All-purpose news and politics thread: Two Steps Beyond!

[Tendrin]

Not just "dying" but also living with the inequality that has been part of this nation's fabric since it's very foundation -- even now when the issue is brought up, deflection is often the very first response.

Kneeling in protest against racial injustice is considered "disrespecting the flag and military" by many, while marching against police brutality is labeled as "hating cops and white people" -- it's much easier for those who don't believe in "white privilege" to complain about being "offended" that than to examine the problems that created these issues in the first place.

Pure truth.

[aja_christopher]

Henry Rolllins on the issue of "white privilege" -- not saying I agree with everything he is saying here, just that his perspective is worth noting.

Personally, I think "White America" could handle what "Black America" deals with every day -- even if only out of necessity -- but the point here is that no one should have to deal with this kind of inequality, especially in a society predicated on the ideology of equality for all.

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"Henry Rollins: White America Couldn't Handle What Black America Deals With Every Day"

"In light of the recent police shootings in Texas and the deaths of Alton Sterling in Louisiana and Philando Castile in Minnesota, both killed by members of law enforcement — just the latest three of the many examples of obscene, needless deaths in America — one could conclude that all hell has broken loose and things are falling apart. I do not agree.

Things are bad, but I would posit that they have been this way for as far back into American history as you want to go. What has changed is the amount of information available to the average citizen. Thanks to cellphones and people employing social networking to spread news quickly, what goes on minute to minute has crossed the line into overload.

Now that you can watch people die on Facebook, your evaluation of the facts and the sheer amount of information you want to deal with is up to you. But you can no longer say you don’t know what’s going on.

The despicable litanies of willfully ignorant denial and misinformation I have heard spouted in the last several days by pieces of **** like Rudy Giuliani all but ensure that things will get worse. The mainstream media outlets allow this utter crap to slide by unchallenged and, by doing so, legitimize falsehoods that could get people killed. Ratings-based, 24/7, for-profit media is the complete death of true journalism and a catapult for propaganda.

If white America experienced a fraction of what black America deals with regarding law enforcement, incarceration, the court system, employment and countless other facts of life, they would immediately and collectively lose their minds.

There are at least two different Americas. They have existed in an environment of almost unbroken mutual exclusivity. That’s over now.

In 1969, when I was about 8 years old, I saw the divide. I went to a school in Washington, D.C., with mostly African-American kids who were bused in from different neighborhoods in the same city. It was a constantly harrowing experience. I got picked on for the color of my skin. Pushed into the urinal, head slammed into the water fountain, shoved down the stairs. It was miserable.

When I really started to understand the two Americas was in third grade. On the last day of school, we were all told if we had passed or failed for the year. There were several kids older than me in my class. They had already been held back and were getting older as their education stagnated. When some of these kids were told that they had not passed, the expression on their faces didn’t change.

Earlier that year, in the play area one day, kids had lined up for free bag lunches that were handed out. There were more kids than lunches. One kid put a pencil through the palm of the kid who got the last one. We all stood there and watched as he screamed.

It was in this year that I understood that my life in America was going to be different, not only because of the color of my skin but because of the advantages that came with it.

Equality, tolerance and decency are not inherently American or human traits.

I learned another lesson many years later, in 1991. I was on the first Lollapalooza tour. It was one of the best summers of my life. I spent a lot of time hanging out with Ice-T. We talked almost every day. He is one of the most articulate and intelligent people I have ever met. I wish I had a teaspoon of what he’s got. I also spent time with his bandmates and crew.

On days off, or when our buses would pull into the same place, we would eat together. All his guys wore gold. I have no idea what a necklace is worth, but it all looked expensive to me. When we went into places, white patrons and staff tripped on these guys. This is when I understood one of the reasons for the visible display of wealth. My whiteness assured them that I could pay for my meal. Ice-T and his guys had to demonstrate their ability to pay by literally wearing a show of wealth.

