More U.S. Cop Shootings Since Christmas than UK's Last 5 Years

[Baruch]

I agree that the fear might not be about something real.  Or that the despair might be about something we can actually handle.  But imagination runs wild, thanks to Hollywood and Madison Avenue.  My thought is, all this make-believe is actually healthier than the opposite ... we work out things with movies and video games ... it makes us less violent than we would be otherwise.  But if we ever do get attacked like in Mars Invades ... then those little green bastards are going to regret it!

[drunkenshoe]

Baruch, your understanding of fantasy is very limited,lol. And when it's a constitution or the culture you live in, your identity, no it is not healthy.

Imagine that for years you have seen yourself in a certain size and look in a mirror and after some time, you start to realise that it is different. You can't put your finger on it or decide if it was like this always or what you actually saw before. But it doesn't feel the same, it feels 'less'. What changed? The mirror is the same mirror.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

I think the media has some folks buffaloed.

[drunkenshoe]

I think the media has some folks buffaloed.

That's your resposne to everything about violence in the media.

[Baruch]

Shoe ... I thought we were like Exes who aren't talking ;-)

But in response to the ideas you bring up (and you are very good) ...

Addressed to whom it may concern ... yes, perspective is very important.  This is particularly difficult for young people who are 20 years old or less ... for almost their entire lives, they have been in a post 9/11 world.  I first became aware of politics when I was almost 8 ... so before that really didn't count.  The young people today, are in the same boat as I was regarding the Korean War (nobody ever talked about it) or about WW II (fictionalized in movies and on TV).  But the Vietnam War gradually came into focus as I went from 8 to 18 ;-)

So how can we deal with gradual change?  How do people we know deal with it (parents, siblings)?  Life is strange, in that I feel like a person half my age, but my body doesn't agree with my feelings.  History (however limited as propaganda), psychology, anthropology ... are correctives to whatever the current narrative might be.  Also contact with people outside my ethnicity, religion, nationality, class etc.

So am I just like I was half a century ago?  As I see it, aging is like ... going from a fairly specific but ambiguous version of myself, into a much more definite version of myself.  That and Ecclesiastes has it exactly right, but younger people won't appreciate, because of their lack of experience.  It has taken me all my life, to overcome my parental input, my school input and my cultural input.  But in my struggle to perceive what universal values might be (and ugly they might be too) ... I have overcome.  But I see no reason to overcome myself ;-)

[Shiranu]

I think the media has some folks buffaloed.

Yes I'm sure it's a media conspiracy to make people believe that cops are shooting people in this country at an exorbitant rate compared to any other civilized (and many not-so-civilized) society.

Those numbers are all part of a media conspiracy I reckon.

Btw... to answer your 1st question...

1,600,000 cops in China in 2007... 94 times less shootings. Again... we are losing to China and that should put up some red flags.

How about some other law enforcement numbers that prove our cops aint saints? I can go ahead and compile some more in a different thread (not that you wouldn't break the broken record cycle of "cops can never be wrong!" that you spout every time they are proven to be ineffective and need to be restructured).

You don't give a shit about the cops; if you did you wouldn't look at this problem and always say "Stop picking on the poor cops! Your just twisting numbers!". If you gave a shit about law enforcement then you would want the problems within it to be fixed.

[GSOgymrat]

According to this poll white women are the angriest people in America.

Poll: Whites and Republicans Rank as Angriest Americans

http://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/poll-whites-republicans-rank-angriest-americans-n488636?cid=sm_fb

[drunkenshoe]

Shoe ... I thought we were like Exes who aren't talking ;-)

But in response to the ideas you bring up (and you are very good) ...

Addressed to whom it may concern ... yes, perspective is very important.  This is particularly difficult for young people who are 20 years old or less ... for almost their entire lives, they have been in a post 9/11 world.  I first became aware of politics when I was almost 8 ... so before that really didn't count.  The young people today, are in the same boat as I was regarding the Korean War (nobody every talked about it) or about WW II (fictionalized in movies and on TV).  But the Vietnam War gradually came into focus as I went from 8 to 18 ;-)

So how can we deal with gradual change?  How do people we know deal with it (parents, siblings)?  Life is strange, in that I feel like a person half my age, but my body doesn't agree with my feelings.  History (however limited as propaganda), psychology, anthropology ... are correctives to whatever the current narrative might be.  Also contact with people outside my ethnicity, religion, nationality, class etc.

So am I just like I was half a century ago?  As I see it, aging is like ... going from a fairly specific but ambiguous version of myself, into a much more definite version of myself.  That and Ecclesiastes has it exactly right, but younger people won't appreciate, because of their lack of experience.  It has taken me all my life, to overcome my parental input, my school input and my cultural input.  But in my struggle to perceive what universal values might be (and ugly they might be too) ... I have overcome.  But I see no reason to overcome myself ;-)

LOL Where did you get that I didn't talk to you. I can get elusive and temperamental. And get irritated when you like my post just for kicks, because we almost never agree. That's it.


You don't get to deal with change -fast or gradual- it deals with you. If someone has the same vision of the world or himself at 20 and 40, he is in trouble. That's why most of the mess change creates is good. Bloody or not. Stagnation is worse.

I don't want to personalise, my situation is alien to the most here and it gets misunderstood every time. But you are a theist and you have that outlook of 'everything happens for a reason', if not typically a religious one. I am not capable of thinking that way, Baruch. My perspective is different than yours. So I don't understand much when it gets filtered from that^ logic. I just don't see 'good' or 'evil'. But that's not a desired trait I guess. People don't like it. It's automatically extreme in the way they find it offensive. Especially, when you are blunt about it. Probably, that's why I am blunt. It doesn't make sense to me otherwise.

