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OR,
The facts show that races other than Blacks are much more likely to be arrested, and harangued by the police, when they are ultimately found not - guilty. Looks to me like anti-white racism by the police force.
OR BECAUSE THEY ARE, IN FACT, GUILTY!!!
Why'd you leave that out?
OR,
The facts show that races other than Blacks are much more likely to be arrested, and harangued by the police, when they are ultimately found not - guilty. Looks to me like anti-white racism by the police force.
BTW:
The previous post is not what I believe, just demonstrates how stats are meaningless.
But to believe that, I'd also have to believe that an outrageous number of arrestees of other races are not guilty of the crimes for which they've been arrested. And I'd have to believe that a fairly high number of indictees of other races are later shown to be not guilty of the crimes for which they've been indicted -- a significantly larger number than the number of blacks who are similarly situated. Are police and prosecutors just sloppy with non-blacks, but laser-focused when dealing with blacks?
Or are they more wary of arresting a black man for fear of being called racist? They get their ducks in a row before getting the warrant, as opposed to having more of a hair trigger with other races? They fear the race card.
I don't know. The point is, the statistics quoted don't in and of themselves mean a damned thing. Not enough information.
The problem is that you have misquoted both he and I.
His argument was that the percentage of the prison population that is Black is "parallel" to the percentage of crimes that they commit.
My post merely argued that the percentages are not equal. How you get a non-sequitur out of this, I am not sure.
Perhaps the greater proportion of convictions relative to arrests of blacks is explained by the overrepresentation of blacks among the "poor". Poor folks don't always end up with the best legal representation and advice.
Last edited by Peter; 02-27-2006 at 06:37 PM.
Bill Maher brought this to my attention.
Is it possible that all discrepancies and inequities in the American legal system are brought about, exclusively, by simple economics and our drug laws, as "forced" upon us by our elected representatives? ... well, upwards of 95%?
I believe racism is rooted in our collective legislation, and not the judicial and executive facets of our world.
JMO.
I think in the following article Mr. Sowell explains things much more than we had
been led to believe. Just think the man wanted someone to actually teach. Shame
on him. I also like the part at the end about some of our past Presidents.
Cathedrals and faith
By Thomas Sowell
Mar 7, 2006
In the grand scheme of things, the recent resignation of Harvard's president, Lawrence Summers, was a small episode. But its implications are large and reach beyond Harvard -- and well beyond the academic world.
David Riesman said that we are living in the cathedrals of learning, without the faith that built those cathedrals. We are also living in a free society without the faith that built that society -- and without the conviction and dedication needed to sustain it.
The faith came first. Centuries ago, farmers and others scattered throughout New England made whatever small contributions they could, whether in money or in produce, to help build a little college in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Today Harvard University is renowned but it has lost the sense of dedication that built it back in 1636. The faculty run the university, as Lawrence Summers has painfully discovered, and they run it in their own narrow self-interest.
A full professor at Harvard gets no personal pay-off for teaching undergraduates. That can be left to the junior faculty and graduate students. Research is where the money and the prestige are.
Summers wanted professors not only to teach undergraduates but to teach introductory courses in a structured curriculum and to stop giving out so many A's that 90 percent of the students graduate with honors.
Giving out A's wholesale saves the faculty's time that would otherwise be taken up by students wanting to know why they received B's, C's, or D's. That time is now available for research, writing and other things with a bigger personal pay-off for the faculty.
Teaching introductory courses in a structured curriculum can provide undergraduates with a far better education than the current cafeteria style of student choices among a hodgepodge of whatever courses happen to be available. But teaching introductory courses in a structured curriculum is also very time-consuming, which is why so few colleges really have a curriculum any more.
It is far easier to teach whatever narrow subject in which a professor is already doing research. Thus in some colleges there may be a course on the history of motion pictures but no course on the history of Britain or Germany.
Students can graduate from some of the most prestigious colleges in the land without a clue as to what the Second World War or the Cold War was about. At Harvard, chances are nine out of ten that such uninformed students can graduate with honors.
No college and no society can survive solely on the narrow self-interest of each individual. Somebody has to sacrifice some of his own interests for the greater good of the ins ution or society serving others.
In crisis, some have to put their lives on the line, as fireman, policemen and people in the military still do. But, for that, you have to believe that the ins ution and the society are worthy of your sacrifices.
We have now been through at least two generations of constant denigration of American society, two generations in which cheap glory could be gained by flouting rules and mocking values.
Is it surprising that we seem to have dwindling numbers of people willing to take responsibility and make sacrifices to preserve the social framework that makes our survival and advancement possible? Harvard is just one small example.
There was a time when being at war meant accepting a great weight of responsibility, even among politicians. After Wendell Willkie waged a tough presidential election campaign against Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940, winning more votes than any Republican ever had before, nevertheless after it was all over, he became FDR's personal envoy to Winston Churchill.
