altnameJag said:
Kerg3927 said:
You don't see these higher percentages in other minority groups such as Asians and Indians. If it's all racism, why aren't they also filling our prisons? Instead, they are filling our universities and typically doing very well for themselves. I would say that the biggest factor is culture. And not racist white culture. The culture in those local communities.
Yes, why would a group of immigrants who emigrated legally with a high cost of entry be doing differently than a group of citizens that were brought here enslaved and did not have equal rights until a generation ago. That couldn't possibly be linked to racism in anyway. It's not like racial profiling, the thing you describe in your first sentence, is racism or anything.
You make a good point about Asians and Indian immigrants, i.e. the high cost of entry being a factor. I admit that I'm not very familiar with how selective that process is, but it makes sense. But there are other factors probably working against them that don't hamper black people, like language and being transplanted into a strange new culture. I did say racism is
a factor for black people, but just one of several and that the overall reasons are complicated, and I stand by that. Too often I see people point at a stat and scream racism (or sexism), without looking at other factors.
For example, I think a lot of what people call racism is simply capitalism. It's economic. Poor white people face those exact same challenges, and there are just as many poor white people in the U.S. as there are poor minorities [https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/poverty-rate-by-raceethnicity/?dataView=1?tTimeframe=0&selectedRows=%7B%22wrapups%22:%7B%22united-states%22:%7B%7D%7D%7D&sortModel=%7B%22colId%22:%22Location%22,%22sort%22:%22asc%22%7D]. Under capitalism, those who are born with money get better education, get raised by better educated parents, and then generally have more financial help from their parents upon leaving the nest. And that is true for all races. Being born poor sucks, and its very difficult to climb the ladder from the bottom. I think the main reason that a higher percentage of black people in America are poor is because they ALL are descended from people who started at the bottom in 1865, and in 150 years - the first 100 years facing actual, real racism - most still haven't been able to climb out... and many have probably given up trying. But it's not racism that is continuing to hold them down, IMO... it's just plain ol' being born poor.
As for racial profiling, it's controversial [https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2015/11/01/what-are-arguments-for-and-against-racial-profiling/F0DlnqVZk7aUXolRuHc0LJ/story.html]. To some it's unforgivable racism and the worst thing ever. To others it's simply using available data to increase efficiency.
For example, you're working security at an airport, and your job is to keep someone with a bomb from boarding planes. You have time to search only like 10 people per hour. Do you do it 100% randomly, including elderly white women, etc.? Or do you give special attention to male Arabs? Which method would prove more effective in preventing a terrorist attack?
altnameJag said:
Kerg3927 said:
Regarding your specific example, just legalize marijuana, problem solved for everyone.
Regarding marijuana, my specific example, Black people are 3-4 times more likely to be arrested for carrying weed
and no other crime than white people. And if they're a black dude, their sentence will be longer for no goddamned reason: https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/fsd0512.pdf and it's been growing.
I would add that, according to this article [https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/06/04/race-marijuana/2389677/], overall about twice as many whites are arrested for weed. Also, according to one long time judge, black communities are targeted because it's easier to catch them...
Arthur Burnett Sr., a retired judge of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia, said his 40 years on the bench showed him that police concentrate their numbers in black communities. It's easier to catch people with marijuana in communities where there are "open-air" drug markets, rather than looking in homes, basements or country clubs, said Burnett, the CEO of the National African American Drug Policy Coalition.
As far as sentencing, what happens once you get into a courtroom is HIGHLY dependent upon the quality of your legal counsel, and that's true for all races. Poor people, white and black, are much more likely to get the book thrown at them because they are using a shitty public defender and can't afford a real attorney. It just so happens that a high percentage of black people are poor, for reasons I discussed above. Prior record probably also plays into it, creating a snowball effect.
I'm sure that there are some actual racist cops out there, and it's probably a factor. But I would argue that the bigger factor is police going for easier arrests in black neighborhoods (fish in a barrel technique) and then a large percentage of those people not being able to afford an attorney.
Again, people should look at all factors before screaming zomg huge racism. Not doing so is part of the boy who cried wolf effect I mentioned.
evilthecat said:
Kerg3927 said:
So those people are never going to stop complaining? Ever?