How do I see aging? Much better than I thought. I'll be 40 this year and it feels much better in many ways than before. I welcome change. Just trying to adjust like anyone else.

[drunkenshoe]

According to this poll white women are the angriest people in America.

Poll: Whites and Republicans Rank as Angriest Americans

http://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/poll-whites-republicans-rank-angriest-americans-n488636?cid=sm_fb

Makes a lot of sense.

[Mike Cl]

Y
Are you aware what kind of a change your country went down under the last 15 years? I guess you are. Just the change on how Americans talk about their country in the last 15 years on the net is unbelievable. Young American men talking about America here in this forum were between ages 10-14 when the planes hit twin towers. It's just 15 years ago.

Ya know Shoe, I've noted that--and I don't like the change.  But part of me questioned whether or not I was seeing correctly.  Part of me cautions the rest of me that I am turning into that typical old man with the typical response -it's not like when I was a kid!'.  But it's not.  We are (as a society) driven more by fear than most anything else.  Bush and Cheney used fear so very well, and the politicians have continued to use it.  Sound bytes drive so much of what is accepted by society as they way it is.  1984 (Orwell) is now the way politics seems to work--Newspeak is alive and well.  Personally, the twin towers did not frighten me.  I was never afraid that the bombs would reach downtown Merced.  I realized from the get-go what that meant.  Not all that died that day were American.  I think there was something like 80 countries that lost people.  The US could have turned this into a real world wide effort to make change.  But it did not.  I kept the hurt and pain within our country so it could be exploited by the corp heads and the politicians alike. Too much corporate control, too much fear and too much gerrymandering. 

On the other hand--I do see most of the younger generation tired of this as well.  I think they may see more than we give them credit for (Maybe Zinn and company made more of an impact than I thoguht).  I welcome the coloring of our society--it will be helpful when white is less than 50%.  I see females as really beginning to see things and most don't appreciate the male run world we live in.  But this type of change is slow and I have to simply accept that.

[Nonsensei]

That's right... China has more control over it's cops than we do. Just let that one sink in.

The article goes on to talk about the profitability of the drug war and private prisons... that one could be a whole-nother thread of it's own (and one I think we have had more than once) so I will just leave a small snippit here.

Not for nothing but..

Population of China: 1,357,000,000
Number of police: 2,000,000
Police to citizen ratio: 1 to 679

Population of the United States: 318,900,000
Number of police: 1,100,000
Police to citizen ratio: 1 to 289

When you want to do an honest evaluation of police violence, you need to factor in more than just the numbers and concepts that support your argument. First up, the higher the police to citizen ratio, the greater the number of crimes detected and therefore the greater the potential for police shootings. Chinese police may shoot less people, but they are also stopping less crimes because there are simply not very many of them in an enormous country both in terms of land mass and population.

Second up, you need to consider what exactly it is that the Chinese police do compared the the US police. For example, I found this page: http://factsanddetails.com/china/cat8/sub50/item301.html

It states that the Chinese police are massively corrupt, spending most of their time maintaining government control rather than solving crimes or protecting people. In general, Chinese police are not there to serve the citizens. Their greatest effect in maintaining order is how brutal they depict themselves to be. People in China fear the police greatly, and stay in line just to avoid them (the implication being that while the Chinese police shoot less people, if you step out of line they will fucking kill you. The lower body count simply means that nobody dares to). Finally, it also states that police are often involved in criminal activity themselves.

So I guess its true that if the US police stopped responding to 911 calls and domestic reports, barely ever bothered to investigate crime, intimidated citizens with the threat of brutal retaliation, and actually got involved, en masse, with criminal activity themselves that the incidences of police shootings would probably plummet. Of course, at that point we would have a lot of other problems.

[Shiranu]

Okay, that makes the U.S.'s numbers okay then.

[Nonsensei]

Okay, that makes the U.S.'s numbers okay then.

Sorry i messed up that article's BS segment designed to make idiots think "OMG WE'RE WORSE THAN CHINA?!?!?!?"

The reality is that China doesn't have police as we think of them. They have thugs that call themselves police. Comparing the US to China is apples and oranges, making this part of the article ignorant at best and disingenuous at worst. The writer should have just stuck with the UK comparison, which has the benefit of being both meaningful and truthful. But I guess our police being more violent than the UK's police doesn't get American's backs up, which I suspect is the primary goal of the article.

I don't like being manipulated.

[Shiranu]

Sorry i messed up that article's BS segment designed to make idiots think "OMG WE'RE WORSE THAN CHINA?!?!?!?"

The reality is that China doesn't have police as we think of them. They have thugs that call themselves police. Comparing the US to China is apples and oranges, making this part of the article ignorant at best and disingenuous at worst. The writer should have just stuck with the UK comparison, which has the benefit of being both meaningful and truthful. But I guess our police being more violent than the UK's police doesn't get American's backs up, which I suspect is the primary goal of the article.

I don't like being manipulated.

I think if we are at the point where we have to make excuses about China being worse just to justify our own sins, then that is reason enough to be concerned. Just because you choose to ignore that does not make everyone else an idiot.

All information presented, anywhere, is with the intent to manipulate. We just pick and choose what manipulation we want to look at in a positive light. So I don't see getting bent out of shape over manipulation particularly helpful.

And yes, I would assume it is to rile people up because what good is knowledge of a crime be without action?

[Baruch]

Shoe - yes, we disagree, but I like that.  And I never "liked" you for trivial reasons ... you underestimate both me and yourself.