Jenksismyhero

QUOTE (Soxbadger @ May 28, 2014 -> 01:44 PM) We dont really want to eliminate gang activity. Too much money in them mines. I dunno about money, but it certainly centralizes the crime and the city and suburbs are all big fans of that.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ May 28, 2014 -> 01:44 PM) Not quite sure which ages you're talking about and maybe the effect would decline as the child approached 18, but there is IMO very conclusive data out there which clearly shows the single worst thing you can do for a child is tear it away from its parents and send it somewhere else. Unless the child's life is literally in danger, there is absolutely huge emotional damage from tearing children away from even less-than-fit parents. You literally see worse outcomes from removing kids from homes where drugs are a problem than you do by leaving them in there. Emotional issues with a future is better than no emotional issues and no future IMO. And again, we're talking about kids who are in juvi, jail or dead by the time they're 25 anyway.

QUOTE (HickoryHuskers @ May 28, 2014 -> 01:42 PM) OK, I followed that link, and my head hurts from reading all the acronyms and restrictions. I'm talking about something much more basic--the school has an adjoining facility that is open 6am-8pm M-F year round. Very simple, basic, on-site registration with no red tape. You don't have kids going home to their "turf" right after school. You have them there until 8pm or whenever a parent can come and get them. No, it's not going to eliminate gang activity, but it's a huge step in the right direction. It's a step, but you're talking about a 6-8 hour portion of the day. While it might be important for some, the majority of those kids are going to go home and be stuck in the same BS as the other kids in school.

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ May 28, 2014 -> 01:37 PM) Your solution is eugenics and the tearing apart of families? How is it any worse than going to prison multiple times? You've got to break the cycle of these gangs. How else do you do it unless it becomes a 24/7 removal from the situation for a generation? Edit: Sorry, let me clarify. I think we should ship kids off to military schools or private schools IF they are the type of kids to get in trouble. Obviously if it's a good kid who wants to go to school, shipping them off makes no sense.

QUOTE (HickoryHuskers @ May 28, 2014 -> 01:22 PM) It's not just building new schools--it's putting the people and programs with the schools to change the communities. First of all, every elementary school in disadvantaged areas should have an attached child care/pre-school/tutoring for kids age 3-12 that is open 6am-8pm M-F year round. Attached, but run separately from the school so as not to be an additional burden to the principal/teachers. Cost is free up to whatever parents are deemed to be able to pay. This frees parents up to be able to hold down jobs without having to worry about child care, which is a very big problem in the schools. The second thing this accomplishes is that it gets kids in the habit of being at school every day from an early age. The third thing it accomplishes is that it gets the basics of learning instilled in the kids before they reach kindergarten. Add adult learning opportunities for parents. They can go learn valuable skills in one room while their kids are down the hall learning in another. Secondly, the schools need to be very aggressive in dealing with absences. This requires non-teacher human resources that most schools can't afford. If a kid is absent from school and the parent does not call in the absence, the school tries to call the parent. If the parent can't be reached or is reached but is unaware of the absence, the school goes looking for the kid. An entire department dedicated entirely to making sure that kids are in school. There is a ton more but these are two of the biggest things. The culture change has to happen over generations. Start with the smallest children, and 20+ years from now you will start seeing real progress. One of the problems is that we have no patience and we keep trying to just throw money at quick fixes that don't work. Illinois already has the daycare system http://www.childrenshomeandaid.org/page.aspx?pid=317 Perhaps it can be expanded, and maybe that's the route to go. But the problem is kids are still going home afterwards. Just like kids a little older, as soon as they go home, they go back to their block and it becomes a territorial thing. Gangs aren't about drugs like they used to be, they're simply about made-up bulls*** territory. And it's a perpetual cycle that starts with young kids. My solution would be military schools. Ship kids off to different states. Incorporate them into other towns/cities that are not Chicago neighborhoods. Let neighborhoods like Englewood and Austin die out. Hopefully in a generation or two, no one lives there anymore and/or they slowly become more gentrified. I'd also offer up money to females to get their tubes tied. Sign on the dotted line, take the cash, don't have any babies. The state will pay for the reversal procedure after a certain amount of time IF you can prove you're economically and socially ready for it.