In the midst of war today, we see former presidents and defeated presidential candidates telling the world how wrong we are -- sometimes collecting big bucks in foreign countries for doing so -- and members of Congress playing demagogic party politics with national security.
We still have the cathedral of freedom but how long will it last without the faith?
Thomas Sowell is the prolific author of books such as Black Rednecks and White Liberals and Applied Economics.
Copyright © 2006 Townhall.com
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Find this story at: http://www.townhall.com/opinion/colu...07/188869.html
One more take on the Libs in our schools of higher learning. And these are the
ones that teach the lawyers. Don't you just love it.
Academia vs. America
By Bill Murchison
Mar 7, 2006
Not just from Antonin Scalia, and not just from Clarence Thomas, rather, from a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court this week came the juicy rebuke to 36 law schools trying to bar military recruiters from their premises.
The learned justices put the matter more elegantly, not to mention cir spectly, but basically they said to the law schools and law profs demanding to keep our government's recruiters at bay: Can't you guys read? Or is it that you don't want to?
The implications of the latter question lend poignancy to the case of Rumsfeld vs. Forum for Academic and Ins utional Research (FAIR).
The legal factories demanding the right to protect students from exposure to the idea of a career in military justice thumb their noses at Main Street America. The Supreme Court had to settle this thing? Why couldn't common sense, tinged with some latent affection for our country, have done the job? Because at too many ins utions of higher wisdom, you prospect for weeks without striking a vein of common sense. Left wing ideology, though -- plenty of that.
FAIR arose from the revulsion the American Association of Law Schools felt at the notion of seeming to endorse "antigay" discrimination by admitting military recruiters to their campuses. After all, the Clinton-era compromise on admission of gays to the military -- "don't ask, don't tell" -- fell short of according gays unquestioned access to military service. The law schools retaliated. You don't do it our way, they said to the military, you do it somewhere else.
I pause for reflection on that one. The instrument of government, whose purpose is the defense of the nation, couldn't recruit law students inasmuch as law profs saw the military as an instrument of discrimination. Congress intervened via the Solomon Amendment, whose present form allows for the cutting off of federal funds to ins utions guilty of trammeling military recruiters. FAIR objected that such a requirement interfered with its members' freedom of speech.
Replied Chief Justice John Roberts, on behalf of a unanimous court (missing only Justice Samuel Alito, who had not yet been confirmed when the case was argued): "Nothing about recruiting suggests that law schools agree with every speech by recruiters, and nothing in the Solomon Amendment restricts what the law schools may say about the military policies."
One might wonder -- as I do -- why our nation's highest court had to be asked anything so obvious as, "Are military recruiters en led to reach U.S. college students on the same terms as nonmilitary recruiters?" What seems obvious to Main Street Americans isn't, alas, obvious to their intellectual establishment. A fair reading of FAIR's argument is that the military's needs don't rise to the level of gay law students' imputed need for affirmation by their military protectors -- according to the Cons ution!
Where this stuff comes from is a matter of conjecture. A strong, indeed, I think, decisive inference, is that our academic community has yet to recover from the Sixties -- probably because many of those who were the Sixties now preen in top academic offices, imposing on the younger generation the ideas they sought, 40 years ago, to impose on the older generation.
It helps to recall what the Harvard faculty did to its president, Larry Summers, for wondering -- in the course of wondering about the paucity of women scientists -- whether women's minds are formed for science in the same way that men's minds are formed for it. Does anyone know the answer to that one? I think not. What brought the roof crashing down on Summers' head and contributed to his eventual demise as president, was his implication that the question of sex differences might be worth discussing. Egad! You might have thought he had proposed a School of Creationism Studies, with Pat Robertson as dean.
Perhaps a few thousand retirements, or funerals, will take care of this particular problem eventually. And perhaps not. It's reassuring meanwhile, as per the Rumsfeld decision, to learn that academics can push illogic only so far, with any expectation of prevailing. You kind of take what you can get these days, don't you?
Bill Murchison is a senior columns writer for The Dallas Morning News.
Copyright © 2006 Creators Syndicate, Inc.
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Find this story at: http://www.townhall.com/opinion/colu...07/188872.html
Is there such a thing as a "Right Wing Liberal?" Just curious.
^^Yeah, I think so. But not really liberal in todays sense of the word. The older
generation really believed in help thy neighbor. But they really didn't like people
who wouldn't try to help themselves. Being poor wasn't see as the same as it
is now. You could have no money, but not really be considered poor. You could
live a good life within your own means. People shared with others what they
had freely and didn't look to government to solve all problems. Government even
recognized this and didn't attempt to solve all problems. Now days people really
don't want to share (I don't mean give money). The want the government to
handle these things thru social programs which in every case do not work. Money
is wasted in administrative cost and waste. Katrina is a prime example.
I guess what I am saying most people in my younger years were conservative to
a "T" but liberal in helping others.
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