Metal Reviews

No, I was never assaulted, per se; I've been jumped on a few occasions, and I've been in a lot of scraps. The blacks I have encountered have invariably walked around with a huge chip on their shoulder and are apt to resort to violence at the blink of an eye. Two houses down from mine, a black kid beat a white kid, a kid I had played with, to death with a baseball bat. And these things were not merely isolated incidences.
You think that blacks are innocent victims? My experience is completely different.
It's not even that, it is the general behavior and the fact that the darker the population, the more crime and violence there is. Can you argue against this? Visit Detroit someday.

By the time I was 16, I had lived in more than 30 locations, from the west coast to the south: one thing I noticed is the less blacks in the area, the less crime, vandalism, and general squalor their was.
In say for instance Colorado, the places I lived in were virtually crime free *and lily white), you weren't apt to get jumped, you could leave your bike in the front yard overnight and it would still be there... sure there are petty crimes and all that, but NOTHINg on a par with anylace that is pre-dominantly black.
Likewise, where I live now: @ 1% black and virtually no crime; in the 6 years my daughter has been in school, not ONE SINGLE fight.
Contrast that to my upbringing where fights, and gun related deaths were the norm. What is the difference? There are virtually no blacks here. There is NO vandalism, no graffiti and actually the one time I have seen an incident here, it was about 5 or 6 black teenagers beating up ONE white kid. I drove up and ran them off. the kid was alright, but shaken up.

My kids leave there toys outside and they are there the next day.
People (women, notably) can take an evening run, and not be raped. Seriously, in the areas that I lived in the Los angeles area, they were practically war zones. And speaking to my mother, who never got out, it is ten times worse.

So don't sit here and tell me I am full of shit. Your experience is different; fine. Great. But mine is just as valid as yours.

If that is racist, then so be it.

p.s.
excuse the typos, just too lazy right now to go back and fix them.

Hallelujah.

This does largely come down to personal experience/race relations between US and UK, but I do still think that perception's important. In your neighbourhood, blacks are seen as the perpetrators of the violence, here, it's the other way around as much as not, if even the cause of crime can be pinpointed so. Doubtless we could each find many examples proving our points, and it comes down to the fact that evil is evil regardless of skin colour. Personal examples ultimately mean very little when faced with stats.

Rio made a good argument, so I won't retrace his steps. A different direction, forgive my late-night meanderings, but I think there's a difference between the open crimes of a racially mixed neighbourhood and the quieter, less obvious crimes of a unified one: paedophilia, fraud, and so on, types of crime that makes less overall impact but more of a personal one. This might just be my experience, but whilst the Jewish community here might avoid drugs and robbery, there are instances of fraud, money laundering, even paedophilia (rare, but still) as mentioned. Different areas will have different crimes, fine. I suspect, however, that the black sections of say, London, are far from the uniform vandalism, graffiti, etc, of what you mentioned, just as they are doubtless free of fraud and such 'higher' crimes.

Race, ultimately then, isn't the arbitor as much as poverty is. Sure, there are instances of eg paedophilia amongst poor people, but as a general suggestion I think you can divide them up like this and find proof of this. Personal opinion, fine. But of the many serial killers in the US, the vast vast majority if not all are white males, no? Seems odd, and this says nothing against whites or pro blacks, just an interesting observation.

As people are saying however, race is a topic too broad for one topic in a Metal forum. Back to the election?

The violence recounted by V is not necessarily exclusively black, nor does it result from being black. It results from the social situations they find themselves in. I can recite very similar episodes involving Italians and eastern Europeans here in Switzerland, and you certainly can't apply the "playing the victim" definition to all ethnicities involved in violence.

@ V/Cry of the Banshee

Indeed, agree to disagree... as usual, haha.

Agreed with Zad, Rio, Fridge, etc...why do black people steal? Because they're black? Er, no...because they don't have enough to survive sufficiently. Saying that black people are inherently an inferior race would also mean saying that the black people who are successful are more inclined to commit crime as well, which is obviously not true. Not that poor black people are more inclined to commit crime than poor white people.

