Author Topic: I'm not a bioligist  (Read 11605 times)

yossarian22c

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Re: I'm not a bioligist
« Reply #50 on: March 28, 2022, 11:02:05 AM »
What the issue really comes down to is sex. To be able to tell by looking at a person and know if they have the sexual parts you are interested in. Basically this is the only scenario where a trans woman and cis woman differ in a way that people really care about.

I don't think you're quite right. You're trying to be pragmatic, which is a decent concept, but it's not just about daily pragmatic "what if" social scenarios. I think there is a lot of stuff mixed in with this that goes far beyond just whether you "accept" someone's identity or whether you're flirting with the right people. There's that, but that's sort of surface level stuff. Part of the thing liberals don't understand about well-intentioned conservatives is that a system (social or political) has many facets, most of which are not stated as open propositions. This means that we are essentially unaware, or at least not quite conscious of, much of the stuff that makes up such a system. By making moves to shake up or even de-structure a system, it's not just the things we know that are challenged, but the things we don't know. This is one area where I think the right-wing has a superior theory of interrelationships to the left, which is the notion that we can't name all the things that go on but you change them all when you try to reformulate social relations, and this is something to be very cautious of. In the case of pronoun usage I think there's a sense for some people that something is being challenged and changed that goes deeper than just polite social language. To even articulate what this something is might be quite a challenge, but it can't be swept away as nothing merely because it's difficult to articulate.

Calling Joe Josephine and she instead of he isn't deconstructing some societal fabric. Just like letting Adam and Steve get married didn't lead to the destruction of marriage and society. I'm open to there being some rules and regulations around scholarships, sports, and with individuals being consistent with their gender expression. Meaning people can't be men everywhere but "women" when going to the locker room or Curves.

Fenring

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Re: I'm not a bioligist
« Reply #51 on: March 28, 2022, 11:48:48 AM »
Calling Joe Josephine and she instead of he isn't deconstructing some societal fabric. Just like letting Adam and Steve get married didn't lead to the destruction of marriage and society. I'm open to there being some rules and regulations around scholarships, sports, and with individuals being consistent with their gender expression. Meaning people can't be men everywhere but "women" when going to the locker room or Curves.

Well, this is a fair critique of that position, obviously. But it's also a potentially false analogy. While it's true the same argument was levelled against gay marriage (it undermines marriage, society, etc), this issue is mired by a few points:

1) Marriage is in fact in a pretty bad state generally speaking. Whether this can be laid at the feet of gay marriage is certainly contentious at best, but it's sort of undeniable that marriage is in a manner of speaking under attack. Whether gay marriage was a pertinent part of that attack would be the object to demonstrate.

2) Gay marriage is in fact restricted to gay couples and those who want to attend such events, so in theory if you want to live cloistered away from all that you can more or less accomplish it. To the extent that you may want to attend a pluralistic environment like a university, you're unlikely (in a classroom in any case) to encounter any overtly sexual activity if you wish to avoid it. So the "if you're going to do it I don't want to see it" attitude is largely tenable for someone not comfortable with gay couples. The issue with the trans movement is not just the similar arguments about society, morals, etc, but that it seems to be enforced as a two-way street: so it's not enough to let people do what they want, but you have to also do what they want in some respects. A typical arts environment, among other cases, is to come into a room (or a Zoom room) and immediately either go through the list of everyone's preferred pronouns, or else on Zoom for them to automatically be included in your name as it appears on screen. And lest you think this is just an opt-in situation, it's very likely that declining to do so will be taken as a very overt statement that you refuse to do so, or at least abstain from agreeing with the practice. This makes even mundane (to the extent that anything artistic is mundane) meetings a potentially hazardous ideological minefield. This is extremely different from sexuality, where it is by no means required or even acceptable to ask a group of strangers what their sexual preferences are, to post them on screen, and even to add whether they are married (straight or gay). That it's this in your face makes it quite different from the gay marriage situation vis a vis its effects on everyday life. Someone living in a religious community in a city might very well really not be impacted much by gay marriage, whereas the same is not going to be true of the new language rules and identity politics implicit in the trans movement.

3) Following up on (2), the gay marriage movement, while distinctly part of the general left-leaning trend towards validating what used to be thought of as aberrant lifestyles, was nevertheless pretty concretely its own thing. Gay marriage was about gay marriage, and nothing else that was overtly attached to it. To the extent that it was part of a liberal trend in culture obviously there would never be a "mission accomplished' acknowledgement made after its institution, but at the same time gay couples got what they wanted so it was case closed on that particular grievance. By contrast, the trans movement appears to come as part of a package deal that includes all sorts of various ideological detritus along with it, all of which you must tacitly adopt along with any position you take on the topic of trans people itself. Sometimes this is referred to under the umbrella of CRT, but it doesn't really matter what it's called; the point is that if you wade into the topic of the trans movement, which you increasingly can't avoid doing, you are simultaneously wading into the waters of an entire interpretive structure that covers politics, social mores, personal attitudes, lifestyles, sexual mores, and even abstract concepts like logic and evidence (which are sometimes argued to merely be artifacts of corrupt power structures). So there is simply no way this is "just" about being polite and using the correct pronouns, or about sports and scholarships. It's just that because these matters are so ephemeral and misty, these are the concrete realities we can grasp and argue about, because at least they're intelligible. But the meat of the matter is not 'about' those things. It's about the general view of life; it's an argument about metaphysics to an extent, and about meaning in the world.

rightleft22

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Re: I'm not a bioligist
« Reply #52 on: March 28, 2022, 12:18:04 PM »
So a supreme court justice nominee just said they could not define what a woman is because "I'm not a biologist."

Shouldn't that response in itself be disqualifying? How can one rule on women's rights issues or other laws pertaining to women if they are incapable of articulating what one is?

Wait, I thought gender was a psychological construct these days. So the correct answer for the "properly woke" should have been "I am not a psychologist."

I don't believe the question was asked in good faith
That said a better intro sentence before she explained what she meant could have been "I'm a Judge not a psychologist, sociologist, or biologist....

I do not believe their was a 'correct' answer and she answered it as a Judge, being open to hearing the arguments.

Fenring

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Re: I'm not a bioligist
« Reply #53 on: March 28, 2022, 02:29:47 PM »
Gender is not some esoteric academic theory.  It is simply a fact, one that can be easily shown simply by looking at different cultures and people.  Are skirts only feminine?  Are women always subservient to men?  Are boys always more aggressive than girls?  Are they always more violent?  There are so many assumptions and customs in our society, based on gender, that have very little if any relationship to a person's sex that it not a question of outlook or philosophy, but simply a matter of observable reality.