I’m an educated, Caucasian, heterosexual male. Does this ensure I will have success and live the American Dream? Obviously it doesn’t, but it damn sure drops me on second base with a great opportunity to steal third.

I live solidly in one of the Americas but have been aware of other Americas for decades. For the last week, I have heard politicians use a phrase that nauseates me whenever I hear anyone say it. The need to “come together.” To that I say, “You first, ************.”

Since an upgrade will not occur on a national level via presidential pen stroke or SCOTUS decision, you have to take it upon yourself to be an infinitely fantastic person every single day. There will be times when it will be a bitch to be so awesome, but you’ll handle it. This century will be about incredible individuals. Bold acts of kindness and a genuine desire to at least try to see things from someone else’s perspective are but two of the mandatory requirements for betterment moving forward.

Don’t wait for your government. It’s a broken machine that can only deliver damaged goods. Prejudice coats the mechanics of the USA’s OS. Attempts to clean the parts are attacked as big-government, special-interest meddling. It’s by no means a Gordian knot, but a total system retool is required. It would be incredibly expensive and time-consuming, and the growing pains would be enormous. Not gonna happen.

Equality, tolerance and decency are not inherently American or human traits. They are values you choose to adopt and use or not. So be amazing all the time."

http://www.laweekly.com/music/henry-...ry-day-7134994

[Tami]

Trump’s Infrastructure Plan: Modest Federal Incentives, Facing Long Odds

Now, White House officials say they are ready — after months of what they characterized as behind-the-scenes meetings with members of both political parties — to push through a plan that they concede will not be enacted without the support of both Democrats and Republicans.

The odds of such a bipartisan effort coming together in the current political environment are long. White House officials said the new spending would be offset by unspecified cuts elsewhere in the budget, which are all but certain to be roundly criticized by Democrats.

Many infrastructure experts consider the ratio Mr. Trump’s aides are proposing for a public-private plan — essentially creating $6.50 in private investment for every federal dollar spent — to be largely out of reach. And the president plans to leave it up to lawmakers, who are deeply divided on how to finance any infrastructure effort, to decide on key questions such as whether to enact a gas tax to pay for it or slash other types of spending.

[Tami]

His 2020 Campaign Message: The Robots Are Coming

Among the many, many Democrats who will seek the party’s presidential nomination in 2020, most probably agree on a handful of core issues: protecting DACA, rejoining the Paris climate agreement, unraveling President Trump’s tax breaks for the wealthy.

Only one of them will be focused on the robot apocalypse.

That candidate is Andrew Yang, a well-connected New York businessman who is mounting a longer-than-long-shot bid for the White House. Mr. Yang, a former tech executive who started the nonprofit organization Venture for America, believes that automation and advanced artificial intelligence will soon make millions of jobs obsolete — yours, mine, those of our accountants and radiologists and grocery store cashiers. He says America needs to take radical steps to prevent Great Depression-level unemployment and a total societal meltdown, including handing out trillions of dollars in cash.

“All you need is self-driving cars to destabilize society,” Mr. Yang, 43, said over lunch at a Thai restaurant in Manhattan last month, in his first interview about his campaign. In just a few years, he said, “we’re going to have a million truck drivers out of work who are 94 percent male, with an average level of education of high school or one year of college.”

“That one innovation,” he continued, “will be enough to create riots in the street. And we’re about to do the same thing to retail workers, call center workers, fast-food workers, insurance companies, accounting firms.”

To fend off the coming robots, Mr. Yang is pushing what he calls a “Freedom Dividend,” a monthly check for $1,000 that would be sent to every American from age 18 to 64, regardless of income or employment status. These payments, he says, would bring everyone in America up to approximately the poverty line, even if they were directly hit by automation. Medicare and Medicaid would be unaffected under Mr. Yang’s plan, but people receiving government benefits such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program could choose to continue receiving those benefits, or take the $1,000 monthly payments instead.