Define complaining?
Like, I know your complaints were partly due to a misunderstanding, but let's say they weren't. Let's say that Dice really were making a world war 2 game with an ostensibly world war 2 setting, but making some models and NPCs female. Now, I don't think you'd have to
like that game, maybe you're after a more realistic world war 2 game and would find it distracting or immersion breaking, but at the end of the day it's a creative decision to sacrifice realism for (some people's) fun, and let's not pretend that's something that's never happened in Battlefield before. Again, a whole bunch of the weapons in Battlefield 1 literally didn't exist or worked fundamentally differently, but were made up to fit a world war 1 game into the mould of a modern shooter.
But your argument, which to be honest sounds very
complaining, is that this wouldn't just be another artistic choice which you could like or dislike, but would in fact be some kind of "cancer" which is somehow destroying Western society. Yeah,
putting women into a video game is destroying Western society.
It's not necessary to bring politics into this at all. Battlefield is a multiplayer-focused shooter, one of the biggest in the world, it has a huge and diverse audience, much of whom is fairly young, or otherwise not part of the traditional "hardcore gamer" set we encounter on sites like this. If that audience wants to see itself reflected in games, and isn't hugely concerned about historical accuracy or the "authentic world war 2 experience", then Dice should have the right to make the games they want. I don't see any reason that is more "political" than putting automatic weapons in world war 1.
But to you, it is political. In fact, it's not just political, what you're doing
is identity politics. You are doing identity politics right now. You are making this political when it doesn't have to be. For some reason, you can accept that a gun that never existed being in a video game isn't political, but cannot accept the same of women being depicted in a situation they didn't historically appear. Why are women inherently more political than anything else to you? Well, because you're interpreting "women" as a political symbol. The fact that you're doing so from a hostile standpoint changes nothing.
So, to answer your question, people will stop using identity politics when
everyone stops using it. But that will mean that it genuinely doesn't matter whether or not there are women in video games. After all, there is nothing political about women.
I suppose I am complaining. You got me there. But I do respect the developers' right to make the game however they want, and yes, I am free to not like it and to not buy it.
As far as a "cancer," I wasn't talking about this game specifically. What I'm talking about is this constant bickering back and forth. People yelling that so-and-so-group is oppressed and not represented enough, that is not diverse enough, it's racist, it's sexist... and then the backlash of no, it's fine, leave it alone, you piece of shit SJW, yada yada yada. It just gets tiresome.
Why can't art forms show representations of the real world anymore, in all it's beautiful chaos and randomness, without creating a shitstorm? Why do we have to diversity wash EVERYTHING to where it looks fake and contrived? You know, sometimes you flip a coin and it turns up heads 3-4 times in a row. It's not the end of the world. An all-time classic TV show that happens to focus on 6 white buddies shouldn't suddenly be "problematic [https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/friends-netflix-sexist-racist-transphobic-problematic-millenials-watch-a8154626.html]."
evilthecat said:
Kerg3927 said:
There has never been so little discrimination in the (Western) world, and yet it seems like there has never been more complaining about it.
Have you considered that this is because, historically, people were afraid to speak at all.
Like, I personally have been assaulted and put in hospital more than once. Friends of mine have been attacked with deadly weapons. People I know have taken their own lives because they could not live being treated as they were. This is the "little discrimination" you're talking about. The "big discrimination" of the past was far, far worse.
I'm sorry those things happened. The world can be a cruel place.
evilthecat said:
One huge advantage which people struggled for for years (using identity politics) is that most people now agree that equality is a theoretically good thing. This means that speaking out about inequality you face is sometimes a useful way to get to change, because most people recognise inequality and don't like it. In the past, this was far less true. When the stonewall riots or the civil rights movement happened, most people sided with the opposition because they fundamentally didn't think queer people, or black people should have the same rights as everyone else, there was an explicit belief that these were inferior humans, they were the enemy who needed to be suppressed and pushed down. Nowadays, that belief hasn't gone away, but it is at least something people are obliged to keep secret, which means we can talk about it in a way older people couldn't have imagined doing.