The only reason gender was not talked about until recently is the almost universal assumption that everything we believed about the differences in sexes was generic or inborn.  That there was no difference between sex and gender.

This is where modern CRT/feminist theory/whatever-you-want-to-call-it is factually wrong about history, both about the term and about social convention. It was a basic assumption of second-wave feminism that gender roles were essentially social conventions, which included household responsibilities, dress, and participation in society. Obviously a huge part of this was opening up the career option for women and the ability (at the time, encouragement) to choose not to have a family. This was well-known at the time, to the point where it was plainly obvious even to conservatives that obviously long hair being feminine wasn't set in stone anywhere, and wearing pink was not feminine unless you decided it was. In fact this concept was so well-established then that we have to take a step back in the present tense as science informs us that some differences between men and women, even in fashion, life choices, and preferences, are in fact biologically determined and are not merely conventions. So to the extent that we ascribe nature to these things, it is more true now than it was in the 60's when the concept of plasticity was even stronger in the humanities than it is now for well-informed people. So that is one thing CRT/whatever is wrong about.

Another thing it's wrong about is that gender wasn't understood until now. And part of this is a language-bending issue. If you're going to use a word in a newly-invented way obviously you'll be able to sell that you've invented the concept you've attached to it, but it's been known not just since the 50's, but for centuries, that there is some spectrum of masculine/feminine in all people, and that you can have a masculin woman and a feminine man. Back then they just called it 'life' and didn't need an academic term for it. Likewise, there were always people who clearly didn't fit into society, both into gender roles (i.e. women belong in the household, should wear women clothes, etc) and in many other ways. Another difference between then (e.g. Elizabethan England) and now is that back then no one fit into society, because the differences between people were huge. Now things are narrowed and normalized, so that you might risk feeling sometimes that people are all doing an impression of each other in language use, manner of dress, meme usage, and especially mores and values. On both liberal and conservative fronts I can pretty much script how an argument would go back and forth on a number of topics, and in 9 cases out of 10 a real live person would say exactly the things I've scripted, like a bot. It wasn't like that back then. So to the extent that normality and fitting into gender roles is such a big deal (to the point of a person saying even their sex-at-birth doesn't fit their self-experience), that is also a fairly new thing since I don't think 'feeling normal' was even a thing hundreds of years ago, such that it would be a big deal if someone didn't feel normal. There was no normal, at least not like there is now. This is due to a combination of processed education and socialization, mass media, commerical branding, and even there mere fact of better nutrition and having less of a health gap in the first world. But people have different internal characteristics along the masculin/feminine axis is not exactly new information, to say the least. All that's changed is how people talk about it. The biology is...interesting...but really not pertinent to this general issue, that IMO nothing new is really being said other than now it's being called an identity and language-oriented normalization issues are arising around it. So that's another ahistorical tacit claim being made.

So I believe you are totally wrong that people previously thought gender was something inborn. Masculin/feminine traits? Yes. But gender was just sex, the thing we call you based on your biology. It was really not complicated. Gender roles was simply the feminist topic of saying that we don't need to conceptualize women's roles as being fixed based on some tradition or antiquated practice. A woman can wear pants and still be a woman, and in fact still be feminine. That is how gender was used as a word. The only reason it was convenient to call it 'gender roles' rather than 'sex roles' is because the latter makes it sound like it's about the sexual act. But now the word "gender" is being related to one's internal dialogue with oneself, self-image, and other things. Fine, fair enough; but that's just a new usage. We haven't discovered these things newly, just now assigned them to a word that previously did not mean that. It's only a magic trick if you think history started in 2010. The things you mention about whether skirts are only feminine, etc, have nothing to do with current gender theory vis a vis identity. In fact, you are unwittingly making second-wave feminist arguments here, because the current conception of gender in fact does presuppose that skirts and dressed are only feminine, and we know this because someone transitioning M-->F shows it (among other ways) by dressing in a way that's traditionally feminine.
« Last Edit: March 28, 2022, 02:34:12 PM by Fenring »

yossarian22c

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Re: I'm not a bioligist
« Reply #54 on: April 07, 2022, 01:31:06 PM »
https://www.npr.org/2022/04/07/1091252803/palm-springs-looks-to-create-a-universal-basic-income-pilot-for-trans-residents

Liberals are idiots. UBI is a great idea. But the important letter is the U - universal, not TBI. Way to take what needs to be the future of post scarcity economics and set it back by a few decades by trying to role it out to the culturally oppressed first. Its an economic policy, apply it to all people in need not just trans persons.

Its like they literally can't see how this is going to play out on a national level. The Fox News headlines write themselves. "California Democrats pay youth to become trans." Face palm.

NobleHunter

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Re: I'm not a bioligist
« Reply #55 on: April 07, 2022, 01:33:23 PM »
I can see some appeal for creating a targeted basic income program but it's going to lose a lot of the savings of UBI since it'll need more monitoring and checking.

yossarian22c

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Re: I'm not a bioligist
« Reply #56 on: April 07, 2022, 01:41:38 PM »
And Fenring, nice post about gender roles and biology vs social expectations. I've always thought a stronger androgynous movement, where people didn't need to fit into one category or the other, would make many trans individuals feel more at ease. The idea that a person needs to deny (or change) their biology to feel at ease in society seems more like a social expectations issue than any inherent biological or neurological issue. But I've always struggled to understand that dynamic while trying to accept people for who they want to be and/or present as, because at the end of the day live and let live. Androgyny seems like a nice fit for what I've head many trans individuals want, at first they want to pass as the opposite sex, but many after they can do that aren't quite satisfied there either, hence the "they" pronoun and non-binary categorization that many of the individuals end up at. 

rightleft22

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Re: I'm not a bioligist
« Reply #57 on: April 07, 2022, 01:53:11 PM »
https://www.npr.org/2022/04/07/1091252803/palm-springs-looks-to-create-a-universal-basic-income-pilot-for-trans-residents

Liberals are idiots. UBI is a great idea. But the important letter is the U - universal, not TBI. Way to take what needs to be the future of post scarcity economics and set it back by a few decades by trying to role it out to the culturally oppressed first. Its an economic policy, apply it to all people in need not just trans persons.

Its like they literally can't see how this is going to play out on a national level. The Fox News headlines write themselves. "California Democrats pay youth to become trans." Face palm.

In context I believe the money to fund the trial is coming from private sources and they defined the criteria of those who would get to apply

So yes Liberals tend to be terrible (idiots) when it comes to optics and messaging but at least its not tax dollars.
It does meet the notion of Freedom as in those paying are Free to do what they want with thier money so those on the right who hate it should be mindful of what kind of noise they make.
(they wont but conservatives can be idiots as well)

Question: Do the qualifications on who is eligible to be part of the trial make any findings of such a trial invalid? If so why?


yossarian22c

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Re: I'm not a bioligist
« Reply #58 on: April 07, 2022, 02:02:23 PM »
I can see some appeal for creating a targeted basic income program but it's going to lose a lot of the savings of UBI since it'll need more monitoring and checking.

