Yeah, I’m not happy about the Switch 2, but the amount of cope is unbelievable. I’ve seen multiple people claiming, “the Wii U sold out a launch too,” even though the Wii U sold worse than the Wii on opening weekend. The sales might still fall off a cliff in a month, but breaking the PS4’s record for launch sales is not a great sign.
Not sure, though, how this ploy would work out for our fine fellows in South America and Canada, the ones currently belabored with being the closest neighbours…
Fuck Mexico, I guess.
Relatable.
There’s a Lovecraft story about this exact thing. It doesn’t end well.
Same.
Whelp, since I’ve already addressed those points, I think we’re finally, really done here. Took a long time, but we finally got there! You can go ahead and have the last word if it will make you feel less wrong about everything.
Jesus fucking Christ. U.S. population in 1970 was 200,000,000 million, 280,000,000 in 2000, that’s 1.4 times higher. Compare that to the prison populations I already gave you, and you’ll see there 6 times higher by those same years, meaning the prison population grew way faster. I figured this out and wrote this in the time it took me to shit, maybe you could start looking this shit up yourself before you waste my time, especially since some of the sources you cited covered it.
Holy shit dude, the page has the total number of people incarcerated by year. If you can’t find it, I can’t help you, maybe take a tutorial on how the internet works. Then I took that total and used the percentages you gave me to calculate the total number of incarcerated black people. By doing that, I showed that, despite your claim that, “the crime bill did not increase the number of Blacks incarcerate,” even when the number of black people as a percentage of the prison population dropped between 1990 and 2000, the total number of incarcerated balck men went up because the prison population went up. 50% of 10 marbles is less than 20% of 100 marbles, despite being a higher percentage. And, no, despite the one sentence you took out of context about the drop in the prison population (which I’ve referenced 5 fuckint times now), this article backs up literally every fucking thing I said:
In the early 2000s, the U.S. was at its highest rate of imprisonment in history,[65] with young Black men experiencing the highest levels of incarceration. One out of every 15 people imprisoned across the world is a Black American incarcerated in the United States.
Black men and women are imprisoned at higher rates compared to all other age groups, with the highest rate being Black men aged 25 to 39. In 2001, almost 17% of Black men had previously been imprisoned in comparison to 2.6% of White men. By the end of 2002, of the two million inmates of the U.S. incarceration system, Black men surpassed the number of White men (586,700 to 436,800 respectively of inmates with sentences more than one year). Becky Petit and Carmen Gutierrez performed a study, published on October 29, 2018, on the incarceration rate of young African Americans, noting that 48.9% of men arrested by age 23 (born 1980–1984), were African American, while 37.9% were white.
After the passage of Reagan’s Anti-Drug Abuse Act in 1986, incarceration for non-violent offenses dramatically increased. The Act imposed the same five-year mandatory sentence on those with convictions involving crack as on those possessing 100 times as much powder cocaine.
The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 may have had a minor effect on mass incarceration.
Prison populations have been skyrocketing since the Reagan era. Clinton’s actions actually made the problem worse. The subsequent actions under Obama and other Democrats didn’t bring us back to anything like the pre-Reagan era and, at best, led to a slight reduction of the prison population and a slight reduction in how over-represented black Americans are in our prison system. Can you please go find someone else to be wrong at now?
Your numbers aren’t in the Wikipedia page you linked.
You gave me percentages. I took the total numbers from Wikipedia and did basic math. Took less than five minutes, dude. Anyway, nothing in the rest of this comment that I haven’t already addressed, so I guess we’re done here. Good luck.
But the crime bill did not increase the number of Blacks incarcerated
Boy, I know I said I was going to stop, but you’re just so wrong all the time and I just can’t stop dunking on you. The crime bills of the 80s and the 1994 bill absolutely did increase the number if incarcerated black men. Even when the percentage went down, the population went up. Let’s look at those statistics in terms of real numbers:
1970: 328,020 prisoners, 134,488 black
1980 503,586 prisoners, 231,650 balck
1990 1,148,702 prisoners, 608,812 black
2000 1,937,482 prisoners, 697,494 black
2020 1,675,400 prisoners, 536,128 black
So, even if you see the percentage going down, the actual number of black men being thrown in prison was increasing until the end of the Trump years. It’s also worth noting that we’re only looking at the racist implications of mass incarceration, but all in all, mass incarceration itself is a terrible, right-wing policy that has increased under Democratic and Republican administrations.