The Freedom Dividend isn’t a new idea. It’s a rebranding of universal basic income, a policy that has been popular in academic and think-tank circles for decades, was favored by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the economist Milton Friedman, and has more recently caught the eye of Silicon Valley technologists. Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen have all expressed support for the idea of a universal basic income. Y Combinator, the influential start-up incubator, is running a basic income experiment with 3,000 participants in two states.

Despite its popularity among left-leaning academics and executives, universal basic income is still a leaderless movement that has yet to break into mainstream politics. Mr. Yang thinks he can sell the idea in Washington by framing it as a pro-business policy.

Sounds crazy at first, but in theory the universal base income idea sounds like something worth considering. Assumning a way could be found to do it without exploding the defict or reverse-Robin Hooding the poor.

[Tami]

Duterte tells Philippine soldiers to shoot female rebels in their vaginas

BEIJING — President Rodrigo Duterte last week told soldiers to shoot female rebels in their genitals, the latest in a series of violent, misogynistic remarks.

Addressing a group of former communist rebels on Feb. 7, Duterte, who served as a city mayor before becoming president, appeared to encourage Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) to target women in conflict.

“Tell the soldiers. ‘There’s a new order coming from the mayor. We won’t kill you. We will just shoot your vagina,’” he said.

“If there is no vagina, it would be useless,” he continued, appearing to imply that women are useless without their genitals, according to local media reports.

The Presidential Communications Office included the comment in the official transcript from the event, but replaced the word “vagina” with a dash.

Duterte’s presidency has thus far been defined by violence — and often violently misogynistic language.

What a world we live in ...

[Tami]

Germany Newspaper Just Said What Every Sane American Thinks of Trump

Der Spiegel just published an article called “A Danger to the World: It’s Time to Get Rid of Donald Trump.” Here are some of the highlights:

Donald Trump is not fit to be president of the United States. He does not possess the requisite intellect and does not understand the significance of the office he holds nor the tasks associated with it. He doesn’t read. He doesn’t bother to peruse important files and intelligence reports and knows little about the issues that he has identified as his priorities. His decisions are capricious and they are delivered in the form of tyrannical decrees.

And with that opening, they capture the basic problem most Americans have with our criminal-in-chief. But it goes on:

He is a man free of morals. As has been demonstrated hundreds of times, he is a liar, a racist and a cheat.
I feel ashamed to use these words, as sharp and loud as they are. But if they apply to anyone, they apply to Trump. And one of the media’s tasks is to continue telling things as they are: Trump has to be removed from the White House. Quickly. He is a danger to the world.

[4saken1]

I just don't believe that being treated with courtesy by a police office is an "unearnt White privilege"...it is every citizens right.

But unfortunately, the reality doesn't match up to this. Maybe if we all just stick our fingers in our ears and yell 'LALALALALALA WHITE PRIVILEDGE DOESN'T EXIST', then all of these issues would just disappear.

[mojotastic]

Now this is interesting, didnt know Saint kitts and Nevis was dangerous.

http://americasquarterly.org/content...5XVA9U.twitter

Which Latin American Countries Got Safer in 2017?


In spite of gloomy headlines, homicide rates declined across great swathes of the globe in 2017. A review of the latest data reveals a sharp drop in murder when compared to 2016. The reductions are especially pronounced in those regions that typically register the highest levels of violent crime. Take the case of the world's most murderous region – Central America's “northern triangle” – which saw a 23 percent decline in murder when compared to 2016.

While this downward trend is cause for cautious optimism, the global homicide drop is not evenly distributed. On the one hand, most advanced economies saw their already historically low levels of homicide diminish even further. But there are still some countries and cities struggling to shake-off high rates of lethal violence, especially Brazil and Mexico. There are also persistent data gaps in most poorer countries and cities which make it hard to fully account for changes in violence over time.

As in previous years, many Latin American and Caribbean countries are still contending with disproportionately high levels of crime and violence. The five countries registering the highest homicide rates internationally in 2017 are all located there, including El Salvador, Honduras, Jamaica, St. Kitts and Venezuela. In 2016, 43 of the 50 most violent cities were situated in the region: when the data becomes available, it is likely that the rankings will be similar in 2017.