I see the appeal, they want to help people. They are just freaking tone deaf to the national conversation and broader optics in how they're helping people.

Also why not UBI for ethnic minorities or women. There are other groups that would have similar economic statistics. Its just going to end up divisive and ineffective to provide economic aid to one group with above average need while ignoring others. Provide economic aid to people with economic need. Because the 18 year old white male aging out of foster care could really use a UBI as well. A trans 45 year old computer programmer with no kids probably doesn't need a UBI. So if you can't make it universal, at least target it based on economic need.

yossarian22c

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Re: I'm not a bioligist
« Reply #59 on: April 07, 2022, 02:07:18 PM »
https://www.npr.org/2022/04/07/1091252803/palm-springs-looks-to-create-a-universal-basic-income-pilot-for-trans-residents

Liberals are idiots. UBI is a great idea. But the important letter is the U - universal, not TBI. Way to take what needs to be the future of post scarcity economics and set it back by a few decades by trying to role it out to the culturally oppressed first. Its an economic policy, apply it to all people in need not just trans persons.

Its like they literally can't see how this is going to play out on a national level. The Fox News headlines write themselves. "California Democrats pay youth to become trans." Face palm.

In context I believe the money to fund the trial is coming from private sources and they defined the criteria of those who would get to apply

...

Quote
The Palm Springs City Council has approved funding for two local organizations to develop a universal basic income program for the California city's transgender and nonbinary residents.

The city council unanimously approved allocating $200,000 for DAP Health and Queer Works in late March. But this was just the first step to develop the program, which would provide a regular no-strings-attached stipend.

The two organizations are now in the works to design the pilot program. They aim to apply for a piece of $35 million in state funding — set aside for universal basic income programs — sometime later this year.

Sounds like tax money to me.

rightleft22

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Re: I'm not a bioligist
« Reply #60 on: April 07, 2022, 02:59:43 PM »
I was remember something I heard for San Francisco

So even if the trial comes back with positive data few will see past how the criteria was defined. So a waist of time

Wayward Son

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Re: I'm not a bioligist
« Reply #61 on: April 07, 2022, 03:05:36 PM »
Well, the Washington Post tried to ask leading Republicans if they could define what a woman is, and, as expected, they fell flat on their faces as anyone else would.  ;D

Some samples:

Quote
“I’m going to tell you right now what is a woman,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) informed the audience at a GOP event after namechecking Jackson. “This is an easy answer. We’re a creation of God. We came from Adam’s rib. God created us with his hands. We may be the weaker sex — we are the weaker sex — but we are our partner — we are our husband’s wife.”

Uh-huh.  So where does that leave unmarried women and widows?  ;D

Quote
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) was asked by a HuffPost reporter to define woman, and replied, “Someone who can give birth to a child, a mother, is a woman. Someone who has a uterus is a woman. It doesn’t seem that complicated to me.” When the reporter asked him whether a woman whose uterus was removed via hysterectomy was still a woman, he appeared uncertain: “Yeah. Well, I don’t know, would they?” ...

Asked again later if he would consider a woman to still be a woman if she lost her reproductive organs to cancer, Hawley said: “I mean, a woman has a vagina, right?”

Gee.  Good question.  And where does that leave a castrated man? ;)

Some Republicans just punted.

Quote
“I don’t have anything for you on that,” said Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.).

“I’m not going to indulge you,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas). ...

Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) shouted his definition of a woman before slipping into a Senate elevator: “An adult female of the human species.” ...

"I have more of a traditional view of what a woman is,” said Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.). ... “My wife.”

Which doesn't help much when you have to decide who qualifies for women's sports.  ;D

Quote
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said a woman is simply someone who is “biologically a woman,” adding that he thinks most Americans can figure out who’s a woman and who’s a man.

“The birds and the bees stuff ― it’s been a while, but I think I remember the general gist of the differences,” Graham said. “To have a hard time answering that question is kind of odd to me.”

Obviously Graham hasn't been keeping up with current events. :)

Many just fell back on the inadequate answer that cherry used:

Quote
In a follow-up email to HuffPost, a spokesperson for Blackburn said her definition of a woman is “Two X chromosomes.” ...

In a written statement, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) offered the same definition as Blackburn: “A woman is born with two X-chromosomes.” ...

Cruz, when asked, immediately answered that a woman is “an adult female human.”

He denied that he had recently looked it up in a dictionary.

“I just happen to speak English,” Cruz said, adding: “A Homo sapien with two X chromosomes.” ...

"Take notes Madam Speaker. I'm about to define what a woman is for you," [Sen. Madison Cawthorn] said. "XX chromosomes, no tallywacker."

Which leaves all those with a single X chromosome or three X chromosomes to two X chromosomes and a natural-born tallywacker out in the lurch.  ;D

With none of the Republican leadership able to provide a good answer, is it any wonder that Jackson declined to try? ;)

Just shows how much more intelligent Jackson is compared to the rest of these bozos.  ;D

Mynnion

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Re: I'm not a bioligist
« Reply #62 on: April 07, 2022, 03:08:56 PM »
Quote
I see the appeal, they want to help people. They are just freaking tone deaf to the national conversation and broader optics in how they're helping people.

Couldn't agree more.  I sometimes wonder if those promoting these ideas want them to fail. 

Another great example is the use of terms like defund the police.  Yeah there are some who actually want the police to disappear but most just want to see demilitarization and an increase in programs that promote de-escalation over the shoot first ask questions mentality that seems to have become the norm.  Why not "Re-imagine Criminal Justice" or something similar.  The same thing with the term "White Privilege."  The term always rubbed me wrong even though I support the idea.  I think of privilege as something you earn not something associated with racial opportunity. 

The Left seems to be constantly trying to recover from self-inflicted wounds.

NobleHunter

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Re: I'm not a bioligist
« Reply #63 on: April 07, 2022, 03:16:37 PM »
Quote
I see the appeal, they want to help people. They are just freaking tone deaf to the national conversation and broader optics in how they're helping people.

Couldn't agree more.  I sometimes wonder if those promoting these ideas want them to fail. 

Another great example is the use of terms like defund the police.  Yeah there are some who actually want the police to disappear but most just want to see demilitarization and an increase in programs that promote de-escalation over the shoot first ask questions mentality that seems to have become the norm.  Why not "Re-imagine Criminal Justice" or something similar.  The same thing with the term "White Privilege."  The term always rubbed me wrong even though I support the idea.  I think of privilege as something you earn not something associated with racial opportunity. 

