a parking permit that did not belong to him.
Purdue sophomore John Moore said he thought the incident was “crazy.”
“With the way things are now, I don’t know why anyone would try to make themselves look suspicious,” he said. “At least they checked it out and made sure everyone got out the building if it was really a threat.”
Under Indiana law, terroristic mischief is a Class C felony. It’s defined as knowingly or intentionally placing a device with the intent to cause a reasonable person to believe that it is a weapon of mass destruction. ...
posted
Of course, the races that racists rail against don't exist, really. Even if one were making an argument for race, the boundaries drawn by racists don't line up. As such, saying it is about race doesn't make much sense. Especially as, for some strange reason, racism is a much greater problem in areas and times with greater socioeconomic (that is, cultural) tensions.
Or are you saying that cultural differences have no impact on racism at all?
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posted
Mmm. If you drew lines of equal population density for particular genes, you would presumably find that not only do genes cluster geographically, they correlate. Of course the lines would not be likely to correspond to the visible markers like skin colour, which perhaps is what you were speaking of?
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posted
im saying the two dont go hand in hand. what O said, what i quoted, isnt true. if someone doesnt like blacks, that dislike remains regardless of the black persons socioeconomic status, affluence, culture or nationality. racism is discriminating against someone because of skin color. at best, culture is one in a long list of motivating factors for racial bigotry.
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quote:Encoding that in law would be difficult (if not impossible), but I see your point.
Not if we were to include some sort of electronic monitoring device that notes when the boot was removed. It'd be more expensive, sure-tack it onto the ticket cost.
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posted
Ah, I see, you just didn't understand the statement. That someone focuses their hate on a group of people defined by a simplified characteristic does not mean the hate does not grow out of culture.
In particular, pay attention to this bit:
quote:and the people associated with them
To many a racist, the people associated are designated mostly by skin color. Of course, there are numerous racists motivated by things other than skin color. For instance, you'll find lots of racists who want to discriminate against biological descendants of people with black skin, even if they themselves lack black skin. Anti-semitism is frequently classed as a kind of racism, and has nothing to do with skin color. You should read the link you gave; notice that it doesn't mention anything about skin color.
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posted
Man rivka, that's twice you've shifted the conversation now. First was suggesting I said it was acceptable to violate the law because the law was stupid, and then responding as though I was talking about 'expedient' as opposed to 'should be done'. I'm not sure what I did to merit that sort of response.
Anyway, sticking it to lawbreakers happens all the time. It's happening now, with this whole boot business, some would say. Are voters really going to object to a measure that would inject more money into the economy at the expense of people who can't learn where to park?
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posted
When I said that I thought encoding it in law would be difficult, I was including politically. Your failing to understand what I meant does not mean I have shifted the conversation. [Edit: If you wanted to say I was unclear, that would be another question. It's quite possible that I was.]
quote:Are voters really going to object to a measure that would inject more money into the economy at the expense of people who can't learn where to park?
I can't speak for your municipality, but I'm fairly certain it wouldn't pass here, even if it made it on the ballot to begin with -- which I think would be politically difficult as well, since I can't see law enforcement being in favor of it either.
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posted
Well, I certainly wouldn't consider this sort of change a priority or anything. Lots of other stuff would have to be running excellently before this would rise towards even the first volume of a to-do list.
I don't see why there needs to be a strong reason to change it, though, given that it's a completely arbitrary thing - how much we punish bad parking and in what way - and the change under discussion wouldn't actually lessen the amount of punishment by very much at all. In fact I suspect for many it would be greater, in the area of higher ticket amounts.
As for the bad precedent, that's not a slippery slope, and it's inaccurate in and of itself. It's a slippery slope because removing city property from one's own property only to use that property to return the city property would hardly encourage people to, say, make off with stop signs. It's inaccurate because it's not just removing city property, it's removing city property in order to return it faster, and pay a higher ticket fee for the privilege.
