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Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: R.I.P. Ferguson

« on: November 29, 2014, 05:06:39 AM »

I'm curious what evidence you've seen that has you so convinced. I haven't seen anything that compellingly defends him.

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Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: R.I.P. Ferguson

« on: November 29, 2014, 04:48:38 AM »

Well now that I know why you're calling it irrelevant and it doesn't seem arbitrary and leave me trying to hokey-pokey around your irrelevant-beam, I know what to focus on. Attorney Lisa Bloom gave a play-by-play critique of all the standard procedures ignored in prosecuting Darren Wilson. We could believe that Bob McCulloch (president of the company that raised funds for Darren Wilson) was simply an incompetent, lazy prosecutor if not for his aforementioned railroading of Dawon Gore. He didn't ask questions of Darren Wilson that are standard practice in these kinds of trials, nobody questioned his conflict of interest with regard to the case, but as much as he went out of his way not to incriminate Wilson, he didn't extend the same courtesies to Gore.

McCulloch is not the beginning and the end of racially-biased law in Ferguson, but he seems to be a major player.

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Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: R.I.P. Ferguson

« on: November 29, 2014, 04:27:00 AM »

5 pages > a few paragraphs and I was getting tired of all the ass-slapping =P

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Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: R.I.P. Ferguson

« on: November 29, 2014, 04:20:47 AM »

I'll grant that I didn't read further than the post I jumped in on, but I was talking to Supes on Skype and she said Tau didn't bring up the points I did so I figured that justified making them, myself. Just for good measure.

The other problem is that you continuously assumed I wasn't thinking about how my points related to institutionalized racism when I made them, so rather than asking for clarification, you repeated yourself in a vague, unhelpful way -- again, as thought you thought I was too stupid to understand it the first time. So then I went off explaining how they were related and you essentially went tl;dr.

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Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: R.I.P. Ferguson

« on: November 29, 2014, 04:10:04 AM »

See, there we go. That was a lot more helpful than just repeating "I'm talking about institutionalized racism' as though I wasn't already aware of that. Now that you've shared your actual train of thought, I don't have to try and psychoanalyze you over the internet or try to provide a swarm of evidence to get at the numerous possible refutations I'm attempting to anticipate.

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Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: R.I.P. Ferguson

« on: November 29, 2014, 04:02:12 AM »

I assume by 'specific case,' you mean Mike Brown. If so, then I have to point out the contradiction inherent to saying 'One case isn't enough to determine whether the entire institution is racist. Give me facts and figures,' and then calling it 'abstraction' when the opponent brings the discussion outside of Mike Brown's individual case. Do you want to go larger-scale or don't you?

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Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: R.I.P. Ferguson

« on: November 29, 2014, 03:41:25 AM »

We're doing the macarena because you aren't accepting multiple examples of black people being attacked in circumstances where white people get their hands held as evidence of an inconsistency when I'm pretty sure it's the very definition of one. For some reason, it doesn't count. I'm trying to figure out why that is, so I try analyzing the definition of institutional racism you're working with for reasons why people of different colors in the same situations being treated differently don't cut it.

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Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: R.I.P. Ferguson

« on: November 29, 2014, 03:20:31 AM »

But if I show you the car and you go 'No that's more of a buggy tbh' or 'That's not a ditch so much as a pit' then I have to challenge your definitions because the fact is somebody's motor vehicle is still in a depression in the road and they need help. Furthermore, this discussion is about whether ditches are widespread hazards for motorists, rather than about a single isolated incident. I'm pointing to multiple depressions in multiple roads and you're essentially saying they're not deep enough to worry about, but I'm telling you the people who drive on that road say otherwise and trying to convince you that you probably don't know their road as well as they do.

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Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: R.I.P. Ferguson

« on: November 29, 2014, 03:07:31 AM »

It's more that I think you're misusing that definition and its implications, which is why I see this as a philosophical issue =P Yes, institutional racism is a different thing. However, no, it's not completely 100% divorced from other kinds of racism, and basing any argument on the assumption that it is, just because it's a different item beneath the same umbrella, is inaccurate.

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Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: R.I.P. Ferguson

« on: November 29, 2014, 03:00:06 AM »

PP: Demanding dry water would be a logical contradiction, objectively-speaking, no matter who said it. Demanding that we talk about social issues without talking about social issues is the same way. Highlighting a contradiction doesn't have anything to do with 'tweaking' anything 'so that I'm right.' A contradiction is a contradiction.

model 29: In the micro sense, almost definitely. Word choice shows where focus is placed; you'd call somebody an asshole if you were attacking them for being an asshole, but you'd call them a slur if you were attacking them for whatever demographic you're slurring.
However, two caveats: 1) that's not the only way that an attack could be racially-motivated. If a black person surprises you and your first reaction is fight-or-flight as with many of the news stories that I posted, then that shows a fearful bias against black bodies. 2) There's also a macro element that needs to be emphasized, composed of society's reactions to said attacks, institutional punishments/lack thereof, and the precedent set by past incidents. That affects the atmosphere and power dynamics at work. White people have done some heinous shit and still been taken alive, whereas black people know what could happen if they mess with white people, so they'd have to be pushed pretty damn far to take that risk. Granted, it makes little difference to the victim in the moment, but these things affect chances of being victimized in the first place. It's a bigger-picture kind of thing: hate crimes against minorities set a shitty precedent for other people in that minority, whereas hate crimes against those in power are swiftly dealt with.