The Left seems to be constantly trying to recover from self-inflicted wounds.

"Defund the police"  works because all the other options lead to the governments giving police departments more money and generally resulting in few actual changes to policing. Compromising on "Defund the police" will at least take money away from the cops and presumably used for better purposes.

Mynnion

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Re: I'm not a bioligist
« Reply #64 on: April 07, 2022, 03:20:04 PM »
It isn't about what the movement would like to happen.  It is about the gut reaction to the term and the Right's ability to use that reaction to destroy momentum and prevent systemic change.

yossarian22c

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Re: I'm not a bioligist
« Reply #65 on: April 07, 2022, 03:21:02 PM »
Quote
I see the appeal, they want to help people. They are just freaking tone deaf to the national conversation and broader optics in how they're helping people.

Couldn't agree more.  I sometimes wonder if those promoting these ideas want them to fail. 

Another great example is the use of terms like defund the police.  Yeah there are some who actually want the police to disappear but most just want to see demilitarization and an increase in programs that promote de-escalation over the shoot first ask questions mentality that seems to have become the norm.  Why not "Re-imagine Criminal Justice" or something similar.  The same thing with the term "White Privilege."  The term always rubbed me wrong even though I support the idea.  I think of privilege as something you earn not something associated with racial opportunity. 

The Left seems to be constantly trying to recover from self-inflicted wounds.

Agree 100% about "white privilege" (and most of the other terms) especially since 99+% of the "privilege" is the absence of discrimination. So its not something whites need less of (which is the connotation of privilege) but that we just need less discrimination in society.

Mynnion

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Re: I'm not a bioligist
« Reply #66 on: April 07, 2022, 03:27:27 PM »
Quote
especially since 99+% of the "privilege" is the absence of discrimination

I'm not sure I buy this.  I think it is an absence of opportunity.  Much of which has been through discriminatory processes at a societal level (Jim Crow, War on Drugs, Separate But (UN)Equal.

TheDrake

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Re: I'm not a bioligist
« Reply #67 on: April 07, 2022, 04:20:39 PM »
It isn't about what the movement would like to happen.  It is about the gut reaction to the term and the Right's ability to use that reaction to destroy momentum and prevent systemic change.

Except there wasn't any momentum. We tried a lot of things.

Retrain the police
Militarize the police
Community relations
Federal oversight
De-escalation training
Non-lethal weapons
Body cameras
Citizen lawsuits

None of these strategies held police accountable. None of it resulted in very widespread reduction of violent encounters.

So you're left with a very basic strategy. The less money cops have, the fewer no-knock warrants they can serve. The fewer cops are out on the street able to shoot, choke, and beat suspects. The less money cops have, the more selective they'll have to be about  who gets a uniform, a badge, and a gun. The less money cops have, the fewer racially motivated traffic stops they can make.

There are other things that could work, potentially, but the best way to get there is to threaten departments with the one thing they can't stand - budget reductions and freezes.

Of course its easier to get along with people who attempt to do nothing.

Mynnion

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Re: I'm not a bioligist
« Reply #68 on: April 07, 2022, 05:01:38 PM »
Quote
Except there wasn't any momentum. We tried a lot of things.

Retrain the police
Militarize the police
Community relations
Federal oversight
De-escalation training
Non-lethal weapons
Body cameras
Citizen lawsuits

None of these strategies held police accountable. None of it resulted in very widespread reduction of violent encounters.

So you're left with a very basic strategy. The less money cops have, the fewer no-knock warrants they can serve. The fewer cops are out on the street able to shoot, choke, and beat suspects. The less money cops have, the more selective they'll have to be about  who gets a uniform, a badge, and a gun. The less money cops have, the fewer racially motivated traffic stops they can make.

There are other things that could work, potentially, but the best way to get there is to threaten departments with the one thing they can't stand - budget reductions and freezes.

Of course its easier to get along with people who attempt to do nothing.

Which circles us back around to the Left's inability to control the dialogue.  All's I am saying is that using terms like defund the police when the news is covering riots in the cities isn't going to win any supporters and is going to provide plenty of the wrong kind of message.

To be clear I fully support a major overhaul of our criminal justice system.  My views line up with many of the Defund the Police supporters.  I just feel that the term is to provocative and in the end counter productive to real change.

TheDrake

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Re: I'm not a bioligist
« Reply #69 on: April 07, 2022, 05:16:56 PM »
What slogan would have worked for you, marching up and down the street protesting the murder of citizens by police? What does your focus group tell you?

yossarian22c

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Re: I'm not a bioligist
« Reply #70 on: April 07, 2022, 05:55:28 PM »
What slogan would have worked for you, marching up and down the street protesting the murder of citizens by police? What does your focus group tell you?

How about disarm the police?

NobleHunter

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Re: I'm not a bioligist
« Reply #71 on: April 07, 2022, 06:05:10 PM »
How about disarm the police?

Because you want them to be murdered by thugs and drug dealers? /talking point

Liberals would do better to refrain from clutching their pearls over slogans and focus on building a compromise of only cutting police budgets by 20-30%.

TheDrake

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Re: I'm not a bioligist
« Reply #72 on: April 08, 2022, 06:46:31 AM »
I disagree. Slogans can be powerful. Look what happened with Maga. Build back better? Really? It's like the marketing people are all Republicans. Hope and change wasn't bad.

Here's what defund the police did. It planted the discussion as a permanent part of the political landscape, which had never happened before with police brutality, not even after Rodney king. Because if a good cop stops a bad cop from beating a restrained suspect and gets fired rather than praised, zero tax dollars should go to that department until every link in the leadership structure is shown the door.

Maybe the slogan should have been more on point

Defund dirty cops, or corrupt cops, or violent cops.

You really think any slogan is going to bring the cop apologists on board?

Meanwhile the slogan also produced majority support for refunding the police.

Quote
Many activists are pushing for more sweeping changes than those covered in congressional legislation thus far, including the “defunding of police,” which is essentially the reallocation of resources from law enforcement to other social services. A majority of voters surveyed favor some reallocation: 63 percent agree that some funding should be shifted from police departments to establish a new agency of first responders who focus on mental health and addiction-related needs, including 83 percent of Democrats, 60 percent of independents, and 43 percent of Republicans.

Mynnion

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Re: I'm not a bioligist
« Reply #73 on: April 08, 2022, 02:42:58 PM »
I had a boss once tell me if you wanted to know the truth you needed to follow the Benjamins.  When you start to add up the costs of incarceration, police forces, the criminal court system we are looking at something like 1/2 a trillion dollars a year.  We have for profit prisons which have in some case cozy relationships with both police and judges.  These costs exclude the massive economic cost of removing a potential bread winner/provider from a family unit.

