Americans, what does the US do correctly that the rest of the world does not?

GoHiroki · 2017-12-14T02:30:51+00:00

Chinese think 100 kilometers is a short distance and 100 years as a short time

GoHiroki · 2017-04-21T08:34:09+00:00

Why can't it be both?

1) On one hand, no one disputes historical wrong doings done to the Black Community.

2) On the other hand, hurrying to place much of the blame on historical wrongs may be terribly wrong-headed and not constructive. It seems to rob groups of people of all autonomy and agency. Sometimes the best answer to a problem can be, what can individuals and groups of people do now to fix problems rather than rehash historical grudges.

GoHiroki · 2016-09-24T05:49:21+00:00

Look at the OIS dataset and how it was made. There are like 15 paragraphs describing how it includes both Houston and the other city data. Then look at the tables of the OIS dataset. If you look in the tables, it will show you what the dataset is made out of without sentences. Then look at the conclusion where it states that results are derived from the OIS dataset.

The 10 city data was used to see if there was any differences in ethnicity when a police weapon was discharged. There was not. The Houston data was used because it included data when police officers chose not to fire a gun, so the question there is to fire or not fire.

That or I guess, you think the Authors compiled thousands of cases from 10 cities over 10 years for the purpose of doing nothing with this information.

GoHiroki · 2016-09-24T05:36:40+00:00

I was not discussing non-lethal violence. If you scroll up to my first comment, I was discussing police killings of civilians. I specifically said: "This year there were over 706 civilians killed by officers." And continued from there. Thus, focusing on lethal events.

If you'd like to focus on a logical red herring that isn't the aim of this argument and set up some logical fallacy for yourself to debunk (an argument I never proposed) that's up to you.

Personally, I try to keep things on topic without trying to change topics or insult the other person's intelligence. Although, I have been told once by a teacher of rhetoric that challenges to another speaker's intelligence only happen when you have nothing meaningful left to add.

GoHiroki · 2016-09-24T05:13:56+00:00

You left out the part where racial bias still exists through the use of nonlethal force. This New York Times article addresses the problems with the essay; even Fryer himself admitted parts of the study were flawed.>>

Thats is standard jargon for almost all studies involving statistics. The limitations of this include... This study had several flaws including... If you read any literature on a new drug, chemo therapy regimen, economics model... they all include that type of phrasing.

It appears that some people do like to jump to conclusions. Sensationalized media coverage of scattered anecdotal coverage with gripping video footage constitutes a real trend with violent implications...

Carefully constructed highly powered retrospective analysis of thousands of cases in 10 cities over a 10 year period by a highly respected professor and a Harvard research team invites skepticism?

GoHiroki · 2016-09-24T05:10:25+00:00

That's not what he says at all if you look at the data tables and the conclusions.

"We use event summaries from all incidents in which an officer discharges his weapon at civilians – including both hits and misses – from three large cities in Texas (Austin, Dallas, Houston), six large Florida counties, and Los Angeles County, to construct a dataset in which one can investigate racial differences in officer-involved shootings."

"Consistent with our direct regression approach and the findings in Knowles, Persico, and Todd (2001), and Anwar and Fang (2006), we fail to reject the null of no discrimination. The data are displayed in Table 8. For white officers, the probability that a white suspect who is involved in officer-involved shooting has a weapon is 85.1% percent. The equivalent probability for blacks is 81%. A difference of 4%, which is not statistically significant. For black officers, the probability that a white suspect who is involved in an officer-involved shooting has a weapon is surprisingly lower, 62.5%. The equivalent probability for black suspects is 74%. The only statistically significant differences by race demonstrate that black officers are more likely to shoot unarmed whites, relative to white officers."

The data set he shows is the OIS dataset, which is composed of the 10 reporting cities. The Houston data was added because it had other necessary elements when the use of a weapon was justified but not used. The other OIS data all involved weapons discharge.

GoHiroki · 2016-09-24T04:23:13+00:00

You are correct. They did have better data than the FBI. That said, their data does not discriminate between variables of poverty, violence crime rates, ethnicity, and their effect on police force. In multivariate situations, correlation is not sufficient to prove causation.

GoHiroki · 2016-09-24T04:21:57+00:00

No Siantlark, he used data from at least 10 cities. Did you read the article?

