The General US Politics Thread

Serious question, do states where certain drugs legalized have a better track record when it come to police treatment of minorities? Because the way wisewillow said it it sounds like the whole "War on Drugs" thing ( which I think never officially ended) is at least connected to the general harassment of minority communities by the police force in the US.

x2 It would be trolling if I tried to derail the thread with an, and I admit, rather irrelevant discussion on grammar.

Edited by HailMuffins on Feb 21st 2019 at 7:33:20 AM

It doesn't exactly help that the very first reaction to the complaint on "American" and its hubris is to immediately fire back at people's supposed ignorance. Me, Drag and Muffin are all Brazilians. We all came from a country that has suffered under the heel of American imperialism and has been choked by its culture. We're obviously going to feel much different about the US taking for itself the name of the continent after the US declared to take for itself most governments of the continent for their own petty political reasons. Hearing the wording all of our lives makes it sound like the true America is the US and the South American is their backyard, which I'm sure you people can calculate how it can be insulting for someone from a country suffering under American imperialism.

It's not anywhere near a major bugbear, but this seems like a overreaction to a simple observation, and it seems a little insensitive to not consider what reasons people could have for having it.

But I agree there are more important discussions going on, so I say we move on.

Edited by Gaon on Feb 21st 2019 at 2:36:31 AM

That's what happens when you name your country as a description rather than give it a proper name. The Founding Fathers probably didn't think things through.

I mean, I agree. I wouldn’t have pointed out the damage done by draconian drug policy if I didn’t.

That said, there’s a lot of law enforcement going on in the US. There are around 850,000 LEOs taking a total of several million enforcement actions each week. The percentage of those that are problematic is far too high, but it would be ridiculous to say every single one or even a majority of them are problematic.

Edited by archonspeaks on Feb 21st 2019 at 2:45:17 AM

@Hail Muffins: The latest one might get somewhere, since South America has gone "fuck this shit, we're out" to Venezuela and are trying to make a new Unasur without Maduro. If you guys take the chance to commit to another step in developing toward a South American EU, you might make something worthwhile.

Since we are talking about race issues Warren, Harris back reparations for black Americans affected by slavery.

What were the reasons the reparations weren't supported before? Is it just because of the cost?

Edited by HailMuffins on Feb 21st 2019 at 7:56:58 AM

Bold, I'm cautiously supportive.

Nah, racism. Because it’s “in the past” and clearly that exculpates all living white people.

I saw a poll a while back where they asked about reparations for black people and the majority said no.

The poll also asked other questions, one of which was if person A steals from person C, and gives the money to person B, should B give the money back to C’s family even though A and C are dead?

Majority said yes.

Edited by wisewillow on Feb 21st 2019 at 6:03:50 AM

Personally, my issues with reparations have been purely practical.

I strongly believe that we should use every resource to fight structural discrimination but my problem with reparations is that they're a bandaid that has a good chance of inflaming white grievance.

Is it a bad idea? I don't think so, I think the US has changed enough that it's more viable.

Edited by Fourthspartan56 on Feb 21st 2019 at 6:07:35 AM

Seems pretty impractical, though. Plus, I guess, on both sides of things you end up affecting a lot of people whose families weren't even on the continent at the time.

Unless I'm misinterpreting it and that's not in the pure "Let's give people money!" sense.

Edited by RainehDaze on Feb 21st 2019 at 11:08:26 AM

Black people descended from slaves and black people who willing immigrated from Africa have different experiences, but there’s some overlap.

There’s a variety of proposals; I don’t think “just hand black people cash” is one of them. I’ve seen some that argued for New Deal style programs aimed at all people below X income (because systemic poverty disproportionately hits black and indigenous communities); I’ve also seen arguments for race based programs of various kinds.

Edited by wisewillow on Feb 21st 2019 at 6:11:04 AM

I think I could get behind the idea of Reparations if it was a "We're going to do this thing once and we're done." However, that's not the sense I get from it. I've never owned slaves. I'm not a racist and I don't want to be. I'm not sure I like the idea of taking my money and being forced to give it to someone else for something no one I know of in my family did. That said, we have had problems in our country, and if this will fix them, then you might be able to convince me. However, I'm far from certain that reparations will help fix the problems that we have. It seems to me pretty likely that if I pay reparations now, I'm going to have to do it in the future in a never ending cycle and I don't like that idea.

x5 I suppose it's naive of me to hope there's reasonable explanations behind this sort of shit at this point.