We as a culture are fixated on incarceration as the answer to everything.  At the same time as the government has been pushing military grade equipment through grants to police forces (likely backed by the manufacturers of said equipment) cuts have been made in programs designed to provide mental health and substance abuse services that are far more effective than dumping the mentally ill on the streets.

Defunding isn't the short term answer although effectively reducing the number of incarcerated may have that impact in the long run.  Re-imagining how we view Criminal Justice is.  We can play hard ass folks who are only interested in dishing out the maximum punishment or we can be smart and change how we do things.

Our nation has moved to an US/THEM mentality and those who are benefitting from that will do all in their power to keep the divide in place.  Terms like Defund the Police just give them ammunition to prevent any real change.

Fenring

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Re: I'm not a bioligist
« Reply #74 on: April 08, 2022, 03:29:30 PM »
Which leaves all those with a single X chromosome or three X chromosomes to two X chromosomes and a natural-born tallywacker out in the lurch.  ;D

With none of the Republican leadership able to provide a good answer, is it any wonder that Jackson declined to try? ;)

I would like to point out again that while even simple questions may confound people with no knowledge, that doesn't mean that a deconstructive approach is constructive. If you want to illustrate that any 'rule' about who is male/female can be confounded with rare exceptions, you are inadvertently using a deconstructive argument where you can reduce anything to components that don't mean anything. It's partially a result of looking at something at the wrong level of analysis; and partly mistaking what a definition's purpose is. Take a table: what 'defines' it being a table? Has to have 4 legs? What about tables with 8 legs, or one big leg in the middle? Maybe just that it's a broad surface held up by legs...but then what about a small table, or a table suspended from the ceiling somehow that's still load bearing? So you can always poke a hole in an English word by showing instances where a given definition will break down. But unless it's your goal to literally undermine the ability to use language, you do have to accept a generally reasonable definition that fits most use cases. The edge cases matter if it means those people will be discriminated against, but otherwise do not stand as some kind of refutation of a generally useful definition. We can discuss tables, or whether someone is born male or female, without worrying about edge cases. Since they do exist, we can develop specialized language to deal with them, rather than to subvert life in general.

Fenring

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Re: I'm not a bioligist
« Reply #75 on: April 08, 2022, 03:48:22 PM »
About slogans such as "defund the police" it's not as simple as having strong slogans with moderate policy ideas. If anything the 'core' of the groups starting these events are far more extremist than even the slogan would suggest, but with a motte-bailey built in so that anyone involved can claim that those with the extreme views are few and not representative. Those who launch certain protests, e.g. Black Lives Matter, are not moderate groups who you can align with if you have problems with the police. The problem comes when it's the only game in town making a splash, so you feel like you have to support it if you're going to have someone pursue your goals (which incidentally was precisely the mechanism allowing crazy parties in places like Germany 1933 to get popular support). But the people founding BLM are basically maniacs as far as I'm concerned, so even if there's no other game in town challenging police militarization (which is an issue I do care about) I still wouldn't support them. More likely than no there are many topics I care about where no one is going to champion them that I can actually support, so that's just too bad for me (and a strike against crony capitalism mixed with crony government).

Wayward Son

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Re: I'm not a bioligist
« Reply #76 on: April 08, 2022, 04:02:15 PM »
Quote
But unless it's your goal to literally undermine the ability to use language, you do have to accept a generally reasonable definition that fits most use cases. The edge cases matter if it means those people will be discriminated against, but otherwise do not stand as some kind of refutation of a generally useful definition.

Except isn't that the whole purpose of asking Jackson to define what a woman is? ;)

In common parlance, we all agree what a man and a woman is.  It is only those edge cases--people who want their physical sex to reflect their mental sex, or biologically don't fit into the agreed-upon categories--where there is any controversy.  And the only real controversy is in some people trying to deny things to those edge cases.

Republicans want a nice, simple definition that can be applied to everyone, especially the "edge cases."  But they themselves can't come up with such definitions, because life--biological and social--is not a simple, black-or-white, male-or-female thing.  The only way they can achieve this is by forcing people into these categories, and ignoring/repressing the "edge cases" into them.

TheDrake

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Re: I'm not a bioligist
« Reply #77 on: April 08, 2022, 04:34:11 PM »
Quote
Our nation has moved to an US/THEM mentality and those who are benefitting from that will do all in their power to keep the divide in place.  Terms like Defund the Police just give them ammunition to prevent any real change.

I contend that it prevented no change because change wasn't happening. People made the same argument against MLK for driving a wedge between people. Likewise with homosexuality, leading to monstrosities like "Don't ask, don't tell" or marriage with another name, "Civil unions". Because people are always going to be terrified of change, and sometimes you got to drag them kicking and screaming with parades and marches for your rights, and slogans that make conservative people uncomfortable.

The slogan used and made famous by Patrick Henry wasn't "Let's Reform the Monarchy" it was "Give me Liberty or Give me Death" I'm sure that pissed a lot of Royalists off. Couldn't swing them to the cause. In the end, they lost.

So yeah, I'm going to support "Medicare for All" even though the thought of having to get in the same line for care as poor people terrifies conservatives.

And a "woman" is anybody who would like to be called and treated as a woman, with some limited exceptions like physical feats of strength and her own doctor's care. A table can be anything you want to sell that fulfills the purpose of putting a thing on it. If somebody calls a desk a table, does society crumble? They are mostly equivalent at the intersection of small tables and sparse desks without drawers. Could you not use a desk as a table? I know you can use a table as a desk. Do we need to neatly separate them, or squeal "That is NOT a table!"

LetterRip

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Re: I'm not a bioligist
« Reply #78 on: April 08, 2022, 06:04:37 PM »
Medicare is for elderly, Medicaid is for the poor.

TheDrake

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Re: I'm not a bioligist
« Reply #79 on: April 08, 2022, 09:05:33 PM »
Medicare is for elderly, Medicaid is for the poor.

It is now. But Medicaid is means based. Medicare is currently for the elderly. The Medicare for all policy says every citizen would be on it, not just old people. Medicaid would therefore cease to exist by being unnecessary.

cherrypoptart

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Re: I'm not a bioligist
« Reply #80 on: April 08, 2022, 09:12:36 PM »
"When you start to add up the costs of incarceration, police forces, the criminal court system we are looking at something like 1/2 a trillion dollars a year."

Democrats and the left focus on those things but seem to lose sight of what we're getting for that money, or what are the costs of not being tough on crime?