In other news, Sarah Palin has down syndrome.

I was talking to a published Christian author at my local bookstore for a book signing. He was conversing with a fundamentalist college student who buys in to the whole creationism/6,000 year old earth bit. He completely derails their conversation to point out how Palin's fundamentalism scares the 'bejesus' out of him. Someone who believes the end times are near having control of nuclear weapons is a bad thing, a la Bush. Eventually, the conversation ended when she said she can't 'read things that conflict with her views'.

Later, he and I discussed how the Republican party is the christian/religious party while they espouse the use of guns and vehemently condemn the socialist practices which the disciples practiced and could be drawn from Jesus' teachings.

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_V6K4fnZSzxE/S ... thread.gif



At the risk of starting a new flamewar on a different topic, there is an interesting article about the 700bn bailout at Lenins Tomb (although written on monday when it looked like it was actually going to happen)

http://leninology.blogspot.com/

(if it has been updated since I posted this scroll down to the article entitled "the fix is in")

about the 700bn bailout, i think it has to be passed, but not as it is. as things are banks are just hoarding cash, restraining access to credit (so we've gone from the extreme of lending to everyone to the extreme of almost not lending at all). lack of investor confidence makes markets far too volatile and their panic and herd mentality exarcerbate every difficulty:

http://www.sec.gov/news/press/2008/2008-48_letter.pdf

a rumor starts that a company is in trouble, and because of that it really gets into trouble.

yes, Wall Street has had a big party, but this is not a mere case of saving investors from their own decisions because of a bubble burst. the consequences could be far more serious than that and intervention is necessary, although not in these molds.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/9973c5b0-8a6d ... fd18c.html
George Soros's take on the plan.

it'll be a very.. cumbersome intervention, but it has to be done. hopefully it will teach people not to take out loans they cannot afford, banks to ease refinancing and not to take excessive risks and authorities to keep a closer watch (they have to be watchdogs, not guardian angels).

also, nice use of this whole thing as a political weapon. suddenly everyone's against the golden parachutes from wall street and championing taxpayers' rights. bah.

Well, some of us have been against golden parachutes for quite a long time

Nice to see the rest of the world catching on

i think most people never liked them, but only as the elections near do the authorities ever propose to do anything about them.

a manager takes excessive risks, destroys any value for shareholders and leaves the company in shambles only to get paid a fortune to do so? who could agree with that?

by the way, you said some stuff a few pages back about:
- manager compensation: while i agree that sometimes wage differences are beyond ridiculous, i still think that it's perfectly reasonable for management to make more money than the others. often they have a serious personal financial stake in the company and either way give much more of their time to their job.
- stakeholders: here i agree - too much attention is given to shareholders and employees and clients get the sharp end of the stick. that said the company has to find financing somehow, and in the case of the stock market investors do need their return. but most of the time that's the best way for a company to get financing. admittedly this is an issue i have to look further into.

EDIT - The Dark Bailout: http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1831863

You are right that they way companies are now it makes sense that "management" occupies a priveleged position, however I would like to see the whole structure of the way companies are run change.

IMO the de-skilling that occurs when you have a very fine division of labour like many companies do (i.e. everyone is only given one task which they just do repeatedly all day- some people just do telemarketing, some people just put tops on bottles) is very unhealthy. It leads to a far greater number of dead-end jobs because people don't pick up new skills, it is soul-destroying for the people doing that work, and it makes them feel completely alienated from that company and hence not bothered about actually doing a good job.

Ideally I would like to see more companies run as cooperatives but as that's not going to happen I would like to see people being trained to take on a wider range of tasks so that they can contribute more. Then once they have given a certain amount of time as service they would be given voting rights in the companies decisionmaking process and a "share of the profits" based system of payment rather than a wage.