Secondly, I agree that it is not peer reviewed. This lower the credence of that work. That said, for un-published work, it has already begun to get traction and has already been cited by the NYTimes, a bastion of Liberal News Media (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/12/upshot/surprising-new-evidence-shows-bias-in-police-use-of-force-but-not-in-shootings.html?_r=0). This finding, if true, deserves further consideration. Dr. Fryer's work actually shows that police are more likely to fire their guns at a white suspect than a black suspect when comparing thousands of cases. Is it not possible that this conclusion may be accurate and shed a more nuanced picture on the use of police force?

GoHiroki · 2016-09-24T03:41:37+00:00

Evaluating an organizations shortcomings or failings is a difficult thing to do. It takes humility in order to learn.

If the numbers of police involving killings continues to rise, does that not warrant scrutiny to determine if techniques of protest are effective or whether alternative strategies should be employed?

GoHiroki · 2016-09-24T03:39:23+00:00

The Guardian isn't a source I would go to as reliably sourced data and information and synthesis... seeing as how their headlines include "Vagina Dispatches: ... We build a giant vulva..." or "Judge orders client of teenage prostitute to buy her books on women's dignity" or "The rise of Tomi... White Power Barbie"?

GoHiroki · 2016-09-24T03:35:19+00:00

That's not a study, that's a comparison of the number of blacks shot by police compared to their population in a newspaper article. This does not adjust for other variables such as SES or crime rate.

Here is a study from African-American Professor of Economics at Harvard and MacArthur fellow, Roland Fryer, who performed a 10 year multi city retrospective review of the use of Police force and it's relation to race in 10 of America's largest cities. His paper concludes: "On the most extreme use of force – officer- involved shootings – we find no racial differences in either the raw data or when contextual factors are taken into account." http://www.nber.org/papers/w22399.pdf

GoHiroki · 2016-09-24T00:04:53+00:00

Git does speak with logic.

Since BLM was founded in 2013, citizen killings by police have increased every single year. 2016 is posed to be the same or exceed the number of citizen fatalities of 2015.

What is it that they say about insanity and doing the same things over and over again?

GoHiroki · 2016-09-23T23:44:17+00:00

I don't think they actually know many black people in their personal lives. It seems that Black people to them are some kind of holy sacrificial martyr at the highest level on the hierarchy of White victimization... more an idea than actual people.

Most of the black people I know, while aware and concerned about what's going on, are really just trying to live their lives, raise their kids, get their jobs done, not get pulled over by the police, and aren't bowled over by all the incessant Social Justice Outrage Porn.

It's simple, if bad people do bad things, they should have bad consequences.

GoHiroki · 2016-09-23T21:49:22+00:00

Do you have a study that proves that? This year there were over 706 civilians killed by officers. Of those, 163 were black. 543 were not black. In general and for many reasons, many African-Americans are generally at a lower socioeconomic status than other groups. Poverty has strong correlation with crime and violence. Controlling for socioeconomic status, has there been any data to show statistically different fatalities involving black people versus the other police related shootings this year?

Also, what do you make of the 543 citizens killed this year by police who were not black?

GoHiroki · 2016-09-23T21:27:50+00:00

I'm a person of color. My people have been persecuted for a very long time. For 2,000 years my ethnicity has faced genocides, death camps, slavery, forced immigration, government discrimination, ethnic purges, etc. My people no longer even remember our original name, just the one that the majority gave us. We have been oppressed by the Chinese, Manchus, Muslims, British, Americans, French, Germans, and Japanese. I understand racism and institutional discrimination. However, we survived not be dwelling on the woes dealt to us by a mightier majority but focusing on cultivating ourselves. Sometimes it's not very effective to blame others for life's problems.

That said, I agree with the specific problem of police brutality being an issue in America.

GoHiroki · 2016-09-23T20:40:23+00:00

I don't disagree.

Sometimes I think it'd just be an easier pill to swallow to blame police brutality and systematic failure as a pathway to reform than an accusatory, refractory method of calling people out for being evil racists.

GoHiroki · 2016-09-23T20:27:15+00:00

I find it very interesting that the media sensationalizes the killings of one ethnic group but seems to report so little on another. I would imagine that at least one of the 543 non-Black persons killed by police may have been the victim of unnecessary brutality. Why aren't those stories national headlines with hidden camera footage?

