Orion

Yeah, when it comes to killing things (up to and including humans), TX is pretty laid back about it, legally speaking. Unless it's unborn fetuses, then they get pretty feisty.

Does a bird respond to affection at all, or is it like "Bitch, feed me and leave me the fuck alone?" Falconing has always been interesting to me, but I know next to nothing about it. I saw that in Mongolia, they do that shit with Golden Eagles, which is straight bonkers to me. Golden eagles can kill and eat fucking GOATS. Not to be fucked with. EDIT: In case you don't believe me http://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=golden+eagle+wolverine&&view=detail&mid=6B64F71AB5524A73DB026B64F71AB5524A73DB02&&FORM=VDRVRV

It hurts me to agree with Lauren....but I do.

Interesting read. I found this excerpt especially interesting: "There is evidence that racial profiling was common practice in the New Jersey State Police in the 1990's: internal police memos; testimony by troopers; and training materials that encouraged officers to stop and search minority drivers. Most striking are police records that show that black and Hispanic motorists, who make up 30 percent of the drivers on the turnpike, were subjected to more than 80 percent of the searches." Given, that was the 90's and scrutiny is MUCH higher now. Looks like that article was written in 2002. Wonder if/how things have changed since then.

Sure. I wouldn't argue that. There is more to EVERY story than 10,000 foot view statistics. That being said, the statistics are hard to ignore. This is just a small sample, I didn't want to post the stats re: the justice system, because those have been mentioned already, and I wanted to try and point some stuff out that is harder to just file under "make better decisions". In CB, Greg asked if I thought it would be easier to get a scholarship as a black kid or a white kid, and brought up the fact that he thought there may be "more scholarships for minorities". That's a legit point. However, again, the fact that there even needs to be "special" scholarships "for minorities" seems to indicate something that is systemically flawed. As I said before, this isn't an easy thing to solve, or even wrap your head fully around, and it's been part of our country almost literally since America was an actual thing. Additionally, your responses to me seem to be far more reasonable and measured than anything you say in response to Geeto. Lol. Glad I haven't reached "enemy" status yet.

Who names their kid "Mitt", really?:dumb:

"A black man is three times more likely to be searched at a traffic stop, and six times more likely to go jail than a white person. Blacks make up nearly 40 percent of arrests for violent crimes. On the New Jersey Turnpike, for instance, blacks make up 15 percent of drivers, more than 40 percent of stops and 73 percent of arrests – even though they break traffic laws at the same rate as whites. In New York City, blacks and Hispanics were three and four times as likely to be stopped and frisked as whites. Black pre-schoolers are far more likely to be suspended than white children. Black children make up 18 percent of the pre-school population, but represent almost half of all out-of-school suspensions. Once you get to K-12, black children are three times more likely to be suspended than white children. Black students make up almost 40 percent of all school expulsions, and more than two thirds of students referred to police from schools are either black or Hispanic, says the Department of Education. Even disabled black children suffer from institutional racism. About a fifth of disabled children are black – yet they account for 44 and 42 percent of disabled students put in mechanical restraints or placed in seclusion." This is not original thought from me, as I don't have access to the statistics. This is pulled from literally the first article I found on the subject, written by the National Science Foundation’s director of legislative and public affairs in the Bush AND Obama administrations. I can share personal anecdotes as well, but the numbers speak for themselves. Does this not ring true to you at all? Do you really believe that all of this stuff is made up, and that it REALLY comes down to ONLY a persons decisions, and nothing else?

What does it explain, my friend?

Motherfucker, I live in Marion, and I grew up on the east side of Columbus. I have seen poor white people. Shit, I have BEEN poor white people (sorta). Don't presume to tell me what I have seen and experienced first hand. Do poor white people have it "better" than poor black people? No, not necessarily. But, they have a greater opportunity to take advantage of "their choices" (which seem to be getting tossed around a lot in the few pages) in order to get out of the situation. White or black, you choose to do meth, heroin, drop out, etc....that's on you. But life, contrary to popular belief, ISN'T just "what you make it", sometimes shit happens to you, and sometimes, that shit is systems based. In that case, it happens more often to people of color than it does white...ON AVERAGE. ALL THINGS BEING EQUAL, it is better in America to be white.