Funny enough, the only significant fall came during the Trump years, when the prison population fell 500,000 between 2018 and 2020. I highly doubt that had anything to do with Trump, and imagine it had more to do with Covid than anything else (and potentially state-level legalization of Marijuana), but it again shows that Democrats did little to curb mass incarceration.
OK, I’m really done now. I know I said it before, but I’m really done this time. I’ll stop spreading all this, “Russian propaganda,” that I became aware 20 fucking years ago when I was in college (damn, those Russians play a long game, huh?). I’m out. Good luck.
LOL, you’ve not proved me wrong, I just don’t care to debate, “It can be racist with if black politicians supported it,” with a guy who needed me to explain the crime bills to him. I said 5 comments ago that I shouldn’t bother with someone so ignorant of American politics, and I wish I’d stuck to that, because this is a waste of my fucking time. I’m out.
Yeah, I’m not really interested in your thoughts on the legislation you just learned about from me a few hours ago, but thanks anyway.
Should have kept reading:
But one thing is clear: the 1994 bill interacted with—and reinforced—an existing and highly problematic piece of legislation: The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, which created huge disparities in sentencing between crack and powder cocaine. Under this bill, a person was sentenced to a five-year minimum sentence for five grams of crack cocaine, but it took 500 grams of powder cocaine to trigger the same sentence. Because crack is a cheaper alternative to powder cocaine, it is more prominent in low-income neighborhoods. These neighborhoods are more likely to be predominately Black and in urban areas that can be overpoliced more easily than suburban or rural areas. While the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010, enacted under the Obama-Biden administration, reduced the crack/powder cocaine disparity from 100:1 to 18:1, the damage had been done, and its effects continue to this day.
Do you see how this demonstrates the Ratchet Effect yet? Conservatives (and Joe Biden) pass a piece of legislation during the Reagan years that causes mass incarceration of black men. Clinton doesn’t move us back to the left, but passes legislation that reinforces the conservative legislation. The closest the Democrats get to, “turning the dial to the left,” is when Obama gets legislation passed that makes the problem 18 times worse for the black community instead of 100 times worse for the black community, and only after the bulk of the damage is already done. Do you see how even, even when the Democrats, “move us to the left,” things are still worse than where they started? That’s the Ratchet Effect.
That minorities are over represented in prison isn’t written into the crime bills.
It is. It created disproportionate mandatory minimum sentencing surrounding powdered and crack cocaine, and since crack cocaine was affecting the black community at much higher rates than the white community, this led to a huge increase in the incarceration of black Americans. To be blunt, this is common knowledge, and you should be embarrassed to be missing it.
I have given you multiple examples of the Ratchet Effect in American politics, but you lack the basic background to engage with them properly. You should start by looking into the Crime Bills of 1984 and 1994. Good luck.
Johnson, Democrat 1963. Too long ago to be relevant which is why I mentioned something newer.
I could keep going, but I just don’t have the time to keep going over nine administrations worth of legislation, only for you to say, “nuh-uh, here’s a single piece of legislation a Democrat passed once.”
??? Stopping crime is right wing?
If you don’t even know about the racist crime bills of the 80s and 90s then I shouldn’t continue this conversation. There are clearly large gaps in your knowledge regarding recent American history. It’s not my place to fill those gaps, but I also shouldn’t be berating you for them. Good luck.
OK, first off:
Both sides are NOT the same.
LITERALLY NO ONE SAID THAT. EVEN THE MEME SHOWS THAT THEY ARE DIFFERENT. IT’S NOT THAT THEY ARE THE SAME, IT’S THAT ONE IS SHIFTING RIGHT WHILE THE OTHER ONE IS NOT SHIFTING BACK.
