While Black Lives Matter so do women's lives in extremist countries

Trade. Fair trade is the thing that they need most. Not the stupid pointless "Fair Trade" organisation but a removal of barriers to entry and our habit of dumping our unwanted and massively subsidised produce on their markets while we stop them selling their produce to us by imposing massive barriers.

Betsy Og said:
So the immediacy of "white cops stop killing black people" is hard to ....err....Trump.
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I love a good pun... a hot cross pun being my favourite.

Yep, not every American who voted for Trump was a mouth breathing racist but every mouth breathing racist in America voted for Trump.
 
I am just delighted that the crisis of Trump's presidency is an internal US matter. It could have so easily been an international conflict with North Korea or Iran and involved nuclear weapons.

Talking to some US friends over the weekend I was shocked at their reaction to the BLM protests, which was basically "oh but the looting". These are east coast liberals, strongly anti-Trump (or at least they think they are). I'm beginning to think Trump may yet be reelected. If that happens on the back of a black boogey campaign I really fear for the future of African America.

I saw three teenage black girls on the street on Saturday with homemade BLM signs under their arms, presumably they were coming from the protest. I must say I felt an overwhelming wave of sympathy for them. Young kids with their lives in front of them, growing up in a society where they feel the need to protest against its view of black people. I felt admiration too, but mostly sympathy, why should they think they have to do this.
 
As one of the 99% of Irish people who want to see Trump humiliated I am becoming concerned that the BLM thing could backfire. As Joe has observed, if you vote Trump you ain't Black, so he has that constituency in the bag. But if it becomes too race dominated Joe stands to lose some of his natural base, RC Irish Americans, who are notorious for their racism.
His choice of VP will be interesting. It seems between Kamala Harris who is less black than Obama or Val Demmings who is assuredly more black than Obama. The safer electoral choice would be Kamala.
 
So to summarise, Black Lives matter. Women's lives matter. So Black Women's lives REALLY matter....
 
Protesting is good but making sure all their adult relatives vote is much more important.
 
Duke of Marmalade said:
I Googled and that is not the case. It has only changed this week, but Biden is now universally the marginal favourite.
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Odds are widening a bit now.

There is a divergence between Trump and NFL & NASCAR. If he loses that base (or is seen to be out of touch even with them), it won't be pretty. Having said that, who knows how nasty the next 3 or 4 months gets.
 
I'd love to be optimistic but I thought he hadn't a hope the first time out, it's rare to go after first term, so not until its announced will I believe it. Signed... Mr. D Thomas
 
Betsy Og said:
I'd love to be optimistic but I thought he hadn't a hope the first time out, it's rare to go after first term, so not until its announced will I believe it. Signed... Mr. D Thomas
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If people had dealings with the US I think it became increasingly likely he had a strong chance from about mid Summer last time around. Once he survived the p****y-gate moment it was clear that the anti-Clinton sentiment was much stronger than the concerns over Trump. The general feeling was that he was an idiot but what harm could he do. Along with the feeling he would slash tax.

Mood is a lot different this time. His active support seems to be slipping. The "what harm could he do" feeling is, naturally, changing. There will be an element that reacts to the BLM movement and will come out for him. But that is likely <40%. He can't win on those numbers and in fact risks a landslide - though I wouldn't predict what the downticket voting would be like at this stage
 
Isn't it remarkable that in a country so large and so powerful and educated the best opposition is Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton before him? Or, heaven forbid, Bernie Sanders!

I saw an op-ed that Joe should select Condoleezza Rice as his running mate. I'd love to see that. She's a moderate Republican, extremely smart (way smarter than the 3 listed above), has loads of experience as a politician and diplomat, she's a scientist, a professor and, as if that wasn't enough is a concert pianist. She was Provost Stanford University for 6 years with responsibility for a $1.5 budget. Given Joe's age his running mate matters and I think she'd make a far better President than him (or Hillary or Bernie or Trump or anyone else I can think of).
 
Purple said:
Isn't it remarkable that in a country so large and so powerful and educated the best opposition is Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton before him? Or, heaven forbid, Bernie Sanders!
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Actually I think it is a strength of the US system that it produces candidates like Clinton and Biden who have been in the public eye their whole careers and whose strengths and weaknesses are well known, and also candidates like Obama and Trump who could come from no where in a short space to become President.

Personally I think all the anti Clinton sentiment was mostly misogyny, having said that I am glad she was not elected as I firmly believe that she would have lead the US to war in Syria, and nothing Trump has done has been as damaging as that would have been.
 
EmmDee said:
Odds are widening a bit now.

There is a divergence between Trump and NFL & NASCAR. If he loses that base (or is seen to be out of touch even with them), it won't be pretty. Having said that, who knows how nasty the next 3 or 4 months gets.
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Betfair go 53% chance Biden 42% chance Trump
 
Fact No 1: police kill about 1,000 people a year in the US (aside: that would be equivalent to about 13 killings by Gardai). 25% of these are Black compared to 13% of the adult population being Black.
Is this evidence of systematic police brutality against Blacks in the US?
Fact No 2: 40% of the US prison population is Black
Now clearly America has serious underlying problems with racial equality. But nobody is suggesting that these incarcerations are substantially unfair at the point of implementation. They are where they are and it would seem that Blacks make up about 40% of their criminal classes. A 25% police killing rate does not look so discriminatory in that light.
 
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Watch 13th on Netflix
 

You are missing the point Duke.

Watch the George Floyd video, the man was murdered. The policeman knew he was being videoed, yet he felt immune. And he was until the protests started.

When the police feel they can CASUALLY murder people on the streets there is a problem.
 
Gosh I am not going to walk myself into a position where I am even subliminally defending what was done to GF.
But at the national level it could be argued that the police treatment of blacks is not out of proportion to the their participation in crime.

Maybe I shouldn't be making the point in this context as it might be misconstrued as some sort of contextualisation of the callous and brutal murder of GF.
 
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So the larger question is why are black people disproportionately represented in those crime figures?
Given the correlation between crime and poverty and given the economic disenfranchisement of black people in America is it therefore reasonable to see a link between that economic disadvantage and racism?
 
Oh absolutely! America has its race problems for sure. But it is where it is and I was just querying whether its police were especially racist. I get a slight glimmer of hope for the place that the statistics do not actually point in that direction.
 
The police in the US are too militarised.
The police in the US are over equipped and under trained.
There are racist police in the US.
That doesn't mean that the police as a whole are racist but, just like here, they tend to close ranks when things go wrong.
 
Duke of Marmalade said:
But at the national level it could be argued that the police treatment of blacks is not out of proportion to the their participation in crime.
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It could be argued, but it is easily dismissed. I would also recommend the '13th' as essential viewing in order to get a better understanding how deeply ingrained this problem is in the US. Listening to family of latest victim Rayshard Brooks, it is striking to hear grown men and women say that they have, all of their lives, been frightened of the police.
 

Really??? Do you how less likely you are to be jailed if you are white illicit drug user rather than a black illicit drug user despite research showing drug use is the same in both populations? Do you know what the chances of a white teenager first offender entering the US justice system compared to a Black teenager first offender. A black man and a white man walking down the same street. Which one do think is more likely to be stopped by police? Sentencing shows that prosecutors are twice as likely to charge a black person for a crime with a minimum mandatory sentence than a white person in the same situation with regard to habitual crime. For all the reasons above, a black man is more than likely to have a criminal record than a white person so it is harder to secure employment which then has consequences not just for the person but whole families.

Are we could just say that black people are more to commit crime...
 
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