I can remember reading in the 1990s the statistics on black women who were getting murdered at high rates, and this being a justification for expansion of police powers. I’m not really interested in your digging up statistics. Let’s just admit that all the mainstream politicians including many who are now old and running for president or soon to be for vp honestly believed they were protecting innocent victims from murder and were acting in good faith. The main cause of death during the opioid epidemic has been overdose; during the crack epidemic, it was murder.
The mainstream now has decided that super-predator legislation was racist, at least systemically which might as well be the same thing as you will be attacked and condemned for the systemic kind as much as for the regular kind.
How is this not historical amnesia? And if so, I don’t see us doing anything except repeating this cycle: a widespread loosening of law enforcement and sentencing, a following wave of murder, a reaction when innocent bystanders especially women are abused and killed, children are neglected and killed, and then another clampdown where everybody forgets what they said today, except to call whoever is running in 2044 “soft on crime”.
I have no problem with anyone who can look back on something they did 20 years ago and admit they were wrong and have since seen the error in their ways andi those 20 years, has demonstrated a clear change and can show results to prove it.
Can you still call someone a racist who made the wrong choice 20 years ago?
If they have not recanted or admitted their racism, absolutely yes.
Sure, but if I have to choose between who was wrong in good faith 20 years ago and someone who was right when it wasn’t popular, why not go with the latter? How many elected officials do we need anyway? We should be a little selective once in a while.
I want the same thing from my elected officials today as I always have — I want them to share my values and priorities. I want them to use their best judgement based on the totality of information available to them and us. When that makes them go against the herd, I want them to oppose the herd. When that puts them in the mainstream, I want them in the mainstream.
I have a very strong preference for men and women who evolve as more information and data becomes available over people who maintain an essentially religious adherence to any particular position.
I recognize that any sort of innovative and creative thinking and behavior carries with it a risk of failure, and I try very hard to not hold such failures against anybody.
I’m much more focused on the present and future than on whatever was done or said in the distant past.
The idea that crime in societies is cyclical as a result of some inescapable mutually exclusive dichotomy of either mass violence committed by the citizenry or mass incarceration committed by the state is absolutely preposterous.
And, all you have to do is listen to Joe Biden’s and Mike Bloomberg’s countless declarations on these issues to know the kinds of racist sentiments that they promoted. I’ve yet to encounter a single person who argues these two guys are horribly racist solely because of the legislation or policies that they passed or implemented while in office,