4597

I thought we moved into the realms of developed, developing and moved away from the class system entirely. The US is a developed nation and should be compared to other developed nations, not developing ones.

4598

Your peers are not necessarily defined by how rich you are.

For example, Trump thinks the Kennedys and Bushes are his peers. They aren’t.

4599

One of DJT’s people.

4600

If you want to understand why the US is so different from other developed nations, then you have to stop assuming that it’s just like other developed nations.

4601

I am sure you don’t mean it that way but it sounds like an abdication of responsibility.

4602

It’s not an abdication of responsibility. It’s an indictment of our system and the root causes of our problems. They do not stem from some innate original sin related to American-ness (Damn that Constitution! Damn that unique Yankee individualism!). They are due to the same social problems that developing countries face. And they can be solved in the same way that developed countries have solved them.

In fact, I think that it is an abdication of responsibility to compare the US to Western Europe and whenever the US falls short exclaim “Americans just have a different culture, oh well. ¯_(ツ)_/¯.”

4603

I don’t need a reminder that the USA is different, and I am not lowering the bar so you can say some nation that gets taken over by a military coup every couple of generations makes the USA look better.

After all, when you say inequality, and I say inequality, I suspect we’re saying something incredibly different.

4604

I don’t see how relegating the US to the minor leagues makes them look better! It should be a national embarassment.

4605

I suppose you’re making some sort of joke with this.

I am guessing Japan might show up nicely on your list… and if you think there isn’t racism there I have a coupe of bridges to sell you.

Here’s the actual joke, ask someone who is black how much of this world they think is fair, yes even in the “favorite” nations, and I suspect they’re not going to pull out charts and measure the USA homicide rates to Angola’s. The fact you would even use those terms… right now, right here… It’s like you’re on different planet.

edit: you added that last sentence which makes it seem like maybe you weren’t actually making a joke.

4606

The “Fuck You, haha” excuse.

4607

Amazon has a lot of problems, this is not one of them.

4608

Sorry, I think we are talking about different things.

When I mentioned “inequality” I only meant income inequality. Which is about the same here as in Argentina and Angola. And I believe that income inequality drives crime, which is why Western Europe is in a completely different group when it comes to homicide.

I was not referring to racism, so obviously in this thread my usage was confusing. Maybe it’s too much of a derail.

4609

This is a good point, I think. America isn’t a European nation vs a Latin American colonial nation; it’s both a European non-colonial nation AND a New World colonial nation at the same time, and so it has attributes of both, including big issues with wealth and social inequalities that remain from that formative period.

4610

We have an income inequality topic. And this attempt to shift the discussion about Black Lives, actual real life breathing brown and black people into this discussion about the poor is absolutely appropriate, but not here.

Racism and inequality does not suddenly stop happening simply because you have money. Try standing in a store and not getting service, likely literally being ignored, or having someone want to call the cops on you for no other reason than thinking someone like you just doesn’t belong there. Try living knowing that if you get a nice car, you might encounter the police… a lot. Hell try waking up and knowing every single day of your life there are people out there who think you are less than an animal, hate, literally hate that you were born and don’t want you to breathe another breath.

We have police literally murdering people for nothing or in one case, maybe 20 dollars. That’s not about the poor… that’s hate and indifference to a person they didn’t see as a person. That’s inequality at the highest level there is, and rooted in our history of trying to prove generation after generation that yes the black souls ripped from their homelands and forced to endure horrific slavery and oppression are indeed people, are indeed citizens and that Black Lives Matter.

We’re not going to solve the world’s poverty problem with the BLM movement, but maybe, maybe we can stop people getting murdered for nothing.

4611

https://www.haydenplanetarium.org/tyson/commentary/2020-06-03-reflections-on-color-of-my-skin.php

We went on for two more hours. But before we retired for the night we searched for common denominators among the stories. We had all driven different cars—some were old, others were new, some were undistinguished, others were high performance imports. Some police stops were in the daytime, others were at night. Taken one-by-one, each encounter with the law could be explained as an isolated incident where, in modern times, we all must forfeit some freedoms to ensure a safer society for us all. Taken collectively, however, you would think the cops had a vendetta against physicists because that was the only profile we all had in common. In this parade of automotive stop-and-frisks, one thing was for sure, the stories were not singular, novel moments playfully recounted. They were common, recurring episodes. How could this assembly of highly educated scientists, each in possession of the PhD—the highest academic degree in the land—be so vulnerable to police inquiry in their lives? Maybe the police cued on something else. Maybe it was the color of our skin. The conference I had been attending was the 23rd meeting of the National Society of Black Physicists. We were guilty not of DWI (Driving While Intoxicated), but of other violations none of us knew were on the books: DWB (Driving While Black), WWB (Walking While Black), and of course, JBB (Just Being Black).

4612
4613

FTFY and it does make a difference. Many good-hearted people who are focused specifically on racism and black violence aren’t differentiating for Black Lives Matter. I’ve seen all sorts of signs during these protests.

How do you separate all that though? What about the war on drugs? Pretty damn racist and a vehicle for racist killings. Is that also out of scope?

4614

This is excellent, thanks for posting!

4615

I want to be clear I am not calling you out, in specific, for this*. But this passive voice trend is a big part of the culture issue.

Police didn’t shoot a man, it was an officer involved shooting. They didn’t fire the gun, a firearm was discharged during the process. Police didn’t beat the shit out of a man, the victim suffered injuries in the process.

Its odious, and the degree to which the media plays along to the framing that police desire in order to deflect and escape culpability is part of the cultural rot.

*you didn’t name the article or data, and you aren’t a TV reporter regurgitating the police script they feed you. I’m only replying to you because you posted it.

4616