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Blayne Bradley
unregistered
posted
quote:Originally posted by capaxinfiniti:
quote:Originally posted by Orincoro: Racism is deeply cultural- it is the rejection of other cultures and the people associated with them
racism is deeply racial.
youre conflating race and culture.
Okay, why are we trying to find a logical and rational explanation of the behavior of a group that overall is by definition illogical and irrational?
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Racism is not 'by definition' illogical or irrational, and you do your argument no favours by including the phrase. There are many possible worlds in which racism is quite logical and founded on strong empirical evidence, and even in this one it is by no means irrational to act on stereotypes in the absence of other information.
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quote:Originally posted by Orincoro: I just don't think doing it that particular way is particularly criminalistic.
I don't know what you mean by that. Deliberately and knowingly violating the law is criminal. Removing a boot fulfills both of those requirements.
Well, for starters the crime has no malicious intent, it has no damaging consequences, and it is not dangerous. The crime in no way impeded the police's ability to prosecute the tickets, and was even done with the specific intent of complying with the law, even if the person had to that point failed to comply.
Now, if the guy showed up yelling and screaming and throwing nickels at the front door, and tossing the boot on the ground and spitting on it, then I can see why the cops would arrest him, and why they would charge him with that crime- it would have a wholly different intent, wouldn't it?
But if the guy just showed up and turned over the boot, with no hostility, I can't see why the police would bother charging him at all. Of course, I would fully expect, given the actual turn out of the story, that the guy probably did a bit more than just turn over the boot.
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quote:Originally posted by Orincoro: Racism is deeply cultural- it is the rejection of other cultures and the people associated with them
racism is deeply racial.
youre conflating race and culture.
There were two sentences there, the second of which was the point, the first of which you quoted. If you read this sentence without reading the next one, I can see how you totally missed what I was saying, but otherwise, quoting the one sentence here without the other is just a douche move.
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quote:Originally posted by Rakeesh: Are voters really going to object to a measure that would inject more money into the economy at the expense of people who can't learn where to park?
It's not "economy," its "city budget." One might as easily argue that this takes money *out* of the economy, though it doesn't really.
:slightly related:
Voters really would object if the search for income eventually invaded their privacy and went beyond the police mission of service and protection. For instance, I voted for a certain city council candidate in my small town who promoted a decrease in parking enforcement. I did this because more than twice, my car was ticketed spuriously while sitting either in my own driveway, or on the street in my secluded dead end road with no traffic- either for being over 12 inches from the curb (what curb?) or being parked in the the wrong direction (again, no danger there at all.
The times I was ticketed, I felt really violated that some local cop had driven out to the neighborhood and papered my car when there was no danger at all, but because the city wanted the money. I understand that my parking may have violated the letter of the law, but it did not violate the spirit of the law one iota. I maintain that's an important thing to consider.
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Blayne Bradley
unregistered
posted
quote:Originally posted by King of Men: Racism is not 'by definition' illogical or irrational, and you do your argument no favours by including the phrase. There are many possible worlds in which racism is quite logical and founded on strong empirical evidence, and even in this one it is by no means irrational to act on stereotypes in the absence of other information.
Explain some of these worlds where racism is logical.
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Eh? Trivial: Genes for black skin genuinely do correlate with genes for lower IQ. Bing, it is entirely sensible to say "Blacks are not as smart as whites".
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quote:Originally posted by King of Men: Eh? Trivial: Genes for black skin genuinely do correlate with genes for lower IQ. Bing, it is entirely sensible to say "Blacks are not as smart as whites".
I thought that Asian-Americans used to score lower on IQ tests that European-descended Americans, back in the 50s, but that the gap no longer exists. Is this not true? I believe I read it in a book that refuted much of "The Bell Curve." Has anyone else read that?
