pjwestin

joined 2 years ago
[–] pjwestin@lemmy.world 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Also worth pointing out that, while America may be 249 years old, no one would consider it an empire for the majority of that time. Its debatable, but I would argue we didn't really reach an empirical level of power until the late 40s, when we started taking over what was left of the British Empire's influence over the middle-eas5.

[–] pjwestin@lemmy.world 6 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (5 children)

Sees desperate people getting coerced by the military-industrial complex into signing their lives away for the promise of an education and a slim chance to escape the cycle of poverty.

"Fucking idiots."

Edit: Attacking the people being fed into the meat grinder of the military-industrial complex instead of the military-industrial complex itself is just boot-licking with extra steps.

[–] pjwestin@lemmy.world 9 points 3 weeks ago

Yeah, I'm not happy about the Switch 2, but the amount of cope is unbelievable. I've seen multiple people claiming, "the Wii U sold out a launch too," even though the Wii U sold worse than the Wii on opening weekend. The sales might still fall off a cliff in a month, but breaking the PS4's record for launch sales is not a great sign.

[–] pjwestin@lemmy.world 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Not sure, though, how this ploy would work out for our fine fellows in South America and Canada, the ones currently belabored with being the closest neighbours...

Fuck Mexico, I guess.

[–] pjwestin@lemmy.world 4 points 2 months ago
[–] pjwestin@lemmy.world 11 points 2 months ago

There's a Lovecraft story about this exact thing. It doesn't end well.

[–] pjwestin@lemmy.world 11 points 2 months ago (2 children)
[–] pjwestin@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] pjwestin@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] pjwestin@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago (5 children)

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?

[–] pjwestin@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago (7 children)

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.

[–] pjwestin@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago (9 children)

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.

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