I love how Palin and many Americans don't understand Iran. Ahmadinejad uses rhetoric, mind you that this rhetoric is much more brutal than ours, and his comments on Israel are mostly rhetoric especially since the imams, or maybe ayatollah (can't remember which), control the government. She got the name wrong of the general of Afghanistan.

And also Castro, either one, is not a threat to America.

Since when did McCain win a war? I'm pretty sure we lost Vietnam.

Joe Biden's life story is so awesome and his foreign policy rant during the debate was awesome.

Anyone enjoy how Palin took a jab at the US Gov. tonight? What a joke...

I personally felt Palin seemed much better prepared for last night's debate than Biden. In fact, I felt Biden had a suspiciously deceitful tone in the way he was speaking, while Palin was much more direct and just seemed to have a better understanding of what she was doing. Although, to be fair, I agreed with Biden at least partially on the state of the whole Iraq War (although I don't think the problem is so much that we're IN a war as it's more that Bush completely handled it the wrong way).

A couple months ago, I said that McCain was getting my vote. Now, I'm a bit more torn between him and Obama. Even though I'm still siding with McCain right now, Obama's actually impressed me during the last month or so. If things keep going like this, Obama may very well end up with my vote after all.

Smaller companies tend to have a greater division of tasks than larger companies. But let's remember that, if there was too much of that kind of individual task division, there'd also be fewer jobs available because there'd be no need for "specialty skills." Instead, you could just have four or five people doing everything while letting everybody else wait in line at the Unemployment Office. Plus, if you're running a business, you want the absolute best. It's hard to be "the best" at something when you're forced to also focus on things that you don't really want to do.

You and I are in exactly the same boat. I've leaned McCain in the past without being certain, but in the past few months I have found myself drifting toward Obama. This is the longest I've gone into a campaign without siding with a candidate. In 2004, I decided on whoever the Dem nominee was before the primaries even got started because I had come to loathe Dubya so much. In 2000, I really didn't like Bush all that much, but I sided with him fairly early since I couldn't stand Al Gore.

The nice thing, for me, this time around is that I really don't have a strong distaste for either candidate. I think they both are saying the right things about my most important issues (economy, corralling big business, alternative energy), so I'm hopeful that better times are on the horizon regardless who's elected.

Agreed. Although I did vote for Bush in the 2004 elections, since I didn't think Carey would be any better. Whether or not my prediction was correct is basically a permanently lost answer.

As much as I hate to say it, I think 9/11 is ultimately what killed Dubya. Before then, I didn't think he was doing that bad as president. But 9/11 was (hopefully figuratively) supposed to be his opportunity to show everybody what he was really made of. And he basically blew it.

I find it difficult to understand how anyone with a minimum amount of intelligence could vote for someone who thinks the earth is 6000 years old and that low taxes are a good thing (how the hell are your schools and hospitals going to get money??).

I'll pretend I didn't see the religious side of your argument, which will lead nowhere.

Both candidates think low taxes are a good thing because...well they are. Lower taxes doesn't necessarily mean lower revenue for the government. Lower taxes mean, in theory, that consumers have more money to spend, meaning businesses grow, meaning those businesses will see their stock rise and can afford to pay their employees more. The end result of this is that everyone (businesses and individuals) makes more money and thus pay the same amount as they would with lower incomes and higher taxes.

I don't think the horrendous state of the US economy has anything to do with tax breaks, at least for families. It has more to do with overactive government spending (including the war) and corporate tax loopholes. Those two factors build the deficit faster than anything else I would imagine.

Also, did you really have to make the remark that anyone who feels anyway other than the way you feel on those two issues has no intelligence? You should enroll is a "Fundamentals of Civil Discourse" class Fridge.

But the free market needs gov't control, that's the whole theory of Keynesian capitalism. Inequalities need to be balanced out, and crap like the investment banks crashing happens because the gov't doesn't keep a close enough eye on the market, which happens when the people in the white house think that unbridled capitalism is the best way to go.

And as for the religious argument, it's not as much a religious argument as it is an "I don't want someone with those delusions and who could be or is already motivated by untrue, non-factual elements."