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Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: R.I.P. Ferguson

« on: November 29, 2014, 02:33:11 AM »

You arranged your goalposts in such a way that, if the evidence brought up had anything to do with socialization, it was suddenly inadmissible. This is a problem because socialization created the people who cause racial problems in the first place. You were asking your opponents to give you water without getting anything wet, which is a 'perfect' defense based on ignoring the very properties of water. You made this a philosophical issue by marking evidence of complex issues as inadmissible specifically due to its complexity, and that had to be challenged before any headway could be made otherwise. Then you didn't accept the challenge. That struck me as cowardly.

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Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: R.I.P. Ferguson

« on: November 29, 2014, 02:24:32 AM »

^ Well sorry for being sick of watching this belittling shit pass for 'intellectualism' everywhere I go.

Philosophy isn't something sectioned off away from the rest of real life. It wouldn't be worth anything if it was. Philosophy is about real life and that's why it's included in this board's title. It influences how the data is interpreted in the first place because, for example, statistics on inequality inevitably bring up whether inequality of opportunity and outcome are all that different. If you don't examine situations like this from every direction, then you're going to miss something. Numbers mean next to nothing without application.

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Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: R.I.P. Ferguson

« on: November 29, 2014, 02:11:35 AM »

I expect you to take responsibility for your leading language and inconsistent reactions to slips in debating form based on which side is making them. If this was really about personal attacks, then you'd have just as much a problem with all the hi-fiving and ass-slapping going on in this thread.

A great deal of philosophy is about examining the definitions of ideas and seeing where their boundaries really lie. For example, 'is there ultimately a difference between inequality of outcome and inequality of opportunity?' is a philosophical question. It examines the way in which the boundaries of these concepts contradict themselves. And hell, as contradictions go, that's an easy one. Refusing to even entertain that notion doesn't give you the right to brandish 'intellectual superiority' over your opponent just because they're trying to demonstrate logically how things you consider unrelated are actually more relevant than you might think upon closer inspection.

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Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: R.I.P. Ferguson

« on: November 29, 2014, 02:00:53 AM »

but of course all the people belittling pro-Ferguson peeps, dismissing their points as rants, aren't making personal stabs at all

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Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: R.I.P. Ferguson

« on: November 29, 2014, 01:50:03 AM »

You're not half the philosopher you seem to think you are if you can't handle dismantling a false dichotomy.

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Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: R.I.P. Ferguson

« on: November 29, 2014, 01:20:04 AM »

Again, we are talking about institutionalised racism. Social attitudes are skewed - I already acknowledged that, but it's entirely irrelevant to this conversation.

Because the beliefs of the people who make up institutions have no impact on the institutions themselves, right? All ignorance and bias disappears and you become a by-the-book automaton devoid of any personal flaws which might impact how you and those around you perform your jobs.

No, see, societal racism is not actually separate from institutional racism. You call 'irrelevant' just because some overlap happens, but there's no such thing as institutional racism without overlap because institutions operate within society. If that wasn't the case, then institutional racism would just up and spring out of nowhere, which isn't exactly cool with the laws of cause and effect. The forms of racism are connected, and that is not grounds for dismissing them -- it's grounds for looking at the subject more complexly.

Correct. That's why I called the notion an unfalsifiable hypothesis. Because it's a hypothesis that's not falsifiable. Do you recall the reason why I said that? Oh, that's right - it's the exact same reason which you now seem to think somehow invalidates my statement.

Just because there are currently limited statistics, that doesn't mean it's impossible to falsify. It means that the statistics are one-sided which is the point I'm making in the first place. If somebody has a monopoly on information, then you can't beat them with the information they have a monopoly on because they have a monopoly on it. However, in the Darren Wilson case, these same people fudged their numbers multiple times. First, he said he got punched twice. Then he said it was ten times. Somehow after ten punches from 'demon Hulk Hogan,' his face was just a little rosy. First, Brown was 35 feet from the car when he died. Then it comes out they were about 100 feet off. During the trial, they appealed to a statute 29 years dead to excuse Wilson's behavior. They can't keep up with their own laws, yet they're going to put this down in official statistics as a justified shooting, so the sources will support him in spite of all these flaws and more. That's why I say statistics are a rigged game. You can get away with referencing a law from the 70s, since removed, and nobody even bats an eye.