I still say, if the federal government provides any additional funds, bring it to Chicago. It might be a net loser at the end of the day, but if we get some public transportation improvement out of it, maybe it's not such a bad idea.

$1 Frazier $5 Jordan $4 Bird $3 Duncan (how is Duncan under Barkley and Malone?) $2 Shaq

QUOTE (iamshack @ May 28, 2014 -> 12:05 PM) Badger and Jenks...do you guys really believe what you're typing, or do you just have your lawyer hats on in here? I get that a solution isn't particularly easy to come by, but you both are pretending as if the teams are now fair and square, when they clearly are not. To use a sports analogy, this is akin to comparing the Yankees to the smallest revenue team in the league, and expecting them to both win the same number of titles. The deck is stacked, and you, me, SS and Badger have benefited and will continue to benefit from it. I'm not saying you should give up all those benefits and go live in the projects or anything, but you could at least have the decency to recognize that you have indeed benefited. I've been benefited sure, by being male, by being white, by being born in the US, by being born in 1982 and not 1682, by being healthy, by having two loving parents, etc. So what? That doesn't diminish what i've done to get where i'm at, or what my parents and grandparents did to get me where i'm at. My family was a bunch of poor to middle class farmers from the midwest. They grew up in tiny ass towns of several hundred people. They didn't contribute to this existing problem just like I haven't.

QUOTE (HickoryHuskers @ May 28, 2014 -> 12:01 PM) Jews in America were never forced into slavery or denied the right to vote, but other than that I agree with you that we can't just single out blacks and hand them cash to "make up" for slavery. The single best way to improve the lives of those living below the poverty level is improving education. I'm talking about billions and billions of dollars worth of investment in infrastructure and people. But nobody wants to do that because for some bizarre reason, we've tied school funding directly to property taxes, whereas money for just about everything else comes out of general income/sales taxes so people don't notice the increases as sharply. I agree education is the key, but plopping a new building with state of the art tech in the middle of the ghetto isn't going to change anything. Kids have to want to be in school. They have to escape the streets. More money may help some, but it's not going to change a lot of what is going on in the poorest areas of the city.

QUOTE (Soxbadger @ May 28, 2014 -> 11:46 AM) The real first step is to man up and take responsibility for your own actions. Slavery was bad, minorities in America have gotten a bad shake. But you cant forcefully change peoples opinions. If you want to change peoples opinions, you need to do something to change it. Writing unnecessarily long articles about how minorities have had it bad (while you completely focus on blacks while ignoring everyone else) doesnt help your cause. It alienates the people who may have helped you. Agreed. Telling white people that they don't appreciate how much they've f***ed up black people's lives and how f***ed up their notions of American history are is not going to help.

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ May 28, 2014 -> 11:33 AM) Right. Modern racism is much more subtle than it was in past generations, but it still very much a pervasive and powerful force. See, this is where we have a disagreement. I don't think that's racist. Maybe a stereotype, maybe a prejudice, but not racist. Racist is literally i'm white, you're back so you're inferior. Prejudice is I've watched the news in Chicago and have seen reports of what black teens in groups repeatedly do when they're away from school and the weather is warm, so i'm going to cross the street just in case. That's not racist, that's a prejudice. Can that be dangerous? Sure. But it's also human nature to be like that. And you're a lying sack if you say that you don't think the same way. That's why i'm not sure what you expect people to do. We've created laws in this country guaranteeing equality and guaranteeing rights. I think that's the best we can do. I think it takes time to get over those prejudices, if it ever happens. We've done this for 40-50 years. Throw money at the problem. It's still not changing, so as I said to Shack pages ago, why would it change this time around? In Chicago (and most parts of the country), you have special schools for inner city kids. You have minority-only contract bids for work from the city. You have job programs. You have housing programs. I don't know the statistics, but i'm sure the vast majority of those programs are used by blacks and not whites (I know the CHA for example is 90% black occupants). And we're not really seeing any appreciable change, right?