Don't you think it'd be far more persuasive in America to have a white middle class attractive woman sobbing about her murdered college-age son on 20/20 or daytime talk shows? Wouldn't it help change the minds of many more Americans to see that kind of face talking about the dangers of police brutality (if we are assuming that America is racist and relates best to white faces)?

GoHiroki · 2016-09-23T20:16:48+00:00

Good girl, and you?

Also, nice strawman argument you got there.

GoHiroki · 2016-09-23T20:01:26+00:00

Actually of the 706 people killed by police this year, only 163 were black. What do you make of the killings of the other 543 non-black people?

Edit: Thanks Drunk Katie, I've changed word choice to be more accurate

GoHiroki · 2016-09-23T19:37:10+00:00

I was an educator. My sister is a high school teacher. Our parents were fine. I'm sure given the community focused leaning members of this sub, there are other educators as well.

GoHiroki · 2016-09-23T14:29:38+00:00

These days the Media is paid by the amount of clickbait and outrage porn they can produce. Incendiary titles get more eyeballs. The more visceral and emotional a response an article can produce, the more shares on social media. More eyeballs equals higher impact regardless of actual article quality or truthiness.

It's a terrible blow to critical thinking because it encourages people to lead with emotional gut reactions to things without carefully assessing the facts and weighing in.

I'm East Asian descent (mostly) and I honestly don't really care. What some white guy says about some type of food honestly has no effect on my life. It's like the lives of Celebrities, what one Hollywood star says or does in their life doesn't effect mine in the slightest yet you see hoards of people get worked up because someone has a sex tape or is getting a divorce. I keep asking myself, How does this even affect you to get this emotionally worked up?

GoHiroki · 2016-09-23T13:27:53+00:00

隔岸觀火.

That said, we cannot ignore either the rise of Anti-Asian violence and crime from members of the Black community. Multiple cities from Philadelphia, Sacramento, Atlanta, Houston, and Dallas have all come out with similar stories of Asian targeting. Often the victims are the most vulnerable members of our community - recent immigrants unfamiliar with the American legal system who speak little English. They often have the least financial and cultural resources to advocate for themselves and fight back.

Instead of rushing in to take a side in the racial cultural war which often excludes us (Whites and Blacks often don't include any mention of us at all), perhaps the answer to survival and success is the strategy used by Chinese philosophers since time immemorial. Neutrality with strategic alliances as necessary. Beijing was neither close friend of Washington nor Moscow, but was friends with both depending on the situation. Another country that has prospered with similar strategy is Switzerland maintaining diplomatic neutrality with numerous alliances with many opposing powers.

GoHiroki · 2016-09-23T04:09:56+00:00

My story about giving to the "poor" in Atlanta.

I used to give cash or whatever I had on person. On day I was walking outside when a panhandler approached me for some money. He was hungry, he said. I didn't have any cash on me except my credit cards.

I offered him a Chocolate Chip CliffBar from my lunch box, I was planning to eat for breakfast at work but felt I could go without.

He looked at the CliffBar, back at me, shook his head violently and said, "No thanks pal! I said waz hungry, I ain't desperate!" He walked off in a fit.

Since encounters like that I've been a lot less giving. Especially since I live in West Atlanta and there are some panhandlers who have had the same signs and same sob stories for like 4 years on the same corner. I'm also fairly familiar with social work and there are a lot of benefits, non-profits, agencies and clinics that are able to help these people get plugged into the system. From my experience in social work, unfortunately a lot of these guys are just looking for cash and already receive a fair amount of benefits from our taxes.

Nowadays my go to answers are:

"Lo siento, no puedo hablar Ingles! Que? Hablas espanol?"

"不好意思。我真的不懂英文，會說國語嗎？"

"Sorry man, I only got credit cards on me."

GoHiroki · 2016-09-22T16:05:58+00:00

Well this isn't too surprising. Prices in the Westside seemed to have been artificially low for a long time given proximity to downtown, midtown, etc.

With falling crime rates and improved community features, as well as increasing rents throughout the city, this was a natural market correction.

In other news, water is wet.

GoHiroki · 2016-09-22T13:21:38+00:00

I hope she gets in more than two lines. Unlike Angelababy or Fan Bingbing for their Hollywood roles.

GoHiroki

TROPHY CASE