Interestingly, it seems that Jackie Robinson was also “ungrateful”
Throughout his remaining playing days, Robinson used his enormous fame to bring attention to the countless ways in which his world was patently unjust. He criticized umpires whom he believed were treating him unfairly, demanded that hotels provide equal access to him and his black teammates, and accused the New York Yankees of prejudice for failing to promote any black players to their team. When, during a mid-game birthday celebration for a popular southern-born player, the grounds crew raised a Confederate flag over Ebbets Field, Robinson fumed. “Who would ever let Jim Crow back in the ballpark?” he asked resentful teammates, who were enjoying the festivities. The press, many of whom had once praised him for turning the other cheek, took exception to his outspokenness, calling him ungrateful and urging him to be a baseball player, not a crusader. Bill Keefe, sports editor of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, declared that “no ten of the most rabid segregationists accomplished as much as Robinson did in widening the breach between the white people and Negroes.”
Just because you believe something is disrespectful doesn’t mean anything more than it is disrespectful to you. If you say kneeling for the anthem is disrespectful and someone else says it isn’t, who is right? Feelings aren’t facts, except on Evergreen’s campus.
Actually, I did provide two examples. Perkins would have preferred to not stand but was “coerced” to stand because of fines. Abdul-Rauf did not stand and was fined. So is it right for someone to have to stand even if it is against their religious beliefs?
The problem with statistics is that they deny individuality and in the US the concept of being an individual is one of our most important values. So if, hypothetically, 25% of black men are criminals it doesn’t mean that there is a 25% chance that an individual is a criminal. The idea that the 75% of black men who aren’t criminals would have to endure stop and frisk is un-American, IMO. I even believe that it violates the rights of the 25% who are criminals.
And 25% is a hypothetical number. The real number is much lower, around 5%. This is why I used the word disproportionately. It assumes more blacks are criminals than is the actual case. The fact that only a small % of stops result in arrest and conviction says that they are stopping people in numbers that don’t reflect the actual numbers of criminals. So a cop will stop a minority even though there is only a 5% chance he is going to get arrested. I don’t which year it was but there were more stops of black men than there were total black men in the city. So by disproportional I mean the number of stops of minorities is out of proportion to the number of minorities who are criminals. It assumes a higher proportion of criminality among minorities than is true. Again, the fact that the overwhelming majority of stops don’t result in arrest, let alone conviction, shows that there is an assumption of criminality based on race that isn’t true. If a cop stops 100 black men and only 3 get convicted, out of 5 arrested, then he assumed that the other 95 were also guilty of something and was wrong. They are stopping black men at a rate that suggests they are all criminals.
You didn’t answer any of my questions. I’ve been doing my best to answer yours. I’ll continue to converse with you but please respond to my questions.
Okay, I’ll play along. I concede. Kneeling during the anthem should be considered perfectly acceptable for the reasons you’ve given. What about my example? Shouldn’t it be equally accepted for a person to show up at an event like this and choose to stand? In your world, that is NOT disrespectful, correct? Who cares if they throw up a salute to the nearest American flag while these guys do their thing? Feelings aren’t facts, right?
Am I correct in saying you would feel exactly the same way about my scenario as you do Kapernick?
Right, you found two people who chose not to stand, and perhaps cited religion. I was looking for examples of religions that actually teach or require this of the people who practice it. I am not aware of any such teachings.
Can you name a religion and cite where this is taught as belief?
I don’t doubt that at all, actually. I was attempting to say that I think one needs to determine disproportionate targeting in a more rigorous way than I think has been done, and my personal opinion as of this time is that a lot of the outcry (notice I am definitely not saying “all” the outcry) stems from people not really being comfortable with mathematics and statistics. ActivitiesGuy has posted elsewhere in the medical threads about how little people really “get” stats and what that does to the interpretation of research. I think it applies even moreso in “soft” science fields.
I clearly described my stance poorly in my original post; I agree with you 100%, and that was one reason I said I dislike people taking a utilitarian view in regards to rights.
My point on the mathematics was separate from this view, and was more theoretical and generalized. I hear a lot of people raising hell on how X or Y disproportionately targets minority A or B or all of them. But they need to digest 2 things in my opinion: 1) does this policy violate rights and 2) separate from 1, which is THE fundamental question, is this “targeting” a question of statistics or a deliberate act by people? In other words, do they see it as targeting because they are emotionally attached to the issue (while they are really looking at a fundamental aspext of math and stats), or is it a concrete problem?
Again, I agree. But I was making a more general point (please see above). “Reasonable suspicion” is a far more lax standard than “probable cause” and even then the NYC force was not upholding the standard in their execution of the program. It was a program that was simply asking to be abused. It has no business being a policy.
Is targeting based on statistics somehow less of a violation of rights? It’s certainly less emotional, but does that make it more/less fair? In the exception of topics that have a dominating force, you’re still left with quite a few people whose rights get violated in the name of statistics.
I want to see these same individuals kneeling for our flag, do the same thing in Mexico to the Mexican Anthem who produce the perverse corruption in that government. Or kneel for the UK anthem for their colonialism. I wonder what the reaction would be?
I am sure racism would be charged all over the fucking place. …
You’re misunderstanding. Violation of rights is de facto a disqualifying factor for policy in my book; please see my comments on utilitarian perspective on rights above, which is exactly what category that would fall into.
What I am talking about is actually a form of “noise”, as in statistical noise. Signal to noise ratio. An optical illusion of mathematics which does not actually exist but which makes a person have an emotional reaction to something–they “see what they want to see” when looking at some reporting or data.