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ May 28, 2014 -> 11:22 AM) Re: white supremacy, let me frame it like this: We had a society built on explicit white supremacy for centuries. It resulted in the impoverization of blacks and the enrichment of whites. If we suddenly and immediately change to 100% colorblind, race-neutral policies with zero reparations or restoration, how are you not just locking in the 300 or so years of white supremacy? To use an analogy, you can't run a race with one runner loaded with an extra hundred pounds of weight, remove that weight half way and then pretend it's all equal from that point on. This is a fallacy too. Tons of whites were "kept down" at the start of our country.

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ May 28, 2014 -> 11:08 AM) How do to reconcile that claim with the reality that black unemployment is higher across all levels of education? That black income is lower across all levels? That sending a resume with a "black" name like Yolanda gets zero callbacks but changing the name to Jennifer but otherwise leaving the resume identical results in callbacks? That there are still landlords like Donald Sterling who conspire to keep certain groups of people out of affordable housing based on race, that two of the biggest banks in the country have relatively recently paid 9-figure fines for ongoing discriminatory lending practices? We have sitting Supreme Court justices who call voting rights protections "racial entitlements" and vote to gut them. Sotomayor did a good job of responding to the idea that the only truly equal path forward is "color-blind" policies in her dissent in the recent affirmative action case: edit: I will once again go to the well of TNC for his post a few weeks ago, "This Town Needs a Better Class of Racist", a commentary how society may be quick to condemn something as blatant as Sterling saying "don't bring blacks to my games!" but never really cared much about the much more damaging housing discrimination he engaged in. Someone else had posted this Bomani Jones interview in the NBA thread back at the time which addresses the same issue, "about how exasperating it is for those of us who see the everyday effects of race to have to deal with the performative sanctimony of those who deny race's continuing impact in all but the most obvious, largely inconsequential situations[...]" The false idea that we "bend over backwards these days for minorities" contrasted with the reality that shows the complete opposite is exactly why people like TNC advocate for something like HR40. This country is still very much in denial about its past, present and future sins. Not sure, but I don't think white people in 2014 look at blacks and say "i'm not going to hire them because they're dark skinned." I think it most likely comes back to a culture issue and the human nature to stereotype. You and Coates and others want the government to change that, but I dunno how you do it.

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ May 28, 2014 -> 07:18 AM) Here's that other article/post by TNC I mentionedt, Other People's Pathologies. It starts off with several links to a back-and-forth conversation he had been having with Jonathan Chait via blog posts. I haven't read the back and forths yet, but it is interesting how he starts off trying to differentiate between black culture and a culture of poverty, and then spends 5000 words arguing that any white person that attempts to say that things have gotten better for blacks is just spewing "sophomoric feel-good rendering of his country's past." I can appreciate this guys position and he makes some good points here or there, but i'm not sure what he wants at the end of the day. People already realize slavery was awful. People realize that the Jim Crow era was awful. People realize that the current situation for many blacks is a result of the policies that have been practiced by people (and at times, our governments) over the last couple hundred years. But other than actual, skin head racists, who in 2014 supports those policies/beliefs? The answer is no one, but reading his articles it's like he wants you to believe that everyone is still racist and everyone wants a white supremacy today. Which is ludicrous. We bend over backwards these days for minorities. We've constitutionally determined that everyone needs to be treated equally...unless you're non-white, then it's cool.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ May 28, 2014 -> 08:29 AM) Now you've just gotten onto a thread I believe in a lot more. IMO the problem is much more the one you just discussed than the one that has been discussed already. I think that the complete breakdown of how our society distributes wealth is the elephant in the room that underlies this entire discussion and I think fighting that should be our number 1 priority. The top 0.01% have skyrocketed to the detriment of everyone else because they've been able to rig the system. Fix that problem and suddenly you'll discover you've taken large steps towards fixing the others Wealth isn't a zero sum game though, so i'm not sure this theory works. The rich can still get insanely rich without affecting the middle class IF the middle class acts appropriately. The problem we have as a society is that every major product we buy - and consumerism is obviously the bedrock of our economy - is made/sold by very few companies. We're not local at all anymore. We buy from national/global companies. And so of course the few at the top of those businesses make all the money. I don't buy this nonsense that the rich have rigged the game. Yes, they have been able to get out of paying some taxes here or there. They get favors more than your average person. But at the end of the day it comes down to consumer choice. Stop shopping at big box stores, stop buying mass produced goods, let the money fan out and we'll all be better off.