In light of this, the deaths of black people at police hands (a statistic thought to be flawed -- due to underreporting) seem much less infallible. Maybe Mike Brown was a one-off case. Or maybe Aiyana Jones got the exact same treatment. Same for Cameron Tillman (who, notice, they write off as a 'freak accident.' Characterizing it as 'just one instance,' just like I said). Despite the open-carry laws in Cleveland, an officer got out of his car and immediately shot Tamir Rice for waving around a BB gun. John Crawford III died under similar circumstances. Hell, Omar Edwards was mistaken as a criminal by a fellow cop and killed without a chance to diffuse the situation. To compare, twice as many white people are killed through legal intervention -- even though there's five times as many of us in the country.

And shit, these statistics are just referring to the people they've killed. Dymond Milburn, a middle-schooler, was mistaken for a prostitute and beaten; actress Daniele Watts was given a lighter version of the same treatment. Have any of you ever been mistaken for a sex worker and taken into police custody? Me either. Black people who are still alive continue to speak about their lived experiences, but they get shut down because these 'freak accidents' aren't recorded statistically as failures on the part of the police force. The officers are rarely given more than a slap on the wrist unless they shoot a white family's dog. The same prosecutor who pardoned Darren Wilson's fatal shooting felt the need to bring a black cop up on felony charges for using his baton. The amount of ass-covering the institution grants cops seems to change based on the race of the officers and/or the victims.

Meantime, James Holmes, the Dark Knight shooter? Taken alive. Eric Frein? Taken alive. You see a white guy waving a gun around in public like Tamir Rice was doing -- with the exception that it was a real gun -- and after trying to talk him down, they shoot just once and take him alive. What did any of these openly violent people do right that Tamir Rice and John Crawford did wrong to get so enthusiastically gunned down by our famously objective police force?

That was really long but it addresses multiple points of yours, so don't freak out when you see there's blocks I'm not directly replying to.

Please explain why you hold this belief. You assume that police officers are incapable of admitting to having made mistakes despite ample evidence to the contrary.

lol 'ew huffington post is gross i won't even waste my time with it
/links a search where the most prominent hits are HuffPo and others accusing police of making mistakes, rather than police directly saying they fucked up'

Of course. That's true by definition. They have had an impact on people's equality of opportunity in the past. Nowadays, it's an equality of outcomes thing.

Another dismissal based in false dichotomy. Inequality of one generation's outcomes limits the equality of the next generation's opportunities. Separating them is logically self-defeating. The line between the two types of equality doesn't exist as much as capitalists like to pretend for exactly this reason.

Again: not something I denied and not the subject of this discussion. Making true statements about things which are irrelevant doesn't make your case any more convincing.

"Brown people are systematically cheated by the system but lol that's not racism."

No - you're just either dishonest or misinformed and act as if we're talking about "racism", when we're talking about institutionalised racism - specifically, Tausami's claim that institutionalised racism is statistically provable. If you'd like to start a discussion about social attitudes, historical factors, or anything other than institutional racism and the statistic provability/falsifiability thereof, feel free to. However, these points are completely irrelevant to this specific discussion.

Again implying that none of those things are connected to the racist way the system has shaken out. I know I'm addressing this twice but I wanna make sure to highlight that this is what I'm talking about in the first paragraph of this post too.

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Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: R.I.P. Ferguson

« on: November 27, 2014, 05:36:06 AM »

D'aww, makin' me blush

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Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: R.I.P. Ferguson

« on: November 27, 2014, 05:18:18 AM »

Right, you need to pick a story and stick to it. Either you're accusing Ferguson police of discriminating against non-whites (or just blacks), or you're accusing them of being a secret society that actively lynches blacks. If you're in the latter camp - frankly, I don't know what to say. I had assumed we're talking about the former.

If you are talking about the former, I would be very surprised if Hispanics were somehow off the hook from the big bad white racist man.

Far as I can tell, Tausami only brought up the KKK to demonstrate how racism can affect different races in different ways and to different extents. For example, only Jewish people get accused of killing Jesus. So no, it's not surprising at all that black people find themselves in front of a greater amount of harmful bias than Hispanic people. It just shows that anti-black racism is more prevalent and deeply established. We think they feel less pain than they actually do and so much of our culture places them in an animalistic role, from jokes about 'getting raped by a big black man' to outright calling them demons and animals, as was done several times over the course of the whole Ferguson thing. You don't hear them talking about Asian and Hispanic people like that because different racism is different.

I'm not waving it away. It's quite possible that about 5% of all stops were caused by racism. In a town as small as Ferguson, this would require a few individuals to have racist tendencies. I am by no means not disputing that racist people exist. I am, however, dismissing as absolutely ludicrous any notions of this being a widespread or commonplace phenomenon in that town.