Even as it is every year we have tens of thousands of murders, hundreds of thousands of rapes against women, hundreds of thousands if not millions more rapes against children, millions of robberies, burglaries, muggings, assaults, thefts, and so on. There are a lot of evil people out there and they need to be stopped. If living in a country with one of the highest standards of living in the entire human history of the planet wasn't good enough for them I'm not sure that throwing money or social workers at them is going to do it either. Sure, worth a shot, but there are a lot of just very evil people out there, your Mansons, Dahmers, Bundys, MS-13, crips, bloods, the mafias including but not limited to Italian, Irish, Russian, Mexican, and Amish. It's not a lack of social workers or jobs or money that's causing people to buy fresh unpasteurized milk.

Seriously though, half a trillion dollars a year spent and how many rapists, murderers, and pedos did that keep off the streets and for a while at least keep some women and children safe? That's money very well spent. We see the proof of it every time we set someone who should be in jail free and they prove it by raping, murdering, or molesting someone soon after their release.

It's interesting how the left including Justice Jackson doesn't display as much sympathy for the victims as the perps, including that pedo pornographer she let off with just 3 months and I don't care if he was "just" 18 because all of his victims were much, much younger than that. Judges like her with decisions like that are more problem than solution, and whatever it costs to keep children safe from porno predators like that is well worth it.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10649571/Pedophile-center-Ketanji-Brown-Jackson-hearing-continued-looking-images-children.html

TheDrake

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Re: I'm not a bioligist
« Reply #81 on: April 09, 2022, 08:57:58 AM »
Most people incarcerated are not violent criminals. 45% are for drug offenses. Are we significantly safer than Canadians? We imprison six times more per Capita than they do. Would you be terrified to walk the lawless streets of... Toronto?

Crunch

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Re: I'm not a bioligist
« Reply #82 on: April 09, 2022, 09:37:27 AM »
So here’s the lessons learned from this confirmation:

1. Child porn is no big deal
2. Women are not valued
3. Pedophilia is just on orientation

Prediction - at least two of you will, in the next 18 months, tell me that “love has no age” and call me a pedophobe.

cherrypoptart

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Re: I'm not a bioligist
« Reply #83 on: April 09, 2022, 01:26:31 PM »
It might be illegal to mention this nowadays but I just looked at the racial demographics of Canada and it was interesting, 72.9% European 17.7% Asian 4.9% Indigenous 3.1% African 1.3% Latin American 0.2% Oceanian. Of course there isn't just race but also the fact that Canada didn't have much slavery, according to the internet about 4,200 slaves in Canada between 1671 and 1834 when the British got rid of slavery and two-thirds of the slaves were indigenous people with one third black, so the few black people Canada does have probably don't have the same hateful grievance attitude against their country. Canada is also a lot more particular about who gets to immigrate there. Not just racist either but ageist and ableist.

A little more sidebar about Canada from wiki: Indigenous people are vastly over-represented and make up a rising share in the Canadian prison system, making up 30.04% of the offender population in 2020, compared to 4.9% of the total population. In 2018-2019, the offender population included Caucasians at 54.2% and Black people at 7.2%; meanwhile, Asian people made up only 5.3%, thereby being vastly underrepresented compared to their share of the overall Asian population at 17.7%.

As for drug use being non-violent, passing around child pornography might be considered non-violent too, particularly by judges like Jackson. The guy she sentenced to only three months didn't rape the child in the videos. Someone else did that. The stock broker or Hollywood A-lister snorting lines of coke off hundred dollar bills didn't torture a female Mexican cop and her husband to death and leave their violated bodies in the street to get information about the other members of her anti-cartel task force but that's how the sausage gets made and distributed. It's a violent process. So just legalize drugs? Then we get more of people like the drug-addled homeless man pushing an innocent Asian woman onto the train tracks and killing her because "she stole my jacket", or another man in London smashing a stranger's head with a brick while high on a synthetic drug but having his lawyer argue that he was not guilty of murder because he was suffering an abnormality of his mental functioning at the time, or the mother of a 3-year-old Michigan girl found stabbed inside a garbage bag who says SpongeBob told her to kill her in a hallucination.

So when that happens then just prosecute and jail? That's a day late and a dollar short and no help at all to the victims.

And that's where the libertarian take on drugs fails. And the Democrat idea too. Just leave people be and let them do their thing until they hurt someone? When doing their thing often makes them violently and murderously psychotic, waiting until after someone gets hurt is waiting too long. Alcohol can do the same thing and it's not illegal? Well maybe learn something there and don't make the same mistake twice and make it worse. Being soft on crimes hurts more people than it helps and it hurts more of the wrong people too, the innocent ones particularly the children.

NobleHunter

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Re: I'm not a bioligist
« Reply #84 on: April 09, 2022, 01:32:48 PM »
cherry, you're aware the data shows that severe incarceration and other "tough on crime" policies fail at either deterring crime or preventing recidivism?

cherrypoptart

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Re: I'm not a bioligist
« Reply #85 on: April 09, 2022, 02:16:43 PM »
I'm not aware of that. The idea that we're tough on crime now is the fallacy. We're not tough enough. Jackson proved it. Three months for child pornography? And even five, six, or ten years is considered tough and when that doesn't prevent recidivism then being tough on crime is a failure? How about life in prison with no parole for child pornographers who are purposefully distributing it? For people guilty of murder, attempted murder, rape with a conviction at a higher standard of beyond a shadow of a doubt, gang violence like drive by shootings, and other violent crimes like that? That's what I'd consider being tough on crime and it would prevent recidivism. We're not tough on crime. We're catch and release. And the prisons are madhouses often run by the inmates and instead of teaching them useful skills to be contributing members of society often times they are gang recruitment centers that train criminals on how not to get caught so easily next time. A prison in which the inmates rape each other isn't a tough prison, not tough as in run with strict discipline. I could agree with prison reform if by reform it meant that the prisoners would be controlled better. If they aren't expected to act right in prison what makes anyone expect that they'll act right when they are released?

kidv

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Re: I'm not a bioligist
« Reply #86 on: April 09, 2022, 02:52:17 PM »
Three months for child pornography?

A question -- could someone please track down if that person re-offended?

cherrypoptart

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Re: I'm not a bioligist
« Reply #87 on: April 09, 2022, 04:30:03 PM »
From the stories I've seen he hasn't reoffended yet. Some sketchiness but nothing illegal. He's still young though, which was ostensibly why he wasn't put in prison for longer. Ostensibly because there could be another factor involved but of course it would be racist to mention it. Besides which just because someone never offends again doesn't mean they shouldn't serve a long sentence for serious crimes. And whether or not it's a deterrent shouldn't matter either. The victims deserve more from our justice system than criminals getting one free use opportunity with them.