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Blayne Bradley
unregistered
posted
quote:Originally posted by King of Men: Eh? Trivial: Genes for black skin genuinely do correlate with genes for lower IQ. Bing, it is entirely sensible to say "Blacks are not as smart as whites".
Except isn't measurements of IQ somewhat unreliable to truly determine the individual worth of human beings and thus a false assumption? And to what extent is this actually LOGICAL to from then step to that if they are not as smart are undeserving of equal rights, represenation, etc?
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Here is a quote from Thomas Sowell, from the wiki:
"When European immigrant groups in the United States scored below the national average on mental tests, they scored lowest on the abstract parts of those tests. So did white mountaineer children in the United States tested back in the early 1930s... Strangely, Herrnstein and Murray refer to "folklore" that "Jews and other immigrant groups were thought to be below average in intelligence." It was neither folklore nor anything as subjective as thoughts. It was based on hard data, as hard as any data in The Bell Curve. These groups repeatedly tested below average on the mental tests of the World War I era, both in the army and in civilian life. For Jews, it is clear that later tests showed radically different results — during an era when there was very little intermarriage to change the genetic makeup of American Jews."
Is this correct? Did American Jews have sudden large increases in average IQ scores, over a period of a few decades? Does anyone know?
KoM, do you actually research anything? Good God, with attitudes and ignorance like yours, it's not shocking that the pogroms, the Holocaust, and Bosnian ethnic cleansing happened. Racism is alive and well today in Europe, I see.
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Here's some quote from the wiki on Thomas Sowell:
"In Intelligence and Ethnicity, Sowell demonstrates how IQ scores have risen among many groups, (see the Flynn effect). He notes that a number of white ethnic groups tallied poor scores as they began entry into the American urban economy. Jews, for example, scored dismally on Army intelligence tests during WWI, leading to assumptions that they were second rate citizens. Jewish IQ scores have risen steadily, and now they rank near the top. Similarly, IQ scores of East Asians were unimpressive in early measurements, but they rank high today. Sowell shows that black IQ progress has been concealed by the practice of statistical redefinitions, or "norming" of beginning measurement baselines. Thus an IQ score that might have been considered "normal" or "average" in 1960, is today considered below par. By recalculating from the original baselines, he demonstrates that not only blacks but entire nations have shown significant rises in IQ over time. He notes that the roughly 15-point gap in contemporary black-white IQ scores is similar to the gap between the national average and the scores of particular ethnic white groups in years past. Indeed similar gaps have been reported within white populations, such as Northern Europeans versus Southern Europeans. Sowell references some of these points in his criticism of the book The Bell Curve.[28] In short Sowell argues, IQ "gaps" are hardly startling or unusual between, and within ethnic groups. What is distressing he claims, is the sometimes hysterical response to the very fact of IQ research, and movements to ban testing in the name of "self-esteem" or "fighting racism." He argues however, that few would have known of black IQ progress if scholars like James Flynn had not undertaken allegedly "racist" research.[29]"
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quote:Originally posted by King of Men: Eh? Trivial: Genes for black skin genuinely do correlate with genes for lower IQ. Bing, it is entirely sensible to say "Blacks are not as smart as whites".
Except isn't measurements of IQ somewhat unreliable to truly determine the individual worth of human beings and thus a false assumption? And to what extent is this actually LOGICAL to from then step to that if they are not as smart are undeserving of equal rights, representation, etc?
I should have said intelligence rather than IQ; further, you are equivocating on racism, which I was using to mean making judgements of intelligence or other personal characteristic from skin colour.
That said, the point remains equally valid if black skin were instead to correlate with, say, a tendency to defect in iterated prisoners' dilemmas, short time horizons, selfishness as measured by ultimatum games, or whatever other index of morality and personal worth you prefer.
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quote:KoM, do you actually research anything? Good God, with attitudes and ignorance like yours, it's not shocking that the pogroms, the Holocaust, and Bosnian ethnic cleansing happened. Racism is alive and well today in Europe, I see.