QUOTE (bmags @ May 27, 2014 -> 04:57 PM) I do find that mindset interesting though. If the government was responsible for a disaster area, pollution, accidental explosion, etc, and it destroyed properties or killed people, and they sued, would people be like "I didn't do it, why should I pay?" That's your problem though, the "government" didn't do a lot of this.

Let me ask you this: say the American people agree to pay something. Do you honestly think it will help? Say every black person gets $50k over the next 20 years. What will that solve? Anything? I noticed throughout his entire piece he doesn't mention anything about changes within the black community. That's going to be the answer, if there ever is one.

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ May 27, 2014 -> 04:52 PM) We can quickly and easily slide that into thanking you for your support for reparations to American Indians. I don't know how I'd weigh 10 or so years of targeted ethnic cleansing and plundering of the Jews by Germany against 250 years of chattel slavery, 100 more years of de jure white racial supremacy and then another 50 years or so of other racial policies targeted at a community. They are both horrendous. Sure they were/are. But context is important. You can't just say "they did it so we should." "They" did it at a time when "Germany" was paying back everyone for the wars they started, and they were being forced to do so by the Allies. And they were paying for a new nation state, not their own citizens.

QUOTE (iamshack @ May 27, 2014 -> 04:42 PM) To the tune of $7 billion in today's dollars. I'll move the goal posts, as Balta will erroneously claim, but killing 6 million members of your group and making tens of millions more homeless is a little different than what happened to blacks here in the US.

QUOTE (Soxbadger @ May 27, 2014 -> 04:28 PM) I read the thread, could not find a decent argument. My family moved to this country post 1900 and they were minorities who were discriminated against. Why should they pay reparations? Because they were racist.

100 bucks a year is still cheaper than those check cashing places that charge you X% of the check you're cashing.

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ May 27, 2014 -> 03:53 PM) Yeah, in a cycle A causes B causes A causes B etc. so you turn to these predatory places like payday lenders because you absolutely need $200 right now to fix your car so you can get to work and not be fired, but then you end up deeper in debt and have to go back again the next time some emergency comes out and you're short on cash. Being poor is expensive. I'll never quite understand people that use those payday check cashing places. They are literally stealing money from you. Go to a bank, open up a checking account, keep 50 bucks in there and you'll never pay anyone to cash a check again. But nope, they don't do it. They can't see the forest through the trees. Same with settlement loan companies. I've had clients use that "service," being charged 50% interest rates. It's sad.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ May 27, 2014 -> 03:07 PM) The kick is up, and, what's this, the goalposts have marched themselves back 20 yards! By pointing out the difference in the two situations that's moving the goal posts? Ok...

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ May 27, 2014 -> 03:00 PM) Somebody needs to point this out. Those are direct victims of false imprisonment (at minimum) perpetrated by the state. Private individuals weren't committing those acts on their own.

QUOTE (bmags @ May 27, 2014 -> 02:57 PM) I really really think you should read the full article. i'm half way through. it's long.