Posted: Sat Jan 06, 2007 7:07 pm
I think you would be surprised at how many college educated white people think that they are colorblind and that race is no longer an issue.
It wasn't all that long ago that blacks were being lynched in this country and the economic and social scars are still ugly and raw. While whites tend to have equity, blacks tend to have debt. We can trace this straight back to the days when white men were whipping black people in the cotton fields and more recently to Jim Crow laws and housing discrimination. If our parents were prevented from living in any but the poorest parts of town and couldn't borrow a dime or make a decent wage we'd stand a much lower chance of getting an education and a much higher chance of criminality as well. The very idea that the average person can go from nothing to something is bullshit. It happens occasionally but for most people they'll be lucky to do slightly better than their parents. And what is slightly better than living in a housing projects with your grandma because your mother had a heart attack at 25 while smoking crack (ten year old neighbor of mine)? Renting an unsubsidized apartment? Actually graduating high school? Assitant manager at a retail store?
Remember, we can't solve the problems of our school system by "throwing money at them" so it's best to starve them to death according to the neo-cons so the schools that serve the worst off amongst us end up having the least money to help these children. All those private schools out there are sitting empty waiting for inner city kids with vouchers to come take a seat, right? Bullshit. It's a mess and the policies of the neo-cons make it worse. The under-served poor children of this country (disproportionally black) are the ones most likely to be lured into ciminality and thus it is more likely they will commit a murder. Note that in other civilized countries the murder rate tends to be much much lower and there is only one factor that correlates to this lower rate: the strength of the welfare state. The neo-cons have convinced us that welfare is evil but I personally think that a much lower crime rate is a pretty good trade-off for something that's never cost more than a few percent of our budget. War, on the other hand, is good according to the neo-cons and we sure do spend a lot on that, like over 70% of our budget. But liberals are bad so...
We can ignore race briefly in the question of the death penalty. How about the insane? Texas kills people that are so fucked up the only way they can get them straight enough to know they're being killed is to shoot them so full of thorazine that they drool. Texas also regularly kills people that are fantasticly retarded. Do we actually gain anything from this? Oh, that's right, Reagan eliminated our public mental health system so we have no place to treat these people other than prison or the execution chamber. Again, I think that's barbaric, but call me an evil liberal for wanting to help people rather than hurt them.
Even the person convicted of the most heinous of murders will not kill again if he/she is locked in a maximum security prison without chance of parole for the rest of his/her life. As one person stated in the report, the death penalty creates a whole new set of victims. In the interest of justice we must be very careful when killing a convict (unlike the way it's done in Iraq) to do our best to make sure we are killing the right person. This means the trial must be replayed over and over again and the victim's loved ones have to have the incident refreshed for them again and again in excruciating detail. And that is still no guarantee that we've gotten it right. The Innocence Project has freed 14 people that were sentenced to death since 1992. That seems to me to be about 14 too many wrongful convictions. How many innocent people with no DNA evidence have been killed in this country? How many is an acceptable number? I say there is no acceptable rate of error.
TankAzz, of course I came out swinging. I throw the ball out to the haters and they ducked. I'm really tired of people letting it pass when these neo-con dumbshits spout off without any kind of logic or reason. I think ZSpider trying to turn Meadows into some kind of troop hater really set me off. Stupid fucker. He knows she meant the legislators that approved the war. Not a single one of the Republicans has a child in the military though there are plenty of their children that are ripe for service. And only one Democrat has a child in the services so I'm not giving those that voted for war a break either, but rather than argue the point made, ZSpider tries to accuse the accuser. It's all lipservice to patriotism with no thought of collective or personal sacrifice or its effect on anyone else. Let the poor kids die so we can have cheap gasoline. They put a "Support Our Troops" sticker on their SUV so people will see it at the Walmart. He can afford the gasoline so he should be able to waste as much as he wants despite the fact we are at war. Until this fiasco we, as a people, have shared in the sacrifices with increased taxes to pay for the war, and rationing of materials and goods so they can be diverted to the war effort. But these people are happy to send someone else's kids off to die while they go shopping.
But ultimately what sticks in my craw is the utter lack of skill or thought these people "argue" with (and there are only three of them, not including the Pigster). Well, here was a chance for them to defend a basic tenant of the conservative platform and they hid. I would've been more than collegial if anyone had actually decided to take up the fight (I gave them a couple of days to come up with something). If you support something as heinous as the death penalty then you should be able to defend it. Belief is not enough. We're pissing away lives and treasure in this country and in senseless wars abroad and it's because the neo-cons are (were?) in control and their beliefs, not logic or reason, are how they steer their course. It's foolish and dangerous behavior to lead by faith alone.
