I may not be that every big city is blue, but I do know that in many red states the cities are blue.
Those blue spots in the south east of the US are blue cities in red states for the most part.
Iām sure they contribute to each other. Big city types tend to be left leaning by nature and probably by consequence of where they live for pretty logical reasons. The closer you live with and interact with your neighbors, the more right youād feel you have to regulate them. When you live by yourself out in the country, you donāt feel you have the right to tell your neighbor a couple of miles away how to live. It is at least evidence though that the Dems lack the ideas/means/will to fix though.
Again, depends on the goal. The elimination of racism is a worthy goal. Addressing outcome disparity is a fine goal. They just arenāt the same thing. Put your passion into what you care about, but act rationally and in a way that can logically achieve your ends. All these people fighting racism expecting disparity to go away are going to be horrendously frustrated.
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It is also a mistake to assume GOP means conservative governing and Dem means liberal governing. New york republicans and Alabama Dems are probably closer than new york republicans and Alabama republicans. Not mention the farther you go back the more parties will have altered in absolute position.
Agree here. I think almost all articles I have read on racial inequality seem to blame racism, and I am thinking well what about this, and this and thisā¦
I am not sure I get to this conclusion. Maybe if all the big cities were red, it would be worse for black people? Maybe it is just a long process. Your statement here leaves me inferring that the GOP could fix it (maybe you didnāt imply that?), but maybe it isnāt a problem that can be fixed. I am skeptical about racial inequality closing significantly in my life time.
This is possible, but it doesnāt alter my conclusion.
Not as far as I can tell. Iād expect progress by this point, but all we have is regression.
I did not mean to imply support for GOP policy. FTR Iām becoming increasingly nihilistic about our political system in general.
I agree. Humans are tribal animals. We are hard coded to identify and discriminate in favor of āourā group. It is a legitimate doubt that we can do much better than we have already.
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Reparations:
The study suggests a payment of $151 million each, and the cost to every person would be $18.96 million.
At $18.96 million per person, it sounds like the plan is to enslave everyone else. The only way you could make something like this work in any reasonable manner is to go after companies and rich families that owned slaves, you canāt make the whole country pay. The US is trillions of dollars in debt anyway, where do they think this money is going to come from?
Like affirmative action, civil rights laws, lower standards for college admissions, welfare, free healthcare, subsidized housing, more money for education per studentā¦ seems like we have institutional anti racism.
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We need to take the ghetto out of people before they can leave the ghetto.
When your neighbor lives a few hundred yards away, what they do is their business, and really doesnt affect you much. When your neighbor lives 20ā the left/right/above/below you, what they do has a much greater impact on you and your shared resources, hence greater regulation is preferred.
The problems faced in an urban environment are much different than those faced in a rural environment, and policies need to address that difference. I certainly donāt know the right answers, and so far the answers provided by folks in power havenāt led to preferable outcomes. To me, trying out the ādefund policeā policies are just as radical as folks trying a more conservative ābootstrapsā approach to the problem.
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Itās a bit of a fallacy that there is a lot of generational wealth in the US. Classes are highly mobile. Even going back to the end of slavery, the big slave owners who profited the most also (justifiably) went immediately bankrupt. The gentry in the south had no ability to manage plantations with fair business practices and no discernible economic skills (or really even basic living skills like cooking, cleaning, dressing). Itās my understanding that it wasnāt uncommon for plantation owners to rely on the handouts of their former slaves just to have food to eat.
Racial inequality should be eradicated. Itās really hard to find in the texts, I.E. laws. But where it does exist, it should be dismantled and redone. The problem is what kind of āequalityā are we talking about? Equality of opportunity and freedom or equality of outcome?
The former I am for 100%. The latter is draconian and authoritarian. Equality of outcome falls to the lowest common denominator, hence is a bad idea and has been tried many times. We used to call it Communism.
I am for equality of opportunity and even a little extra to help marginalized groups if such a thing will truly help.
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I was with you until the last sentence. the defund the police movement is one of the most idiotic things Iāve ever heard. The police have problems, but they unequivically save lives, mostly of the poor. It is a fact that more policing equals fewer black people being killed. It is factually antithetical to the espoused goals of the movement. You can dislike conservative economics all you want, and it may not work there, but there are few things as idiotic as the defend the police movements. The only thing that comes to mind thatās worse off hand is the BLM goal of ending the nuclear family.
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So there you go, there are few people or companies currently in existence that have benefittd directly from slavery. Also there were more than a few black people who owned slaves, are their descendants going to pay reparations too or are they exempt because of their skin color?
A few years ago the Jamaican government tried to make the UK pay reparations, they made the same mistake of asking the entire country to pay. Like I said, the only hope for any sort of reparations is to go after individual companies and people who benefited from slavery. Needless to say, they got zero reparations. Itās an exercise in futility doing it this way.
This is the conclusion I come to as well. It seems wrong to punish uninvolved individuals. Even it you say well it is their ancestorās fault, I think we have almost unamimously agreed that punishing a child for the sins of the father is wrong.
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Even further, if the reparations are based on genetics, there are a significant portion of blacks in the US who are descended directly from white slave owners. Look at Thomas Jefferson.
Eh, defund actually is a fairly conservative ideal- basically they are looking to cut funding from a govt funded agency that no-doubt has a ton of fat to cut. Its cutting funding, not eliminating funding.
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But even recent immigrants will pay too, thatās how stupid it is. Even black people from other countries I would imagine, since their ancestors werenāt enslaved in the US. Itās complete nonsense.
So do they pay or get paid? This gets complicated.
That may be true but cutting funding doesnāt mean they magically become more efficient. Cutting funding means cutting worthy programs, resources, and officers too. Like Seattleās 50% cut. Iāll bet you folding money crime goes through the rough and the increase in blacks getting murdered from the cuts is larger than all blacks killed by the same police force at full strength. If they actually go through with it, Seattle is going to turn into one giant hell hole.
But it was legal. Ask for reparations from the African nations that enslaved them in the first place.