I must say I do not see what I said to which this is a reasonable response. Perhaps you did not read the entire exchange you are responding to?
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quote:KoM, do you actually research anything? Good God, with attitudes and ignorance like yours, it's not shocking that the pogroms, the Holocaust, and Bosnian ethnic cleansing happened. Racism is alive and well today in Europe, I see.
I must say I do not see what I said to which this is a reasonable response. Perhaps you did not read the entire exchange you are responding to?
It all makes sense now. Europeans are huge racists. I would never have thought it, but between the Holocaust and the Serbian ethnic cleansing, there's plenty of evidence for it.
When I was in college, I remember the members of the Dallas Symphony saying how Claus Peter Flor, the conductor, was kind of a Nazi, as in, "extremely anti-Jewish". I thought it was odd, seeing as how surely Europeans had grown beyond such nonsense by the 1990s...I just assumed that Mr. Flor was some kind of outlier.
Apparently not. Wow. I guess if you're surrounded by nothing but white people your whole life, and white people seem to run the world, you might assume that white people are somehow better/smarter. I don't have this problem, but I can see how it would happen, maybe.
To answer you MORE directly, KoM, the fact that you mentioned the IQ differences between American blacks and American whites AT ALL, and acted as if it's some kind of fixed quantity, says to me that you have a gigantic gap in your general knowledge about race. I have no such gap. I simply picked up the knowledge that IQ scores are extremely changeable, back when I was in college. I read The Bell Curve, and I read the articles and books refuting it, or at least skimmed them. Such information was all over the place. OTOH, you, who are probably at least as smart as I, and better-educated, simply are not conversant with this knowledge, so far as I can tell. I must ascribe this to general European racism, right?
[ November 30, 2009, 01:03 AM: Message edited by: steven ]
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posted
Steven, in your eagerness to pounce, you are not paying attention. KoM is, I am pretty sure, talking about imagined hypothetical worlds. Not necessarily (or even probably) this one.
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quote:Originally posted by kmbboots: Steven, in your eagerness to pounce, you are not paying attention. KoM is, I am pretty sure, talking about imagined hypothetical worlds. Not necessarily (or even probably) this one.
He is? Why would you assume that? I really can't imagine bringing up IQ differences in a discussion about race without automatically also mentioning the complete lack of validity of such testing in determining the relative intelligence of racial groups to each other. Given that, I don't see why he brought it up, unless he really had no idea about the data I mentioned.
I think he had no idea. Further, I think that he has such a shallow depth of knowledge on the subject because he, like probably nearly all Europeans, simply assumes that white Europeans are the smartest race, period. Based on where he grew up, I suppose I can see how such assumptions, wrong as they are, can exist.
I have encountered the data from racial IQ studies before, back when it was huge, in the mid 90s, just like KoM. The DIFFERENCE between him and me is composed of two parts:
1. American whites know that superficial generalizations about race are nearly always totally useless and incorrect. Our media, as well as the people ourselves, are much slower than Europeans to accept such generalizations. In Europe, such assumptions about race pass uncontested. No one would bother to publish The Bell Curve there. They all already believe in the higher intelligence of whites. Even if someone DID publish it, it wouldn't get discussed in the media or around the water cooler. It would be like discussing the wetness of water, to them. "Of course whites are smarter", they'd say. "Why write a whole book about something so OBVIOUS?".
2. I know plenty of very highly intelligent African-Americans. I know at least 1, maybe 2, that are almost certainly are smarter than I am. I'm already in the top 1% for intelligence anyway, according to my SAT scores, so the whole "whites are smarter" thing just doesn't fly with me. Someone like me would naturally, given my background and experience, look for data to refute The Bell Curve. Someone like KoM, with a different background, would simply say "of course whites are smarter" and not even bother to read The Bell Curve at all, let alone look more deeply into the issue.
KoM, I ask you, did you know about the data refuting the racial IQ studies or not?
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