oh, so they "disrupt families" and at the same time you don't think they "can operate as extended families"? Inconsistent much? You're such a shill for the Trump camp it's getting pathetic.

I guess it's a good thing I don't respect your opinion. Like I said, I think they're preaching dangerous nonsense. Rather I think they should be championing the family as the best support network for children.

Then in what sense do you find such support networks troubling?

I don’t think BLM can operate as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, namely because it isn’t an extended family or village that collectively cares for one another.

Seriously? You don't just have a problem with black lives mattering, you have a problem with an oppressed people having support networks?!? Or is this like a "gay marriage will ruin marriage" thing where you believe that black people having support networks will somehow make your white family (I'm confident that you're white) dissolve?

None of the above.

Is it scary?

No, it just hints at the ideological undertones of the organization.

I think you are overstating the dangers even if you believe it is nonesense.

Perhaps. But I believe family stability is important to the health, wealth, and well-being of individuals.

They couldn’t replace it if they tried. My contention is that they are preaching dangerous nonsense, none of which has to do with police violence or racism.

What is a trained Marxist?

God knows.

Nowhere do I see the word “replace”.

Then why would you say “replace”?

Where does Karl Marx have to do with an activist movement with no centralized local leader?

When the founder calls her and her co-founders “trained marxists”, I take them at their word.

We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.

https://blacklivesmatter.com/what-we-believe/

Anyone can go look at the quote, which doesn’t include anything about men in jail. That’s because you made it up.

I think we’re past the culture wars. One side didn’t show up. Thus most institutions lean in a certain direction. Nowadays it’s closer to a cultural revolution than war. Year-zero stuff—struggle sessions, class conflict, iconoclasm, and a taste for ideological purges. What isn’t certain is whether this consolidation of power will last or whether it is merely the death throes of a failing ideology.

Your really can't read can you? They stated "We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement". And why would that be? Maybe because 1 in 3 of black men end up in jail at some point in time and the nuclear family is too often not the reality?

They even state in the paragraph before it "we make our spaces family-friendly and enable parents to fully participate with their children." They're not anti family and they're not trying to replace it but to support them through wider networks, such as, ironically, communities that you actually mention in the very next sentence.

The rest of that post is just silly. Nobody needs to support a well funded political party either. Oh wait.

They disrupt the western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement because 1 in 3 black men end up in jail? Can you quote them on that or are you just making that up? Don’t bother, I already know the answer.

And here I thought I was being reasonable, the only sane person in a madhouse.

Quite so. Indeed, much of what you have to say tells us about you rather than about how things are.

It ain't nice.

I’m sure your view of me is completely fair and just.

Which are also self-evidently good things no less than the proposition that black lives should matter.

But sure, something something Marxism bad mmkay?

Not to me. When self-avowed marxists start disrupting families through their make-believe “villages”, I see trouble. No activist network can substitute for family or community, and no one needs to support a well-funded protest organization to fight against racism. So use your hashtags and fist emojis to your heart’s content.

Yeah, how about doing that instead of equating their training to what BLM actually stands for. Not that there is anything wrong with Marxism to begin with but different discussion. And it's clear as day what the point of dredging up a video from 2015 has to do in this discussion. Distraction and poisoning the well.

What BLM pursues is a conservative goal. They demand black people should not have their constitutional right to freedom be violated through excessive force, racial profiling and over-policing of their communities by the police. Defund the police is the policy proposal they believe best reaches that goal. One wonders why people keep objecting to the goal and you'd expect conservatives and Republicans to support it as well. So there's a lot of resistance against a basically conservative demand to respect constitutional rights by Republicans. Is it coincidence Marxists founded BLM instead of Republicans? Or do Republicans perhaps not care about constitutional rights? Or, as I suspect, do they need their racist white base to win any election at all?

Justice sacrificed for power.

They also want to “disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another”. They also want to “dismantle cisgender privilege”. I can support the premise that excessive force and racial-profiling are wrong without supporting some well-funded, far-left identitarian group who I believe care more about their activist bona fides than about “black lives”.

I appreciate the effort but I fear it was a waste. The nonsensical aspect of your interpretation of the statistics, in my opinion, is that these disparities are necessarily the result of racism and no other factor. Yes, the disparities can be frightening, but you nor anyone else have proven that racism compels and influences police brutality, or any other disparity. Your picture of systemic racism is missing the racism.

If you think one can reasonably prove that the US government has purposefully constructed the relevant laws in ways that they knew would disproportionately affect the races, then why don’t you do that? “The results speak for themselves” isn’t a good enough answer.

Certainly many laws and policies have been a failure—war on poverty, welfare, war on drugs—and if one wants to continue to view the world through the lense of race, some races are more affected than others. But to assume some concerted and pervasive racist motive in both the creation and application of these laws is a step too far, and worse, it leaves other potential factors (fatherless homes, education, criminality, culture, media) out of the equation.

The phrase “Black Lives Matter” is a self-evident truth. The group Black Lives Matter was founded by “trained Marxists”, so hopefully we can differentiate between the phrase and the “movement”.

I would consider that systemic or institutional racism, yes.



Yes, I do not know the answer to that question. Care to fill me in?

Right, according to “US officials with direct knowledge”, the sine qua non of anti-trump conspiracy theories.

The Department of Defense continues to evaluate intelligence that Russian GRU operatives were engaged in malign activity against United States and coalition forces in Afghanistan. To date, DOD has no corroborating evidence to validate the recent allegations found in open-source reports. Regardless, we always take the safety and security of our forces in Afghanistan — and around the world — most seriously and therefore continuously adopt measures to prevent harm from potential threats."

https://www.defense.gov/Newsroom/Releases/Release/Article/2241964/statement-by-assistant-to-the-secretary-of-defense-for-public-affairs-on-intell/

The pentagon has found no corroborating evidence of recent allegations regarding Russian bounties. It’s starting to look like 2016 all over again.

