Peterson's 12 Rules For Life, have you heard of this?

[bennyboy]

Disparities in educational funding create and compound disparities in hiring.

I want to understand exactly what you mean by this sentence. I read it to mean that school districts in poor areas are funded poorly (perhaps in response to low test scores), and that you're talking about disparities in hiring quality teachers. Is that what you mean by it?

Disparities in pay, if hired, then contribute to poverty- an incentive to crime as income.  At the terminus of all of that unequal policing and unequal sentencing creates and maintains broken families.

I think this needs some stats, but my impression is that it's pretty much dead-on. And it's pretty cancerous-- in communities with very high arrest rates, even families still together will be interacting with highly distressed individuals, leading to a pretty bad ride for everyone there. Shows like "Last Chance High" shed a pretty fair light on the struggles of educators to even get kids to be decent human beings, let alone shine academically.

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As for police brutality, the stats are not so clear-cut. Take killings of civilians by cops-- here's what I've come up with after a few minutes of googling. On the one hand, while 12% of the population are black, 31% of people shot to death by police are black; that's a pretty horrific disparity. On the other hand, about 30% of all police encounters are with black people, which means on a per-encounter basis, black people aren't more likely to be killed than anyone else. Then there's the fact that black cops are equally likely to shoot and kill black people as white ones are-- I would have to assume that they aren't secret KKK members.

So the underlying problem is that police are interacting with black people a lot more than with others. Why is that? Is it because white cops are just itching for an excuse to find black people to interact with? Or is it that police are normally deployed more to impoverished areas because that's where most crimes happen, and that there are a lot of black people in those areas? 3x more black people live in poverty, and 3x more (compared to % of overall population, not in total numbers) are killed, and this correlation must not be ignored. Phoned-in descriptions also are about black people 3x more often, so the description over the wire is often like: "Black male, wearing a hoodie. . . " and so this is going to bring police into contact with black people more often.

Now, I'm sure there's a whole lot of racism in police forces, and this is a major problem. And I've mainly just scanned a few popular articles and some data sheets so far-- so I'm not an expert on the issue now. But it seems to me that numerically, the issue is better explained by economic disparity, and by resultant crime rates in areas, than by racist intent on the part of the police force.

It all comes down to money, man. The way to end ALL these problems is more productivity-- better schools cost money. Better trained teachers and police cost money. Health care, day care, jobs programs. They all cost money. If America can ramp up production, and the government can spend money on engineering projects instead of fucking smart bombs, then a lot of these supposed moral issues are going to be found to be essentially economic ones.

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Now, I know you're going to get back to calling me a white supremacist. Expected, and accepted, that you will do so. But let me say one thing that I think we can both agree with whole-heartedly-- in all these cases, solutions don't have to be considered mutually exclusive. Focusing more on increasing productivity, and therefore average wages, does NOT mean that racism shouldn't be rooted out of the police force, or that black people should be allowed to be discriminated against in the job market.

I'd also say that the police motto should be: risk death rather than dish it out, because it's your fucking job.


Also, I'm going to pre-empt you and recognize that there's a lot stuff like this out there:
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/opi...c958fb21ed

How do you change this, though? How do you tell some middle-aged white mom who sees black kids in hoodies hanging out in the back alley that she's not supposed to call the police? Is she really calling because they're black? What if they were wearing sweater vests or varsity jackets? Is it possible that portrayals of black thugs in the media have fostered a fear of black people who look a particular way?

I don't know the answers, overall. It might just be asshole racists a lot of the time making trouble because they have nothing better to do. But I suspect there's more to it-- the media portrayal of black people as violent has a lot to do with it, and the popularity of gangster rap and so on reinforces this-- a lot of young black people work very hard to LOOK dangerous, don't they? Street cred and all that, no?

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--edit-
I left my original post in hide tags in case you want to get into the issue of policing, but I realize I saw the word "police," and used your last post as a jumping-off point into that issue, even though it wasn't really the main point of your post. On re-reading it, I see a lot of discussion of the economics of racism. That's for sure where I'd start in all this, so I like the direction you're going. My current position is that the race issues comes down to economics-- if poor people are treated differently (or turn out differently), and if black areas have very high poverty rates, then you get a total cluster-fuck correlation: IQ, income, education, crimes, police interactions, police shootings, gang violence. You'd also get a lot of other correlations-- cancer deaths, lifespan differences, musical preferences, even names.

I think the solution is not to cry racism, even though some of it is that-- it's to point to class warfare and lack of productivity; solve class problems, and a lot of that racism is likely to evaporate in my opinion. China's rich people are pumping out skyscrapers and factories, and funding engineering projects all over the world looking like heroes, and our rich people for the most part are sitting on stock portfolios and real estate and funding political campaigns to get controls on fracking removed or whatever. Gotta get people firing on all cylinders. Gotta win gotta win. And THAT is why you educate poor kids, let prisoners out of jail, give people health care and so on-- because fighting to be the best is a lot better than having to learn Mandarin!

(and I know. . . I've studied it. . . fuck Mandarin)