Crunch

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Re: I'm not a bioligist
« Reply #88 on: April 09, 2022, 06:50:01 PM »
cherry, you're aware the data shows that severe incarceration and other "tough on crime" policies fail at either deterring crime or preventing recidivism?

You’re aware that the point of prison is not to deter crime nor prevent recidivism?

Fenring

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Re: I'm not a bioligist
« Reply #89 on: April 09, 2022, 07:45:35 PM »
You’re aware that the point of prison is not to deter crime nor prevent recidivism?

This is an opinion, not a fact. There is no fact regarding what prisons are 'for'. They existed before and continue to do so, and one can create justifications about why that's ok. To know what they used to be for you'd have to look way back in history. At this point they're here because they're here.

cherrypoptart

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Re: I'm not a bioligist
« Reply #90 on: April 10, 2022, 05:12:42 AM »
I agree with Crunch. If we wanted to deter crime we would do something like the Muslims do and cut off hands for stealing and then for worse crimes the punishments start getting serious. If we were actually concerned with recidivism we wouldn't let them out. So what's left? Punishment. Prisons are a punishment for getting caught and convicted of doing something wrong. The punishment may be too lenient in the minds of some and too harsh in the minds of others or some combination of too harsh and too lenient in the minds of people like myself but it is what it is. Thinking it's something else is just getting set up for disappointment. If sometimes it serves as a deterrent or rehabilitation or stops recidivism that's great and it's worth shooting for but I think we all agree that none of that is 100% whereas practically no one will disagree that prison punishes.

TheDeamon

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Re: I'm not a bioligist
« Reply #91 on: April 10, 2022, 09:47:43 AM »
It might be illegal to mention this nowadays but I just looked at the racial demographics of Canada and it was interesting, 72.9% European 17.7% Asian 4.9% Indigenous 3.1% African 1.3% Latin American 0.2% Oceanian. Of course there isn't just race but also the fact that Canada didn't have much slavery, according to the internet about 4,200 slaves in Canada between 1671 and 1834 when the British got rid of slavery and two-thirds of the slaves were indigenous people with one third black, so the few black people Canada does have probably don't have the same hateful grievance attitude against their country. Canada is also a lot more particular about who gets to immigrate there. Not just racist either but ageist and ableist.

Uh, you might have heard of a thing called the underground railroad? A lot of escaped slaves wound up in Canada after a certain Supreme Court ruling meant just escaping to a "free state" wasn't enough to ensure continued freedom.

Tangentially, that also ties into another reason why Canada lurched to the left after the 1970's. Vietnam War draft dodgers obtaining Canadian citizenship and having kids, or going to work in education fields inside Canada.

cherrypoptart

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Re: I'm not a bioligist
« Reply #92 on: April 11, 2022, 01:29:23 AM »
That should result in people being even more grateful but their incarceration rate is still double their population percentage. I could see indigenous people being sore about Canada but not black people, and I wonder if all the excuses you hear about America for the high crime rate apply to Canada, meaning that I don't see how those excuses could apply, good excuses too like the the welfare system incentivizing fatherless households, a longer history of slavery, drugs being allowed to flow into their neighborhoods, and the rest of it. How much of that went on in Canada? And then you have the Asians with five times the black population but a couple of percentage points lower for their incarceration rate. I guess the main thing that explains all of that is proven by this post even existing: racism.

I was wondering if we beat Canada to the punch here. Do they have any black Supreme Court justices, or black women? While I was looking into that I stumbled upon some controversy with one of their black women judges. Apparently, a higher court than hers got it into their heads that one of her rulings was tainted by favorable racism in which she found a defendant not guilty by reason of being the same race as him. Her verdict was overturned by the next higher court but then that was overturned by their Supreme Court. It was just interesting that they actually went there.

"In 1995, Sparks heard the case R v S (RD), in which a 15-year old black teenager was accused of hitting a police officer with his bicycle while the officer was attempting to arrest another person. Sparks acquitted the defendant, and in her decision she explicitly appealed to the "prevalent attitude of the day" as social context relevant to the ruling. The legal scholars Allan C. Hutchinson and Kathleen Strachan later summarized Sparks's specific finding in the case as follows: the police officer in question was acting in a context in which police officers have been known to overreact while dealing with non-white people, and certain claims by the defendant were believable in context, with the consequence that the Crown had not discharged its evidentiary burden to prove that all of the alleged offenses had occurred beyond a reasonable doubt. The Crown appealed Sparks's decision, focusing their case on the possible apprehension of bias, asserting that as a black Nova Scotian Sparks may have been biased towards the black Nova Scotian defendant. The motivation for this appeal caused substantial controversy, particularly since the allegation of bias was directed against the first black woman to be a judge in Canada, who was also at that time the only black female judge in Nova Scotia, as well as the most senior woman and only racialized minority judge in the province's family court bench. The appeal was initially successful, and Sparks's decision was overturned by the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal, but the case was taken up by the Supreme Court of Canada who in 1997 reversed the decision by the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal and restored Sparks's original decision. This appeal and the Supreme Court's rejection of it have been studied for their implications of bias in the Canadian justice system, and how they affect the reasonable apprehension of bias. The political scientist Shanti Fernando wrote that the appeal against Sparks assumed two things: first that to observe the existence of systemic racial bias in the legal system is to violate judicial impartiality, and second that judges are more sympathetic to defendants of the same ethnicity. Hutchinson and Strachan wrote that the case functions "as a springboard" for understanding the connection between a judge's interpretation and their identity in their legal decision-making. Judges have subsequently argued that the absence of similar official accusations of bias against white judges does not signify that white judges have never been biased towards white defendants, but rather demonstrates a depth of bias against non-white people in the Canadian justice system at the time."

------------------------------------------

I don't know the particulars of the case but her tortured reasoning seems more like a version of jury nullification where as judge she's letting the person off not because she doesn't think he actually hit the police officer with a bicycle while the officer was arresting someone else but because, as the wiki article stated, "the police officer in question was acting in a context in which police officers have been known to overreact while dealing with non-white people, and certain claims by the defendant were believable in context, with the consequence that the Crown had not discharged its evidentiary burden to prove that all of the alleged offenses had occurred beyond a reasonable doubt." That sounds a lot like nonsense but actually it's even less non-sensical than Judge Jackson letting a pedo-pornographer off with 3 months.

Now the same thing happens a lot with white judges and white perps too as we've seen numerous times like with a rapist or a drunk driver who kills a family getting probation as long as they are young white men, at least one of whom was suffering from affluenza at the time, and the judge wouldn't want to ruin their lives.