I know I'm just one person, but I literally know of no one who hasn't already died of old age who feels that way. I don't think everyone is just keeping it secret. I think most people really don't feel that way.
This is not aimed at you at all, but my advice to any minority group or their supporters would be to not exaggerate the discrimination they are
currently enduring (again, not saying you are) and don't accuse people of discrimination just for harmless every day variations in diversity. The world is and can never be perfectly homogenized, and nobody likes walking on eggshells worried that some angry person might suddenly jump out and verbally attack him. That type of stuff is only going to lead to backlash, which
hurts your cause... hell, it may even put someone like Donald Trump in the White House. Don't cry wolf unless there is really a wolf.
evilthecat said:
Kerg3927 said:
This "reminding" comes from both sides, and I would say it usually originates from those whining about a lack of perfect diversity in pretty much everything.
I don't know.. arguments about the "divisiveness" of opposing positions overwhelmingly come from people who don't
think they're using identity politics (but really are, because seriously.. we all do, all the time).
I like to think that I try very hard not to. I try to think of everyone the same, without putting them in a category.
Saelune said:
Kerg3927 said:
Saelune said:
Identity politics is what bigots created to oppress people who are different. Identity politics were created when a man told a woman she was less than him, identity politics were created when a religious person told a homosexual they are a sin against God, identity politics were created when a white person said that being black makes you property, not human.
All of those bad things happened in the past, obviously. They are rare occurences today. It's not 1860, or 1920, or 1960 anymore.
Saelune said:
The only way to stop identity politics is to fight for equality.
As I said above, there is no such thing as perfect equality. There will always be some bias, and all we can do is minimize it. I would say that we're probably close to as good as it's ever going to be, at least among educated people. And right now, because of the boy who cried wolf effect and the backlash it creates, this continued obsession over perfect equality seems to be polarizing us and moving things in the wrong direction.
Rare? Children are literally in cages and Nazis are more protected from violence than children are. Bakers are literally discriminating against homosexuals. Women are condemned for calling out people who support a sexist man who gets praised by the same people calling those women sexist.
There is a difference between crying wolf when the wolf is not real than people looking at a wolf eating the boy and saying 'How dare that boy hurt that wolf's feelings!'
Perfect equality? How about just letting black people not be shot by cops who then get paid vacation as a reward, how about not letting sex offenders run the government, how about letting gays buy a damn cake! How about immigrants being treated as people, not live stock!
Imperfect equality is a broad term, too broad. Seperate but 'equal' broad.
Human trafficking is a terrible, serious problem, but that has nothing to do with identity politics. I don't think the traffickers discriminate. They take all kinds.
Nazis and white supremacists say stupid shit, but under freedom of speech laws, they are entitled to the right to say it, even if no one else likes it. You cannot curb their freedom of speech rights without curbing the rights of others. Both good and bad speech must be protected, even if it makes others uncomfortable - in fact,
especially if it makes others uncomfortable, because that is the only type of speech that
needs protection, and it is the absolute foundation of a free, democratic society.
Cops have tough jobs, and many aren't well-trained... they are going to f*ck up from time to time. I try not to judge them too harshly, because I've never been in their situation, having a gun pointed at a potentially armed suspect and having to make a split second life or death decision under high stress. Yeah, I'm sure some of them are bad people. Others just make mistakes, like everyone else.
Regarding what is "rare," I understand the basic concepts of statistics and probability, or at least I like to think I do. I don't buy lottery tickets, because the odds of winning are pretty much zero. I consider it to be a tax on people who are bad at math.
How many bake shops are there in the Western world? A million? I would say that one homophobic baker out of a million is the very definition of rare. Just like one guy at Starbucks who foolishly calls the cops on two black guys for loitering, probably costing his company $millions in PR damage control, is rare. Out of the tens of thousands of Starbucks worldwide, we only know of something like that happening once, right?
There are 7.4 billion people on this planet. If you stacked 7.4 billion one-dollar bills on top of each other, it would be 500 MILES high. Think about that the next time you see one isolated episode that makes the news. And I think most of them make the news, because it's click-bait gold in this day and age, and everyone has a phone on their camera with access to Twitter only a click away. One or two individual homophobes or racists in the news out of billions does not mean that the whole Western world is homophobic and racist.
erttheking said:
Kerg3927 said:
erttheking said:
A man was just sentenced to death because he was a gay man and the jurors felt that that meant that he would enjoy life in prison and therefore it wouldn't be a punishment for him.