OK, now that that’s out of the way…you think Biden was great for the environment because he limited (not banned, limited) Arctic drilling? Then why did oil production go up under him?
American oil production has reached its largest volume in recorded history—more than 13.2 million barrels per day in October, official figures show—outpacing its highest point under Donald Trump’s presidency, 13 million barrels daily in November 2019.
Environmentalists say that the levels of oil production seen at present in the U.S. are not necessary to facilitate the transition to renewable energy, and that it is within the president’s power to curtail it.
While domestic oil production has soared to new heights under Biden, figures produced by the Bureau of Land Management suggest his administration has not significantly reduced the number of drilling permits on public lands, despite the president saying in February 2020: “No more drilling on federal lands, period.” Newsweek
There’s tons more I could say; the BEACH Act is good, but it’s just amends the Clean Air Act to add testing for recreational waters. H.W. Bush did the same thing with the Clean Air Act Amendment in 1990, which effectively eliminated Acid Rain. Reagan and Bush were still both shit compared to their predecessors, but Clinton wasn’t significantly different.
You can see it in almost every issue. Crime? Biden championed the crime bill in the 80s that led to mass incarceration. The Clinton’s were even more zealous on incarceration (remember Hillary’s Super Predators?). Obama did speak out against mass incarceration, but he did little to curb it, and he started giving the police surplus military equipment. The economy? Carter was the one that started distancing Democrats from the New Deal, while Clinton deregulated Wall Street and paved the way for the 2008 crash; Obama response to that was basically the exact same bank bailouts that Bush had been doing, plus some weak regulation that was nothing compared to what Clinton repealed.
I could keep going, but I just don’t have the time to keep going over nine administrations worth of legislation, only for you to say, “nuh-uh, here’s a single piece of legislation a Democrat passed once.” I don’t know what to tell you. Look up Overton window, I guess.
Holy shit, I don’t know when I started misspelling Reagan’s name, but now I feel like I need to go through thousands of replies and figure it out, because this has definitely been going on for months.
It really isn’t that right-wing, especially economically, but there’s a lot of factors that make it seem that way. First is that it did go through a large, neoliberal shift in the 80s during the Regan years. When the economy crashed in the early 90s, the Democrats decided that, instead of returning to their New Deal roots, they would also run on neoliberal policies. The Republicans moved further right because of that, especially on social issues, and then the Rachet Effect described in the meme really started to ramp up.
Couple this with a lot of political illiteracy among the public in general, and you get a lot of people who actually don’t know what they believe and default to partisanship. If you poll people if they support gun control, you will get a very negative response, but if you break gun control into individual measures (longer waiting periods, mandatory background checks, magazine capacity limits, etc.) you get much more support. It’s the same on almost every issue; people don’t support a, “big government takeover,” of the healthcare system, but they broadly support Medicare for all. There’s a somewhat famous picture of a guy holding a sign that says something like, “Get Your Government Hands Off My Social Security,” that I think sums up this ignorance pretty well.
This attitude isn’t limited to the right, either. If you asked a Democrat “Who deregulated Wall Street?” they’d probably tell you Regan, Bush, or the other Bush. In actuality, the most significant deregulation, which lead directly to the 2008 financial collapse, was Clinton’s repeal of Glass-Steagal. Liberals think that Obama made significant progress on regulating Wall Street, but what he put in place was nothing compared to the deregulation that proceeded it.
Citizens United and the rise of mega donors also plays a pretty significant role in moving the parties away from policies that the general population want and towards the goals of a few oligarchs, but this reply is already way too long, so TL;DR: the country got pretty right-wing under Regan, both parties became more right-wing as a result, the population has become much more left-leaning since income inequality/cost of living went way up, but the parties are still both right-wing and most people are too ignorant to understand that.
Sees desperate people getting coerced by the military-industrial complex into signing their lives away for the promise of an education and a slim chance to escape the cycle of poverty.
“Fucking idiots.”
Edit: Attacking the people being fed into the meat grinder of the military-industrial complex instead of the military-industrial complex itself is just boot-licking with extra steps.