pjwestin @ pjwestin @lemmy.world

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3

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1,064

Joined

2 yr. ago

...so this is some real pedantic shit I'm about to do here, and I apologize in advance, but that's the wrong picture. François Clemmons was on the show between 1968 and 1993. The original episode where they share a pool aired in 1969, and both men were much younger. The picture above is from Clemmons final appearance on the show in 1993, titled "Love," where they again share a foot pool. I know this because my toddler has become Mr. Rogers obsessed and I've seen the 1993 episode 3 dozen times in the last month.

I think mods should remove misinformation, but to my mind, for something to rise to the level of, "misinformation," it needs to be egregiously false and harmful, like vaccine skepticism or election denial. Removing a comment, which is effectively true but debatably incorrect from a wonkish perspective, and labeling it misinformation? That's bullshit.

If they wanted to remove comment where he says, "blue Maga," whatever. Not the way I would run a community, but whatever. If they want to ban him for posting screenshots from the automod, OK, I guess he was poking the bear at that point. But the only reason to pull that other comment is because it contradicted their worldview. That's bad in most communities, but in a news community, it's unacceptable.

Yeah, I checked the modlogs, and it was exactly the mod I thought it was. There are two mods on News and Political Memes that don't like criticism of Democrats. Someone picked a fight with me on Political Memes, calling me a, "fucking moron," and telling me I didn't understand something. I showed him polling that disproved him, and he tried to prove that the Pew Research Center didn't know how to conduct a survey. We were rude back and forth to each other for a while, but the kid who instigated the fight caught a 1 day ban for, "rudeness," while I got a perma-ban for, "trolling." They even left up separate comments on the same thread where he told another user they were, "too stupid," and to, "shut the fuck up." It's best to just block the communities they mod.

For the record, it's a disgrace that they pulled that one comment for, "misinformation." The only thing I would dispute is the claim that, "Biden [sold] more protected land than any other president," and, "[approved] more drilling for fraking than any other." Oil production did boom under him, and he expanded drilling on federal lands after promising not to, but I think the rate of sale and approval was about the same as Trump. Either way, that's not misinformation, it's just nuance.

No matter who you are, no matter where you work, the facilities team is really in charge.

Wait, is that really it? Because that's fucking awesome.

I've always assumed it was some sort of ornate, ceremonial hammer made of pure gold that they keep in a special chamber, but now that you mentioned it, I really hope it's just a claw hammer they borrow from the maintenance guy.

Honestly, now that we're literally sending people to concentration camps, I have zero fucks to give about this superficial bullshit. No one gives a shit about what Hitler wore at the '36 Olympics, and no one's gonna care what this asshole wore to a funeral.

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

Source

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.

It's probably easier to count the ones where the DNC didn't have their thumb on the scale. First, it's been way less than 100 years since voters even determined who the candidate was; before 1976, primaries were basically just opinion polls, and delegates picked who they wanted regardless of voter input. Also, after the Carter team blamed Ted Kennedy for their loss, the DNC started ostracizing candidates that made primary challenges, so they definitely put their thumb on the scale for incumbents. So off the bat, we're looking at less than 50 years of primaries, and only in non-incumbent years.

Then the party definitely put its thumb in the scale for Clinton in 2016, Biden in 2020, and they literally just picked Harris in 2024. So, that means that the unbiased primaries would be Carter in '76, Mondale in "84, Dukakis in 88, Clinton in 92, Gore in 2000, Kerry in 2004 (though personally I think they kinda did a hit-job on Howard Dean) and Obama in 2008. Out of 12 primaries in over 48 years, 7 have been open and fair contests. About 58% successful in keeping their thumb off the scale.

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.

"We can't give everyone a trial!"

Smash cut to 250 years of giving everyone a trial.

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.