If you think all the issues with inequality just magically went away, you haven't been paying attention.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/opinion/charles-rhines-gay-jury-death-row.html
I would point out that the murder was in 1992... 26 years ago, so he wasn't "just sentenced." I would also point out that this type of story is probably extremely rare. I've certainly never heard of such a thing. And finally, I said "equal under the law," as in what the law says, but you never know what's going to happen when a jury deliberates... people are naturally biased in various ways, and juries are by design made up of average people, with variances in education, etc. Either way, that guy could have avoided the whole death penalty vs. life in prison thing by simply
not murdering someone. I am against the death penalty, but hard to feel too much sympathy for him.
The conviction was made in 1992. It was upheld this year. You can't use the "it happened a long time ago" defense when the injustice is being protected by the courts in modern day. And justices are upholding the jury's decision today. They're not overturning it even though they have a chance to. So much for that equality under the law thing.
Again. If you think we live in an equal world, you aren't paying attention. White and Black people smoke Marijuana at the same rate, yet Black people get arrested for it much more often with much harsher sentencing, most states don't have a law against the trans panic defense, Ohio is currently considering a law that will enable parents to deny their children to procedures they'll need if they're trans, atheists technically can't hold office in seven states, ask Lil Devils how America treats Native peoples (spoiler alert, they steal their fucking children), it's still legal to torture gay people in a spiteful attempt to turn them straight, and a load of other shit.
I don't know the details of that case, and I'm not a lawyer. Just because they didn't overturn it doesn't mean all those judges are homophobes. It could just be a weak case. That NY Times article talks about a few jurors remembering discussions from the deliberations 26 years ago. Sounds kind of like hearsay to me (typically inadmissible in court). It just might not have been enough proof of bias. The burden of proof in a court of law is a lot higher than it is on the internet.
The marijuana thing I discussed above. I've never heard of trans panic defense. Is that really a thing? Has it been successfully used as a defense in the modern era? Re: Ohio, again, I don't know much about the topic, but it's not the first time a parent has been able to make a decision about what is best for his kid. Kids are usually young and confused, because well, they're kids. It's probably a pretty complicated issue, and a very inexact science, because you are relying upon testimony from a kid. Didn't know about the atheist thing... that sucks, but is it even enforced? Re: Native American kids, googling around, it looks bad, but I don't know enough about it to have an opinion... if it's as bad as it looks, hopefully now that it's exposed it will stop. Regarding conversion therapy on minors, googling around, it looks like a bunch of states have recently made it illegal... hopefully the rest will follow suit.
I never said the world was perfect. In fact, I said the opposite. I said it can't be perfect. You did point out some archaic laws still on the books that definitely need to go, and hopefully they are being phased out. I'm also all for exposing really bad shit wherever it exists. My point was, as I posted above, that there is a lot less really bad shit going on in the Western world than there used to be, and that it was my opinion that the
frequency of much of it is exaggerated because people don't understand probability. They see one news article and go zomg it's happening everywhere!
erttheking said:
Imma...imma take a wild guess and say that you're a white, cis-gendered heterosexual male? Sometimes I get one of those wrong when I take this guess, but I've never gotten more than one out of four wrong. I find it very telling that the people who suffer the least from inequality are the ones who are so quick to champion how injustice is over.
So my opinion doesn't count? I'm not allowed to discuss it? White, cis-gendered, heterosexual males are people, too, just like everyone else. They're not all the evil people some make them out to be. And they're certainly not all privileged. As I linked above, there are 17 million white people in the U.S. living in poverty. I doubt they wake up every day and say privilege... sure feelz good, man.
Which brings me back to identity politics. If we want to help out poor people, how about all poor people? Or all disadvantaged people? But instead, with identity politics we get all this tribal animosity, my team vs. your team, and everyone gang up on the white, cis-gendered, heterosexual males because f*ck them, all of them. I think it's counterproductive.