"My job is to repeat things until they are true." --George W. Bush
It wasn't all that long ago that blacks were being lynched in this country and the economic and social scars are still ugly and raw. While whites tend to have equity, blacks tend to have debt. We can trace this straight back to the days when white men were whipping black people in the cotton fields and more recently to Jim Crow laws and housing discrimination. If our parents were prevented from living in any but the poorest parts of town and couldn't borrow a dime or make a decent wage we'd stand a much lower chance of getting an education and a much higher chance of criminality as well. The very idea that the average person can go from nothing to something is bullshit. It happens occasionally but for most people they'll be lucky to do slightly better than their parents. And what is slightly better than living in a housing projects with your grandma because your mother had a heart attack at 25 while smoking crack (ten year old neighbor of mine)? Renting an unsubsidized apartment? Actually graduating high school? Assitant manager at a retail store?
Remember, we can't solve the problems of our school system by "throwing money at them" so it's best to starve them to death according to the neo-cons so the schools that serve the worst off amongst us end up having the least money to help these children. All those private schools out there are sitting empty waiting for inner city kids with vouchers to come take a seat, right? Bullshit. It's a mess and the policies of the neo-cons make it worse. The under-served poor children of this country (disproportionally black) are the ones most likely to be lured into ciminality and thus it is more likely they will commit a murder. Note that in other civilized countries the murder rate tends to be much much lower and there is only one factor that correlates to this lower rate: the strength of the welfare state. The neo-cons have convinced us that welfare is evil but I personally think that a much lower crime rate is a pretty good trade-off for something that's never cost more than a few percent of our budget. War, on the other hand, is good according to the neo-cons and we sure do spend a lot on that, like over 70% of our budget. But liberals are bad so...
We can ignore race briefly in the question of the death penalty. How about the insane? Texas kills people that are so fucked up the only way they can get them straight enough to know they're being killed is to shoot them so full of thorazine that they drool. Texas also regularly kills people that are fantasticly retarded. Do we actually gain anything from this? Oh, that's right, Reagan eliminated our public mental health system so we have no place to treat these people other than prison or the execution chamber. Again, I think that's barbaric, but call me an evil liberal for wanting to help people rather than hurt them.
Even the person convicted of the most heinous of murders will not kill again if he/she is locked in a maximum security prison without chance of parole for the rest of his/her life. As one person stated in the report, the death penalty creates a whole new set of victims. In the interest of justice we must be very careful when killing a convict (unlike the way it's done in Iraq) to do our best to make sure we are killing the right person. This means the trial must be replayed over and over again and the victim's loved ones have to have the incident refreshed for them again and again in excruciating detail. And that is still no guarantee that we've gotten it right. The Innocence Project has freed 14 people that were sentenced to death since 1992. That seems to me to be about 14 too many wrongful convictions. How many innocent people with no DNA evidence have been killed in this country? How many is an acceptable number? I say there is no acceptable rate of error.
TankAzz, of course I came out swinging. I throw the ball out to the haters and they ducked. I'm really tired of people letting it pass when these neo-con dumbshits spout off without any kind of logic or reason. I think ZSpider trying to turn Meadows into some kind of troop hater really set me off. Stupid fucker. He knows she meant the legislators that approved the war. Not a single one of the Republicans has a child in the military though there are plenty of their children that are ripe for service. And only one Democrat has a child in the services so I'm not giving those that voted for war a break either, but rather than argue the point made, ZSpider tries to accuse the accuser. It's all lipservice to patriotism with no thought of collective or personal sacrifice or its effect on anyone else. Let the poor kids die so we can have cheap gasoline. They put a "Support Our Troops" sticker on their SUV so people will see it at the Walmart. He can afford the gasoline so he should be able to waste as much as he wants despite the fact we are at war. Until this fiasco we, as a people, have shared in the sacrifices with increased taxes to pay for the war, and rationing of materials and goods so they can be diverted to the war effort. But these people are happy to send someone else's kids off to die while they go shopping.
But ultimately what sticks in my craw is the utter lack of skill or thought these people "argue" with (and there are only three of them, not including the Pigster). Well, here was a chance for them to defend a basic tenant of the conservative platform and they hid. I would've been more than collegial if anyone had actually decided to take up the fight (I gave them a couple of days to come up with something). If you support something as heinous as the death penalty then you should be able to defend it. Belief is not enough. We're pissing away lives and treasure in this country and in senseless wars abroad and it's because the neo-cons are (were?) in control and their beliefs, not logic or reason, are how they steer their course. It's foolish and dangerous behavior to lead by faith alone.
"My job is to repeat things until they are true." --George W. Bush