TheDrake

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Re: I'm not a bioligist
« Reply #93 on: April 11, 2022, 09:43:54 AM »
The death penalty and canings didn't seem to curb the drug trade in Thailand, so how punitive would you like to get, cherry, and is it about reducing crime or about hurting people in retribution?

Thailand, by the way, is easing away from the punitive incarceration route, and the killing people route.

Quote
Eighty percent of more than 300,000 inmates in the Thai penitentiary system are currently detained on drug-related charges, according to official figures.

Quote
"The new law shifts away from the old concept that emphasises only suppression because more suppression has not resulted in drug eradication," Chatchawan Suksumjit, a senator who chaired a joint parliamentary committee overseeing changes to the new narcotic laws, told Reuters.

"Punishment will now be divided between low level, which means drug users, who will systematically receive treatment rather than prison, while high level offenders will face more severe punishment," he said.

As much as people want to glorify Old Testament Justice, it doesn't work but is paradoxically embraced by supposed Christians with a purported philosophy of forgiveness and the redemption of the sinner.

Thailand gives up on failed drug laws

msquared

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Re: I'm not a bioligist
« Reply #94 on: April 11, 2022, 09:47:58 AM »
The forgiveness and redemption is only for them and their friends, not for the other.

rightleft22

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Re: I'm not a bioligist
« Reply #95 on: April 11, 2022, 10:05:23 AM »
I find that many people throw around words like Love, forgiveness, freedom without ever really knowing what they mean when the use them.


Fenring

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Re: I'm not a bioligist
« Reply #96 on: April 11, 2022, 10:31:56 AM »
I'll play devil's advocate for a moment, just to try to steel man cherry's position. One of the things about love, forgiveness, and freedom, is that they are not innately easy virtues to foster, and I suspect they develop for humankind over time in relation to our ability to generate good environments (yes, I'm using a lefty argument to support a righty position!). If you are living in a crime-ridden corrupt cesspool you will not be able to enjoy freedom regardless of your personal beliefs; otherwise you may 'feel free' but be mostly restricted in your choice. In fact I doubt if someone stripped of most choice will even psychologically be able to feel free. Likewise with forgiveness: if there is no quid pro quo at all then this virtue will be almost impossible to foster. When dealing with criminality I think part of the right-wing position is not so much that each person must be punished for the joy of seeing them punished, but rather out of concern for the disordering of society. Let your guard fall, and criminals will slowly erode the safety of neighborhoods, undermine faith in the system, and lower all of our standards. I think it goes something like this.

If I'm right, then the need to ensure criminals are dealt with strongly (tough on crime) is an attempt at having a strong immune response to infection, which in turn is actually the perceived best means of fostering the forgiveness, freedom, and love that require so much environmental nurturing. At least, this is in theory. And I actually agree that our civilization is much closer to chaos than most would want to admit; see what happens when lockdowns are threatened (hoarding toilet paper, etc) and you'll see just how little it would take to devolve into utter pandemonium. I don't think we are quite so far from barbarism at all times, and keeping this thin layer of civilization present and strong may require stern measures. I do not happen to agree with right-wingers about the prison system, especially in regard to non-violent crime, but I do agree with the sentiment that something has to be done and we can't be lax about keeping the environment around us as clean as possible so as to make fostering virtue not only possible but attractive.

rightleft22

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Re: I'm not a bioligist
« Reply #97 on: April 11, 2022, 11:12:47 AM »
Its all how you define the words
If one is assumes the act of forgiveness means one cannot hold the person forgiveness accountable or responsible for their actions then your argument holds. There is no place for forgiveness in the 'justice' system.

Phycological the experience of Freedom often has little to do with what one can or cannot do. Thus those the make the loudest noise about Freedom are also those most willing to take it away from others in the name of freedom.  The rise of the dictator proves that to avoid the fear of losing what one has one will sell ones freedom in the hope of retaining it.

Love, Freedom, Forgiveness, Justice, Boundaries, Social Contract we think we know what we mean but keep stumbling on contradictions, paradox, hypocrisy, fear, ignorance, greed... till those words have very little meaning. 

rightleft22

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Re: I'm not a bioligist
« Reply #98 on: April 11, 2022, 11:37:43 AM »
Just as Fear is to Courage as Doubt is to Faith... so to  the virtue of Love, forgiveness and experience of freedom none of which are tested when all around us conforms to our will and imaginings of how the world should work and conform... To argue that one can only Love and forgive when things are good suggests to me a huge disconnect of what it means to love and forgive. How it is those virtues and agility the engenders the experience of freedom. Or so the wisdom traditions suggest.

Sadly the virtues and so our real freedoms are the first things we surrender when life is not as we will it to be. the false quest of 'freedom'.

Fenring

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Re: I'm not a bioligist
« Reply #99 on: April 11, 2022, 12:05:56 PM »
Well, leftright, part of the issue is indeed language - specifically about what a person actually wants versus how they express that (or are unwilling to). Let's say a person has a deep-down conviction that they are more important than everyone else; actually this is probably the norm. And let's say additionally they have a deep-down conviction that other people innately owe them things, but virtue of being more important. And the conclusion of this line is the deep-down feeling that you have an innate right to enslave any or all to serve you. I don't think any of these sentiments are particularly rare, but they are rarely concious and therefore the manner of expression in language becomes mired in these hidden desires. So when someone  says "people should let me do as I wish" (which to some is how they define freedom, although not me) that may actually be an expression of the inner feeling "I should be treated as a king, and this is a minimum requirement of that". Obviously this sort of statement will not adequately express the inner feeling, even setting aside how socially unacceptable it would be to say such a thing even if you were aware you felt it. So yes, the propositions (love, forgiveness, etc) do not end up meaning what they claim to mean on paper, because the source of these statements isn't a long intellectual discernment process but rather the best way to express the primal urges they felt anyhow.

Thinking along these lines, it might not be quite proper to say that many claim to believe in freedom but are hypocrites. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they do not in fact believe in freedom in the sense you might mean it, as would be revealed in a Socratic dialogue. They believe in something or other, which is labelled as "freedom", but in other parlance might mean something quite different. Catholics define freedom as meaning the ability to choose the good; but it does not mean the ability to define the good. So it is actually the opposite of saying you can choose to do anything you want; the idea of doing any thing you wish would be more likely defined as being trapped in a prison of your own desire, not freedom. I suspect the Buddhists might agree with this particular proposition, at least. But the American "the only law shall be do as thou wilt" is obviously very different from this. I would call that license, not freedom. So the word choice and baked in content matters a lot. And yes, there is room for hypocrisy even if a person has clearly defined what they mean. But I don't think the right-wing position is inherently hypocritical.