Take the following picture:
Are there actually peaks in this graph, or is it an optical illusion? The naked eye says “looks like peaks”, but it’s untrustworthy: this could be a fluke of the instrument, the measuring method, bad data, anything. You shouldn’t eyeball it. Detecting the REAL signal depends on the noise, the method of data gathering and measurement, the TYPE of noise that the signal (or experiment) is likely to generate–high frequency, low frequency, is it regular in periodicity, or quasi cyclic or quasi periodic? etc. It is dependent not only on the data gathering method but also the history of data and any changes in methods–as is any mathematical “clean up” algorithm you could or should apply to the data (which is called “smoothing” in most applied sciences)
In the picture above it is possible due to the high frequency and regularity of the noise that there could really be something there–but you’d have to no eyeball it.
What about this picture?
Are those real signal peaks or just irregular and cyclic noise? How do you know?
Where’s the real signal? Which ones are only noise? Is picture B hiding a signal? Is C? Or is that unmeasurable, hidden within noise?
Detection is also dependent on the quality of the data points themselves that are being gathered AND you need to know the type of noise you expect to encounter in an experiment or statistics analysis to really get a good accurate clean up going.
The point isn’t that a disproportionate effect isn’t real, or is only ever an illusion. I KNOW it can be real, I agree. The question is “how do you know?”.
General hypothetical: let’s assume some random policy does NOT violate anybody’s rights. Is it an automatic problem that it has a disproportionate effect on some group?
You’d better think about it, because we target things all the time–the wealthy “don’t pay their fair share” so some people target them for taxes; disadvantaged youths are targeted for more school funding, etc.
The point I was trying to raise is: IF a policy doesn’t violate rights, 1) how do you detect disproportionate targeting amidst noise and 2) what is the fundamental reason for it? Is that reason legitimate or not?
We have already established that a) I think stop and frisk is abominable and b) it violates rights, so it’s out. I agree already
Social science noise is among the hardest kinds of common noise to figure out. It’s made worse by sensationalized reporting and op-eds by people who don’t know the first thing about it, and by often poor gathering methods (some by default since humans make irrational decisions and change so much) and by varying quality and length of time something has been reported, and by changing standards of reporting or gathering (think of the medical field here: is there a real rise in some disease incidence or is the rising rate in diagnosis due to better methods of detection, or even over-diagnosis i.e false positive?).
Jehova’s Witnesses are prohibited from certain patriotic acts and with others are given a choice. Perkins wanted to choose to sit but the NBA wouldn’t allow it. So there you go. Also, religion is open to interpretation so an individual can make a choice based on his personal interpretations. The problem is that when Christianity, for example, was created I don’t think there were any national anthems so Jesus would not have addressed that question. That’s why religion in some cases serves as a guide rather than strict dogma.
Sure, okay, you came up with an example of one person. In his case, perhaps it is best that he remain in the locker room until the anthem concludes. What do you think about that?
You still haven’t answered ANY of my questions. It is almost like you don’t want to or something…
I just answered one of yours. Your other questions didn’t need to be asked since I stated my thoughts on disrespect. But I’ll repeat, I am not saying someone should not feel disrespected if someone kneels for the anthem or interrupts his prayer or whatever else. I don’t believe in telling people how to feel. I also can fully accept and understand why they feel the way they do. The only point I was making is that just because someone perceives something as disrespectful doesn’t automatically make it so. If that’s the case then any accusation can be valid. You could say something and someone can say it’s racist and no matter your defense it is still racist because someone took it that way. I’m not saying that you can’t believe something is disrespectful or racist just that your belief doesn’t get to be the final word. Are we becoming so simple in our thinking that we can’t take into account things like intent? Let’s do away with irony, sarcasm, metaphors, subtlety, satire, etc.
I commend you on your intellectual consistency. You’re no hypocrite. I’d feel like a total asshole if I sauntered up to those Muslim guys and interrupted their prayer. I am of the opinion that they’d be absolutely justified in considering me to be an asshole for doing such a thing, for exactly the same reasons I think Kapernick’s an asshole for calling attention to himself during the Anthem.
Thank you for the productive exchange. I understand your point of view much more clearly now.
The problem I have with the kneeling is that it doesn’t seem like there was an actual plan behind it. Usually when someone protests they want something. Had he knelt, in order to get attention for his reasons for kneeling, and then had specific things he wanted to see happen or at least brought attention to an issue, and then left it there it would be one thing. But to continue kneeling didn’t make much sense to me. It’s like, what do you want other than attention? If he had said I’m going to continue kneeling until some change is enacted or whatever at least that would make sense. Once he brought attention to the issue and it then became all about the act of keeling and not about the issue he should have stopped. It became counterproductive.
Yep, this has been my thought. We now have, in some cases, entire teams taking a knee for some nebulous “cause”, but I’m not aware of what needs to happen for them to stand back up.
Not that ayones watching the colts 49rs game those teams stink. However Im a degenerate gambler. Pence was at game for Payton Manning day and 49rs took knee. All up in his prune face tsk tsk. Well instead of making a statement at half time he runs off like a bitch. Oh well lets hope Indy covers 2.5 pts daddy needs new shoes
I know right… Payton manning day… Hes like a national hero in indy…notice nobody else left game. Just more red meat for Prez Twitter fingers to get the honey boos boos rawled up…means nothing. But i won $200 so im happy…go horse
I was curious if anyone would bump this so we could talk about the Vice President going to the game and dropping a couple hundred grand on the taxpayers for a publicity stunt.
(If you believe that it was an acceptable way to send a message, that’s fine, although I do not agree; if you believe that Pence actually went to that game just to honor Peyton, but had a spontaneous fit of patriotism that made him so upset that he just couldn’t be there for another minute, give me a break)
