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There is nothing new about inner city crime and it has always had an ethic flavor to it. From the earliest days of American history it was associated with being an Irish affliction, then it was Italian and Jewish. Today it is African American and Mexican/Central American (although I notice that eastern Europeans and Asians fly under the radar of most commentators. It seems that crime as always served as an economic stepping stone for entry into the entrepreneurial class.
Since the dawn of man, the world has always had the haves and have nots. Throughout history, the haves will write laws, oppress, lie, cheat, steal, create wars, kill and destroy with evil to keep themselves in the have category (power). Then came along the great America, which many argue was the first place in world history that was supposed to give an open and even playing field for all. The have nots, could become a have with hard work and dedication cause no entity could "class" them out.
Well it almost worked! Today, we have the same type of oppression going on, only in a slightly different form. The government is controlling our lives from birth to grave and every aspect of our entire day, day in and day out. We are slowly being boiled to death and fail to see it.
Well it almost worked! Today, we have the same type of oppression going on, only in a slightly different form. The government is controlling our lives from birth to grave and every aspect of our entire day, day in and day out. We are slowly being boiled to death and fail to see it.
Your first paragraph made sense, but somehow you then leapt to a Glenn Beck talking point.
The government has never controlled my life. I've come and gone as I pleased. I paid taxes which were more or less fair, and I object only to paying for several idiotic wars that we did not win and it didn't matter that we lost. I never felt that the regulations on my daily life were onerous until the Department of Homeland Security took over the country, and even then, they seem to be paying little attention to my propensity to be a terrorist.
If anybody took over my life, it was the "hard working" people you described, who were "dedicated" only to grabbing so much power and control that they literally, from their lavish corporate board rooms, usurped the power that the founders hoped the government would keep for itself. Those foolish wars were entered into only because war itself was in the financial interests of those corporate powers, and how long they could be drawn out was more important economiclly than whether we won or lost.
None of which has anything to do with race or crime, but neither did your rant.
Despite what we see in newspapers and on the 5 o'clock news, the types of crimes that have the most devastating effect on society are not committed in inner-city ghettos or by people carrying handguns illegally hidden in their waistbands. They are committed in offices by executives, in government agencies by bureaucrats, in banks by officers or tellers, or by managers of companies. These are white-collar crimes.
Until they are exposed and emblazon headlines for a time, most white-collar crimes do not exist in the public mind. There is no reason why they should. These criminals don't mug victims in the night, they don't neglect their children. No, they are more circumspect: they embezzle, skim off the top, regularly pad travel expenses, etc. As a result, such infractions usually are "invisible," even though they cost the economy of the United States billions of dollars a year.
The costs of white-collar crime are impossible to calculate, but they are probably a lot greater than the financial costs of all of the crimes which are customarily regarded as "the crime problem." However, the financial cost does not take into account the cost of these crimes to the social fabric as a whole. White collar crimes violate the public trust and create distrust; this lowers social morale and the fundamental principles of American institutions.
Despite what we see in newspapers and on the 5 o'clock news, the types of crimes that have the most devastating effect on society are not committed in inner-city ghettos or by people carrying handguns illegally hidden in their waistbands. They are committed in offices by executives, in government agencies by bureaucrats, in banks by officers or tellers, or by managers of companies. These are white-collar crimes.
Until they are exposed and emblazon headlines for a time, most white-collar crimes do not exist in the public mind. There is no reason why they should. These criminals don't mug victims in the night, they don't neglect their children. No, they are more circumspect: they embezzle, skim off the top, regularly pad travel expenses, etc. As a result, such infractions usually are "invisible," even though they cost the economy of the United States billions of dollars a year.
The costs of white-collar crime are impossible to calculate, but they are probably a lot greater than the financial costs of all of the crimes which are customarily regarded as "the crime problem." However, the financial cost does not take into account the cost of these crimes to the social fabric as a whole. White collar crimes violate the public trust and create distrust; this lowers social morale and the fundamental principles of American institutions.
