quote:

So, you - an entity manifestly incapable of constructing a reasoned argument - attempts to insult me by implying weakness, I'm amused more than anything else. You're not someone admirable, someone worthy of respect - indeed your progressive descent into desperate, plaintive pleas to engage marks you out as a lonely soul who craves validation.

quote:

ORIGINAL: blnymph

Even those statistics of races as such are a typically American issue. There may be similar statistics in some European countries but not identical in those categories.

quote:

The problem is neighborhoods and even whole cities that tolerate and even encourage criminal behavior. The areas that are so infested with thugs and gang violence you run the risk of gunfire just stopping at a stoplight in some of those areas.

quote:

But, any discussion of options in disassembling the cesspools of "thug life" deifying communities is met by accusations of "racism". How do you combat pervasive attitudes that guide children into criminality?

quote:

ORIGINAL: vincentML

quote:

The problem is neighborhoods and even whole cities that tolerate and even encourage criminal behavior. The areas that are so infested with thugs and gang violence you run the risk of gunfire just stopping at a stoplight in some of those areas.

You ignore the history of how these ring suburbs came into existence. When the Federal Government allowed International Harvester to sell their cotton picking combine in the Southland the new technology threw many sharecroppers off the land. They migrated to the North beginning around 1960, a second wave following the one that had migrated north for defense jobs in the 1940s. The migrants came mostly to the inner cities, attracted by new government housing projects, mostly high rises. Whites and affluent blacks fled the cities, taking job opportunities with them. This circumstance resulted in poverty, drugs, and crime. When crime became untenable civil authorities destroyed the high rise apartment buildings and provided Section 8(?) housing in the ring cities. They moved the people, their drugs and crime to the suburban ghettos but jobs did not follow to any great extent.

quote:

But, any discussion of options in disassembling the cesspools of "thug life" deifying communities is met by accusations of "racism". How do you combat pervasive attitudes that guide children into criminality?

It is a problem not easily solved although there are groups within these neighborhoods who are trying. The Federal Government provides funds for "community policing." That is one prong of the solution. The perception by blacks that they are harassed by police, where "stop and frisk" was used wantonly and where unarmed black men are shot by police more often than white, and the culture-shaming rhetoric that arises from the Right do lend themselves to concerns about racism in America, as do comments like "cesspools of "thug life"

My own thought is dealing with the problem requires assistance to groups already on the ground and to the police in the neighborhoods with different tools and a different mind-set as suggested by the community policing agenda.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Kirata

quote:

ORIGINAL: tweakabelle

You can squirm, rationalise and evade as much as you like. Nothing you said alters or even contests the substantive criticism I made about your refusal to acquaint yourself with leading contemporary thought, which was:

"when you rubbish contemporary thinking you don't understand, you are in fact rubbishing many of your own views. "

Not a good look in any one's book.

I saw nothing in any of the previously cited entries on the work and thought of the principal post-structuralists to support your claim ...

quote:

ORIGINAL: Kirata

quote:

ORIGINAL: tweakabelle

quote:

ORIGINAL: Kirata

I saw nothing in any of the previously cited entries on the work and thought of the principal post-structuralists to support your claim ...

What a clever formulation of words to avoid admitting that you know nothing about the work and thought of the principal post structuralists. Your "previously cited entries" contained little or nothing about the "work and thought of the principal post-structuralists" but consisted of cheap personal shots and character assassinations.

For example this bit of cheap and nasty character assassination is the entirety of your "entry" on Foucault one of the most important and influential intellectual figures on the world stage since WWII:

"In February, Foucault gave a speech denouncing police provocation to protesters at the Latin Quarter of the Mutualité. Such actions marked Foucault's embrace of the ultra-left, undoubtedly influenced by Defert, who had gained a job at Vincennes' sociology department and who had become a Maoist. Most of the courses at Foucault's philosophy department were Marxist-Leninist oriented . . . While the right-wing press was heavily critical of this new institution, new Minister of Education Olivier Guichard was angered by its ideological bent and the lack of exams, with students being awarded degrees in a haphazard manner. He refused national accreditation of the department's degrees "

