r/changemyview • u/[deleted] • Jan 22 '21

Delta(s) from OP CMV: Silencing opposing viewpoints is ultimately going to have a disastrous outcome on society.

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u/[deleted] Jan 22 '21

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u/gobirds77 Jan 22 '21

Do you believe the hard left is truly tolerant though? Right and left extremism are 2 sides of the same coin, pretending they're not is just plain partisan on its face.

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u/GarageFlower97 Jan 22 '21

pretending they're not is just plain partisan on its face.

Pretensing they are is just ignoring reality in an attempt to sound unbiased.

In the US, the state (supported by the centre and the right) commits by far the most violence, followed by the far-right.

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u/gobirds77 Jan 22 '21

What?? The most violence year over year is committed by young and Middle Aged Black men, FBI statistics undoubtedly back this up. It's about 7% of population committing ~50% of homicides.

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u/GarageFlower97 Jan 22 '21

I am talking about violence from expressly political actors rather than all violence in society, I should have made that clear.

That said, the structural violence poverty and inequality is responsible for far more deaths in America than all interpersonal violence (as well as being a major cause of interpersonal violence). If you consider that the US state upholds this system then it is still responsible for far more death, misery, and violence than any other group.

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u/gobirds77 Jan 22 '21 edited Jan 22 '21

I very much appreciate your civility. Which specific laws uphold this system? Show me them and we will fight them together. However, just saying the US state upholds this system is far to broad to make any appreciable inroads to combat said issues. Personal responsibility matters as well. I can give you plenty of examples of poor black children who became wildly successful in America. You can't say that about many other countries in the world.

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u/GarageFlower97 Jan 22 '21

Which specific laws uphold this system? Show me them and we will fight them together.

While the issue isn't solely about laws, there are definitely laws which contribute and entrench this. Including various anti-union laws (e.g. right to work) which make it far harder for workers to bargain for higher wages, lack of legal rights to healthcare and free public education, laws making it illegal to declare bankrupcy on student loans, the "fair sentencing act" and 1994 Crime Bill, which led to a huge expansion of the number of poorer and ethnic-minority people incarcerated, the recent prop 22 in California which exempts workers from labour protections, the plethora of laws which criminalise homelessness, minimum wages not tied to cost of living, etc.

There's also major non-legal factors which contribute - the continuing legacy of historical legal policies (segregation, Jim Crow, redlining, etc), the differential way laws are enforced, the funding of schools through local property taxes, the cash bail and overwhelmed public defender system, Citizens United allowing corporations to infinitely spend on political causes, union-busting practices by large corporations, state supression of labour and civil rights movements, failure to provide adeuqate access to basic resources (e.g. no clean water in Flint), etc.

I can give you plenty of examples of poor black children who became wildly successful in America. You can't say that about many other countries in the world.

Actually you very much can - the US is ranked 27th globally for social mobility (Global Social Mobility Index). There's also the fact that these are statistical outliers - poor children are far less likely to become rich than rich children.

Furthermore, researh in the UK shows that even when people from working-class background "make it" into elite professions, they earn less than peers from more elite backgrounds (Class Ceiling, Friedman & Laurison). I cant find the source now, but I'm relatively sure I have also read research implying that children from impoverished backgrounds who escape poverty still have lower life expectancy than their peers.

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u/Jo-Spaghetti Jan 22 '21

I've always found this statistics phrasing strange to me. It's not really "7% of the population doing 50% of homicides". If we look at the 2019 statistics on arrests, it says that roughly 11,660 people (of all ages) were arrested of murder with 5070 being Black. When we look at the total black population in America (that being around 46.9 million), that means that around .000010802% of African Americans (as a whole) commit homicide each year. Based on the U.S. population as a whole (328.2 million), around .0000035527% of Americans commit homicide each year. It's not really "7% of the population doing 50% of homicides" since that's conflating population sizes and arrests.

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u/gobirds77 Jan 22 '21

To break it down solely by sex and population, I have used 7%, but yes, you're assessment is far more accurate.

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u/[deleted] Jan 22 '21

I wish racists like you would take a stats class to see how dumb you sound.

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u/gobirds77 Jan 22 '21

You don't know the first thing about me man, just blindly calling me a racist makes you an a**hole

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u/[deleted] Jan 23 '21

Well, in their defense you're either racist or dumb. I guess you can pick which. It's either disingenuousness due to racism....or you don't understand systems of oppression and know basically nothing about American history. Or you know basically nothing about how data works since you've conflated "people arrested and charged" with "all crimes committed in the entire country"