I would choose to be white, easy. Look, I'm not asking the question so that I can then point and say "See, you ARE a racist!" (I'll let Geeto fight that particular battle, I'm not interested in pointing fingers at individual on CR, when the bigger issue is systemic). I'm trying to illustrate that, if my assumption is correct, most if not everyone who answered that question honestly would say "white". That doesn't make you a racist, it makes you aware. I believe "woke" is the term that the kids are using these days. I'm postulating that, while economic status IS a common and major component in discriminatory behavior, all things being equal, race is still the main factor. It's a loaded question, but not in the way you thought.

Miller, you didn't do too well on multiple choice tests, did you?

Oh, you absolutely can be. In fact, "yellow" is probably one of the worlds most prevalent poor colors (how many of the more than 1 billion folks in China qualify as "poor"?). I simplified the question as much as possible, because "CR". If those were your two options, which would you choose?

That question is legit, and you know it.

One more question for CR, and then I'm out. If you had to be born poor, would you prefer to be born poor and white, or poor and black?

That was a shitty joke.

That's a lot of runs.

If your ignorance is only occasional, you are doing better than the majority of CR. Welcome to the board, dude.

Welcome to the forum, dude. Nice ride. Tell Shawn Cunix that DJ says "hi".

Your shit is looking better and better, Randy. I'm going to want to buy something from you...perhaps as soon as Christmas.

God, what a soup sandwich of a thread that was.

I think that you may have inadvertently hit on a very large part of the problem. 1955 may seem like a long time ago to YOU (and me, to be fair), but to a significant percentage of America, that was when they were kids. For instance, my father is 68. He was born in in January of 49. Ever heard of the Jim Crow laws? They weren't even "officially" abolished until 1964, and even then took decades to roll back in some of the southern states. So, I wasn't born until 78...but that mean that I am only a little over a decade away from being an "illegal" baby (Some Jim Crow laws outlawed interracial marriage, and sought to completely disenfranchise mixed race children). My fathers mother was born in 1910 (that 10 years before women could even vote, for those of you wondering), when "Separate but equal" was still a thing. Her grandmother was a slave. You asked me why I thought that terms like "n*gger" still have such an impact, especially when used by a white person. My answer is that for a long period of time, that word (among others) was used to specifically dehumanize an entire culture group. It was a word that was meant not just to be insulting, but to be used in place of the word "person". Slavers didn't trade in "people", they traded in "n*ggers". And that word was essentially government sanctioned up until the time of our freaking parents. So, not so very long ago. Think of everything you hold dear and to be true and right...how much of it did you learn from your parents? Probably quite a bit. As a kid, I learned that that was a word that was reviled, and we didn't use it. I'm a 38 year old dude, and I STILL wouldn't say that shit around my dad for fear that he'd kick off in my ass. TL/DR food for thought: All of this heinous shit that we tend to think of as "so long ago", wasn't actually that long ago at all.

I understand that I'm not solving anything, or even putting forth an idea for a solution. I don't know how to fix the issue, it's not an easy one to solve. Also, no one should apologize for what they were born into; it is what it is. You do have the opportunity to improve the system, or at least live at peace within it. Just something else to think about.

While that DOES seem to be triggering a bunch of folks in here, that doesn't exactly conform to the requisites I specified. 3 out of 3 white guys say "nothing". My point, is that of course it's fucking nothing. When you are on the top rung of the ladder, nothing that anyone shouts at you from below means shit. Chris Rock has a little bit in one of his older stand up specials where he suggests that it is so good to be white that there is a "one armed bus boy in this room right now who wouldn't trade places with me, and I'm RICH". It was funny, but I also tend to agree with him. I have the interesting perspective of having a black father but looking just like the rest of you crackers. In my 38 years on this planet, I have been discriminated against exactly 0 times, but I've seen it happen to my father several times. Only the most extreme apologist is "blaming whitey" for all of the foibles of individuals that aren't white, but if you think that the system isn't slanted your way, then you are just out of touch. For the record, I don't blame you if you are...I have met a hundred people in the last year that are "racists" and don't even know it, because they live in rural areas and just haven't ever really interacted with anyone who wasn't just like them. They are simply ignorant of the actual issues that minorities face. If we lived in a world where everyone was the same color, we would still have the same damned issues, but the dividing line would be something less obvious, like "caste", or "bloodline", or any other differentiator that you can see in medieval England.

Because I want to know what a bunch of (presumably) white guys think about things that I could call them that would honestly offend in the same way that "N*gger" or "W3tback" or any of the other derogatory terms used for folks of other colors/nationalities get called. To quote a famous Irishman, "Quit changing the subject and just answer the fooking question".

Awesome, anyone else?