Would you be able to give a brief explanation of the last time period where you would agree that police in many areas across the US treated the races differently? Surely you at least acknowledge that this was a problem in the past yes?

I would not be able to because I don’t know the answer to that question.

When was the last year that you would agree that systemic racism existed in the US?

I don’t agree with the premise of “systemic racism” as it has been provided here. I once thought it was the same as institutional racism: the US was certainly institutionally racist for most of its history, with laws explicitly discriminating for and against races. But absent those laws and institutions it becomes difficult to indict the system for racism. It’s actually a testament to the system that we’ve come so far.

The typical ploy of blaming Trump for the incompetence and failures of the states, the worst of which are governed by democrats. The fact is Trump is not allowed to govern the states. He cannot enact health policy in New York, for example.

It’s the same in Canada. Quebec was harder hit than British Columbia, and have diverging policies, each with their own health officers and laws. So one cannot blame Trudeau for Quebec without praising him for BC.

Oi @NOS4A2, have you buggered off because you understood a worked example of systemic racism and now want to forget the fact?

Nope. I remain unconvinced.

It would be doing much the same thing if it didn't record the ethnicity of the people "it" samples. It has a tendency to concentrate policing effort based on race regardless of whether it records ethnicity data. So long as the people "tested" for criminality are black or poor or from neighbourhood X, it allocates police effort more to black neighbourhoods (like or near X) over time. The algorithm "figures out" black=criminal from what it's fed and how it tells police to feed it.

If it’s not so much the skin colors of those involved, but the prevalence of criminality in certain neighborhoods, then it would appear that the results are a consequence of the criminality and not the skin-colors of the individuals involved. This isn’t to say that racist police wouldn’t misinterpret and abuse the data for racist reasons, of course.

That's the crucial thing though, a supposedly race indifferent algorithm does pick up on real correlations (poverty + nonwhite proportion in neighbourhood + crime rate). Those correlations it picks up are manifestations of systemic racism.

You find the same thing when you try making hiring work through a machine learning algorithm for assessing applicant competence, it picks up on systemic effects in the training data and enforces them through its predictions; the algorithm ends up a racist misogynist.

I’m not sure how those “correlations” are manifestations of systemic racism. Poverty and crime have myriad causes, none of which is limited to this or that race.

No one can deny that there is racism and discrimination in hiring practices, but such discrimination is forbidden by law and has been for quite some time, and there are legal, systemic and institutional means with which to find justice—systemic anti-racism.

If I understand you correctly it records and discriminates on the basis of race. If so then yes it is racist. I would even argue that the act of considering the races of those involved as some mitigating factor, especially if it is built into the algorithm, can only breed more racism.

I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt.

Does the system record and profile on the basis of race, and not some other factor?

If there is some part of the algorithm or data in that system that suggests police target certain racial groups, I would have to agree with you. But I cannot see those in the article. Is there something in that system that suggests certain racial groups should be policed heavier than others?

Is discrimination based on individual's birthplace, ancestry, culture, linguistic characteristics, explicitly racist (non-technical sense)?

If it was written into a law, and explicitly discriminates on these grounds, I would say it is.

Would you say forbiding discrimination based upon an individual's birthplace, ancestry, culture, linguistic characteristics, is a good way to prevent racism in a non-technical’ sense?

I think it helps, at least when it comes to employment. Can it prevent racist thinking and beliefs? Probably not.

Your intuitions are that "Let's ban all Trump supporters with approximately 3.4k posts who believe racism is predominantly propagated by putting people into race boxes who have approximately" explicitly targets you. And is Nos4a2-ist.

But your intuitions for "Let's enact policy that almost exclusively disadvantages blacks" are that it's not racist. Because it's not articulated in those terms.

You are not consistent.

It explicitly targets “Trump supporters with approximately 3.4k posts who believe racism is predominantly propagated by putting people into race boxes”, to be sure, and given that I am the only one here who fits that description, it’s clear that it targets me.

I have no intuitions for “let’s enact policy that almost exclusively disadvantage blacks” because I have seen no such policies. If there are such extant policies I’m welcome to hear them. In fact I’ve been asking for them.

Is it racist to discriminate against ethnic groups?

Given the conflation of race and ethnicity I would have to say it is. Whether technically it is or not I am not too sure.

Okay. Now let's say that it's anyone with approximately 3.4k posts who fit the criteria. Still targets you? Even though it's weakened to effect other people incidentally?

It certainly discriminates against a certain group of people while excluding others.

I’d love to hear your argument.

[

If there was another person who fit the criteria who wasn't you, would it cease to be made to target you?

It would still target me and people like me, sure.

It doesn't even refer to you. How can it target you?

I don’t see who else it could refer to.

Let's say we started banning Trump supporters with over 3.4k posts who believed that racism is propagated mostly through people categorising others into racial categories...

No, Nos, it's not directed at you. It would be a principle thing.

That’s the sort of discrimination I’m talking about and looking for. For example, this policy is racist:

“ No negro who is not in the military service shall be allowed to carry fire-arms, or any kind of weapons, within the parish, without the special written permission of his employers, approved and indorsed by the nearest and most convenient chief of patrol.”

This is an explicitly racist policy. So maybe you can help me out here: if the “system” is absent such policies, how is it racist?

Sounds to be more about ethnicity than race.

What was the point of that act in your opinion?

To forbid discrimination on the basis of national origin.

That’s right.