Racism isn't an 'individual' thing. You're thinking of prejudice. Racism is what comes of millions of people's subtle prejudices stacking the deck against specific groups through social stigma and terrible but convincing logic that convinces them that, for example, black people are more threatening -- even if they don't consciously realize they think so, they just freak out and go 'He's got a gun!!' when they see a black guy with a sandwich. And that's the crux of it: nobody goes around hollering about hating black people anymore because that's stupid and they know it. People try to be logical. They just do that with misinformation about different races, so they tell themselves 'lol its such a stereotype but it's so trueeee!! XD' Maybe they wouldn't think so if they actually spoke to black people regularly. Maybe the law would deal with them differently if it hadn't been framed in all of this shit when it was established.

Hatred would be easy to identify and remedy. Racism is a problem because it's ignorance, which can go unnoticed.

The only way you can be stopped for an equipment violation is if you're committing an equipment violation. Unless you have some data to prove that white people in Ferguson are just as likely to commit those but are let off the hook, I don't see how this could be racist. Again, the simple fact that the poor people of Ferguson are mostly black seems to fit in much better here. Not because it's stereotypical, but because car maintenance costs money, and a notable characteristic of being poor is not having much money.

There's no such thing as a statistic for the stops not made. 'How many people didn't you arrest last week?' They don't end up on any kind of roll sheet because they weren't looked at. However,

(in which case I await evidence), or it is not statistically provable, in which case it's an unfalsifiable hypothesis. In my epistemic system, which is largely based on pragmatism, unfalsifiable hypotheses are not useful, because they do not lead to any useful conclusions about the world that surrounds us. So, if the systematic racism in Ferguson is invisible and functionally ineffective, it may as well not be there.

it's not unfalsifiable, it's just a matter of who is given voice in our culture and who is dismissed or silenced. Tausami's earlier mention of the stereotypical cop stopping people of color for stupid shit like license plates pointed to the common knowledge among them that that's the situation where police brutality lies. They pull you up on some minor BS and come completely unglued on you, sometimes grievously injuring you in the process. Hell, white people within the system pull teeth trying to get the same mistreatment to show that the system is equal and fail. However, every time they bring this up, they're told that they're just one instance, not statistically-significant, written off, dismissed, ignored. Add to it, nobody's going to admit 'Yeah I saw a white dude driving around and I should've stopped him but I didn't' to anybody because it'd make them look bad -- and they won't admit it to themselves because they wanna think they handled the situation correctly. This isn't a conspiracy; it's what spawned the phrase 'cover your ass.' So the countless single voices of the people affected by this can't stand up to the 'official statistics,' omissions and ass-covering and all. How many millions of 'just one instance's will it take to finally match the statistics? This is what is meant by 'the voice of the people,' and it's being ignored.

We are discussing institutional/systematic racism. This means differences in equality of opportunity, not outcome. If you want to cry about the fact that many black people are poor, take it up with someone else.

To be clear, you're insinuating that hundreds of years of social stigma and generational wealth/poverty exacerbated by redlining and gerrymandering have had no effect on people's equality of opportunity? That they got the same head-start as anybody else in spite of all of those forces? That is an aspect of racism in and of itself: the belief that all the impoverished brown folks in the country got what they deserved and were in no way exploited by those with social and financial leverage over them. They're poor now because they got screwed continuously for generations. The fact that there are outliers does nothing to minimize that.

All of your points are easily explained without invoking a big bad racist white man conspiracy. Historical factors, education, economic disparity, attitude, and crime statistics simply fit reality better.

The fact that you just described several contributing factors to the very racism you deny shows that you're working off a flawed definition of racism. It's not a conspiracy, because it's not about any individual asshole sitting around going "God damn I hate brown people. How can I screw them over?" This isn't a video game and the villains aren't that easy to spot. Historical economic disparity worsens issues of education and crime because generational poverty taxes mental health and thus incentivizes sometimes unhealthy coping behaviors. The stress of working several jobs simultaneously, trying to find time to take care of other business, and still being so underpaid that you can't keep your head above water would wreck anybody's judgement. Shoving the blame for this off onto the people being exploited is a way of dehumanizing them, because you deny the stressors they put up with every day and ignore all logical reasons for them being where they are, instead painting this surreal portrait of some hick who doesn't want to be able to buy their own food at the end of the week. No human being is like that.

The biggest thing is that all of these points are interconnected, so it's impossible to refute just one of them at a time because you need to refute the very relationship between them. Which is incidentally a lot like the prejudices that got us into this mess in the first place. People are logical, so any one misconception causes their entire worldview to reorganize in order to support it, spawning countless other misconceptions which have logical consistency within themselves but not with the rest of the world.