That said, even some of these countries and cities managed to make a sizeable dent in their murder problem.

Take the case of El Salvador, listed as among the planet's most murderous countries over the past four years. El Salvador dropped its homicide rates by 26 percent between 2016 and 2017. The current national homicide rate of 60 per 100,000 still places it at the top of the global ranking, but it is almost half of the 2015 rate of 103 per 100,000. Meanwhile, San Salvador, the capital city, reported a reduction from 136 to 100 per 100,000. The drop comes after years of investment in police training, criminal justice reform and investments in violence prevention.

Neighboring Honduras also recorded sharp reductions in homicidal violence in 2017. The murder rate dropped by 28 per cent to 46 per 100,000 last year. Declared the world's most murderous city from 2012 to 2014, San Pedro Sula witnessed a decline of 50 per cent last year. Taking the slightly longer view, the homicide rate dropped from a high of 193 per 100,000 in 2013 to just 51.4 per 100,000 in 2017. Similar declines occurred in Belize, Guatemala, and Puerto Rico.

The turn-around in many Central American countries is in sharp contrast to the grim experience of Mexico. The ratcheting-up of clashes between organized crime and state security forces led to a dramatic 20 percent spike in murder in 2017 compared to 2016. Mexico's homicide rate of over 20 per 100,000 is double that of 2005, the year before former Mexican President Felipe Calderón launched a war on drugs. For the first time, Mexico will be listed in the top 20 countries experiencing the highest homicide prevalence rates.

There are similarly worrying signs of deteriorating security in parts of the Caribbean. Specifically, homicidal violence has continued to increase in Jamaica, in part because of gang rivalries. The island nation has a murder rate of 56 per 100,000, the second highest in the world. Likewise, Trinidad and Tobago, registering a homicide rate of 36 per 100,000, has seen a fourfold increase since 2000 when its rate was hovering closer to 9.5 per 100,000.

The view from South America is mixed. On the positive side of the ledger, Colombia continued its extraordinary downward trend in homicides in 2017, a pattern that started in 2002. The country experienced a 5 percent reduction in relation to 2016. These improvements in public security are taking place against growing popular dissatisfaction over the peace accord with the FARC. Indeed, despite continued declines in homicide there are still predominantly rural parts of the country registering sharp increases in victimization.

As for Venezuela, no one knows exactly what is going on given the political and economic turmoil that has engulfed the country. The government has not released official figures for over a decade. Unofficial media reports suggest homicides actually reduced in 2017 by 12 percent. Even so, with a purported murder rate of 53.6 per 100,000 (the government disputes this and says it is closer to 47 per 100,000), Venezuela would still rank among the top three most violent countries in the world. There are signs, however, that state killings increased last year. Indeed, if we added state killings to the homicide tally, the rate would increase to 89 per 100,000, albeit still lower than the combined rate of 2016 (91 per 100,000).

Brazil has yet to release its 2017 data, though early indications are that it will be similar to 2016. The Brazilian Public Security Forum – a network of research institutions – registered at least 57,395 homicides in 2016. But information for 2017 – especially data from the country's state secretaries from public security – has yet to be officially collated. Even so, Brazil's homicide rate of roughly 28 per 100,000 is sufficiently high to ensure that it is among the top 15 most murderous countries.

[mojotastic]

TL;DR: Murder rates went down around the world but Central America is still one of the most dangerious region in the world when it comes to murders.

[Trey Strain]

These are the people who the Democrats should filibuster for. Not for illegal aliens.

http://www.foxnews.com/health/2018/0...eport.amp.html

[Tami]

These are the people who the Democrats should filibuster for. Not for illegal aliens.

http://www.foxnews.com/health/2018/0...eport.amp.html

Haven't the Republicans been trying to destroy the ACA for years? They haven't yet, and when the Democrats take control of Congress I am sure they will cement the ACA into stone after fixing whatever needs ot be fixed, that couldn't be done before becasue the Republicans kept blocking it. This includes laws involving prescription drug costs.