I can't argue with that statement. Some white collar crimes actually injure or kill people in indirect ways, such as the case with faulty vehicles. All crime is bad. All crime needs to be solved because of the cost on human beings. Most white-collar crimes aren't reported because no one "dies" or get physically hurt. It is when someone gets their hands dirty and someone else gets hurt physically that a crime is exposed.
You may not believe this, but yes IQ tests are culturally biased. So, I can grow up in your community (or you in mine) and based on our cultural backgrounds alone, we can expect to see some overall differnences in IQ data. What is interesting though, if you want to discuss race, is a look at SAT scores when comparing White and Black students. Overall, Black students (of similar socio-economic backgrounds) do not preform as well on the test in general, BUT they do better on the HARDER questions. Data can be skewed in many different ways.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jtur88
I went to second grade. It is found that George Washington chopped down a cherry tree.
Obviously, some IQ tests are, were, or can be biased. Since that fact emerged, a great deal of effort has been dedicated to removing the bias, and in spite of that, there are huge (like 20-point) differences between the observed IQs of different ethnic groups even where the testees grew up in the same community.
If the tests were sociologically biased, boys and girls would have different test scores, but they don't.
You have predetermined that you are going to disallow any data or evidence that you can call "biased" on the basis of your own bias about that data, based on what some prof told you in anthropology class.
If you are going to disasllow any "biased" data from corrupting your research, you need to also disallow all crime statistics, because law enforcement, prosecution, sentencing, attorney access, jury selection, plea-bargaining, and even the letter of the law are all highly biased along racial lines. So where does that leave you?
I don't look to third party studies to make my determinations. I use my own life experiences. I can trust those, cause I was there. who knows what some other person experiences were. Or their relevance to my own.--I'm one man, not a committee.
Yes, good call, I'd never let those University funded studies get in the way of personal experience, but I'm glad that most engineers don't feel that way........
"I sat and observed a number of drug dealers in southern Florida, I never saw a lack of personal responsibility". Some folk's just have a different notion of responsibility I guess.........
"I sat and observed a number of drug dealers in southern Florida, I never saw a lack of personal responsibility". Some folk's just have a different notion of responsibility I guess.........
I think of personal responsibility as taking the risks and getting the training and doing the hard work necessary to assure sufficient income that my family will not become a liability to the economy and require welfare. As far as I know, that is exactly what every conservative poster on this board means when they rant and rave about personal responsibility. It seems to me that drug dealers (and white collar criminals) meet all those criteria.
During a trial scene on The Wire, the character Omar Little (who robs drug dealers for a living) had the following exchange with defense attorney Maurice Levy who is trying to discredit Little's testimony against his client, during cross examination:
Maurice 'Maury' Levy: You are amoral, are you not? You are feeding off the violence and the despair of the drug trade. You are stealing from those who themselves are stealing the lifeblood from our city. You are a parasite who leeches off...
Omar: Just like you, man.
Maurice 'Maury' Levy: ...the culture of drugs. Excuse me? What?
Omar: I got the shotgun, you got the briefcase. It's all in the game though, right?
Frankly, I've heard young black drug dealers make such turns of logic hundreds of times, placing their activities in the context of white collar crimes or wars between nations. If it is alright for America to go to war to protect its supply of oil, why isn't it alright for them to go to war to protect their supply of drugs or access to lucrative drug markets, they have reasoned. Another oft repeated refrain is the all too accurate observation that they, as street level dealers, don't own any planes to import drugs into the country, nor do they manufacture guns, why is it that the police concentrate on their business activities? Yes, we know those truths to be self-evident, but in the logic of the street, and it is a logic, the emphasis in law enforcement isn't on the "big guys" (read white folks) but on some small time, street level dealers.
When confronted with the possibility of incarceration, or death, they argue, seemingly unknowingly, that it is a simple cost/benefit equation. They take their life time earning potential, the probability of arrest or murder, and weight them against the immediate rewards. For young men who have neither the hope or expectation of a long life, the answer is clear, one must earn as much as one can in the short run rather than defer earnings as a result of seeking an education for a job that they believe requires an intolerable amount of subservience to a perceived white power structure (in many ways their arguments are as libertarian as many of those arguments put forth on these pages).
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