That is not the entirety of the cited entry. That's just an excerpt from it. The full entry is at the source I linked. You know, the part you cut out of your snip.

quote:

A community that tolerates and even encourages criminal behavior will end up run by the criminals.

quote:

It is a common denominator behavior in highly crowded urban areas worldwide.

quote:

What I ask is how do you break the cultural behavior of condoning and even encouraging criminal behavior when it becomes rampant in a community? The situation is like attitude cancer in a community.

quote:

I do consider Section 8 housing to be a liberal concept that sounds so good in theory but the way it was practiced made for even a larger problem. . . [SNIP]. . . In the 1980s when Section 8 was the "solution to welfare housing" several very new apartment complexes down the road from where I currently live became 80% section 8 over the course of a year. In 3 years the apartment complexes were referred to as "crack city" and had broken sewer lines running across yards where kids were playing.

quote:

ORIGINAL: tweakabelle

quote:

ORIGINAL: Kirata

quote:

ORIGINAL: tweakabelle

quote:

ORIGINAL: Kirata

I saw nothing in any of the previously cited entries on the work and thought of the principal post-structuralists to support your claim ...

What a clever formulation of words to avoid admitting that you know nothing about the work and thought of the principal post structuralists. Your "previously cited entries" contained little or nothing about the "work and thought of the principal post-structuralists" but consisted of cheap personal shots and character assassinations.

For example this bit of cheap and nasty character assassination is the entirety of your "entry" on Foucault one of the most important and influential intellectual figures on the world stage since WWII:

"In February, Foucault gave a speech denouncing police provocation to protesters at the Latin Quarter of the Mutualité. Such actions marked Foucault's embrace of the ultra-left, undoubtedly influenced by Defert, who had gained a job at Vincennes' sociology department and who had become a Maoist. Most of the courses at Foucault's philosophy department were Marxist-Leninist oriented . . . While the right-wing press was heavily critical of this new institution, new Minister of Education Olivier Guichard was angered by its ideological bent and the lack of exams, with students being awarded degrees in a haphazard manner. He refused national accreditation of the department's degrees "

That is not the entirety of the cited entry. That's just an excerpt from it. The full entry is at the source I linked. You know, the part you cut out of your snip.

Another attempt at obfuscation. I never said it was the entirety of your cited entry, I said it was the entirety of your entry on Foucault. Which it is. I quoted the relevant part of your cite on Foucault in full, just as I stated before presenting the quote. Your comments here are at best misleading at worse downright deceptive.

They say the cover up is often worse than the original crime. Here your original crime was to dismiss something - post structuralist thought - that you don't know nor understand, from a position of ignorance. Now in your attempts to draw attention away from the fact that you have been caught out, that your ignorance means you are unknowingly trashing your own repeatedly stated views, you are repeatedly (and desperately) trying to obfuscate the issue.

Despite having 3 opportunities to do so, not once in this exchange have you denied or even contested the substantive accusation I have made against you - you dismiss post structuralist thought without knowing it, studying it or understanding it at all, which forces you unknowingly into a position where you trash your own opinions.

Your repeated silences on the substantive issue speaks volumes. These silences are far more eloquent than your sad and sorry posts.

quote:

"Foucault argued that 'the real political task in a society such as ours is to criticize the workings of institutions which appear to be neutral and independent; to criticize them in such a manner that the political violence which has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight against them'...yet Foucault did not recommend that power be reconstructed on the basis of justice. he considered justice itself to be an illusory idea. for Foucault, it was all about power..."

quote:

ORIGINAL: PeonForHer

Foucault uprooted all of the grand theories of the modernist outlook, Bounty. All those great theories of how the world 'objectively worked', he picked to pieces. This means liberalism, neoliberalism, conservatism; it also means Marxism and all its offshoots. It would be beyond cretinous to cast him as 'just another lefty', as some have done here, on the basis of some feverish Googling of their pet ultra-right-wing websites. To try to attack him and his thinking in that way would be like using a peashooter against a tank.