So, blame this on the Republicans.

Oh, and there really aren't any "Illegal Aliens", or at least there wouldn't be if Immigration reform that creates a clear path to citizenship were enacted, which is what the Democrats have been trying to do for years but again the Republicans kept blocking it because, well, they only want rich white immigrants.

[KNIGHT OF THE LAKE]

Except racism and discrimination doesn't only affect "black" people: it affects Latinos, Muslims, Arabs, Indians, Jews, Asians, and nearly every other "non-white race" as well in various degrees. It could be argued that racism against black people is the most obvious symptom of this bias, but other "non-white" individuals often face ethnically-based discrimination as well -- examples of this is how Arpaio singled out Hispanic drivers for racial profiling or how Arabs are often viewed as "terrorists" despite the fact that only a minuscule percentage of Muslims actually engage in "terrorist" behavior.

Meanwhile, "white" people rarely have to deal with such assumptions -- even when they are responsible for quite a few "terrorist" acts in this country.

The fact that you can even try to limit it to "blacks" just shows that the concept of "white privilege" isn't even fully understood by many of it's critics -- which is why I reiterate that it's kind of useless to have a discussion about something when there isn't a full understanding of the subject at hand.

Going to disagree with this. You rarely hear stories like the one's in this thread "like driving while black" applied to Jews, Asians, Indians, or Arabs. I think your reaching on this one. Especially on Jews. Most Jews get lumped into white. And Asians have some of the best income rates and lowest discrimination rates you'll ever see. Is there some elements of racism levied against them? Yeah but that happens to most ethnic groups. Italians and Irish people who also get lumped into white see biases and racism against them as well. Pretty similar to the same level Jews and Asians do. You just don't see any of those groups getting stopped for no reason or arrested going into their house or followed around a store by a clerk. So I do think there is a significant difference in the context of when the concept of white privileged is evaluated.

So yeah I do think most of the symptoms that are affiliated with "white privilege" apply mostly to the black population and possibly to a lesser extent SOME Hispanics. Also a big function of this is black slavery in the United States and later segregation having effects that spilled over into the modern day. Something that other racial groups do not have as part of their ethnic history in this country.

[KNIGHT OF THE LAKE]

As always, /some/ people want us to be more concerned about the feelings of 'decent' white people who might get their undies in a wad over a phrase than the actual impact of white privilege.

To me it's more about messaging. I think the political ideologies on the left are received better but poor messaging causes them to lose. In this case, I think the term is something that the majority of middle and lower class whites take offense to as somehow minimizing their problems and also stifling any discussion with them. In my experience, upper class whites are more receptive to the term, however, you should also realize they are so removed from the trenches and they aren't going to give up the privilidges they have either.

I really think that rightly or wrongly the term itself has become something that's viewed with hostility and doesn't have any positive impact. It's more likely to loose would be allies than to gain new ones. So it's more about do you care about building consensus and getting something done or do you care about actual results? If your okay knowing that when that term is brought up the conversation is immediately going to lose a lot of people, then have at it.

To be honest, like I said in a previous post, I don't think it's a well thought term anyways, as it most of the symptoms prescribed to white privilege negatively impact blacks more than any other race. Like I said if it was called anti black bias or anti black/hispanic bias, it would be received better

[aja_christopher]

Going to disagree with this.

Feel free to disagree -- doesn't make you right.

Again -- if you don't understand the concept itself, then there's no point in wasting time on this conversation.

That said -- I'm moving on.

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"White privilege (or white skin privilege) is a term for societal privileges that benefit people identified as white in some countries, beyond what is commonly experienced by non-white people under the same social, political, or economic circumstances."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_privilege

[TheInvisibleMan]

white people may not like hispanic people or Asians or "Arabs"

but they are only AFRAID of black people