Not that it is particularly surprising, what is, though, is hearing Obama was one of those who was against it, but I'm guessing he did it to better the chances of winning the elections rather than thinking it isn't necessary.

Regardless, here's hoping, if any of those two take the POTUS seat, they'll make that into a reality.

Edited by HailMuffins on Feb 21st 2019 at 8:11:15 AM

Like if it's reparations just in the sense of "let's give people money", there are so many things wrong with it that I'm not even sure where to start... step one being that it doesn't fundamentally address any problem.

Step two being you need to decide who qualifies. Is it just a matter of race? Because that would be the absolute worst case you could present such an idea: just giving a massive quantity of cash directly to any part of society as a way to make up for something that didn't affect all of the people in question, without thought for whether they need it.

Because any policy that then involves "give Ben Carson money" is just so full of holes to attack from other angles...

Here’s the thing though. Because we’re white, we benefit from the legacy of slavery. Slavery helped build our nation’s economy. In the 1930s-1950s, the programs that built the middle class (federal housing loans, GI Bill, etc) were written to restrict most black people from using those benefits. I never murdered an indigenous person, but I live on land taken by murderers, while the great-grandchildren of the murder victims live in horrific poverty on the reservations their grandparents were forced to move to.

You can benefit from the bad acts of others without lifting a finger yourself. That doesn’t mean it’s our fault, but it means we should do our best to right these wrongs.

No one is seriously proposing that.

Edited by wisewillow on Feb 21st 2019 at 6:17:32 AM

X4 While you have never owned slaves you have benefited from people owning slaves in the past, so the argument is that that unbalance is one that needs to be addressed. Also it’s probably not your money being used for this, I don’t think any proposal has a specific white person tax as it’s method of being paid for (a standing tax on all confederate memorabilia (including the current flag of Mississippi) I could get behind).

I’m personally not sure on reperations, specifically if framing an expanded social program aimed at the poorest in society as reparations is going to be the best way to sell it politically.

Edited by Silasw on Feb 21st 2019 at 11:19:40 AM

All I have to go in is an 8 paragraph news article talking about "reparations", which normally means actual money.

@Wisewillow: The problem with the Native Americans example is that there's a pretty strong argument that, while the US was wrong to take those lands, they've been under US control for so long that they're now legitimately the US's. I'm not saying nothing should be done for Native Americans, but that specific logic doesn't necessarily work.

Like I said, I'm not against the idea of reparations per se. But I do want the reparations to do two things. First, actually fix the problems. This is doubtful, particularly with the idea of 'cash reparations'. Second, for us to be done with it. That the debt we owe for slavery (or whatever we are paying reparations for) is paid for and over with. It's that second one I truly seriously doubt.

Edited by Soban on Feb 21st 2019 at 6:32:29 AM

Building a society that is anti-racist and ending systemic racism isn’t a one and done situation.

Reparations won’t make individual cops less racist. They won’t free black kids from prison. They won’t bring back black women who died due to medical negligence.

Reparations would do a lot, but there is no one magic fix to any systemic issue, let alone three centuries of white supremacy.

@Soban: For what it's worth it's probably not possible to really ever fully undo the damage caused by slavery and the like.

I think the idea there wasn’t that reparations should fix all racism, but that reparations shouldn’t be done now and then again in 40 years and again 40 years after that.

I think it would be helpful if people described exactly what they mean by reparations and how it would be done.

Ta-Nehisi Coates made a good point in his famous article on the subject that the important thing isn't necessarily that reparations actually be given, but the concept and African Americans' grievances considered seriously enough that the government would properly investigate it so that if they decide not to pursue it, that they can show it's out of demonstrable impracticality as opposed to dismissed out of hand.

My personal opinion is that it does indeed seem a bit crass in concept to just divert a bunch of tax money towards handing a sum of cash to anyone descended from African slaves; my family came long after slavery was abolished and certainly did not own any slaves, so certainly a lot of them would be resentful of the idea of giving up their money towards a vague other group they had no involvement in wronging in such a way. Yet, the idea of a selective tax on "white" people as a whole because some of them were slaveowners stands against my principles.

But as Coates pointed out there are discrete instances such as housing discrimination in Chicago for which black plaintiffs could demonstrate a negative financial impact, and won financial compensation for. As LSBK pointed out, it can be done, and probably should in some fashion, but it has to be smart.

Edited by AlleyOop on Feb 21st 2019 at 7:13:49 AM